Living Chi & Feng Shui

Living Chi & Feng Shui

February 15, 2018
By GRANDMASTER GARY KHOR

The ancient Chinese knew that connection with the living Chi (also spelled Ki or Qi) around them can help them find their place, meaning and purpose in a dynamic, ever changing world. In these modern times we can also stay whole despite the fractured times. We do have a saving grace, in the Chinese Taoist concept that Life is full of immense possibilities. The Taoists were devoted to the spiritual holistic world view in the essential nature of things and the Way of Nature.

30 years ago the thought of sticking needles in certain parts of the body to help it heal and repair itself was considered laughable in the West. Now you can get a medical refund for acupuncture services. Any skeptics who try to explain its benefits away on the basis of a “placebo” effect are hard put to explain why acupuncture is enjoying equal success in the veterinary field. After all, why should an animal believe that it should get better because someone has gone to the trouble of sticking a needle in a particular point?

Other Chinese practices such as acupressure and exercise systems such as Tai Chi have also become mainstream activities. All of these practices have one thing in common: they are based on the harmonisation and regulation of Chi energy.

Chi is often referred to as “life” energy, which can be somewhat misleading as one could then think this energy is only involved with living things. The term “animating” energy is much better as the Chinese maintain that all movement and transformation that occurs within the universe requires Chi.

In a sense Chi is the Chinese solution to the Grand Unified Theory that we are searching for in the West. It is the name given by the Chinese to the primal energy that underlies all activity and change. We can experience the effects of this energy in various ways which we describe as heat, light, sound, gravity, time, electricity, magnetism, etc.

Chi lies at the heart of another Chinese practice that is becoming more and more popular in the West – Feng Shui. (Feng means wind, Shui means water – in Chinese terms wind carries and disperses energy while water attracts and collects it). Whereas acupuncture, Tai Chi and the Chinese practices referred to above deal with the attempt to read, understand and regulate Chi within the human body, Feng Shui is the complementary practice dealing with the reading, understanding and regulation of Chi within the external environment.

When the theory of Chi flowing through a series of channels or meridians first emerged in the West it was immediately derided on the basis of where was the proof? Could anyone demonstrate the existence of these meridians and show they flowed one way rather than another? How could anyone prove what influenced the flow of Chi in a meridian and even if it did, what effect this would have on the body.

Fortunately there was a considerable body of knowledge that had been written down, particularly about the behaviour of Chi in terms of yin and yang and the five elements. Practitioners who claimed “revealed” knowledge (whether from ancient master-student lineage or more recent spiritual connections) could be called into question when what they were saying was clearly inconsistent with this established body of knowledge.

Today of course we can measure the electro-potential changes that identify the existence of acupoints. We can trace the passage of radio-isotopes as they follow meridian pathways throughout the body and, using the latest brain-scanning technology, we can measure location and changes in electrical activity that occur in the brain as different acupoints are stimulated. In a hundred different ways modern technology has confirmed the traditional knowledge while never overturning it.

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