Fire Dragon Day, Fire Dragon Month, Menorca, Balearics

Fire Dragon Day, Fire Dragon Month, Menorca, Balearics.

 

“The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with limitations and determining for himself what his duty is.”

Hexagram 60, Jie, Limitation
Book of Changes Wilhelm Edition.

Es Grau is what they call a “biosfera” that is to say a nature reserve. As well as home to abundant reptile life, it claims to be the winter resort of the Northern European coot. I’m just another one, I guess.

I’m sitting by myself at the huge kitchen table, listening to Thomas Tallis while I eat my breakfast: toast, (remarkably) Menorcan marmalade and tea made with Brooke Bond PG Tips Pyramids; very expensive, locally bought. I’m looking across the hilly heath-covered country towards Mahon, the capital. Those flat-topped hills are welcoming goy moons which are said to coincide with nothing much other than life going on. Huge gate is the usual translation; a friendly invitation. Happy, as they say, is the land with no history.

It’s often windy here which is just as well for the turbines now cartwheeling on the ridge. Last night I left my heavy curtain open to be at one with the beating of the wind. It was a wild night, the trees sighing and creaking. I’m only a couple of miles from the sea of course.

Occasional villas stud the skyline; a dozen or so to the square mile, I estimate. There’s no high rise even in Mahon, about five kilometres away, no clubs, no nightlife; paradise for the recreational hermit.

I’ve been alone in this rather splendid villa for nearly three weeks. During that time I’ve reviewed my approach to exteriors, planned my next couple of courses*, wrestled with the formulae of Qi Men Dun Jia and the ba zi theories of Jerry King, missed my wife and children and listened to a great deal of Josh Ritter. In no particular order. Maggie’s passing (as well as those of Annette Funicello and Mike Denness) came and went without any call for my attendance and a couple of atrocities the world could have done without.

I first stayed in this villa in 2003 when I’d only recently come out as a practising feng shui man. Back then my hostess, bless her, bartered us a fortnight for 12 people (12 people!) in return for a feng shui report. That was a riot; kids everywhere and the lizards running for cover.

I’ve learned a bit since then. That rococo report and map, sound though they were, missed the obvious: this is technically a 6 Fate House (built in 1973) on a North East-South West axis which puts the current Water Star (essentially about Wealth, should be at the front and free) to the rear and the Mountain Star (Health, rear, solid) at one end of the swimming pool. Sifted down, that means a downturn in financial fortunes from around 2004. I think my hostess will agree that that maps onto her experience. Not to say by the way that finance is everything. Abundance is a much wider issue than money and whether because of or despite my attentions, she has done pretty well against most of the benchmarks of a successful life, I’d say. But it’s interesting how over ten years everything gets more and more complex and then it’s simple again. And as she will learn on my return, there are things to be done about it.

In that first report I pointed out that several of us suffered ear problems, a function of the stars 1,4 and 7 which are about the orifices of the body. These Stars were overactive because they fell to the South where the pool is and there was scarcely an hour when it was not foaming with kids.

This time I noticed in the first day or so that the soles of my feet were cracking. The feet relate to the East and the Eldest Son. In this villa it’s where the sitting room is. This year the East is troublesome; stay out if you can. In 2003 we spent many evenings in that room passing the guitar and the rioja. The room is itself an eccentricity, being the lower half of a turret that juts out to the East like a snaggle tooth. There has been recent repair work to its exterior; something to be avoided in the Year of the Snake. I’m alone and I have no need of the room. So I have partitioned it off and not been back in. My feet cleared up almost right away.

I email with Jess and Hen my twin daughters. Now they’re twenty five and as independent as you like. And I text with Joey who was eight back then; eighteen’s very different. It’s World Record Store day so he’s gone to buy Record Corner, Godalming out of Manchester Orchestra. They’re not from Manchester or an orchestra btw. My other children are in occasional touch if it’s only to thrash me at Words with Friends. And I Skype and FaceTime with Sheila. I can see the familiar furniture beyond her on my laptop screen. It’s not quite the same as being there with her though. Poor poor me, all this luxury to myself in 20° Celsius.

And I’ve been reacquainting myself with the Yi or Book of Changes. I don’t think anybody ever does any more than that. I’m suspicious of anyone who calls themselves a “Master” in the sense of having fully grasped it. It’s too fundamental. Confucius wrote that he’d need another fifty years of life to begin to grapple with it and I’m with him on that one.

My hostess’ Father died some twenty years ago. I don’t know how much time if any he spent here but he hangs heavily over it as do the lighter living spirits of the many who have splashed in that pool. I can see them and hear them as I consider next year, the Year of the Wooden Horse. And atrocities, austerity, abuse and all, I’m with Josh Ritter when he sings “Don’t let me enter the year with an empty heart.”

*North Western Seaboard May – for details email admin@wingsagency.com

Next starter professional Feng Shui Course starts September. Tempting Early Bird offer still open. 

Year of the Cat

For feng shui to work, timing is everything; feng shui is doing the right thing in the right place at the right time after all. Grand Master Raymond Lo – for me the gold standard – says very clearly that no formula is as powerful as simply respecting the Flying Stars of the year. And a decade-plus of simple house visits has convinced me of the same.

We’re walking Godalming High Street over the Easter Bank Holiday Weekend. We hear Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat playing through a doorway. Sheila finds it hard to pass one particular store. I’m happy to go in because it’s warm. This early Easter has been so cold. If I were the Easter Bunny I’d wrap up tight and stay home.

Al Stewart’s not actually a big favourite of mine – that throwaway baritone always seems so impersonal, like Cat Stevens without sweetness – I don’t remember hearing this song since the year he’s referring to: the Year of the Rabbit 1975.

I was in the music business in those days and could tell my Als from my Cats. Slightly pre-punk. I expect I was playing Neil Young’s Like a Hurricane or Gene Clark’s No Other that year before the Sex Pistols change everything.

Sheila tries on some bits and pieces. The music moves on.

Rabbit? Cat? The confusion comes from Vietnam. Apparently Rabbit -muw- means something tricky in Vietnamese. So astrologers in that region of SE Asia call the Rabbit “Cat”. You may recall there was a fair bit of cultural exchange between the West and Vietnam in the years leading up to 1975; enough to make anyone stick to their own way of doing things, I would have thought.

As it happens this very early Easter also falls in the month of the Cat er..Rabbit: March. The Rabbit month is reflected in British tradition by March Hares. Hares, Rabbits, Cats, they must all be freezing right now.

Cool for Cats. 

However cold it may be, it’s spring cleaning time and the following day I’m in Birmingham bright and early. Well, early if not bright. I have two Rats to work with today: one born in the Double Water year of 1972, the year of Watergate when Nixon’s controlling need to record his version of things led to his downfall but not before escalating the killing in Vietnam in order to win re-election.

Such slips speak of too much Water. As does the sinking of the Titanic in the previous Water Rat of 1912. Too much water: too much cold, too much talk. Or too little.

The other Rat I’m seeing today is a Metal one born 1960, the year John F Kennedy defeated Nixon to become US President. These Rats tend to suffer some bitterness. They are dark chocolate as opposed to Cadburys’ Caramel.

The first I’m returning to – Farah – she’s a rather beautiful single Mother with a dreadful tale of nastiness in her upbringing which she’s keen to put behind her. To say that a woman is a Water Rat is to say that her Mother was Water and her Father a Rat. Water and the Rat are both about talk as well as secrets. Free open speech you might call yang Water, the stifling of communication you might call yin. The Rat can be either or both; this one and the family she grew up in appear more yin than yang. To the North West – the Father area – of her house is a damp neglected garage. She doesn’t want to talk about it and we don’t.

My job today is simple linear, hands-on feng shui; keeping her home in tune with the year of the Snake. All the places that offer clean helpful energy have changed since last year, the Year of the Dragon, the dark stuff has moved round too. So we light up the Tiger in the North East with a single light and make a jungle of houseplants around the Horse in the South. We load the Rat with metal in the North and we identify the Monkey in the South West for attention later.

Broadly that’s it. Most homes are feng shui neutral, equal parts supportive and disastrous and the quickest way to bring positive change is to activate the current useful stars with yang energy – that is noise, movement and sometimes light and Water – and keep the rest quiet. We move her kids’ keyboard out of the blocked South West and into the arc between North West and North East where things are lively this year. It doesn’t matter much whether we put a Metal pagoda there or a Metal panda as long as it’s Metal and there’s movement around it.

The second Rat – Maire – has reached a rare moment of peace in a life of service to children, not all her own. There’s a weariness in the 1960 Rat. The shine comes off; time for a burnish, like JFK’s reputation.

Here my task is heavy-duty ba zi. Maire’s been housebound looking after her children – all with various forms of special educational needs – for an entire generation and George Osborne’s good news for her is that her income is to go down by around £200 a month. Don’t start me talking.

But she does of course. We work from the premise that she is responsible for her life; sometimes this is hard to take on and I don’t insist anyone does, simply that she pays close attention. We work through a hair-raising narrative of unbalanced Celtic forebears: locked rooms, violence and controlling behaviour. Two sessions of an hour, punctuated by scones and tea and we’re on top of it. There’s daylight. Afterwards I walk to Blake Street station in the bitter cold and the bright low sun; four hours and home.

I’m away now somewhere warmer – writing, learning and researching for most of April – and we’ve emptied my diary but you can put yourself in it for May by contacting Sheila (at fengshui@wingsagency.co.uk)

if you feel ready to thaw out too.

And you might like to know I’m teaching a crash course in feng shui and ba zi on the North Western Seaboard the last week in May. Some knowledge of Chinese Metaphysics required. Let us know if it sounds like your sort of thing and you’re at ease with flying.

Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize for that escalation in Vietnam by the way. That’s a bit like George Osborne getting an award for civic regeneration. Bless them both.

Contact Richard: richardashworth@imperialfengshui.info

Visit his website at: http://www.imperialfengshui.info

Snow: plough on?

 

The Snake Year: what you see is not what you get. Overarching concerns include human trafficking and the treatment of women.

Snow: plough on?

Tiger month. First thing Friday, a demanding week. I’ve been preparing for the first weekend of this year’s ba zi training, conducted four or five ba zi sessions, a couple of surveys and a third day one-to-one with a very linear-minded Southern European billionaire. I have to step up to the plate to work at this pace.

And this morning we may have hit a new low as grandparents: Mr Levi (7) is playing Nazi Zombies on the X-Box and wants last night’s cold pizza for breakfast.

Sheila and I are agonising over whether to postpone the first weekend of the 2013 ba zi course. Snow has fallen and the meteorologists say there’ll be more. On the other hand there’s a reason the weather forecast appears next to the astrology in the papers. So I place a coin at ding (S1) where the underlying causes for things may be revealed, and ask the universe:

“Should we cancel?”

The powers-that-be reply pretty much right away. My attention is drawn to the window. The first thing I see is a car number plate: BU 56. Hexagram Number 56 in the Book of Changes is Lu, the Traveller  and “bu” means “not” or “don’t”. That’s clear; don’t travel. Thanks, universe. We postpone. Again.

Mr Levi assures me the world is once more a safe place for the living.

Nearer my God to thee.

The Snake, Pig, Tiger and Monkey are sometimes called the “Four Stations”. This means they are to do with mobility. In each such year we can expect issues to do with travel: airline strikes, unnecessary delays, cancellations.

I’m sitting on a train from Clapham Junction to Haywards Heath, packed tighter than a lifeboat on the Titanic. These are not commuters hanging from the straps and apologising for putting their elbows in each other’s eyes; the train is going the wrong way for that: that is to say it’s going South out of the metropolis away from the banks and the City.

This is what South West trains call their “Extreme Weather Service”. What does that mean? Fewer trains for the same number of passengers. Don’t start me talking about privatised industry but in the year of the Snake, I’m unlikely to be the only one. I look around at the people hanging onto seat backs by their elbows.

Some sort of peak is likely in the Tiger and Monkey months ie February (hello!) and August and some sort of resolution in the Pig month of November. These concerns will be live the world over. Pay close attention to events concerning newer and faster trains.

The harassed guard explains in stumbling Central European English that the delay to this train and the cancellation of the previous three is down to a passenger being taken sick earlier. There’s grumbling but this is Britain. We summon the spirit of Dunkirk. A lady coughs. There are rueful grins.

“Pretty sick of it myself,” someone says. There’s a ripple of laughter.

Like the guard, just doing what he does in order to pay the rent, a young banker is talking loudly on his iphone. His first call is to a client. Words such as “offshore” and “arbitrage” and “cap app” stud the dialogue. He advises whoever it is not to be distracted from his core business by the prospect of gains on currency.

“Stick to what you do,” he says.

His second call is to arrange dinner and a show. Sounds expensive. Bristling turns to mumbling.

“That’s the worst movie ever made,” he laughs to his date.

Around him there are more mumbles. I imagine this is as close as I’ll get to Mississippi during the time of the Freedom Riders. We’re British. We grin. We bear it. We don’t care about anything enough to cause a fuss. 1.5 million people who protested through the streets of London against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 went home and lived with it. Austerity, that is to say the systematic shifting of wealth from the poor to the wealthy, proceeds within us and without us. We’ll accept it. We may even believe we’re all in it together. It’s a comforting thought. Neither Les Miserables nor Battleship Potemkin is about to happen here. I read that even China has enacted laws that make big corporations pay their dues.

The Snake year: travel issues, resolving November. I’ll put into a sealed envelope what I think may occur. Here’s a question: why aren’t passengers on trains required to wear seat belts? Answer: because then no one would be able to stand and there would be fewer paying passengers per train.

Travelling Northwards or South, also North West and North East is pretty sound this year. Avoid travelling West or South East.

Snake year: what you see is not what you get.

Gaudiamus

Our return flight delayed by the BA/Iberia airline strike, Sheila and I are in Barcelona a couple of days longer than we expected. We visit the extraordinary Gaudi cathedral Sagrada Familia. Antoni Gaudi was a pioneer of the Modernista school of architecture. He spent much of the latter part of his life living rough in the grounds of the cathedral, his final project. When he died – hit by a tram – he was mistaken for a tramp. Gaudi’s work is often called “mystical.” One building of his in central Barcelona features tiling meant to imitate the scales of a Dragon. The walls shine; they look like they might actually be sticky.

We walk from our hotel. It’s about 10′ Celsius. This may be Spain but it’s February and nippy. We arrive at the cathedral whose uniqueness is never quite rendered in photos. Up close it looks like something between a termite mound and Sleeping Beauty’s castle: magnificent. And weird.

High on the facade is a 4×4 lo shu – or magic square – like the one we use in classical feng shui, except that Gaudi’s has 16 squares. The Chinese diviner Yang Hui (Yuan Dynasty, contemporary with Kublai Khan) constructed a similar square in the 13th century. And Albrecht Durer engraved one in wood two hundred or so years later. In both cases the figures add up to 34. For Durer this – handily – placed the numbers 4&1 in the bottom corners as a kind of signature (A=1, D=4).

In the gift shop there are replicas in the form of key rings, coasters, badges and postcards both of the cathedral, the lo shu and the Fibonacci curve whose application I can’t see in the design at all. But what do I know?

The numbers on a 16-square lo shu should add to 34 in every direction but Gaudi’s has been doctored to add to 33. This arrangement appears to be referencing the age (33) of Christ at his death as well as doubling the numbers 10 and 16 which may reference the 10th and 16th letters of the alphabet: J and N: Jesu Nazarenus, Jesus of Nazareth, I guess.  He was a deep one that Gaudi.

To make it even more confusing, the Barcelona lo shu is the work of the sculptor Josep Subirachs and was added years after Gaudi’s death. Just how it connects with Gaudi’s vision is unclear. Gaudi’s biography tells me Subirachs was born precisely nine months after Gaudi’s death which is clearly considered almost literally pregnant with significance,

We have a decent frittata for lunch and return to the hotel to puzzle.

 United!

I’m working with Coleen whose beautifully maintained home in a Manchester suburb has recently housed a well-paid footballer. There are one or two of these in Manchester. United are a huge business of course. When they are playing at home, forget about driving anywhere.

This player appears to have been absorbed with football training to the exclusion of house training. When he left, the house was Colleen tells me, a tip. Now she has restored it and taken in two fresh lodgers. They appear lower-maintenance: one is a young man who is currently suffering unrequited love and the other a recent divorcee. She’s obviously fond of both and has taken up a role as a kind of surrogate mother.

She is at a crossroads; she wants to work in making people happier, healthier and wiser. She’s qualified in psychotherapy but can’t seem to get her practice off the ground.

The young man’s bed linen is predominantly black. Not a winning colour scheme. Black, for his ba zi is draining. Red and white is more like it. Red & white, fire and metal, means something like success but also relationship, passion if you will: liquid currency and other fluids flowing as they ought. These are the colours of the Bank of China, of HSBC, the only clearing bank not to need a bail out. And of course Manchester United. Arsenal too. And Liverpool.

“Does he ….er….entertain?” I ask.

“I won’t let him,”she says, a little affronted.

I look at her. She knows what I’m going to say:

“You’re not his Mum. It’s not really your business.”

She sniffs the air.

“Not more than three times a week and I’ll charge rent if it’s more often than that,” she says, not that strictly. She knows she’s programmed to be a Northern caricature but she’s far too smart to actually be it.

“Fair enough.”

That and some red and white linen might do the trick. The room is in the North West which is the ruling location in this house. He’ll be fine.

We look up at the divorcee’s window overlooking the South East at the front.

Something to do with the church.

“You’re right,” she says approvingly. “How did you know?”

“I don’t know,” I say baldly.

I used to expect applause when insight came to me. Now I realise that a sober response is actually more respectful.

Colleen is, as I say, at a crossroads. What is this handsome and perceptive woman going to do with the rest of her life? She’s not troubled about relationship; her eyes mist over touchingly when she talks about her man. She obviously loves him. There’s a win. She’s turned her home into combination haven and healing centre for the unlucky in love partly because she is so certain about it. Lucky lodgers.

She has talent and skills, behind her a career in change management. She wants to work with people: healing and transforming their lives.

“But what has my experience got to do with healing?”

I blink.

“Everything.”

We talk about the process of change.

“Essentially miracles consist of two things,” I say taking my life in my hands: “Knowing the problem and knowing what we want. To put it another way: telling the truth about what’s so and about what we want. Solving it follows.

You don’t need me to tell you that. You’ve been doing it for years.”

She listens intently..

“Telling the truth about what we want is a yin, heart, lunar, passive feminine process. Essentially it consists of feeling what we feel. Clarifying what we want is a question of vision: a yang, head, solar, assertive masculine process.

Two clues: feel what you feel, celebrate the good stuff (whatever that means btw) and dare to experience the bad stuff. There are no absolutes: some people find tickling painful and some like to be whipped. Make no attempt to feel good until you do.

Second: when you feel pessimistic, feel it but don’t think it. Be disciplined enough to hold onto your dreams.

“Taoist thinkers see three kinds of energy, fortune, process: Heaven which may mean how it is, Earth which may be what we do about it and Human which is perhaps the choice to act.

One down, two to go. Now let’s do some feng shui.”

Next we plot the energies in the house and make a series of changes in the mysterious process of turning choice into action into change. What connects these procedures? Damned if I know.

Visit Richard’s website: http://www.imperialfengshui.info/

 

Snake Year Catch-Up

The Year of the Water Snake: do-it-yourself feng shui for the year. What to do where, why and indeed when in 2013.

Every year is different. We all know that, however we express it. For some 2012 was the year of Barack Obama’s second term, for others the year that austerity bit; for still others, it was the Year of Sudden Change. Likewise in 2013 women’s rights are already in focus while the traditional Chinese nickname, the Year of the Snake in the Grass, suggests one in which nothing is quite what it seems.

We had a collision between these forces when snow made inevitable the postponement – again – of this year’s ba zi course which was to start last weekend. One student from Serbia arrived without incident but several from nearer by could not have been sure of getting home. It’s an ill wind….and one outcome is that the first of the four Weekends of Discover the Secrets of the Four Pillars now falls on February 9th & 10th and there remain places on this starter course in Chinese Astrology. Details here.

2012: The Year of Sudden Change.

Many found the Dragon year 2012 to be an extended plate-spinning exercise. As a Dragon myself, the instructions on the tin were to adopt a different approach and so I made three separate visits to feng shui masters in SE Asia for enlightenment while continuing to survey, write and attempt to have a life. For many the year was more chaotic. Some were called to several fronts, handling personal, professional, emotional and spiritual emergencies all at the same time. My friend and role model Master Jon Sandifer died during this time.

This demanding pattern, sometimes called the “Four Earths” is a feature of any year ruled by an Animal of the Earth Element: Ox, Dragon, Sheep or Dog. It affects any person with an Earth Animal anywhere in their ba zi (or Chinese Horoscope) which is pretty much everyone. And it hits when the month, day or even hour is ruled by Earth. So in the Dog month of the Dragon year, Barack Obama, born in the Earth year of the Ox 1961, found himself fighting an election, Congress, a hurricane and an invisible enemy simultaneously. Who’d want to be re-elected?

2013: The Year of the Snake in the Grass.

The corresponding pattern in 2013 the Year of the Water Snake, is known as the “Fire Penalty”. Similar conditions apply but this time invoked by Snake, Tiger and Monkey. The focus accordingly is likely to come in the Tiger (February) and Monkey (August) months.

And the outcome is different: the Fire Penalty and often therefore, a Snake year is about interference. When Monkey and Tiger coincide this year, expect gazumping, unsolicited advice, intrusive neighbours, blurred lines of demarcation at work and triangular relationships. On a bigger scale it can mean incursions on privacy as well as interference in the course of justice. Sounds fun.

Right now I’m still fine-tuning clients’ buildings to set them up for the Snake year. In some cases that’s best done in February or even later and I am (cautiously) still available but if you want to make your own changes, my DIY Tune-Up Drill will be available shortly. Email Sheila at wingsagency@gmail.com if this rings your windchimes.

What to do where and when, who to call.

Meanwhile to help you survive and thrive in 2013, here are a few simple principles for this year:

1. Don’t dig, drill or agitate the South East, the North West or the East. These hold the tai sui, sui po and san sha respectively. Don’t ask.
2. Don’t face West or South East for any length of time. Many beds and desks on these axes ought to be moved.
3. Do open doors or windows, face and/or occupy South, North and North East. Occupy South East & North West with respect. Other areas caution; that is East, West and South West.

Feng shui is doing the right thing in the right place at the right time so there’s lots more (including how to measure these orientations and where from) but respect for the above should support health, wealth and wisdom in 2013 and keep us all from a plague of boils.

Both feng shui and ba zi are lifetime studies. Some students are ready to practise relatively rapidly, some never get there. If you’d like to learn how to do this stuff, as I said, I’m teaching ba zi over eight months starting February and feng shui over eight months from June. Join us.

Richard Ashworth. ©2013

www.imperialfengshui.com

Richard Ashworth’s Forecast for the Year of the Snake in the Grass 2013

2013: the Year of the Snake in the Grass.

The end of the world as we know it? Er..no.

Is truth always positive? Of course. Once the truth comes out, you know, it’s all right. We’re scared that if the truth comes out that it’s not all right. It’s the other way around.

Yoko Ono.

Hold the Maya Noise

My son Thom once told me it was better to be an optimist than a pessimist because the optimist has more fun even if he’s wrong. He was only seven at the time otherwise he might have added that worthwhile futures are born in the mind of the optimistic. Each pessimist believes he’s a realist even though realism itself is a function of what we have decided upon. To put it simply: Chinese and other mumbo jumbo to one side, we are each of us responsible for our reality and next year is no exception.

What is it that we have decided? Few dates have been subject to as much advance speculation as today, 21^st December 2012: are we in for cataclysm and disaster? Should we run for the hills?

As you may have learned by the time you read this, the answers to these questions are no and no. Firstly from my standpoint, that Mayan moment on the day of the Solstice is offering information about 2013 not 2012. I use the prevailing energies to read the likely trends of the following not the current year. It’s an interesting date but its significance has been importantly misunderstood: it’s not about that moment itself but about the dynamics that follow. I’ll be here, promise. You too.

Secondly there are, as I write, a variety of social and geographical processes in motion which follow the Chinese 60-year cycle. Their outcomes may become inevitable around now but very little of importance happens suddenly and irrevocably; whether in human or other affairs, trends build and lead to a moment of focus and resonate beyond that time.

Finally, to predict floods, tumult and plagues of boils is too easy and of little use. So I draw conclusions based on existing evidence but aim to invest no further. Forgive me even that, Ms Ono.

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Canons to the right: This is a year with a great soundtrack. Johannes Pachelbel author of the Canon in D, perhaps the most influential piece of music ever written, was born in the Water Snake year of 1653. Listen to the Canon. Now listen to it again. Now sing any stadium-filling ballad of the last half century over it. Those who haven’t been in an arena recently if at all, might open with Ralph McTell’s Streets of London. Otherwise Don’t Look Back in Anger perhaps or Jessie J’s Pricetag.

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Snake Dharma.

The Snake is the sorceror’s apprentice and the sorcerer is the Dragon. This means that the events of a Snake year often extend those of the previous (Dragon) year. Issues unique to any Snake year are likely to be about truth and falsehood. So set the controls for a year like 2012 with added bad faith. The Snake is the seeker after truth. When balanced the Snake is allergic to misrepresentation, unbalanced that same Snake is a major league bull-shitter. Issues of justice and its miscarriage are typical. What you see is not what you get. What to expect in 2013 then includes:

Mitchellgate: evidence of inter-constabulary turf wars and between government and police emerges. Heads will roll. No change follows.

Afghanistan: further shenanigans among the top brass. I warned Water Dragons like David Petraeus last year that 2012 would bring a change of career direction. Boys will be boys.

Hillsborough: a tightening knot of fudge. The police know nothing and never did. In fact they weren’t even there. Oops, that’s worse.

Leveson: a paler shade of whitewash. The press remains unregulated. Wood Snake Piers Morgan, having spied too late in gun control a hobbyhorse that allows him to preach against pork in a synagogue, joins his soul mates the Murdochs under a cloud. But hey it’s a pretty comfortable one.

Cut backs:  further systematised funnelling of wealth from the poor to the wealthy under the generic term “austerity.” No upturn follows in the same way that no upturn follows a leap from a tall building.

Sex: usually a subtext of Snake concerns, so continued fallout from the escapades of the late Jimmy Savile. And others. Awareness of mistreatment of women is a theme of the year. This leads to change over time but action is needed. Let’s start now.

Tax: It’s getting tough to buy a book, a cd or even a cup of coffee with a clear conscience. In 2012 legislators claimed disingenuously that tax-avoiders like Amazon, Google and Starbucks were “immoral” In 2013 the challenge is to change the laws that encourage this moral laxity. They won’t.

Global warming: no serious addressing of this before 2016. But it will be. Never underestimate the ingenuity of men.

If there is one change to make in 2013 it is putting an end to much of the above. How?

Like this, perhaps:

http://twitter.com/#!/sunny_hundal/status/281555804853776384

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Syria:Some Chinese Masters say that the Animal of the Year is inherently at risk. I think not but it’s a push me-pull you year for Wood Snake Basher Assad. His future is actually more to do with his other pillars. The fate of Snakes generally is mixed this year; not all bad at all. In 2013, however Assad’s luck runs out. In order to get away with killing the women and children in his charge, he needed to fly to a tax haven long before now.

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Forever blowing bubbles.

My principal model for the years 2000-2020 remains the first two decades of the 18^th century, precisely 300 years ago. The years 2009 to 2020 reflect the years 1709 to 1720. These are the years of the so-called South Sea Bubble.

When years are twelve years apart and thus share an animal (like the Water Snake 2013 and Metal Snake 2001) they are somewhat alike. When they are separated by multiples of 60 years (like the Water Snakes 2013 and 1713) they are very much alike.

As I outlined last year, in 1709 (corresponding to 2009) the South Sea Company was established. By 1713 it had sold off as junk bonds vast sums of the national debt. The value of these bonds became inflated as they traded third, fourth and fifth hand in the following years. In 1720 the whole farrago blew up losing millions for investors all over the British Empire. This modern-sounding fiasco was one of the great British innovations; centuries ahead of its time, up there with Stephenson’s Rocket, the Dyson Air Blade and gunboat diplomacy. And it is recurring right now.

Typical again of Snake business is the sleight of hand by which alumni of American investment bank Goldman Sachs have gained in turn control of the US and European Central Banks and now the Bank of England. It’s actually proved necessary to naturalise a Canadian (Mark Carney) in order to give Goldman this further privilege. What suggests to the asleep-at-the-wheel helmsmen Cameron and Osborne that the bank that set the balls-up rolling by securitising the Greek national debt and jobbing Greece into the Euro thus making a sizeable contribution to the current misery for all but bankers and trustafarians, should breed the Messiahs of recovery? Bear in mind that Goldman received a $10 billion bailout in 2008/9 which they repaid inside a year. I don’t know which part of that statement is the more worrying.

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Cricket: Not much convergence between my demographic and cricket fans but I can please myself every now and then. In 2005 I was asked to predict the outcome of the Ashes Series and went correctly for an England win. If you care about these things, this is a year of recovery for West Indian cricket and of retrenchment for India. England may end the year as number one.

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 Metro Goldman Maya.

Rest assured it won’t last. The banking system is on the verge of collapse. The prevailing energies at 20:16 on the 21^st lack both Wood and Metal; that’s two of the five Elements, the two most aggressive and most associated with money, markets and trading. It may be that we are being offered a future in which money and guns count for less.

Karl Marx wrote in the 1860’s that capitalism would mature to the point that its decline would be inevitable. It just would not work any more. We’ve reached that point. And that’s bad news only for the greedy. A better system, perhaps in the form of something along the lines of the enlightened Grameen Bank is emerging. Something happens today that makes that inevitable, a moment that will be traceable when all has fallen into place in perhaps eight years’ time. It may not be obvious until then. This is what the Mayan calendar marks, I think. It’s certainly not effective legislation separating “casino” banking from deposits which will take geological time. It might be gun control.

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Treachery Extra: Conquistador Francisco Pizarro may have been born in the Water Snake year of 1473. He certainly executed the Emperor Atahualpa on the 15^th July in the following Water Snake, 1533 even though the Inca had delivered the ludicrous volume of gold demanded as ransom by the Spaniards. This violence may have been the single most irreversible action in history. Pizarro was of course assassinated by his own men in a quarrel over the gold. Consider the consequences.

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Slave to the Rhythm: 1653-1853

Opaque issues running through 2013 like the letters in a stick of rock include violence and what can only be called slavery. Trends rise and fall within these sixty-year cycles and the trafficking of human beings seems to be attached to cycles punctuated by the Water Snake.

Most of us for instance know that the port of Bristol was a pivot of the slave trade. In the suburb of Clifton to this day, Blackboy Hill runs up to Whiteladies Road. It’s a relatively little known fact however that the Church of St Leonard was erected next to what was then the harbour, to commemorate the abolition of slavery. This followed fierce campaigning by Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester. It’s lesser known again that this took place in the mid-11^th century, the stock-in-trade then being hapless Midlanders who were shipped across the Irish Sea. Even lesser known may be that this church was demolished in the Water Snake year of 1773, at the height of the more familiar (African) Slave Trade. History, you may have noticed, repeats itself.

It’s better known that slavery was proscribed by law all over the British Empire in the following Water Snake year 1833, having been first enshrined in the Americas by the case of Johnson versus Casor in the Water Snake year of 1653. Astonishingly Anthony Johnson a black slave owner born in Angola, contested the right to freedom of his servant John Casor who thus became the first legally-sanctioned slave in US history. Up to that point indentured servants seized from their homes in Africa, were eventually released and given land to work out their retirement. That same Water Snake year the first slave, one Abraham van Batavia, arrived in South Africa. Lucky old Abe.

My research suggests that an issue is often born, matures and is settled within a 180-year period punctuated by the same pillar. Arithmeticians will have noticed already that it is 180 years since 1833. And in that time the issue has gone largely underground. But it’s still with us. In 2013 the plight of children in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asian domestics in the Gulf States as well as women trafficked for all the reasons women are routinely trafficked Westwards across Europe and Asia – non-consensual sex and the more unpleasant domestic chores – is highlighted and change begins to happen.

It’s been a long time. Long enough.

To make a difference yourself  contact:

http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/?gclid=CPDFgv3XqbQCFU3HtAodHS0Aqw 

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Las Malvinas son Argentinas: just as the Water Dragon of 1832 (180 years before last year’s) indicated isolation issues for Greece in 2012, that year being the first time an independent Greece had been recognised, so in 1833 the Falkland Islands were sequestered by the British. This may not be great news for Thatcher’s favourite grandchild David Cameron. Though of course if Argentina conducted themselves diplomatically more as they do on the football field they might command greater international respect. Or perhaps that’s the problem.

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Consonant, please Barrie.

I used to predict time and place of spree shootings – pretty accurately, though I say it myself – nowadays I care only about addressing the fundamentals that bring events like Sandy Hook about. Here’s a hint: you can’t shoot without a gun. Obama’s onside but it’s an uphill struggle.

The date I’ve left till now to reveal is that it’s 180 years now since the Boston Tea Party and the need for armed vigilance from which the pro-gun lobby claims legitimacy: December 16^th 1773. Consider that perhaps in the light of the above. We are being offered an alternative.

This and many other issues might be addressed by a second term President who stands to lose nothing by sticking to his er…guns. In his first term he is dependent upon maintaining a certain level of popularity in order to have a chance of re-election. But since two terms is the maximum permitted by the twenty second amendment of the US constitution, a second term President can please himself. Metal Ox Barrack Obama promised hope and change four long years ago. Among the changes promised were the closure of Guantanamo and the rolling back of personal freedoms. Neither was delivered. He said nothing about gun control or human trafficking but the alert reader may notice that in 2013 we have essentially one theme not several. Why with very similar gun laws does Canada suffer literally ½% of the gun crime of the US?

The Chinese cycles suggest Obama has more purchase than we might guess. The US electorate gave him a second chance firstly because he was head and shoulders above any of the certifiable and laughable ranged in opposition but also because a series of impassioned speeches led them to believe that he might deliver more than a series of impassioned speeches.

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Salmond Fishing: 1715 was the year of the so-called “15”, when the “Old Pretender” James Stuart landed in Scotland hoping to raise a rebellion to oust the first Hanoverian King George 1^st who had acceded to the thrones of England and Scotland in 1714. This may presage the reaction of Scots to the devolution vote tabled for 2014. Its yes/no structure makes secession a long-odds outcome. The Scots can be sore losers though.

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The Chinese calendar is on their side.

Here’s why:

When I was asked during 2012 who would win the US Presidential Election, I would point confidently to Feb 4^th 2013 and say “Obama.” There he was in the Chinese calendar on the operative date. If you understand ba zi you can see for yourself.

That date is lap chun, the Spring Festival, the orthodox date from which to divine the nature of a year. The Four Pillars (or ba zi) of that day feature a Water Snake year, Wood Tiger month, Metal Ox day and Earth Rat hour.  Although the Year Pillar is what most people know about a Chinese year, the Day Pillar – the precise day concerned – is the engine of the ba zi. Every Chinese Master derives most of what he knows about a ba zi from the relationship between the Day Pillar and the rest of the chart.

Interestingly then, Xi Jinping, the new Chinese Premier was born a Water Snake (in 1953) and Barack Obama a 1961 Metal Ox. China is represented in the Year Pillar, the US President in the Day Pillar. On the face of it, China continues to emerge as Global hegemon – bold enough to provoke both India and Japan for instance. Xi Jinping represents visible emerging authority but Obama wields the real power this year. He’s in his second term. Why not take some risks? On gun control he’ll be resisted by the forces of idiocy who claim straight-faced that government will deprive them of guns in order to control. There may be something in that but it is surely a lesser and addressable evil?

This may be the last time an American President can truly be called the most powerful man in the world. In 2013 we see that power wielded usefully to reduce the violence in the world.

And the Beatles remain right: “All you need is love.” Barrie: please note.

Richard Ashworth ©20^th December 2012

Singapore Slung

December 2012

Singapore Slung

I’m back from the Convention where I spoke to the Singapore Grand Masters about my particular approach to ba zi*. I think it was clear that I know my pings from my pongs, I didn’t seem to upset anybody too much and we sold a few books, in which I was assisted by my Russian friends Tatiana and Olga who at the end of the event, presented me with a bottle of authentic vodka

which I proceeded to get confiscated at airport security on the way home. What was it doing in my carry-on luggage?

Now there’s an oriental mystery.

While in Chinatown I bought my supply of Monkey amulets in the market for protection during the Snake year. Pigs, pay special attention: these are mostly for you. This is basic prophylactic feng shui for the year of the Snake in the Grass. The energy of 2013 is very different from 2012 and now is the time to make changes in readiness.**

The consensus is that central issues of the year appear to be the what-you-see-is-not–what–you-get of the Snake as illustrated by the shenanigans around the Leveson enquiry and the hanky panky of the US Generals in Afghanistan. December 21st isn’t the end of the world. It isn’t even the end of the Banking System As We Know it. That’ll take approximately seven more years. My Power Point incorporated a recent slide of Neil Young to illustrate the Taoist concept of qing or affection about which more in my next diary.

At the Speakers’ Lunch which followed I found myself sitting with Grand Master Raymond Lo, possibly the best known feng shui man in the world. GM Raymond has been very generous to me over the years; he has given me limited edition books and I have attended a variety of workshops and short courses with him but never really felt I made contact. On this occasion he opened conversation by telling me how much he admired Neil Young. We then spent 40 minutes or so talking rock’n’roll in general and obscure guitar solos in particular. I had no idea that GM Raymond was a closet rocker.

Later I got to hang with legendary polymath and all-round good egg, Stephen Skinner who in his knowledgeable way, showed me around the new Buddhist Temple in Chinatown: four storeys, built by subscription inside 5 years, it is host to one of the Buddha’s teeth. Another was displayed at the Drukpa Foundation in North London earlier this year and Stephen was able to confirm my suspicion that like the splinters of the True Cross which, assembled together would amount to a mighty forest, if all the alleged Buddha’s teeth were to be reunited, the Gautama would be an orthodontic prodigy indeed.

*Discover the Secrets of the Four Pillars of Destiny: (click here for more info) I’m teaching starter ba zi again opening the weekend of January 19th and 20th. Ba Zi is a lifetime study of course but by the end of the fourth and final weekend, the attentive student will be able to draft ba zi in Chinese characters (it’s not actually that hard) and have all the tools necessary to interpret. No Chinese Master would think of assessing the feng shui of any building without drafting the ba zis of the occupants, nor would any traditionally-minded Chinese parent let their daughter entertain a suitor whose ba zi was incompatible with her own. Ba zi is the best means I know, short of deep intimacy, of really knowing who somebody is. This course is looking like an interesting and varied group. We never teach more than 15 and there remain a few vacancies.

**Tune-Up: I’m available until February for a small number of Tune-Ups for 2013. If you want to hire me, contact Sheila by clicking here. page But be prepared: the drill includes several clearing “Activations” before the year starts. It’ll be available as a do-it-yourself late in January but for best results, you’re going to need the Activation details meanwhile.

Next: My 2013 Animal Fortunes will be on the website shortly, followed by my Forecast for the year of the Snake in the Grass, which will be sent out to subscribers before the Solstice.

Richard Ashworth © 2012.

Coming shortly: Richard’s Animal Fortunes 2013 &
his forecast for the Year of the Snake in the Grass 2013
Click here for details on the Ba Zi Starter Course for 2013

The Chestnut Suite, Guardian House, Borough Road, Godalming, Surrey, GU7 2AE | tel: 01483 428998 | info@imperialfengshui.info

Corporate and Media Contact: Peter Dunne. Tel. 07768 617330 peter@peterdunne.com

© Richard Ashworth 2012

Sound and Vision.

News Flash: The opening weekend of Richard’s next ba zi starter course Discover the Secrets of the Four Pillars”is now January 19^th & 20^th 2013. Early Bird offer still open. 

Sound and Vision.

When Linda lay dying, Paul McCartney is said to have reminded her of her favourite moments: riding her horse in the hills of Wyoming was one, the sun on her face and her hair trailing in the wind. Tibetan Buddhism features a series of such bardos or lessons. The intention of these is to carry into the next incarnation the highest learning of this one.

In feng shui there is the idea of qing, that is affection. It’s the moment in a poem when we are touched, that point in a song where it gets under your ribs and turns upset into poignance. The character qing features in many Chinese ideographs, including that for being in love.

It was once suggested to me that I should base a tv programme on an office block that was empty. The idea was that I would demonstrate feng shui techniques by filling it.

“How long has it been empty?” I asked.

“Two years plus.”

“No,” I said, “If anybody cared it would be full.”

Al Green’s Tired of Being Alone is playing in the restaurant where I’m sharing a Pad Thai with my friend Bob. A restless Metal Rabbit, he’s a millionaire media man who’s just hit sixty. I see loneliness unusual for a man who enjoys his own company the way he does.

Bob tells me he is splitting from his glamorous paramour. She’s a cult celebrity, a very creative woman. He isn’t that cut-up, he says. He says he’s enjoying slowing down.

“My kids are of an age where they’re not in my face and I kinda like it,” he says.

Last time I spoke with him he had a thousand ideas. He’s encyclopaedic about 70’s singer-songwriters and he spoke of a book of interviews. In the world of marketing, the word “creative” has been hijacked to mean something like “manipulative” but he truly is. For decades he has been going into companies and giving them simple common-sense ideas that transform everything. The split has inspired other plans.

“I don’t need all that space any more, so I’ll probably downsize and move to the coast.”

As we talk I’m listening closely to Al Green’s rhythm section: soft springy drums, at first just a single rimshot per bar, a spare backbeat then a comforting snare. Next the whole kit kicks in and knits everything together and those wise old horns gently punctuate the keyboard and follow the guitar chords down into the verse. Then young Al enters. Already he has the voice of an unfrocked preacher; at twenty two, he is not much concerned with staying together. He’s just so tired of being alone. Or so he says.

Bingo.

This week I surveyed a big Georgian house in East Anglia. The eldest son was sleeping in a metal bed (a magnet for geopathic stress) under a beam at chest level, in a reclaimed attic under a sloping eave, over the tai chi (or heart) of the building; pretty much a full house of poor placement. Oh and the East (meaning Eldest Son) was missing.

“Great news,” I tell my client, a beautiful 40-something mother and by-necessity manager of her brilliant husband’s architectural practice. “It’s the worst positioned bed I’ve ever encountered.”

She knew of course but hadn’t known what to do about it. Which is why she called me in: the teenager had a suspected collapsed lung, signaled by mysterious chest pains.

“That’s good news?” she responds.

“Yup. Because we can move it.”

We talk tao. She’s a frustrated writer. They’re everywhere this week. Why would that be?

An ailing son is only part of the problem; they’re running as fast as they can to stay in the same financial position. He designs, she does everything else. She’s very capable but she’s not happy.

“If we will pay attention, the universe is always talking to us,” I say, speaking as the author of a dozen unpublished books. “First it jogs us, then it slaps us around the head and finally it sends the fire brigade.”

“I must write,” she says. She’s taken courses in creative writing but finds she has no time to actually put pen to paper.

There is upset in her eyes and a catch in her voice. I ask her to breathe deeply into her diaphragm. Her eyes mist over. I point to the caution on the jacket of my book the “Feng Shui Diaries”. WARNING: this man may make you cry. When he was a little boy, my son Joey used to describe my work as “making ladies cry.” I’m not a brute; it’s just that tears usually bring healing. Tears express qing.

We have hit something that matters. Now things start to move.

Safe and Sound.

Marisa has been having sound therapy.

“My therapist says you can do feng shui by making noises. Is he right?”

Well yes. Why not? Feng shui is doing the right thing at the right time and noise is a vibration just like light and music. We can “activate” a spot to induce change by gentle tapping with a rubber hammer. Simple as that: yin is still, yang is moving; ignore the Elements and go for pure yang. Sometimes I recommend no more than this. This puts the feng-shui-as-interior-decoration school of thought into some sort of context.

Marisa is great to work with. I meet her for a ba zi session once a year in Edinburgh when I’m up for the Fringe. She lays her cards on the table – man trouble, work frustration, deeper spiritual stuff – and allows me to be wise and soothing for her. She tells me she admires (in order of importance) my red shoes and my pride in my children. Bless that Marisa.

Monkee Business.

I meet up with Bob for a rare Mike Nesmith concert at the Union Chapel in Islington. Nesmith never lived down the Monkees but he’s a fine singer and songwriter and a rather decent human being. There are three in the band: Nesmith, a bass player and someone on keyboards and Apple Mac. Bob recognises the pedal steel solo by Orville “Red” Rhodes that has been cut and pasted from the album “Nevada Fighter”.  We’re standing there clapping for an encore and he whispers the name of the one hit that has not yet been performed . Sure enough it follows.

It’s cold on the way back but not that cold. The frost is late; perhaps two weeks. In the years I have been observing these things, the first overnight freeze in Godalming has never been later than the 18th of October. What’s going on? Scientists won’t agree, which makes my guess as good as anybody’s: nature’s pissed off, is what I’d say. And wouldn’t you be?

Next morning, driving Joey into College, I notice how much brighter the light is than I expect.

“I can’t see a thing.”

“Nobody can,” Joey says, indicating the traffic. The cars driving South East up the hill proceed by inches. He’s actually more interested in the music he’s got on his phone: it’s “Graceland” by Paul Simon.

“As if I didn’t know that, as if I didn’t know my own bed,” Simon sings over those melting chords: Mississippi meets South African township. He gets it; Joey can feel qing. talk and listen at the same time. And text. And check Facebook.

Even with the sun-visor down however I can see only yards ahead. This is Surrey, so there’s lots of polite waiting and some flashing of headlights but no honking. We proceed slowly. I drop Joey without incident.

Autumn light has always been low and slanting but it used to be less harsh. Nature compensated for the angle by making the rays softer, I guess. I expect to blink and shield my eyes but I used to be able to see the way ahead. We are in serious trouble if the softness is going out of the light.

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Real Water, real Mountain, real ch’i is in the mountains and lakes that have been etched and wrenched onto the surface of the World over this time. Ch’i being beyond both creation and destruction, is older but its arrangement on Earth is precisely that old. From this standpoint the Sun has risen and set a billion times. It’s we who have changed.

Riding the Waves.

Sheila and I go to see the reformed Beach Boys. It’s Brian’s Wilson’s touring band (who can do all the voices) plus five of the originals. Brian sits at a piano but doesn’t play it. None of the old guys attempt the top notes. It’s a great concert nonetheless and hits the wet eye button when long-dead Carl and Dennis Wilson join us by the miracle of sequencing and video.

Dennis, the drummer was the only Beach Boy who actually surfed. In their 70′s performances, Dennis mostly wasn’t even needed on drums and he would take a solo spot, walking right up to the lip of the stage and singing “You are so beautiful” in a fragile voice, half croon half croak. Billy Preston got the composing credit but Dennis introduced it as a song he wrote himself. I saw him do this at the Top Rank in Reading in 1971. I was on the floor just feet away.

Sometimes I think of Dennis in the short years before he would drown, wandering from party to party, half-coked, half-drunk, jamming with musicians among whom his clout as a Beach Boy disappeared the shameful neglect of his talent by the band he co-founded and never left. Perhaps he wrote “You are so beautiful,” at one of these sessions.

Sometimes it’s not a question of what’s true so much as what is useful to believe. A bardo is truthful in its own right. It cannot be ironic. Irony is no more truthful than romantic poetry.

Bob’s philosophical, he tells me. She was on the rebound from the father of her child. He still loves his second wife. That’s my opinion, not his but he says:

“That’s the way it is, isn’t it? Everyone’s in love with someone who doesn’t love them back.”

Richard Ashworth.

The Joy of Setts

 

The Joy of Setts.

September, the month of the Earth Rooster in the year of Sudden Change, the Water Dragon, 2012; feelgood Britain is flush with pride following the bread and circuses of the Olympics as libraries and public toilets close and badgers barricade themselves into their homes. I’ve just returned from a brief walkround survey of the most expensive property I have ever entered: perfectly positioned in SW1 but decorated in suede and metal better suited to a pub snug than a home.

I remember back in the 90’s, Lillian Too telling me that if your own feng shui is sound, then so will your advice be. She went on to give me advice that allowed me to make a killing on HSBC shares but that’s another story.

“If he’s been divorced and bankrupt half a dozen times, he’s probably not a great feng shui man,” I remember her saying.

Around her house outside Kuala Lumpur, there’s more “sentimental” (ie gently flowing) water packed into one place than I have ever seen this side of Niagara. Draw your own conclusions. She was then and remains a brilliant and benevolent woman too with a serious and not widely known altruistic agenda.

That advice – and the investment tip for that matter– made a great deal of difference to me and I have always aimed to honour it. Which finds me writing about two subjects today: my children and Jon Sandifer who died last week.

I’m writing in the restaurant where my eldest son Jaime, now holder of three degrees, waits tables while contemplating his options. The restaurant claims to offer free wi-fi but this has turned out to be the Cloud which hijacks my connection and then like a plumber on a Sunday, constantly claims to be on its way. So Jaime finagles me into the wi-fi proper and here I am.

The music system is playing quite-but-not-very-obscure hits of the 21^st century ranging from a welcome selection of Sheryl Crow to one of the Iglesias’ doing sincere.  Would I lie to you? I rather think so.

I didn’t know Jon Sandifer that well. We studied with Master Chan Kun Wah together and we shared coffee breaks, taxi rides, and a study session or two. That was enough for me to know that he was a good and deeply spiritual man who valued family above all. If he was about anything he was about children of whom, like me he had more than his fair share. He talked of them with enormous fondness, respect and trust. It was clear he’d do anything for them and vice-versa. As Lawrence Fishburne remarks in Boyz n The Hood, any male can sire children but it takes a man to be a father.

Jon was one of the reasons the Feng Shui Society has survived and when I had differences with the Society myself, he was remarkably supportive. He was also of course the author of several very influential books about Nine Star Ki and a teacher who straddled the line between authentic and new age teachings with deftness and integrity. The world is poorer for his loss.

Jon’s approach to feng shui was from the direction of other Eastern studies. He was, as well as a Feng Shui Master, expert in macrobiotic theory and much else. An assiduous student of the Book of Changes which he referred to as “the book,” he had undergone arduous transformational work with a series of Masters in such disciplines as Sa Zen which is essentially sitting for hours at a time while a Master hits you with a bamboo stick if your attention wavers. Sometimes the line between enlightenment and S&M is a blurred one.

During one taxi ride I remember telling him about a volatile Master I worked with myself for several years in the 1980’s who could be so confrontational that one look from him was said to make people throw up with fear. Not such a negotiable skill.

One weekend this Master was holding an “aggression workshop”. These weekends consisted in the main of people who knew each other well, shouting at each other. Sometimes for hours on end. Often the matched pairs were close colleagues, even married couples. One protagonist abused another freeform while the other listened. Those were the rules. When the vocal one had emptied the bile ducts, they had the right to call up someone else they felt needed a going over. It could be anyone. No one knew for sure when they would be next. If things got out of control – threatening fisticuffs say – the Master would weigh in, spreading opprobrium left and right, a truly intimidating experience. In time this practice was, I think, largely responsible for his organisation being led to disaster by those who had the thickest skins and the loudest voices, but the opportunity to share in safety the inevitable aggression that builds up between people working closely together could be extraordinarily liberating. Aggression, from the Latin “aggredior,” after all simply means “stepping forward”. Fighting as Chuck Spezzano is fond of saying, is just foreplay.

Meanwhile however, in mid-session the atmosphere could be extremely taut. There were strict ground rules – not calling out from the audience was one – which were enforced mercilessly. If his look did not shake the unwary, the Master’s frank and undivided attention would. The things we put ourselves through. Still that was then and this is now.

During each session there was absolute silence other than the single raised voice of the current protagonist. Sometimes it was like being in the kitchen during a particularly vicious “domestic”. Afterwards there was calm(ish) discussion chaired by the Master but you (that is I) never knew when the spotlight would fall on you (that is me), triggering a welter of calumny.

As I write, Guns and Roses are playing. I’m reminded of their fatuously pugnacious “Get in the Ring” which could be the soundtrack to what I’m describing.

On the occasion I was telling Jon about (he had been part of groups doing similar stuff) there was a particularly inexperienced and naïve participant involved who had come up from Bristol for the weekend and either did not know the rules or had not experienced the full emetic power of the Master.

It was one pm: time for lunch. A particularly gruelling face-off had just completed. Exhausted and sweaty, the combatants took their seats once more: brothers who had been sharing an office, as I recall. The Master unsmiling, himself as far as anyone could tell about to launch into attack, took a deep breath.

“Well,” he said and looked impassively around him.

The room was silent.

At this point a chirpy West Country voice piped up from the back of the room.

“Oi warnt moi dinner,” it said.

If anything a deeper silence. Everyone inhaled. Some winced. Many lowered their heads defensively, holding their ears like Rugby forwards entering a scrum.

The Master exhaled deeply and looked around the room once more, his eyes dead calm.

“Me too,” he said. “I want my dinner.”

Having done similar work, Jon appeared to find this as funny a story as I did. Perhaps you had to be there.

Flying Stars.

My own daughters Jess and Hen are in Hollywood this week attending wall-to-wall meetings.  They write together and this year several of their screenplays have attracted interest. So now in addition to their high-powered British agent they have one in LA. They’re five foot-nothing identical twins who look far younger than their twenty four years: pocket sized and cute as a button.

They’ve grown up around feng shui and New Age thought. They tolerated being advised to love rather than retaliate when school got difficult. They’re used to having to manoeuvre around water fountains that have suddenly sprouted around the house or being told the day air tickets are cheapest is not the right time to travel. From the age of nine they’ve been home-educated campus style. So they’ve grown used to my political rants and my skewed take on world history. They’re both straight A-students by the way and Jessie is qualified in ba zi. And obviously they have been the subjects of my mumbo jumbo.

How’s this of use to you? One: both are Rabbit/Dragon cusp babies who have grown up knowing they have choice. If you follow my ramblings you’ll know that the Dragon suffers this year what is known as the Four Earths. In short this means they are presented with more plates to spin than they have limbs to spin them. The instructions on the packet btw are to keep saying “Yes.” This pattern applies in a Dragon year to (at least) Dogs, Oxen and Sheep too. Hence the Year of Sudden Change. “Yes” is the right answer to most questions actually.

Second: they know that there has never been anything more important in either Sheila’s or my own lives than our children. They know also that slavery is no example.

My other kids btw have all done me as proud: from the proper academic via the successful salesman who is my second son to the other boys, the musicians, who have just signed to a US label so cool there’s no point telling you about it.

Clearly, the universe being what it is, children choose parents just as profoundly as parents choose children. Which at the risk of myself being emetic, means that I’m a lucky man, Lillian Too was right and Jon Sandifer’s children must be very special. Call it good fortune, call it feng shui, call it karma, call it the Tao, call it blind luck but bless that Jon Sandifer wherever he may be.

© Richard Ashworth 2012.

Never too late

Never too late.

“No truth is ever a lie. I stumble and fall but I give you it all.” Barry Gibb.

Late July and it’s raining fit to remake Blade Runner. This year is different. Back from trips to Singapore (twice) and Bangkok in search of wisdom, I’m teaching, drafting half-a-dozen ba zis at any given time and surveying houses as required but my objectives have changed. This can be attributed to a variety of influences including that I am a Dragon in a Dragon year. But there’s more.

Barbra Streisand’s A Woman in Love is on my writing playlist. Willy Russell, author of Educating Rita and Blood Brothers said he never had music playing when writing in case the emotional effect was due to the music rather than the writing. I play music while I write for exactly the same reason.

These very silly Bee Gee lyrics come with the usual great tune. La Streisand apparently arm wrestled Barry Gibb over the lyric “It’s a right I defend, over and over again” which he claimed was feminist but I think it’s just there to rhyme with “within.” Bless them. No one gave the world more fine tunes for longer than the Bee Gees. But a three-headed Cole Porter they were not.

Carl’s mother has been dying a long time. My attention has been repeatedly drawn to her over a period of years. On the 30^th June he texts to tell me she’s gone. Bless him, bless her, bless his Dad who’s left behind. Many of those in God’s antechamber slip away when the chi peaks: at dung gee, the Winter Solstice, when the fabric between the worlds is thinnest and at ha gee, its Summer counterpart when the sheer power of chi can blow away those whose breath is short. Both my own parents died at mid-summer.

Carl is an enlightened man who expresses his feelings cleanly and completely.

“How are you?” I text him.

“Bereft,” he texts back succinctly.

He has lived with his Mother’s wasting with such dignity, never losing sight of his own responsibility and hers, his choice, her choice, their mutual choice. I know he cries but unlike almost all my clients, I’ve never seen him do it. It’s as if tears would be a betrayal of his truth. He has completed with her whatever he needed to complete and seen to his Dad’s well-being. And now he just has pain. And he knows his pain is both respectful of the treasure that was his mother’s life and a failure to accept that she is gone.

“At times like this,” I text, “It would be nice to know a little more or a little less.”

He sends me back a rueful colon and a bracket.

Hope and loose Change.

Traditionally Dragons (and Dogs) suffer in the Dragon year. But that’s just laziness. The clash of Elements is an opportunity to learn. Which is what the smarter Dragon does in a Dragon year. So mostly I are been travelling and studying. I’ve learned a great deal already and met some remarkable people and we’re only just entering August, that is the Monkey month.

My objective is to write a book of prophecy. The predictions will cover 2016 onwards so if it’s totally wrong I’ll have been paid long before I’m found out. The book will cover the likely events of the 21^st century as indicated by the ancient Chinese gan zi cycle of time. This is the cycle of sixty year animals. The project is kind of ambitious and I may end up either making (more) of a fool of myself or get lost in feng shui surveys and ba zis, the various needs of my retainer clients, side projects, feeding my children, seeking nirvana or becoming ensnared in my personal demons (see 2010 for this).

In summary I remain open for business but I’ll be back and forth a bit.

Accordingly I’m also writing a book about how I did or didn’t achieve my aim which will be more in my usual style: cheap shots, jokes and mumbo jumbo with the odd poignant moment. We have tv lined up to film the search involving trips all over the World to quiz Chinese Masters. And I expect (budget sustaining) to go to (at least) Washington DC, Beijing and Hawaii in search of mystical stuff. This will take me well into 2013, the year of the Water Snake, the Snake on the Grass.

There is essentially no difference between forecast and creation, so I won’t be foreseeing wars, hideousness and plagues of boils which would be simply irresponsible. Prediction must be truthful, simple and healing. There’s always a way to look under and around events and see wholeness because there is no such thing as truth, simply what is or is not useful. This is the tao. No truth is ever a lie.

You see, every generation thinks the world is going to hell. The smarter ones know this. Which doesn’t stop them thinking they’re the exception and that this time it’s really going to happen. But it isn’t; it’s going to be alright. I have a duty to this truth.

We have four more years (by the oral tradition) of the 8 Fate which is about spirituality and self-discovery. Get it while it’s hot. Did you know there are currently at least four incarnate Buddha Matreyas? I know firsthand that at least one is a fraud but hey, the more the mudita.

After the 8 Fate we enter – guess what? – the 9 Fate until 2043. The 9 Fate is about Fire which means, among other things global warming. A critical mass of the world will not wake up to the fact that it’s burning its own boats until after 2016. Then we have 27 years (nine for each line of the Trigram Qian, the Father) in which we solve the problem, elegantly, safely, peacefully. Essentially when the smartest minds find they can make more money saving the world than ripping each other off, everything shifts. It will happen.

And no, that’s not it. There’ll be 80,000 odd more words

Spoiled for Chois.

We have wrongly- delivered mail, addressed to someone with an Irish name. It looks like a dvd and it belongs three doors away. I drop it in on my walk into the office two days before I break for the summer. A fit-looking middle-aged Chinese man answers the door and takes the package.

“For my stepson,” he says, looking at the name on the package..

I have seen this man before. He is a fabulous violinist who sometimes busks on the High Street.

“Cai,” he says, offering his hand.

“Richard. Cai…is that Choi?”

“Choi is my surname,” he tells me and rattles off his full name including a patronymic that I don’t catch.

How did I know that? I put it down to a confusion in my rudimentary Chinese between “Cai” and “Choi”. There are other words for a mistake that turns out to be right. Feng shui and ba zi are both essentially just reading the waking dream.

Time out of Mind.

As part of this process of discovery, Sheila and I attended a Chuck Spezzano weekend in July. We were well overdue for the sort of spiritual infusion that only Chuck delivers.

Lency, Chuck’s wife, is my son Joey’s godmother but for one reason or another I hadn’t seen Chuck or Lency for over ten years. Too long. No one delivers the simple message that love is the answer like Chuck. And that doesn’t mean he’s some sort of flower child. He’s an ex-quarterback for God’s sake, built like a brick one. His Psychology of Vision material is essentially the Course in Miracles delivered with enormous heart. Nothing heals like heart.

He has studied Hawaiian Kahuna. Some of his methods are sound feng shui and this may be a reason but what works is universal. He breaks a room up into numbered segments that are perfectly consistent with Chinese numerology and he divines from whatever is presented to him exactly as a Chinese Master would. At least one who had not been traumatised by the Cultural Revolution into claiming to be “scientific”. Science, schmience. Why limit ourselves this way?

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood, Chuck says. Time’s an illusion. It’s all now. Healing is retrospective, immediate, universe-wide. This idea alone is enough to change the world.

Chuck is monogamous, of high integrity and astonishingly perceptive which is not true of all New Age healers, teachers, gurus, what-have-you. And as I say he has a heart the size of Wembley. Click here.  Accept no substitute.

Chancel Be a Fine Thing.

Now Carl is buying his Dad a new home.

“Slight hold-up with chancel costs,” he tells me matter-of-factly.

The origins of this impossibly English hitch are lost in time. It means that built into a freehold is the obligation to contribute to maintaining the parish church. A feudal thing.

“Could be expensive if the roofing lead gets nicked.”

He’s very conscious of the value of commodities and the coming change of investment paradigm which becomes inevitable in August and accelerates during the Dog month of October. This is what 2012 is about as I suggested in December. And it’s benevolent. Everyone even bankers, emerge happier if they have a mind to. Wait and see.

Today we’re looking at a potential office for him. Two actually. The building that houses both is on land that sags downwards to the North East. This is what a Chinese Master might call a yin feature and I’d call poor architecture. The previous occupants of the first office which sits on the sag appear to have been tipped out of the building.

“A great future behind them,” I say, noticing the desk backing onto the door.

The agent standing back speechless in case I blow his sale, confirms hesitantly that I’m right.

“They talked a good fight. They’d been successful before but yes, they went bust.”

Carl knows the simple (and very inexpensive) feng shui truism that what happened to the previous incumbents tends to happen to us unless we take positive action.

And the other office is much better. For one thing, it’s in the South of the building which suggests success over the next two years. This is because the South holds the 1 Star of distant good fortune; distant because the numbers of the Flying Stars or fei sin in each location, descend year by year and the current star of plenty is number 8. The previous occupants, we discover, expanded into bigger accommodation. His proposed roomie is a feng shui agnostic who doesn’t want to be bothered with nonsense like facing the right way so I suggest Carl bags the best spot for his own desk.

Merry Christmas Yaki Soba.

You can be fined $500 for importing chewing gum into Singapore. Frankly when my knee finds it on the underside of a table on a train I’m sympathetic to Lee Kuan Yuw on this. But what’s striking about Singapore, as Kuala Lumpur, as Bangkok, is how much building, how much commerce is going on. South East Asia is alive with acquisitive energy. Everywhere there are buildings going up, land being reclaimed from the sea.

I’m in Singapore to meet the magnificent maverick Master I shall refer to simply as Si Fu. Si Fu has a very individual take on ba zi. He has no time for Structures and Formations or even supporting Elements, dismissing these ideas with a flick of a nicotine-stained hand. I warm to his method and to him. He says he’s happy to be written about and filmed. He’s been in Brisbane for 40 years but still speaks quite fractured English. In Chinese, however he’s a poet. When I video him talking about the Chinese cycles, he first writes a long poem of his own composition up on the whiteboard.

Time after time as he analyses a ba zi, he talks about wayward children. He sees damage everywhere, apparently able to see what will happen and no more. It’s always too late to have a happy childhood appears to be the message; we can only deal with now. Every pessimist believes he’s a realist. Si Fu cares so much and he’s so Chinese.

Outside the hotel seated on a dwarf wall for a smoke, he shows me his model for predicting market movements. It’s like the biggest bingo card you’ve ever seen. There are patterns of numbers all over it, some I recognise, some I don’t: pairings that look familiar, sequences that repeat and some that seem not to.

“If there’s a pattern, I’ll find it,” he says. I don’t know how effective his system is but he holds meetings with a small group of investors and advisors every night. He’s not here often. Mostly these days he’s holed up in Hong Kong, teaching in Mandarin.

Between sessions with Si Fu I explore the Singapore Barrage where is sited the world’s silliest building, the Marina Bay Sands Hotel which houses the new casino complex. In Singapore now they have Formula One, the Singapore eye, amphibious Hippo boats and the fun resort of Sentosa Island. And the casino. They’ve bricked over most of what brought tourists; the once-grand Raffles Hotel is sandwiched between high rises and encroached by new roads. So they’ve introduced attractions to bring people here for reasons other than business.

Feng Shui Masters have argued for years over where the energy feeds into the casino. I take the MRT (Metro) out to inspect the flat reclaimed land beyond the bay and then climb to the top of the hotel itself. It must be three hundred feet high and it looks like three stumps topped by a surfboard. It dominates the Singapore skyline. The view is extraordinary; I can see all three contenders for the source of the energy from here. Knowing this is crucial to drawing prosperity into the casino. Two of them are clearly not it.

As it happens, Singapore’s Wan Li Feng Shui Book Shop is only one stop away by MRT. So I drop in and finance the jaunt by selling them copies of my book The Feng Shui Diaries (now available as a download btw just click here)

Si Fu’s not well. He coughs and takes medication several times a class. I don’t know how serious this is. I know he’s some sort of genius, I know he’s angry and I know he is returning to Hong Kong. And I think it’s because he can’t stand to speak English anymore.

He has little good to say about any other Masters. But that’s not unusual. Feng Shui Masters have big egos. They do compete as to whose luo pan has the most rings. They really do. If you go into Ricky Than’s Feng Shui Shop in Kowloon, there’s one so wide you can’t lift it.

On camera Si Fu rants about the turning of the energy that has put the West on the back foot. All around us in Singapore there is enterprise. In the UK only bankers are positive. Many Chinese think of 9/11 as the biggest break history has given them since the Ming. It took America out of the game. Si Fu sees a transfer of power. He locates it in 2003; Iraq, I guess. That fits the gan zi model. With the Chinese in the ascendant in Asia, in Africa, in Iran, it’s hard to argue with him. The photographs of the first floor escalator at Selfridges’ New Year Sale in London, apparently the biggest first day of a sale in history, show not a single indigenous face: Asians as far as the eye can see.

“The Americans have brought it upon themselves,” Si Fu says, almost spitting. And he says a great deal more, much of which we’ll probably use in the tv series. It’s heartfelt, it’s bitter and it’s brilliant.

After two weeks his ba zi method has reassured me that my own methods are sound as well as fast-tracking me into knowledge only a half-century of practice can bring.

We talk idly for a while. He puts down his cigarette. His wife passes and frowns. He ignores the disapproval. A passing student wags a finger at him.

“You know you shouldn’t,” she says.

There are no tears here. But I am deeply moved by this man. Carl and his respectful sensitivity are a million miles away. And the Psychology of Vision.

We part with a handshake. I say I hope I’ll see him again. I don’t know that I will. I keep remembering that it’s never too late and where the chewing gum came from.

© Richard Ashworth 2012.

Lizard Head

Lizard Head.

Snake day.

So nature adjusts. Too little rain is followed by too much. Just what you’d expect in a Water Dragon year. Followed by a heat wave. Followed by more rain. And today the slugs are at my sunflowers.

At the railway station I try to buy a ticket from the ticket machine. It’s attached to a South-facing wall. Right into the sun. The sun is so low and its glare so fierce even at 7am, that I can see nothing and could as easily be buying a ticket to EuroDisney or Glasgow as to Waterloo which is my intention.

The train is full of commuters. These are neither the driven ones of the 5:32 nor the expansive broadsheet readers of the 8:53.

Dysfunctional weather for dysfunctional times; one day monsoon, the next it’s the Gobi desert.

Sometimes I’m asked to summarise feng shui in a sentence and I may respond that if you plant tomatoes against a North-facing wall, you’re likely to be disappointed. A similar principle applies to ticket-machines and South-facing walls. ATMs on the other hand are a study in themselves.

In London I am surveying an interior design showroom. What impacts the feng shui of any building is at least 70% external, so first I inspect the streets. There are knots of energy where the traffic loops and dead spots where streets end suddenly. Cutting through an alley, I come across what to my unsophisticated eye, appears to be a new Banksy: high up on a wall a black and white image of a shopper and trolley plummeting to the pavement. The shopper’s legs outstretched behind her are realistic enough to make me wince.

The toilet of the showroom is at the geometrical centre or tai chi. This is generally not a great indicator; consider the metaphor. Intuitively I flag that it suggests theft. This is borne out by the events of the following week which I’m not going to go into here.

On my way home I’m thinking about a young girl born in 1998 in the Monkey month of August. That makes her a Tiger of course. Tiger plus Monkey plus Snake brings what is called the “Fire Penalty”. I have it cyclically in my own ba zi; can mean sickness, can mean interference, can mean withdrawal. From where I’m sitting, there’s little difference between these as life choices. This Tiger was mysteriously ill in 2006. Like her mother, she’s a busy and gifted girl with a lot going on in her life and it’s the easiest thing in the world to attribute mystery illnesses to fatigue or cussedness.

“She’s run down,” you might say or “Rest.”

Not really good enough.

Back then I could tell from the ba zi when she’d recover and I was proved right. I also predicted some sort of minor relapse early in 2012 as what is called her “Big Fate” or “Luck Pillar” changed. Right again. The ba zi shows a further occurrence in a decade or so which is why I’m thinking about her now. Sometimes I can do without being right about these things. The house had a nasty spot in the South East, the realm of the Snake, that didn’t show up in any of the Chinese calculations. That wasn’t good enough then and it’s not good enough now.

Across London on the Overground, then Waterloo back to Godalming.

From Godalming station I take a shortcut. It’s off-road, mostly dirt track, some of it narrow path. The smell of wild garlic is in the air. Although the rails are only yards away, it feels remote. The path is not wide enough for vehicles and there are only a couple of cottages along the way. The heat even at six in the evening, shimmers.

As I turn a corner, something on the rough gravel catches my eye. It’s a sloe worm or an adder (aka viper): brown and about a foot long. Could be either. The viper and the grass snake (green but otherwise similar) are the only wild snakes in the United Kingdom. And the sloe worm, as I recall, is strictly speaking a lizard. As a boy in Cornwall, I was taught that such beasts only come out when it’s very dry and it’s years since I saw any.

Some Masters call the Snake the “seeker after truth”. The other side of this, the yin to the yang, is that truth is often the Snake’s issue. What you see is often not what you get. As an example perhaps, the Snake rules 1953, 1965, 1977 and 1989 and so on, the (Chinese) month of May, between 9 and 7 am, and days you’d need a Chinese Calendar to identify but also any ba zi that includes both Tiger and Monkey; this is the “Fire Penalty”. Tricky as hell.

The snake -or lizard- slithers. It appears to be whole but that could be deceptive. So often the only reason a wild animal breaks cover is because it’s a goner. This one is pretty lively. Furious actually. It’s exposed to the late glare of the sun and it’s not keen on public sunbathing.

The study of snakes is called “herpetology”. This word appears connected to those for shingles and cold sores, the ailments of the run down. I don’t know enough to know how these facts are connected. What I do know is that the Tiger’s symptoms could be what used to be called “scrofula” for which there are standard TCM prescriptions. It’s reckoned to be related to a weakening of the yin in liver and kidney.

The snake – or lizard- sort of hisses up at me but it’s only little, its complaint more “s” than “sssss”.

It’s a bit crucial to know which is which, as sloe worm and grass snake are harmless while the adder’s bite can be fatal and this one is in the middle of the track where it might be squished. That is er….run down. Hmmm. The way is quiet but nowhere within the GU postcode is ever truly lonely. I look down. On the beast’s forehead is the distinctive “v” that identifies the viper. With some care, I pick up a stick and encourage it into the hedgerow.

The Tiger’s symptoms are in her neck. In 2006 I couldn’t get a fix on the problem other than to suggest they move. They did. She got better. This time again she has recovered without any real clue as to what went wrong. In point of fact, her mother developed the same symptoms – which is love indeed – and they convalesced together. I tell the Tiger’s mother about liver and kidney yin.

What you see is not what you get.

I must have been seven the last time I saw a snake in the wild; an August afternoon during the endless summer break from school. It was above the cliff path from Mullion to Poldhu, the heathland where Marconi sent that first radio message across the Atlantic. On that peninsula between the Lizard Head and Lands End, there’s nothing but water from the gorse of the cliff to Newfoundland. Now that’s what I call remote. I was taught how to listen for adders on summer afternoons. They rub against dry bracken and make a rustling sound. When you hear that, it’s time to get out of the undergrowth and be sure you’re wearing shoes.

I shrug off the snake and the Tiger. As a diviner, the message I’m receiving from the divine is that the snake is pissy but harmless. Still not quite good enough.

I’m a healer before I’m anything else. I end up dealing with money because that’s what’s expected of the feng shui man. But it’s got very little to do with why I get up in the morning. To be whole, that is alive, alert and open to the world, is to be abundant. Healing is a spectrum that ranges from physical change at one extreme to performance enhancement and closeness to God at the other. But all good fortune is a function of wholeness. When we heal we are fortunate.

The thing about Snake, Tiger and Monkey is that when they coincide they pick a fight. It’ll show up differently, not always physically, not always even negatively but the Tiger is a er…sitting duck for the Snake and Monkey.

For the time being at least the snake – if not the Snake – however is safe in the undergrowth.

Meanwhile FYI: I’ll be teaching introductory feng shui in four doses over four weekends from June 23rd (click here) and ba zi over four weekends from October 10th (click here)

Also excitingly my 2007 book The Feng Shui Diaries is available as a download now (click here). It’s got some good jokes.