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/

 

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

Bo Xi Lai Nouveau

Bo Xi Lai Nouveau

It’s raining as I walk into Godalming, the worst sort of English weather: no driving wind to give the rain character, no cold to make it sharp. It’s not even raining particularly hard, it’s just wet, the sort of wet that makes everything dark and floppy.

The walk takes me past the Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist which dwarfs the houses either side. In the front window are quotations from Mary Baker Eddy. “You are safe,” one reads. I must have been twenty before I was sure that Ms. Eddy neither sang duets with Jeanette McDonald nor played the twangy guitar on the “Peter Gunn Theme” but over the years her message has suffered worse misunderstandings than these. “You are safe,” the banner reads. Always good to know.

Certain buildings feng shui Masters call “Dragons’ Lairs” because they are equal parts bear trap and treasure house. Activating the correct spot in such a dwelling at the correct moment can be followed by unfeasible good fortune, the wrong one by a plague of boils. Only a feng shui Master would knowingly take one on. This building, part church, part reading room, part sales office, looks like just such a construction.

It’s the 23rd and after energising the downstairs loo of a period house in Berkshire between the hours of six and eight in the morning, I’m back in Godalming prior to another trip to South East Asia, the topic of study this time being ba zi in physical healing, the place where feng shui meets Traditional Chinese Medicine. This information is likely to percolate into my ba zi teaching later in the year just as Xuan Kong Da Gua has entered my feng shui teaching (commercial break: on which the Early Early Bird offer runs out next week)

As I pass the paper shop in the pouring rain, I notice that the hosepipe ban shares headlines with the skullduggery in China. The ten-yearly reshuffle of the hierarchy at the People’s Congress approaches. Sixth-in-line Bo Xi Lai is fingered as a conspirator to murder. This has nothing to do with justice; the allegation arises not as part of the slow grind of the wheels of the law but because Bo has crossed some line in the internal politics of the PRC. There is every indication that had Bo minded his ps and qs, the rapidly cremated body of apparently poisoned businessman Neil Heywood would remain under the carpet so to speak. Q is of course pronounced “ch” in Wade Giles Mandarin, btw (just as the x in “Xi” is “sh”).

However hard it rains, Godalming never floods even though much of the town is below the level of the River Wey that runs through it. This is because of the flood meadow.This Lammas Land is mostly river from November to April which is why the town isn’t. This flood plain as its Celtic name (derived from Lug, God of Light) suggests, is as old as the town itself, upwards of sixteen hundred years probably. Feng shui is wind and water, the ancient principle being to preserve the water and protect against the wind. It’s easy to forget just how powerful Water is.

One Saturday afternoon several years ago, Sheila and I were walking our dog Zusu down by the river. The level was dangerously low, the water having that dusty look a too-shallow river gets, the fish too visible. Once home we rang the Water Board and discovered that there was a stopcock located in a building on the riverbank. A wheel was turned, the level was restored.

 Mary Baker’s Eddy.

The events of this watery year 2012 can be expected to reflect previous Water Dragons: a Dragon’s Lair, poison and treasure. Such years include 1952, 1832 and 208BCE, all troublesome times for China. In 1952 Tibet was the treasure, annexed and never since relinquished, long-term not such a popular move with the natives. In 208BCE, Qin Xi Huang Di, having unified China with unbelievable brutality, lit out for the Eastern Ocean on a successful search for shamans to kill him with immortality potions. 1832? China is deep in the Opium Wars. Oh and Greece secedes from the Ottoman Empire. 1712: the South Sea Trading Company buys the national debt and sells it back to investors as junk bonds. Plenty of parallels to play with.

Toxic times indeed. As I walk into town, fleeing my office where there is more going on than I can concentrate over, I notice that there are now three nailcare shops. Although there are fewer pubs than there used to be, only one or two premises are boarded up. They will become restaurants in due course or Tesco Metros or be demolished and replaced with maisonettes at a quarter of a million per bedroom. This is banker country. Recession is something that happens to other people.

Despite the wealth of manicure options, there’s no Starbucks in Godalming as yet so I head for Costa which like approximately half the shops on this East-West High Street, faces due South and so enjoys a Flying Star pattern called “String of Pearls”. To cut a long story short, shops change hands but nobody goes bust. There’s always someone else ready to open a haute couture boutique as a tax loss. Or a coffee shop.

Unlike Starbucks, the coffee at Costa tastes like coffee, something I’d generally consider a disadvantage. That doesn’t matter however as I don’t drink it anymore. Coffee tends to desensitise when I need to be sensitive and we can’t have that, can we? These days I drink green tea for the most part. So what am I doing in a coffee shop? The truth is that I am drawn by the buzzing energy, the comings and goings, conversations that I half-hear, activity that demands nothing of me. I can be involved and not involved. It’s a place to hide if you like.

As the shop fronts due South, till, bar, coffee machines and staff are all in the South East. This means that in 2012 till, bar, steaming coffee machines and in the recent unseasonal heat wave, steaming baristas are all in the wu huang or Five Yellow as well as the tai sui, the direction of the year energy. These annual spots of sat chi or Poison Stars are not places to linger.

So I’m unsurprised that things appear to be going wrong around the engine room of the cafe. The flow from the boiler tap is down to a trickle. It takes the pretty young barista several minutes to pour enough boiling water onto a Twinings Green tea bag to fill a large cup. She’s studying law at Guildford Law College and reported for duty at 6:45 this morning, she tells me. And today, according to her young male colleague (Film Studies, Manchester) the till is not taking cards. He’s a bit hot under the collar. I’m not surprised. There’s no room behind the counter which itself is piled with enough confectionery to render the staff close to invisible. The counter is designed for all sorts of things but serving coffee is not one. It’s okay, I say, I’ve got cash and I can wait. Then all of a sudden he asks exasperated, of nobody in particular, “When is this going to be sorted out?” and I blurt out without thinking: “About six weeks,” and he looks at me as if I am criminally insane. Not the first to do that of course. Mouth open story jump out, as my first mother-in-law used to say.

I find a quiet table and make my tea bag last an hour. Every now and then someone I know walks in, greets me, we talk, I explain myself. Then I return to making sense of the Xuan Kong Da Gua material I’ve brought back from Thailand. This is powerful stuff.

Xuan Kong means “Mystery of the Void,” and the story goes that it was used in mediaeval times to hide armies in plain sight. The general who employed a XKDG Master could appear from nowhere right in the face of an unprepared enemy. I have been using this material for more than a decade now but the new slant I am working with gives the whole thing a fresh edge. While I work, the wife of my current problem client, an unemployed banker, emails to tell me he may have landed the job he wants. Thank God for that. XKDG properly measured, located and applied, should make a difference that quickly.

Having studied for ten hours-plus most days over there, I have mastered the bulk of the theory but there are three bits I don’t understand. They’re like an ache. I can not bypass them. Classical feng shui is like mathematics; there’s no point approaching stage two until you’ve mastered step one. By three pm, I’m deeply frustrated. I persevere. By five, two of the three problems are making sense. Thank God for that too.

It’s still raining on my way back and I want to ask the Water Companies some more questions. Just how wet does it have to get before I can water my sunflowers? What proportion of the lost water is due to leaky pipes and poorly secured reservoirs, what proportion overuse of river water by industry?

Finally, the last few windows before I’m out of town, I pass the hand-care shops. Expensively engraved upon the glass of one is:”Proffessional Nail Care.” I’m a Virgo. I was straightening up the pictures on other people’s walls long before I was paid for it. Two f’s where there should be one is almost as distressing as failing to understand Xuan Kong Da Gua. I have to look away.

You can get hybrid nail replacements now apparently. I’m frightened to speculate as to just what that might mean.

But of course we are safe. There is little to which the appropriate response is not a smile. Come hell, high water, death or the taxman, but especially high water, the Tao is both beyond control and worthy of trust. Not that the Tao gives a damn. It just goes on taoing its thing. So thank you Ms Eddy. We are indeed safe.

Richard Ashworth April 2012.

Happy is the Land with no History

Happy is the Land with no History.

Thailand, early afternoon the second week in February 2012, the “land of smiles”: I have cynical thoughts as the plane circles to land at Bangkok Suvarnabhumi. I’ve spent a little time in Prague with its machine-gun toting police, in Rio de Janeiro and in Las Vegas. Sex tourism is an ugly phrase. But then so are “belly button” and “big pharma.” From the air what I see is a fertile country, green with canals and vegetation. On the ground I find a people gracious and uncomplicated. The lady who organises my limo to the hotel is short on English and long on smiles. The taxi driver apologises for the lines of Toyotas and Kias, bumper to bumper all the way to the distant nest of chrome and concrete high-rises that is Bangkok.

“Cutting edge cars and architecture but no better at handling traffic than London,” I laugh.

“Here on business?” he asks.

“To learn,” I answer.

He laughs several times on the way and is visibly appreciative of my small tip.

The admission of ignorance is the beginning of learning. I’m here to study date selection or zi re with Master Mas Kehardthum whose unorthodox approach appears to be the cutting edge.

I first came across Master Mas at the International Feng Shui Conference in Singapore in 2008. I remember Lillian Too flicking her magic scarf at him next to her. He had clearly pressed some buttons. Then I made a point of seeking him out at Montreux in September 2011 when the unorthodoxy of his date selection model became clear. It was possible he had the best and most authentic method I had come across.

Master Mas had two immediate claims to fame: one that in the summer of 2001 he warned a client to move out of the Twin Towers right away, the other that he had successfully selected in advance a date for a huge lottery win.  At the Montreux assembly which had advertised five Chinese Masters and fielded one, the material he presented was both outstanding and, like the conference, clearly incomplete. I was intrigued enough to speak with and discuss studying with him during 2012. But I wanted to fill such gaps as I might first.

The gaps were clearly intended. If, like me, you have been working with Xuan Kong Da Gua (don’t ask) for a decade or so with results that tend to but never actually arrive at 100% reliable, you will have been as certain as me that there remained something missing in the information passed down from the ancient Masters.

Curious, I attended his presentation at the 2011 Singapore gathering six weeks later. The material was again not whole. But with a different piece missing.

This may if you are unfamiliar with the world of feng shui, seem weird: that deliberately incomplete or even inaccurate information should be routine. The fact is that many Masters still subscribe to the traditional position that the ”secrets of heaven should not be divulged.”  A large proportion even of the small number of worthwhile feng shui books in English contain deliberate mistakes and omissions. Every teacher I have studied with, with the honourable exception of Derek Walters, has held back information.

Derek is incidentally in my experience pretty much the only European expert your average Chinese Master will offer the time of day. This is because he is respectful, learned, smart and does his homework. He knows and respects space-clearing, intuitive placement and Black Hat but knows that feng shui is a Chinese, Elemental thing.

So I found an air-conditioned Starbucks in a downtown Singapore mall, sat down for three days and pretty much worked it out. There remained holes but I was ready enough to email and book myself onto his next zi re training to fill them.

That’s the story so far.

The hotel is modern and large and so is my room. The toilet has an electronic flush with cartoons illustrating its use but I’ll draw a veil over that. Jet lagged to hell and back, I venture out. There are barrows of fresh fruit on the street. I am tempted by the deep red of the apples and the green of the melons but have a traveller’s fear of water-based street food.

Thai fruit is legendary. The rills and aqueducts I saw from the air were an indication why. This country is a market gardeners’ paradise.

There are two city rail systems in Bangkok: the underground MRT, pretty much indistinguishable from those crisscrossing Singapore and Hong Kong and the Sky Train whose track, much like its Berlin equivalent, is twenty feet or so up in the air. I take the Sky Train, not so much tempted by its exotic name as funnelled by the crowds. Three or four stops later, I get out at a sign that says “Golden Buddha.” I walk there, put my red Converse All Stars into a handy bag and sit before the Buddha in a British ex-public school version of the Lotus posture. Tourists come and go. Every now and then a European is gently requested to take off a hat or put on a scarf. In central China this place would be a nightmare of cheap construction and sweet wrappers but here it’s magical. I intend to stay a minute or two and remain more than an hour. But for the odd fidget, I sit still, feeling the presence of God.

I carry no watch and I lose track of time, spilling out blissed and in touch with the universe. I unfold my City map, forgetting that this is the accepted international sign for “Please take money from me” and am jolted by an elderly Chinese man trying to sell me river boat trips. He’s stressed – I can feel the striving in him – but backs off gently when I turn down his offer.

Back at the hotel and out on the street, I am again struck by the affability of the people. Stall after stall is selling knock-offs. I have a shopping list of handbags to buy and I haggle clumsily which the stallholders seem to enjoy. There are Calvins for Joey, my teenager who hates to wear low slung jeans but appreciates both designer labels and a bargain. Even the hookers who line the street, smile gently. They don’t appear desperate like their opposite numbers in the West.

The Date Selection Class consists of twelve of Master Mas’ students and myself. Although they are a cosmopolitan selection largely from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and mostly Chinese by culture and race, as so often happens, the only language they have in common is English. No wonder the British are such poor linguists. There’s no need to learn languages and hence to understand other cultures. Whose loss is that?

The lovely Li, Master Mas’ star student introduces me to Dragon Fruit which looks like a decorated melon but tastes more like an impossibly rich pear. Young Yulius whose self-chosen European name speaks of a deep hinterland of classical scholarship, entertains the class by being unable to sit still. I can’t help noticing however, from his comments, that he picks up every point first time. A trio of Chinese housewives appear on the face of it to be sharing some man-free down time but are razor sharp also. Master Mas’ material is radical and rigorously logical, derived from first principles. After each six-hour day I retire to my room and write up my notes. It’s the only way I’m going to stay on top of this. So I’m pretty antisocial and don’t get to know these welcoming people as I might.

“May you live in interesting times” is how the Chinese curse goes. There are ways to explain a country this fertile and this contented. Buddhism in action is one. Constitutional monarchy is another. But the key I think, is that this bottomlessly gracious nation never goes to war. A dozen or so monarchs of the Chakri dynasty have for centuries avoided conflicts with neighbours as volatile as Laos and Cambodia, charming successive waves of acquisitive Portuguese, Dutch, and British, even convincing the Japanese to travel discretely across the Southern uplands to Malaysia rather than invade. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse generally arrive together. Tilled fields are a sign of a peace that can be trusted.

The current King Rama IX, is the longest-serving head of state in the world. Sixty-five years, since you ask, six more than our own monarch.

The only exception to my self-imposed purdah is a sumptuous barbecue at Li’s home. Her house is a temple to feng shui: wou lou shaped fence, blinking light at the propitious North East, floor receding towards the rear. And the acid test is that her husband and children beam, her house is large, unshowy and comfortable and the shrimps are the size of footballs.

After ten days I emerge to catch a dawn long haul. I’m in no state to teach this material just yet but I can start to use it. Almost immediately an email from Kruno in Zagreb who has just landed the job offer he sought, the afternoon of the first Activation I prescribe in the light of the new information, bears out that I now know something. Meanwhile those who will settle for what I knew already can register for the Wind that Stops at the Water, starting  23^rd June. We’d love to see you.

Robert Mugabe slept in my bed.

Robert Mugabe slept in my bed.

1. I’ve got a gong and I’m not afraid to use it.

My friend Dawn is a self-made not-so secret millionaire. She made her fortune in the flooring business. At pretty much every modern international airport you’ll find yourself stepping on her floors. And she’s been a pioneer in introducing non-toxic solvents and in fair treatment of the workforce too. Altogether she’s a remarkable woman. And she’s bonkers about feng shui though I’m sometimes not sure she’s quite sure what she means by that.

Last time I visited her big homestead high on the Cheshire ridge, she had just placed a pond. My compass said it was in the North East.

“Why now, why there?” I ask her. I know she expects me to scold her when she does these things. Why buy a dog and do your own barking?

“I just sort of thought it would be nice,” she says innocently.

She has of course placed the pond intuitively. Intuitively. What do we mean by this? Most Chinese Masters are dismissive of students who claim to be intuitive because it’s so often an excuse for not doing the homework. As it happens, all the great ones are deeply intuitive but don’t try getting them to own up.

I do some calculation. Dawn plays new age music that keeps hinting at tunes and then stopping short. It’s poignant and atmospheric. Once or twice I zone out and listen to Bon Iver’s achingly beautiful version of Bonnie Rae’s I can’t make you love me. If she wants my attention Dawn has a big Balinese gong she can hit from time to time.

Technically I’m identifying what palaces Dawn has put the doors into by placing water. The palaces are like a clock face. There are twelve of them, ranging from birth to death via maturity. Each occupies a position on the compass depending on the source the energy is coming from. And a massive external body of water will usually be that source. In other words the pond has altered the nature of the energy entering the house.

“Well?” she asks, bringing me a cup of tea just the way I like it; English Breakfast, strong, too much milk, builder’s tea, this is the North of England, after all.

“You’ve put your front door into mo yuk.”

“What does that actually mean? You know I can’t tell a ying tong from a ping pong.”

“Mo yuk means hanky panky. You’ll have been unusually frisky.”

She colours and tells me just how right I am. And her secrets are of course safe with me. Suffice it to say that she’s a recently divorced woman who has every right to a bit of fun.

She tells me she’s concerned that money is flowing only one way right now: out.

“Will that have anything to do with the pond?”

I look out across the vales of Cheshire where the disc of Jodrell Bank is shining in the distance. Her house is high up the slope and the long drive falls away to the West.

“The West is where money is this year.”

“OMG. Did I do that?”

“You’ll have made it more extreme. Next time I’ll balance it up.”

“How?”

“Height and weight. The West is best kept high and heavy long term. This year, if it’s not, it’s likely to mean money going out. You’ll need something very heavy.”

“I’ve been thinking of a stone circle,” she says and stares into the middle distance. I have seen that look before.

2. The ground beneath my feet.

On my way back from Singapore at Changi Airport, a month later I notice the particularly springy flooring and text Dawn.

“This one of yours?”

“Yep.”

In Singapore and Malaysia I have noticed so much building, so much busyness, so much commerce that Blighty seems very tame by comparison. It’s twenty degrees cooler back home in every sense I can think of. Singapore and Malaysia. are feng shui central of course. Nothing is built without involving the legions of feng shui men. You have only to raise your eyes to the skyline. At the junction of North Bridge Street and Pickering Street I see skyscrapers with missing corners, skyscrapers with holes cut out of them and skyscrapers in a sort of static Mexican stand-off where a very tall one is topped by another slightly taller one and this by another in a constant game of architectural top-handie.

Because Singapore is eight hours ahead, I’ve found myself working almost round the clock. By day I’m looking at buildings and researching, by evening handling emails and calls from England. I do a lot of my work in Starbucks because they’re the same wherever you go and I like to work surrounded by energy without having to get too deeply involved. For those studying ba zi btw, this gives away that I was born in the Monkey month.

One afternoon, for some variety I walk to the colonial Raffles Hotel, now dwarfed by its surroundings. Nearby there’s an extreme example of feng shui one-upmanship: a restaurant complex mirrors St Andrews’ Cathedral opposite with its tall spires. The surrounding high rises echo both but they’re so much bigger. Their towers dwarf the colonial markers that once established the supremacy of the British way of life. Not any more.

And there is no recession here. Everyone’s in business. The Metro teems and there are cranes all over. Everywhere there is building, everywhere competition. A generation ago Singapore had fishing villages and open space. It’s only about the size of the Isle of Wight and yet it competes on equal terms with vast nations like China, Germany and the USA. But it’s just about run out of space.

It’s monsoon season, very hot and uncomfortably humid which makes it a relief after Raffles to enter the air conditioned malls again. Monsoon season means storms every afternoon, some of them spectacular electrical spectacles. It also means that the pavements are slick from about 4pm. In Singapore much of the pavement is shiny terracotta and I’m wearing rather natty red Converse All Stars which have virtually no grip. Cue feng shui man in the frozen lake scene from “Bambi”.

3. Strait Story

I take the bus North into Malaysia. It’s a high tech double decker which gives me a wonderful view across the Straits of Malacca. Any ship sailing East-West whether Royal Navy aircraft carrier on the way back via the Red Sea to the Mediterranean or Fuchuan warship of the fleet of Admiral Zheng He en route to Malindi on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa, has had to pass through here since navigation began. The coach eats the miles and I eat a cold curry served by the young Muslim steward.

Although Singapore and Malaysia are very different, they share this constant hum of building. Only Malaysia has more real estate. There’s no hardwood any more but there are at least real mountains to the North and open space.

Jim and Tessa’s condo in Kuala Lumpur is typical. It’s so new that the load bearing columns are too full of wires and technology to afford me an accurate take on my compass. The needle goes haywire and I have to stand back yards. I conclude it’s East-West though.

Tessa is a sweet lady with roots in half-a-dozen cultures. Malaysian is one, Welsh is another. Their last home was in the valleys outside Cardiff. This is a bit different.

Tessa is also a big fan of feng shui. For her though it is a Chinese thing with strict rules and traditions. She loves to pore over the almanacs produced by every Master in South East Asia with a following and her shelves are stacked with technical books on feng shui, ba zi and other aspects of Chinese metaphysics. She plies me with tea and sandwiches and tasty Malaysian delicacies. My being a vegetarian doesn’t faze her at all. Her ba zi suggests next year she takes her cooking skills seriously.

I show them both on the development plan how the guard house is appropriately to the North West and the external water of which there is a great deal – fountains, swimming and infinity pools – North and that there’s an alternative exit South West and a substantial shrine to the East. When Jim takes me out past the armed guards to measure up, I see that the shrine is loaded with recent offerings: fruit, joss sticks, tealights. The Buddha is as golden as a koi carp.

I explain that these positions spell a dwelling deliberately positioned in Wood chi formation. Furthermore there’s a chunk left out of the floor plan, making for a classic “hatchet” shape which is I imagine to stimulate trading of the apartments.

Tessa’s mostly concerned that the condo is safe for 2012.

“Where can I put my candles this year?” she asks, house proud and concerned about cooking smells.

I generally treat a condo as a room in a bigger building. Theirs is in the West of the development which means they are sitting both on the wealthy Water star and the healthy Mountain star. So that’s alright then.

Jim good-naturedly shows me round. They banter. Tessa pretends he’s totally useless and he pretends not to be a man who commands silly fees for repairing the IT systems of big corporations. He’s on the cusp of a decision: is the future of his business East or West? In 2012, the Year of Sudden Change, both East and West are prosperous. The long term is East though.

The kitchen is in the South East which is ideal in 2012 when the nasty wu huang 5 star will arrive. A kitchen activates so much contradictory energy – Wood in the form of food, the Fire of cooking, the Metal of cutlery, the Earth of simply eating and of course a great deal of Water – that it is the perfect place to hide poor flying stars.

Jim and Tessa have put me up in the very smart East Inn Hotel. They buy me dinner there the first night. Tessa flirts outrageously with the very French head chef who I take at first to be gay. He’s not and he’s a rather interesting man whose cv includes a two month spell as a human shield hostage in Iraq. He also makes a world class Thai red curry.

In the bar a pretty Muslim girl is fronting a covers band; voices, guitar, backing tracks. She of course knows and loves Tessa. She sings “Light Up” with great sensitivity and afterwards I congratulate her on “that Snow Patrol song”.

“Snow Patrol?” she questions. We settle for Leona Lewis.

Tessa buys an ornate water feature from the feng shui shop. I think it’s mostly to terrorise the nervous Chinese guy who owns it. She haggles without mercy. Jim and I hang back, neither of us brought up for this.

I set their condo up for 2012. There are fresh places to stimulate for wealth and safety in the Water Dragon year. And I get a first hand look at the new condo they’re buying across town. I’ve only seen it on paper before. Once again I can see that there is feng shui intelligence at work in the orientation, the way the blocks are positioned relative to the river and the two promontories have been kept West and North East relative to the buildings. It’s so clear, it’s as if I know the thinking of the Masters responsible. Which may actually be the case.

Jim takes my picture: feng shui man sweltering in front of apartment block.

Before they found their temporary accommodation, Jim and Tessa stayed at the number one hotel in KL for several months.

“Wonderful hotel, the best suite,” Tessa says with a twinkle. “You’ll never guess who had slept in my bed.”

“Try me.”

“Robert Mugabe.”

“Robert Mugabe slept in your bed,” I repeat back to her.

“Robert Mugabe slept in my bed.”

Jim is falling about laughing.

“I’m not a bit surprised,” I say.

3. Hanky, no panky.

Back in Cheshire, Dawn has ordered two trucks of huge stones.

“You’d better tell me where to put them,” she texts me.

Indeed I had.

From my Chinese calendar I choose a very special day. She meets me at the railway station in her coupe with a purple Dragon stencilled on the bonnet. It has state-of-the-art mp3 hi fi that only plays U2.

Next morning I’m up early. I’ve calculated positions for the stones that will balance the house. When you calculate where to put Mountain (that is height and weight) and Water (that is er… water) in a Xuan Kong pattern there are two main considerations: what suits the house and what suits the person. Often these contradict and usually they require compromise. Remarkably the locations are pretty much precisely those that I would have chosen if I were calculating something specially to suit her which isn’t how I arrived at them. There are huge odds against this fortunate occurrence. No such thing as coincidence.

In my faux Paul Smith coat I venture warily into the freezing morning to locate the sites in the landscape. Dawn’s excitable about the ley lines her dowsing rods have unearthed running across her garden. She’s always excitable actually. Paul Smith doesn’t keep the chill out and she lends me something more Arctic, a fetching little blue number. But still my thumbs are so cold it’s hard even to rotate the rings of my luopan.

Affable Northern workmen are already outside with anglegrinders and mallets and drills. My meticulously calculated Xuang Kong positions fall almost precisely into her ley lines. This is pretty interesting too. This woman is certainly a Master of something.

The stones arrive, huge irregular shapes of local sandstone. The guy who delivers the first consignment explains to me that the hoist on his truck can take precise volumes of weight out a certain distance from the flatbed. The hoist lifts first one stone then another into position. The low winter sun emerges dazzlingly from behind the trees above Dawn’s home. He manoeuvres the last stone into precisely the correct location. It’s bloody cold. Dawn makes tea. One of those moments of perfect poignance.

It’s been a very special day. Dawn tells me that today she has been able to dowse without her rods.

“Dowsing rods are just an excuse not to take responsibility,” I say.

“I know, I know,” she says. “Those stones look bloody good though, don’t they?”

Richard’s website is: www.imperialfengshui.info

Washington Emolument

Washington Emolument

 

In 2005 in the company of Master Howard Choy, I visited the sacred Taoist complex at Wudan Shang set among the “Seventy Two Mountains” in Hubei, Central China. The breath taking photograph of the green roofs against the azure blue of the sky that adorns the cover of my book the Feng Shui Diaries was taken by feng shui architect Carlo Reyneri that day. Feng Shui carries no essential spiritual baggage but that was an extraordinary day, the sort that stays with us for life. That year we also visited Prince Zhao’s mausoleum where the river has been dried up by the Three Gorges Project as well as Mao Tse Tung’s birthplace in Xiaoshan just outside Changsha, the most tense place on Earth and high above the village at the head of the valley, the tomb of Mao’s grandfather.

Howard tells me he is planning to lead another trip to China in October 2012. I strongly recommend you go. Click here for more info.

Mountains come in a variety of patterns; nine basic and infinite variations and each means something. Morecambe Bay, home of my teacher Master (soon to be Grand Master) Derek Walters is lined with goy moons – the huge gate, Wudan Shang largely with mou kuk (guardian) and t’ang lung –  the hungry wolf. I could never make the count seventy- two by the way: sixty-eight, seventy four, sixty-seven? 2011 is the time of the hungry wolf, I think. The kids outside St Pauls Cathedral, in Boston, New York and Seattle recognise this. This is the generation born between 1987 and 1994, that on both sides of the Atlantic, was disenfranchised in 2005 and bitterly disappointed when they got finally to vote in 2008 and 2010 respectively. This generation, the yang (that is outgoing) Animals from Rabbit to Monkey will not take unfairness lying down. The t’ang lungs of Wall Street and the Square Mile draw them like iron filings to a magnet.

The t’ang lung is an upright, trunk-like shape, used in some schools of feng shui as an attractor of wealth and power. The ideal is to find it naturally in the form of hills but it is often synthesised. The bigger and older it is, the more energy a made up one will hold. Examples include Cleopatra’s Needle which was plundered from Egypt in the 19th century (but since the early 19th century has been on the London Embankment) and its twin at the foot of the Champs Elysées.

Interestingly this year the Washington Monument, the World’s best known t’ang lung, has been closed for structural reasons. Those of a conspiratorial turn of mind* consider that the Monument was part of an 18th century Masonic plan to carry the British Empire across the Atlantic. I don’t have time for conspiracy theory but if it was, it does seem to have worked. And I’ve listened to more than one Chinese Master explain exactly what part t’ang lungs might have played. Notice there are one or two in Beijing. It’s also interesting to record that the plot was chosen and the monument designed sixty or so years before it was erected. As if someone was awaiting the perfect moment after the Civil War had been won, the Suez Canal had been cut and the new Fate Cycle begun in 1863.

Similar questions could be asked about the tomb of Mao Tse Tung’s grandfather. How did a penniless peasant get to be buried in pole position? How did those who placed him there six years after his death get the formula so wrong so that instead of three generations of power, he managed just the one? What other puzzles are hidden in the Chinese landscape? If you join Howard Choy’s expedition, you might find out for yourself. He’s a native Mandarin speaker as well as a tai chi, chi gung and feng shui Master, raconteur and good sport. You could not be in safer or more skilled hands.

*See, for instance, David  Ovason, “The Washington Zodiac

Clearing Banks

Brief Bulletin

Clearing banks

It’s normal in South East Asia for a feng shui man to oversee any major building project. Everyone in Singapore knew that the late Master Swan Lek supervised the building of the eccentrically placed Casino and that Grand Master Tan Khoon Yong succeeded him. It’s also common knowledge that the architect Richard Rodgers incorporated feng shui into the design of buildings in Hong Kong. Even I once impressed clients buying a condominium in Kuala Lumpur by identifying the style of the feng shui of the development and from that telling them correctly which apartment would have been handpicked for the architect to occupy. That’s the Far East of course; they do things differently there.

There is however no question but that some of the biggest organisations in the world are using feng shui on a grand scale. And not just in the Far East but here in London. You only have a to look at the shape and position of certain buildings like the MI6 building or Swiss Re (known of course as “the Gherkin”) to be sure.

Usually they’re secretive about it. It’s relatively unusual for blatant feng shui to take as high a profile as the current HSBC advertising campaign: the one in the Sundays. With the stack of books.

HSBC may have its HQ in the square mile but its roots of course are in Shanghai and it shares house colours with the Bank of China: red on white. This is the red of Fire melting the white of Metal into liquid capital. Which may sound contrived but only one British clearing bank has required no shoring up; this one. The feng shui seems to be working.

An example of a bank that seems to have ignored feng shui altogether is the Union Bank of Switzerland, current record holder (at £2+ billion) of the biggest fraudulent trading bill in history, whose City HQ is drastically undermined. Go and have a look. I’ve looked at the void under that building close up and it was always asking for trouble.

The HSBC ad features the usual red and white and the Dragon emblem (meaning power) plus fortuitous « 8»s and «g»s as well as a kind of staircase of books apparently bound in green leather. There are twelve books just as there are twelve Animals (the staircase leading into 2012, I guess). The Wood colour green is an innovation, presumably to represent this Rabbit year and each volume is marked with a Roman numeral from I to XII which for many masters is shorthand for the Twelve Animals, I being Rat, XII Pig and so on.

Is this coincidence? If it is, so are the infinity symbols and interest rates featuring 8’s.

Human rights and the environment are another issue the Chinese being the pragmatic people they are, but one of the thousand Chinese Masters I’ve never met, is orchestrating this feng shui and it seems to be doing what it’s supposed to.

Thought you’d like to know.

Richard Ashworth.

Wise in Morecambe

 Richard Ashworth

Feng Shui Diary

for the month of the Wood Sheep

Thursday July 7 th 2011 20.06

Hour	Day	Month	Year
Water	Water	Wood	Metal
yum	quai	yute	tsun
sute	hoi	may	muw
Rabbit	Pig	Sheep	Rabbit

“All is well here and Saoirse has moved back in. My prayers were answered! The NW bit worked!  Thanks so much for all your help.”

Kim, Bagshot.

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 “Why do some people make good decisions and some not?  I think of the ba zi or Four Pillars of Destiny as a map of our most likely mistakes. Since the Elements run in eternal recurring cycles, the moment of birth can be run backwards or forwards to reveal a person’s choices, potentials, opportunities and as far as such things are possible, their mistakes. Through the prism of the Tao, all of  these things are decisions and if a decision can be made it can be unmade.” Richard Ashworth.

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Wise in Morecambe

As the Horse month of maximum Fire closes and the Wood Sheep opens, a huge brush fire approaches Los Alamos in Arizona where the plutonium left over from all that testing in the 60’s is stored. Oops. Apparently it’s in containers unable to withstand enormous heat; not that you’d get much of that in the desert. The timing of this embarrassment in the deep West of the US at the onset of the second month of the Wood Triad (trust me or ask questions at the end) mirrors the inconvenience at Fukushima in the extreme East in the first month of the Wood Triad.

Wood Sheep btw, not such a great month for Metal Sheep of 1931 such as Murdoch R but the prognosis for the Sheep’s year remains pretty up. The Tao has a sense of humour and is always telling us something if we will pay attention but never underestimate the resilience of the powers of nastiness.

And indeed although we tend to find it easy to ignore hideous events in Africa and Asia, Fukushima may have brought home that natural disasters can happen to real people who wear suits and go to the cinema. Los Alamos suggests such things could even befall Westerners.

This nuclear stuff, some might say, is the outcome of the Three Curses at the Western cardinal point in a Wood Year. Others might call it a warning to be wary of nuclear power. In March the issue was domestic, in July it’s military.

Games without Frontiers

Back here on the western fringe of the EU, I’ve been teaching Mr Levi (5) to play Beggar your Neighbour (he cheats). I protest uselessly as he deals from the bottom of the pack. Mr Gaby (10) looks on cackling and returns to playing Fable 2. Up in Scotland their Dad, my son Thom, is just arriving at T in the Park where his band Our Lost Infantry are playing. They are wonderful, by the way but I would say that, wouldn’t I? Judge for yourself, click here.

Last week I was in North Cornwall, helping my friend Maurice with his retreat above the ancient church at Tintagel. Now Julie summons me to Morecambe where she is setting up her home telesales business. Morecambe happens also to be the home of Derek Walters, my old teacher and the leading Western authority on Chinese Astrology*. It’s a long shlep by train so I travel the night before and stay in a traditional Lancashire B&B where I am treated with routine indifference.

“Do you want breakfast?” my hostess enquires as I struggle in underneath a shoulder bag, a wheelie and a canvas Wagamama carrier.

“Yes, I guess I do, thanks.”

Not till the morning though.

“That’ll be five pounds, then,” she says, holding out her hand and passing the note to her husband, a very large man in vest and braces who is apparently due to be going out to work at 2 in the morning. Rather him than me. The next morning he will chide me for interrupting his sleep at 7am by slamming doors. I didn’t but I feel for him.

There are perhaps a thousand books in English on the Animals of the Chinese Zodiac and all of them owe a debt to Derek Walters. Of those perhaps a dozen are worth opening and of that dozen he wrote three.

He’s just back from Siberia where he celebrated his 75th birthday which, as you will know, makes him a 1936 Rat. In China and Germany and Finland and Russia they hang on his every word.

“Do you ever get lonely?” I ask him.

“Whatever the opposite of loneliness is, I suffer from it,” he says good-naturedly.

We talk about the Mansions of the Moon, calendars and the positioning of churches. Along with his dog Ty, he takes me in his vintage Jaguar up to St Patrick’s Church high above Morecambe Bay. Built into the floor of this working place of worship is a pagan arch and higher up the cliff a little chapel. Like the church at Tintagel, it commands a view far out to sea, in this case to the Lake District and the Cumbrian Mountains which are just about visible in the haze. Ty rushes ahead over the rocks. He’s pretty surefooted.

“Why here?”

“Good question,”

Derek has the ability distinctive of the wilier Rat to induce others to commit to a view before he does, a useful quality in a teacher.

“Founded from Ireland?” I say, vaguely gesturing over the water in an Irish direction.

“Possibly.”

We both know that these coasts were ravaged annually by Viking raids from 800 onwards which makes foundation later than that very unlikely.

Out to the edge we follow Ty who has been lured by the smell of burgers on a campfire nearby. There are stone graves cut into the rock here.

“Why?”

“No idea.”

When may be an easier question to answer. Christianity was brought to these Isles by Roman soldiers in the 1st century AD. The earliest British martyr was St Alban who was beheaded in AD 304. But when the Romans return to Rome in 410, pagan barbarians overrun most of Europe. Britannia holds firm for a while – perhaps a couple of generations. This is the setting of the Arthurian stories whose power may be in the idea of a united Christian island surviving the break up of the Roman Empire. To cut a long story short, some very few churches may have stayed open; in remote places like the Cumbrian Mountains or dug into the thin topsoil of the Cornish coast. Some were founded or rededicated by Irish Monks who converted the errant British (now English) from around 600AD. St Patrick’s claims to have been founded around 970. Nah. Like Tintagel, perhaps 700. Otherwise (but less likely) before 410.

We repair to a pub where we discuss how the variable lengths of the days alters their meaning in terms of the Chinese Animals. He is currently translating a book on this subject from the Russian, fascinating to me but not everybody’s cup of tea.

*No serious student should be without his Complete Guide to Chinese Astrology ISBN1-84293-111-3

Old Religion

Julie’s house faces South East into the Snake across towards what I guess is the edge of the Pennines. To face this way, as I explain, is to face deception.

“The Snake: what you see is not what you get.”

The plot lacks a great chunk of North West. This is the place of the Father. The garden is arrow-shaped to the rear, almost as if it has been deliberately hacked to exclude a piece. So she lacks a great chunk of her Father. Actually Fathers; it turns out she parted unhappily from her husband of twenty five years relatively recently and now she’s rebuilding her life. Interestingly so are both her adult daughters. The three have callous menfolk in common.

She is apologetic as she cries, recollecting her Father’s poor behaviour and her husband’s as well as her sons’ in law.

“So this is caused by the garden?” she says, prepared to take as religion whatever I say.

“Not caused,” I say gently. “Reflected perhaps. What it does mean is that as we repair the garden we repair you.”

Some women are reactive to the notion of being fixed; not generally those who pay me a fortune to bring Tang Dynasty formulae into their homes though. Traditionally men often claim to feel nothing as women emote around them. In the Tao everything is its opposite and I am as close to tears as she is.

“I get on with my Dad so much better now,” she says. He should be so lucky. What she tells me of his behaviour would curl my hair were it not already.

“The thing is,” I say, “We appear to have little choice but to love our parents. As Chuck Spezzano says, “The flag can not fight against the flagpole.” The degree to which we are damaged is the degree to which they are to blame.”

“Yes.”

“And vice-versa.”

“I think I see. If I see them as bad I commit to being damaged?”

I nod.

“Let’s not labour it, we’re going to fix your garden.”

What’s required is that the rear of the garden is squared off so as to make a regular rectangular shape. We will put her shed, currently dominating the South West, in the area behind. There’s a bit more – the Tang formulae call for someone who can hold a compass the right way up – but broadly that’s it. The plot actually is not unlike Osama Bin Laden’s at Abbottabad. He had similar unresolved Daddy issues, it seems, but evidenced by what he did with his upset, limited access to therapy.

She has five grandchildren including two grandsons.

“Boys become men in time,” I point out. “And if you exclude one you may exclude all.”

She shudders.

We go out to the front to arrange what is called a Dragon’s Claw which will hold the energy in on that side. The fence needs reinforcing with hedge. Beyond that is a road which is bringing healthy chi and beyond that again perfect, open field.

“At the far edge we want table mountain,” I say, “Experientially about head height. Just like that.”

I indicate the Snake in the distant Pennines. All of a sudden I notice something.

“What’s the big structure on top of that hill?”

“Heysham Power Station,” she says.

“Heysham Nuclear Power Station?”

“That’s the one.”

On my return journey I watch Baby Monkey Riding Backwards on a Pig on my iphone. It may be that the wisdom of the ages has been distilled into this short film:  Do watch!

Mr Levi certainly suspects so.

This month only

During this Wood Sheep month, a little action, life, water, even fire, to the North may pay dividends. Don’t let that interfere with anything I’ve put in place for the year or longer term and keep up the “journeys” I have prescribed on these pages previously. They are the heart of how to benefit from the unique energy of this Rabbit year.

China Incidents

Fukushima in the East at the opening of the Rabbit month, Los Alamos in the West at the opening of the Sheep month. If you’ve followed me this far you may understand why I suggest we are very careful of our own nuclear installations from early November.

©Richard Ashworth 2011

Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.

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