Feng-Shui : For a Healthy Environment

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Advocates of Feng-Shui will not buy a corner home or one at the apex of a T-junction that approaching automobiles or trucks may appear to aim at. They keep draughts at bay by ensuring that front doors do not align with a rear entrance or huge windows. Long or narrow corridors, dark corners, confusing entrance halls or steep stairs that menace are firmly avoided. They should rather be comfortably wide, well illuminated and welcoming. The privacy of bedrooms is more suited to smaller windows.

The overall floor plan should be clearly defined and simple - not confusing, disorienting or ugly, or with dark bathrooms or toilets placed anywhere except in the most appropriate position.

We refer particularly to the virtues of the Nautilus, the Giverny, the Salzberg and Place Bordeaux, because we instinctively consider the benefits of Feng-Shui when we choose to award a new home design for excellence, since it resides - together with Japanese minimalism - somewhere between utility and beauty.

Interior rock walls are out. So are exposed beams, vaulted ceilings and huge fireplaces. They are characteristics of self-aggrandisement that Confucius would have warned against as hubris - an overbearing pride or presumption. The ugliness of sharp edges or discordant themes are to be shunned. On the other hand, smooth and curvaceous features - as in Monarch's Evergreen - initiate positive thoughts, harmony, domestic bliss and, indeed, all the righteousness of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism with its Right Thoughts and Right Attitudes.

Today we are more conscious than ever before of the damage caused to our environment by global warming, and the damaging effects to the psyche of the wrong environment. Damaging environmental factors include, for example, the deleterious effects of noisy transportation corridors - airports and flight paths, highways, rail lines and bus routes. Definitely a negative force in Feng-Shui. The closer children live to them, the higher the risk to their intellectual development.

According to Dr Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself, a study has revealed that "Children in public housing high-rises above the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago found that the closer their floor was to the highway the lower their intelligence."

Is their lower IQ a function of the effects of living next to the highway… or is the link between low income and low education the determining factor that located them in these apartments in the first place?

Regardless, advocates of Feng-Shui would warn us not to live close to commercial, industrial or heavy traffic areas.

However, he does refer in particular to "genetically predisposed children" and "the continuous background noise from machines, sometimes called white noise," which is "very stimulating to the auditory cortex."

"White noise is everywhere now, coming from fans in our electronics, air conditioners, heaters, and car engines." To test his hypothesis that it could damage the brain, Dr Doidge exposed infantile rats to white noise when they were mere pups, and discovered afterwards that the effect on their brains were significant - "their cortices were devastated", he reports.

Clearly we should avoid this type of environmental pollution. Within our own homes, where we have the control, we can do so. But if this environmental pollution is external, we are essentially trapped with a health risk. This suggests we need not only avoid locating adjacent to transportation corridors, but also power lines and transformers, and if in a condominium apartment block, also ventilators and elevators.

These are all good reasons why some home buyers prefer to choose a premium lot on a crescent or a private cul-de-sac which is not on a bus or heavy traffic route or on top of a shopping centre or a car park, or in a multi-use condo apartment building in a busy downtown street, but tucked quietly away in a low-traffic suburban area instead.

Perhaps you may even be fortunate to be able to afford a home in a private enclave, or on a ravine lot.

As we become increasingly urbanized - largely to be closer to our places of employment - we increase our exposure to environmental pollution from such as the electro magnetism of high voltage electric cables or cell phone repeater stations and the toxic fumes of traffic and idling trucks.

In the 1980's Ottawa home owners where shocked to discover that they were harbouring significant emitters of environmental pollution within their own homes. One of them was urethane insulation material which emits cyanide gas when it burns. Another was radon, an invisible, odourless gas that can cause cancer. As well as being produced in nuclear energy plants, it is also concentrated in phosphatic rock and black shale, from where it can be drawn into homes through small cracks in the foundation, or through well water.

Is it even possible to observe Feng-Shui in an urban location?

When it was conceived and its tenets carefully formulated in the tenth century, China did not have to cope with all the problems of servicing an overpopulated metropolis or the urban sprawl that first began to be duplicated in Europe soon afterwards. Populations and construction have grown exponentially since then - in modern China as well as in the West.

Even so, the basic principles of Feng-Shui, some of which have been described above, can be followed with fairly obvious benefits, largely by using common sense, and recognising that some neighbourhoods are clearly less harmonious than others.

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