Cate Bramble, a classically trained feng shui practitioner, author, and scientist, has a great website called "The Ultimate Feng Shui Resource: Feng shui facts without the New Age Psychobabble since 1995" (http://qi-whiz.com/content/about-fsur ). She is not faint of opinion. Her words and website are straightforward. As a scientist, she abhors what she has termed "Mcfengshui", the shortcut versions that leave the practices of classical feng shui in the dust for easy profit.
In an earlier post, I said where you live, the luck you were born with, and what you DO about it will determine your life path. Cate says it better.
"Feng Shui is not an excuse to lay on the couch and expect that a mirror or wind chime can fix everything in your life. In Chinese tradition, Feng Shui is third on the list after what you were born with and what you do with your gifts — that means your life is still your responsibility."
I go to her website for reinforcement when I am dismayed about the uphill battle classical feng shui faces after it was commercialized and distorted in the west. Most people think feng shui is about mirrors and bamboo flutes, or interior decorating, or charlatanism. No wonder. That is how it has been sold. I cringe to see a certain California practitioner's name mentioned on her site. I once paid this guy $300 for a consultation early in my explorations with the subject. He showed up with a crystal, did a "cleansing ceremony" in a room that had "bad energy", and ran through some form school observations that I knew about by then, although I was not yet a classical feng shui student. After he left, a friend said, "He didn't tell you anything new." Last year, as an experiment, I bought a new book he co-authored. It was tripe, like the consultation.
To see the worst possible manifestations of Mcfengshui, one only needs to go to LivePerson.com and search feng shui. The practitioners who come up have handles like "Angel Messenger", or call themselves feng shui psychics. Even in this crowd, though, there appears one classically trained practitioner named Monica Hess. Because the patrons of this site seem to lean towards the psychic version of feng shui, or any topic, Monica is probably not getting the business she deserves, and scads of folks leave the site after their "feng shui" consultation with newly twisted views of what it really is, or should be.
Today, I read a never-before-seen (at least by me) link on Cate Bramble's site. As much as I visit, I have yet to read everything on it. Although it is a linked article from 1998, it is the best I've read about how Lin Yu, creator of the Black Hat Sect, hijacked classical feng shui in America. Read it here- http://www.sfweekly.com/1998-08-26/news/in-the-money-corner/full .
Stay tuned for my promised, and as yet undelivered, post about monthly stars.
