Feng shui for prosperity begins with a useful question: does your home support the life you are trying to create? Before buying another lucky object, look at the entrance you use every day, the desk where you work, the bedroom where you rest and the things that surround you. Are they helping you move forward, or are there simple changes waiting to be made?

My approach is to bring prosperity into the whole home, rather than confine it to one supposedly powerful corner. A welcoming entrance, a usable workspace, a flourishing plant and a carefully chosen book can each play a part. The aim is to connect your intentions with your surroundings and your everyday actions.

The following tips draw on my feng shui practice. Traditional associations are presented as feng shui symbolism, not guarantees of financial results. Start with changes that are useful, affordable and personally meaningful.

What do prosperity, wealth and abundance actually mean?

For this guide, prosperity means having the resources, opportunities and support to live well and develop what matters to you. It includes money, but also time, relationships, meaningful work, learning and the freedom to make choices.

Financial wealth concerns the resources you own, considered alongside what you owe. Income is money coming in; wealth is not simply how much you earn or how expensive your home looks. In a broader personal sense, you might also regard your knowledge, friendships, creativity and available time as forms of wealth.

Abundance, as used here, means recognising what is available and worthwhile, without pretending that resources are unlimited. An abundant home need not be crowded with possessions. It might contain fewer things, better used and more deeply appreciated.

Surviving means concentrating on immediate needs and getting through the next demand. Thriving means having some room for development, enjoyment, contribution and choice. These are working descriptions, not labels for judging people. Financial challenges are not proof of bad feng shui or the wrong mindset.

My article on wealth corners and prosperity discusses wealth beyond currency, including books, art, time, creativity and freedom (Cisek, 2008). Your first task is to decide which of these you actually want more of.

A practical feng shui principle: intention, energy and ritual

“FENG SHUI = INTENTION + ENERGY + RITUAL”

Jan Cisek, Feng shui tips 

Use this as a framework, not a scientific equation. Intention means identifying what you want. Energy includes the traditional feng shui concept of qi and the qualities you experience in a space. Ritual means making a deliberate change that expresses your intention.

For example, clear your desk with the intention of completing a proposal, arrange what you need and then write the proposal. The environmental adjustment and the practical action belong together.

1. Give prosperity a clear, personal meaning

Write one sentence beginning: “A more prosperous life would allow me to…” Be specific. Perhaps you want to build a financial buffer, attract suitable clients, spend more time with your family, develop a skill or create room for a new business idea.

Now choose a place in your home that can support that intention. A comfortable reading chair can serve learning. A clear dining table can make space for conversation. An organised desk can become the place where you complete work rather than store unfinished projects.

Create a small card with your intention and one next action. For example: “I am developing a more sustainable working life. This week I will review my current projects and contact one prospective client.” Keep it where the action happens, rather than hiding it in a drawer.

Try today: identify one prosperity goal, one supporting place and one action. Do not start by changing every room. Start by making one connection between the life you want and the space you already have.

2. Make your front door welcoming and easy to use

Begin your practical feng shui review at the entrance. Walk towards your home as though visiting for the first time. Can you identify the door easily? Is the approach clear? Does the entrance feel cared for?

Clean the door and handle, remove unnecessary items from the threshold and check that the lighting works. Give shoes, coats, keys and deliveries somewhere appropriate to go. Keep the route through the entrance usable rather than creating an obstacle course.

You can treat this as a symbolic invitation to opportunity, but give it a practical expression. A business entrance should help visitors find you. A home entrance should make coming and going straightforward. Neither needs an expensive makeover.

In a rented flat, focus on what you control: your own doorway, the space immediately inside it and the daily accumulation of bags or post. Respect shared areas and keep access clear.

Try today: spend ten minutes improving the first metre inside your front door. Use something you already own before buying a new accessory.

3. Clear the clutter that gets in the way of prosperity

In my guide to feng shui and clutter clearing, letting go of excess is part of making space for what matters (Cisek, 2023). This does not mean turning your home into an empty showroom.

Start with clutter that obstructs a useful activity: a desk you cannot work at, a chair you cannot sit on or paperwork you cannot find. Choose one small area and sort its contents into things to keep here, move elsewhere or responsibly release.

Ask: “Does this item serve a purpose, express something I value or genuinely belong here?” A treasured collection is not automatically clutter. Equally, something expensive does not deserve permanent space simply because you once paid for it.

Complete the task. Put the useful items away, arrange the donation and remove the recycling. Moving an unwanted pile from the desk to the bedroom floor does not resolve the obstruction.

Try today: clear one working surface and use it for its intended purpose immediately.

4. Locate your feng shui wealth area without becoming trapped by the map

The bagua is a feng shui map that relates areas of a space to aspects of life. My guide to the different bagua approaches distinguishes three ways of working (Cisek, 2007).

Compass bagua: the wealth area is associated with the south east. Entrance based bagua: it is the far left area when looking into the space from its entrance. Personally chosen symbolic approach: select a suitable place to represent prosperity and your intentions.

These are different ways of organising the space, not three measurements that must identify the same corner. For a straightforward start, choose one approach and understand how you are using it.

Refresh the chosen area. Clean it, remove things that do not belong there and add one meaningful feature: a plant, artwork or a lamp. Do not sacrifice the room’s function to satisfy a diagram.

If the mapped area falls in an awkward place, work with a suitable part of a room or a personally chosen prosperity space. An irregular floor plan is not a financial verdict.

“In short, your wealth doesn’t depend on your wealth corner.”

Jan Cisek, Feng shui wealth corners (2008)

5. Choose a money plant you can actually help to thrive

Plants offer a direct way to express growth. My feng shui money plants guide includes the jade plant, Crassula ovata, and the coin plant, Pilea peperomioides, among the plants used as prosperity symbols (Cisek, 2017).

Choose according to the conditions in your home and the care you can provide. Check the plant’s light, watering and household suitability before bringing it in. A symbolic position is not a reason to ignore what the plant needs.

Use a stable pot and protect the surface underneath. Keep the arrangement proportionate to the room. One well cared for plant is enough to begin; you do not need a collection of lucky species.

Give the plant a personal meaning: steady development, patient care or a project you are nurturing. When you attend to it, ask what else needs attention in your working life.

Try today: care for a plant you already have. Its condition is feedback about its growing conditions, not a prediction about your bank balance.

6. Bring useful light into overlooked spaces

Lighting is one of the simple adjustments discussed on my feng shui tips page (Cisek, n.d.-d). Before installing anything new, consider how you use each part of the room.

Does your reading chair have a usable lamp? Is your desk shadowed? Is a corner abandoned because nothing about it invites you to sit there? Move an existing lamp and test the difference at the time of day you normally use the space.

For a prosperity area, light can serve as a symbolic expression of attention. Practically, it can make the space more useful and its contents easier to see. Aim for comfortable illumination, not maximum brightness or glare.

Try today: turn one neglected corner into a place for reading, planning or reflection. Keep cables tidy and away from walking routes. Choose a lamp rather than a ritual that requires an unattended flame.

7. Use colours and materials to express the qualities you want

In the five elements framework, wood or tree symbolism includes growth and upward movement, with green among its associations. My article on the wood element relates this symbolism to plants, fresh flowers and uplifting imagery (Cisek, 2019b).

Use those associations selectively. A green cushion, a wooden tray or a picture of growing trees may be sufficient. You do not need to redecorate an entire room or impose a colour you dislike.

Ask what prosperity looks and feels like to you. It might suggest richness and warmth, or spaciousness and simplicity. Work with your existing furnishings and the room’s purpose.

Gold, purple or other colours may carry personal associations with wealth, but there is no need to treat any shade as a compulsory money magnet. A colour should support the environment you want to live in.

Try today: select one existing object that expresses growth, stability or enjoyment. Place it deliberately, then leave enough space around it to appreciate it.

8. Work with the water element without creating extra problems

My water element guide connects water symbolism with opportunity and career prospects. It also discusses using water pictures when an actual feature is unsuitable (Cisek, 2019a).

A photograph of a river, lake or coastline can be a practical starting point. Choose an image whose mood suits the room. Consider what it means to you: movement, connection, openness or replenishment.

Before buying a fountain, think beyond its appearance. Where will it stand? Can you maintain it? Will the sound remain pleasant while you work? Could splashes, cables or access become a problem? Follow the product’s installation and maintenance instructions.

Do not acquire fish simply to fulfil a prosperity formula. An aquarium is a commitment to living animals, not just another ornament. Artwork is an alternative when that commitment is inappropriate.

Try today: use a water image you already own and pair it with a practical question: “Which opportunity will I follow up this week?”

9. Choose prosperity symbols that mean something to you

My wealth corner guidance includes plants, crystals, water imagery and other personally meaningful objects as possible prosperity symbols (Cisek, 2008). The important question is not how many you can accumulate, but what a chosen object represents in your life.

A small bowl could stand for receiving and appreciating resources. A piece of artwork could express creativity. A photograph might represent the kind of working life you want to develop. A traditional object is appropriate when you understand and value its meaning, rather than feel obliged to display it.

Keep the arrangement simple. Select one focal object and write a sentence about its purpose. For example: “This represents the time and freedom I am working towards.” Place the sentence discreetly nearby.

Avoid turning the shelf into a growing collection of remedies. Adding more things is not necessarily the next useful step.

Try today: choose one symbol and connect it with one behaviour. Let a bowl beside your desk remind you to complete your weekly administration, not merely wish for more income.

10. Arrange your desk around the work that creates value

Prosperity feng shui should include the place where you work. My business feng shui approach considers workstations, circulation and the relationship between the business and its surroundings (Cisek, n.d.-a).

Try a desk position that gives you a comfortable view of the room and its entrance, where the layout allows. Avoid putting your chair in a busy route. A supportive position should also provide enough room to move and use your equipment properly.

Keep the main working area available for the task in progress. Store reference material within convenient reach and put unrelated projects elsewhere. A prosperity object belongs where it does not interfere with the work.

For a shared dining table, create a portable work kit that can be put away afterwards. Your home does not need a dedicated office to support purposeful work.

Try today: sit at your desk and identify the next task you will complete. Adjust the space for that task, then begin. Rearranging furniture should not become an alternative to doing the work.

For readers who include energy harmonisation in their feng shui practice, Helios3 is an optional addition to the working environment. My feng shui shop describes it as a Schumann resonance generator for homes and offices, with a 5V USB connection. It can be incorporated into your existing workspace without adding another decorative object to the wealth corner. This makes it worth exploring when your intention is to consider the whole environment where you plan, create and work. View Helios3 and order online.

11. Keep prosperity books in your home and by your bed

One of my top practical tips is to keep a small selection of books on prosperity and wealth creation in your home, including one by your bed. Give learning a visible place in the environment you are creating.

My Top 100+ Books on Prosperity and Wealth Creation page offers a starting point (Speed Reader, 2025). You do not need to buy or read the whole list. Choose one book that addresses your current question.

Possible starting points from the list include Creating True Prosperity by Shakti Gawain, Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, and 50 Prosperity Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon. The list includes both practical and spiritual perspectives; they should not all be treated as the same kind of guidance.

Keep the arrangement modest: one current book, a bookmark and perhaps a small notebook. Read a few pages and write down one idea you can use. For example: “Tomorrow I will identify one recurring expense to review” or “I will make time to clarify what enough means to me.”

Then apply the idea at an appropriate time. A book on the bedside table is an invitation to read, not evidence that its contents are being absorbed while you sleep. If financial reading keeps your mind busy at bedtime, move it to a daytime reading chair instead.

Try today: choose one prosperity book, give it a visible home and turn one useful idea into an action. Borrowing a copy is entirely consistent with this practice.

12. Keep your bedroom a place for rest, not financial administration

The bedside book should complement the bedroom, not turn it into a second office. Set a boundary between a little reflective reading and working through invoices, messages or business problems in bed.

Review what you see from your pillow. Remove items that belong to unfinished work. Give clothes and belongings a place to go, and keep the route to the bed easy to use. Check whether the room feels comfortable for its main purpose.

Where possible, choose a bed arrangement that feels supported and allows practical access. Work with the actual room rather than sacrificing comfort to a rigid placement rule. In a studio flat, a screen, closed storage or a simple end of work routine can mark the transition.

Try today: clear your bedside surface, leave one suitable book and put work materials away. Include rest in your definition of prosperity. A home that only reminds you to produce more has not yet made room for the life those efforts are meant to support.

For a discreet addition to your bedroom feng shui, PIMAT is another option available from my shop. Described there as an energy regenerator, it is a small patterned cotton cloth placed on the mattress beneath the sheet, so it does not add to bedside clutter. In this broader approach to prosperity, its relevance is the attention you give to your own wellbeing, not just your work or possessions. Readers interested in energy based practices can explore it alongside the practical bedroom adjustments above. View PiMat and order online.

Helios3 and PIMAT are optional products within an energy based approach. Their proposed effects are not independently established by the shop information, and neither product should be treated as a guarantee of financial results or a substitute for medical care.

13. Give your wallet, paperwork and digital space a reset

Extend the same care to the places where you handle money and information. My prosperity guidance includes reviewing the contents of your wallet as a simple ritual (Cisek, 2008).

Remove obsolete items, put important receipts where they belong and organise what you use. Keep necessary records rather than throwing documents away indiscriminately. There is no need to replace a serviceable wallet or carry money you cannot comfortably spare.

Apply the idea to your digital environment. Create clear folders for current projects and administration. Separate material requiring action from reference material. Review unnecessary alerts and shortcuts that interrupt the activity you intended to do.

A meaningful image on your computer or phone can serve as a personal reminder, but it should lead back to something concrete. Use a photograph representing your goal alongside a visible next step.

Try today: organise one small information area so that the next important document or task is easy to find.

14. Repair everyday problems before buying more remedies

Walk through your home and list the things you repeatedly work around: a leaking tap, a broken drawer, an unreliable lamp, a door that catches or storage that never quite works.

You can read these symbolically as interrupted flow, but there is no need to turn the metaphor into a prediction. Deal with the actual problem. Arrange suitable repairs and leave electrical, plumbing or structural work to appropriately qualified people where needed.

Include the kitchen. Make the preparation area usable, organise the food you have and keep necessary equipment accessible. Let nourishment and practical care be part of your prosperity practice, not just decorative displays.

Check recurring household arrangements too. Is there an unused subscription you have been meaning to review? Is something awaiting return? Are you buying duplicates because the original is buried in a cupboard?

Try today: resolve one small source of waste or inconvenience. A repaired drawer or completed return may be a more appropriate prosperity adjustment than another purchase for the wealth area.

15. Make prosperity a shared and continuing practice

Bring the idea beyond possessions. Decide how your home can support relationships, learning, enjoyment and contribution alongside financial aims. My approach to feng shui for homes starts from individual needs and the creation of supportive living spaces (Cisek, n.d.-b).

Make room for a conversation, a shared meal or a creative activity. Display a photograph that reminds you of valued relationships. Pass on an unused item when doing so is appropriate. Generosity can mean time or attention; it need not involve spending money.

Review your chosen prosperity space regularly. Does it still represent what matters? Is the plant being cared for? Have the books become an unread pile? Has the intention changed?

Keep what supports your life and adjust what does not. You do not need to start again because one object moved or a symbolic arrangement became inconvenient.

Try today: choose one action that expresses prosperity as something lived and shared, rather than merely displayed.

Your seven day feng shui prosperity plan

Day one: write your prosperity intention and improve the entrance. Day two: clear one useful surface and complete the sorting. Day three: choose your prosperity area and add one meaningful object.

Day four: care for a plant or improve a neglected corner with an existing lamp. Day five: organise your workspace and complete one important task there. Day six: place a selected prosperity book beside your bed or reading chair and apply one idea.

Day seven: review a practical result and decide what to maintain. Perhaps the desk is usable, an enquiry has been answered, a repair has been arranged or your next step is clearer.

Record changes without promising yourself a financial result by a particular date. If an opportunity arrives, welcome it, but do not assume that its arrival proves which object or ritual caused it. Judge the practice partly by whether your home is becoming more supportive and your actions more consistent.

Start with what you have. Make the space useful. Give your intentions somewhere to live, and then act on them.

Questions and answers about feng shui for prosperity

What is the best feng shui tip for prosperity?

Start with the adjustment that removes the most obvious obstacle to a useful activity. For one person, that is clearing the desk. For another, it is organising paperwork or creating a place to read. Add a meaningful prosperity symbol afterwards, rather than expecting the symbol to do the practical work.

Where is the feng shui wealth corner?

In the compass bagua, it is associated with the south east. In the entrance based bagua, it is the far left area viewed from the entrance. My symbolic approach also allows you to choose a suitable prosperity space. These distinctions are explained in my bagua guide (Cisek, 2007).

What should I put in my wealth area?

Choose something that fits the space and expresses your intention: a suitable plant, a lamp, artwork or a meaningful object. Keep the area functional. A carefully chosen item is enough; there is no requirement to combine plants, crystals, water and ornaments in one crowded display.

Can feng shui make me rich?

This guide does not establish that a placement or ritual creates financial wealth. Use feng shui to organise your surroundings, express your priorities and support practical action. It does not replace paid work, skills, sound decisions or appropriate professional advice. Neither does financial difficulty prove that you have used feng shui incorrectly.

Is it good feng shui to keep prosperity books by the bed?

It can be a useful personal arrangement when it encourages reading and suits your bedroom. Keep one current book rather than a large stack. Read it and use its ideas. If the topic makes bedtime feel like work, keep the book elsewhere and protect the bedroom’s purpose.

What if my money plant is not thriving?

Review its growing conditions and care. Move it to a more suitable position, seek plant care guidance or choose a different form of symbolism. Do not interpret a struggling plant as a prediction of financial loss. The practical priority is the plant’s actual needs.

Can I use prosperity feng shui in a rented room?

Yes. Work with a shelf, bedside table, desk or reading corner. Keep changes reversible and respect shared space. A tidy work surface, a selected book and a meaningful image can express your intentions without repainting, installing equipment or rearranging the entire property.

What if my bathroom is in the wealth area?

Keep it clean, usable and maintained. Address leaks as maintenance issues, not evidence that wealth is being drained by the bagua. You can choose another suitable place for prosperity symbolism. My wealth corner article rejects the idea that an awkward or missing area determines your finances (Cisek, 2008).

Do I need to spend money or wait for an auspicious date?

Neither is necessary for the practical changes described here. Begin with cleaning, organising, moving an existing object or reading a borrowed book. Choose a time when you can complete the task. Do not postpone useful action because the arrangement, budget or date is not perfect.

How can I get advice for my particular home or workplace?

A personalised review can consider the layout, your preferences and the practical purpose of each space. For advice from Jan Cisek, contact Feng Shui London about a consultation.

References and related reading

The sources below are the Feng Shui London articles, shop information and prosperity booklist used in this guide. They document the author’s feng shui approach and reading suggestions; they are not presented as independent scientific confirmation of financial effects.

Cisek, J. (2007, March 12). Feng shui bagua. How to use bagua? Difference between classic compass bagua school and western three-door gate of chi bagua map. Which feng shui bagua school is better? Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (2008, February 6). Feng shui wealth corners in homes, workplaces according to bagua matrix to boost prosperity and wealth creation. Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (2017, March 8). Feng shui money plants. Feng shui plants to attract wealth into your homes and workplaces. Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (2019a, June 3). Water element in feng shui = opportunity, prosperity, wealth and career prospects and more… Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (2019b, December 3). Wood or tree element: The theory of five elements. Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (2023, October 8). Feng shui and clutter clearing: The art of less: Embracing minimalism for a feng shui-inspired life. Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (n.d.-a). Feng shui for business. Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (n.d.-b). Feng shui for homes. Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (n.d.-c). Feng shui shop. Feng Shui London.

Cisek, J. (n.d.-d). Feng shui tips. Feng Shui London.

Speed Reader. (2025, July 10). Top 100+ books on prosperity and wealth creation. spdrdng.

The post Feng Shui for Prosperity: 15 Practical Tips for Wealth and Abundance appeared first on Feng Shui London UK • The Capital Feng Shui Consultant.

It is a fair question, and after more than forty-five years of practice and several years of doctoral research into feng shui, I want to answer it properly rather than defensively. The answer has two halves. The first half is that feng shui is not a modern empirical science, has never claimed to be one, and does not need to become one in order to be useful. It is an art, a philosophy and a practice (if you want the short version, see What is feng shui? What is feng shui for? Short answers). The second half is that this does not place feng shui beyond examination. A claim can be traditional and still be testable; the only question is what to measure.

Is feng shui a pseudoscience? Only when it pretends to be a science
This is also the right place to deal with the word “pseudoscience”, because it is thrown at feng shui more often than it is earned. The philosopher of science Michael R. Matthews devoted a whole book, Feng Shui: Teaching About Science and Pseudoscience, to using feng shui as a classroom example of how to tell science from its imitations, and his charge sheet is worth reading: an aversion to empirical testing, no attempt to disentangle variables, immunising explanations whenever evidence disconfirms a claim, conflicting advice between practitioners, and the borrowing of scientific words such as “energy” and “magnetic” without their scientific meanings. I summarised the book on this site when it came out (Summary of Feng Shui: Teaching About Science and Pseudoscience by Michael R. Matthews) and I recommend it to every practitioner. But notice what the charge actually is. Pseudoscience is not a property of a tradition; it is a property of a claim. Something becomes pseudoscience at the moment it dresses itself in the authority of science without doing the work of science. Feng shui as an art and a philosophy makes no such claim, and it needs none: nobody accuses painting, ethics or architecture of being pseudoscience, because none of them pretends to be physics. The “scientific feng shui” that Matthews rightly takes apart is the invention of people who understand neither science nor feng shui, and who imagine that a tradition is only respectable if it can be relabelled as a laboratory result. The sensible position, and the one I hold, is the opposite: feng shui is an art, a philosophy and a practice; some of its principles can be studied scientifically and should be; and the moment a practitioner says “science proves” where the evidence does not, they have stopped doing feng shui and started doing pseudoscience.

What Donald Hoffman’s critics got wrong
What makes this conversation more interesting than the usual sceptic-versus-believer exchange is that science itself does not work in the way its loudest defenders imagine. When the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman presented his Interface Theory of Perception, which argues that evolution shaped our senses for survival rather than for seeing reality as it is, critics accused him of sawing off the branch he was sitting on: using an evolutionary theory to undermine the physical world that evolution is supposed to take place in. Hoffman’s reply was a short lesson in the philosophy of science, and it applies with surprising precision to feng shui. Science, he pointed out, does not assume that its starting premises are true. It assumes only that they are internally consistent. Every theory rests on axioms it does not explain, every good theory organises a domain, and a great theory goes one step further and tells you where its own assumptions stop working.

In this article I take five of those principles and hold them up against feng shui. Some of them flatter feng shui; some of them discipline it. Both are useful.

1. The black swan: what a single exception does, and does not, prove

One counter-example is enough
Karl Popper’s insight was that universal claims are fragile in a very specific way. To show that “all swans are white” is false, you do not need ten thousand observations. You need one verified black swan. For centuries Europeans had seen only white swans and treated the whiteness of swans as a settled fact, until black swans were found in Australia. One counter-example was enough to retire a universal rule, and it did something more productive than that: it forced naturalists to look for the deeper framework that explains both the white swans and the black one.

Taleb’s black swan: the improbable event that changes everything
Nassim Nicholas Taleb borrowed the image for his book The Black Swan and gave it a second meaning that is just as relevant here. Taleb’s black swan is an event that lies outside ordinary expectation, carries an extreme impact, and is explained away afterwards as if it had been predictable all along. His targets were financial markets and forecasters who mistake the absence of a black swan so far for proof that black swans do not exist. His deeper argument is about the limits of what we can know from past regularities: the turkey that is fed every day for a thousand days has more evidence than ever that the farmer is benevolent, right up to the day before Thanksgiving. Both meanings of the black swan matter for feng shui. The first tells us that no rule about spaces is safe from a single counter-example. The second warns us that a run of successes is not proof that our model of a space is complete, and that the factors we have not been measuring are often the ones that decide the outcome.

The feng shui black swan
Feng shui is full of universal-sounding rules. A popular manual will tell you that a south-facing door always brings recognition, or that water in a particular sector always brings wealth. Then a practitioner visits a south-facing house whose occupants have struggled for years, and the sceptic says: there is your refutation. The mature practitioner sees something different. This house is a black swan. It disproves the slogan, not the discipline. It sends you back to the fuller analysis: the landform and the approach to the building, the internal layout, the light and the air, the timing, and above all the people who live there. A failed surface rule is an invitation to think, which is exactly what it is in science.

The swan cuts both ways
Here, though, I part company with the argument as it is often made in feng shui’s defence, because the black swan cuts both ways. If one exception can retire a universal rule, then one success story cannot establish one. The client whose insomnia lifted after we moved her bed is real, and she matters enormously; she is the whole point of the work. But she is a case, not a law. Environmental psychology works with populations and averages precisely because individual results are noisy: people differ, houses differ, seasons and life events differ, and expectation alone can move outcomes. Neither perspective is wrong. The practitioner is rightly concerned with this person in this space at this moment; the researcher is rightly concerned with what holds across many people and many spaces. A serious feng shui has room for both, and my own doctoral research is built around that distinction between personal preferences and the more general, transpersonal patterns that seem to hold for most of us.

Do single cases count as evidence?
They do, but as the weakest form of it, and knowing why is more useful than dismissing them. Medicine, which has thought about this longer than anyone, keeps the case report at the bottom of its evidence hierarchy and yet refuses to throw it away: Jan Vandenbroucke’s defence of case reports points out that they are how new effects, unexpected side effects and new mechanisms are first noticed, and Jeffrey Aronson and Manfred Hauben have shown that an anecdote can even be definitive on its own when the effect is large, immediate, reversible and has a clear mechanism, as when a symptom appears each time a drug is taken and vanishes each time it is stopped.

That is the position for feng shui. The client who slept badly for years, moved her bed and slept well the next week is real evidence that something happened, but on its own it cannot say what: the move, the attention she paid to her sleep, the expectation that the change would help, the season, the conversation with a consultant, or the plain tendency of bad patches to improve in time. A single case becomes stronger evidence when it starts to behave like an experiment, which is why medicine developed the n-of-1 trial, in which one person alternates between conditions several times so that chance and expectation have a harder time explaining the result, and why psychology and education have formal standards for single-case designs that require repeated, planned reversals before an effect is credited. A feng shui practitioner can borrow that logic today: record the situation before the change, make one change at a time, ask the client to keep a simple diary, and where practical try the old arrangement again for a week before settling. Done that way, anecdotes stop being stories and become data, and a shelf of them is how the questions for the larger studies are found.

2. Science assumes consistency, not truth

Coordinates are not threads in space
A common assumption is that science deals in objective truth while feng shui deals in unproven notions like the five elements or the bagua. The comparison is unfair to both sides.

No physicist believes that x and y axes run through space like threads, or that a force vector is a physical object. Coordinates, vectors and field equations are an internally consistent language for mapping how physical things behave. Their justification is that the language holds together and that it predicts. Hoffman’s point is that this is true of every scientific theory: the theory does not explain its own axioms, it uses them.

The five elements and the bagua as a language
Feng shui works on the same footing, and it is open about it when it is practised well. Nobody claims that “wood” or “metal” exist as substances on a periodic table. The five elements describe processes: growth, expansion, stability, contraction, stillness. Yin and yang describe rhythm and relationship rather than two kinds of stuff. The bagua is a map of life areas laid over a plan, a diagnostic lens that asks which part of your life is receiving attention and which is neglected. These are symbolic, internally consistent languages for reading a space and for acting in it. The map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal, and the bagua is a model rather than a mechanism. Its value lies in whether it helps you see something you would otherwise have missed and then do something about it.

Even the name of the discipline is a model rather than a description. Feng shui means wind-water, the two forces that carry and shape everything else in a landscape, and not “wind and water” as two separate items on a list; I have written about why that small difference matters in Feng shui means wind-water, not wind and water.

Qi is a model, not a measurement
Qi belongs in the same category, and I would rather say so plainly than dress it up. Qi is the central working concept of feng shui, a way of talking about flow, vitality and the felt quality of a place, and there is no scientific definition of it. That does not make it useless; it makes it a model. A model earns its keep by what it lets you do, and it is retired when a better one comes along.

3. Unexplained foundations and “infinite job security”

Science is an open-ended unfolding
Because no theory explains its own starting assumptions, Hoffman observes, there is always room for a deeper theory to explain the premises of the earlier one. He calls this “infinite job security in principle” for scientists. Science is an open-ended unfolding, not a finished building.

How feng shui has evolved: form, compass, and now evidence
Feng shui has evolved in precisely this way. The earliest form school took the landscape as its unexamined premise: mountains behind a dwelling for shelter and support, water in front, protection to the sides, an open prospect ahead (see Prospect and Refuge Theory,
Appleton, 1975). When people moved from valleys into towns and then into apartment blocks, those premises no longer covered the cases practitioners met, and compass and time-based schools developed to deal with orientation, entrances and cycles inside built structures. Today the environments have shifted again: open-plan offices, screens in every room, homes shared with routers and a great deal of electrical equipment, and work that happens wherever the laptop is. A contemporary, evidence-informed feng shui that draws on environmental psychology, building biology, semiotics and plain common sense is the next layer in the same process, not a betrayal of the tradition.

Is science reactive and feng shui proactive?
Here I want to correct a claim that is often made on feng shui’s behalf, because it is only half true. It is said that science is reactive and feng shui proactive: that feng shui knew about the benefits of nature and of a protected position centuries before researchers “discovered” biophilia and prospect and refuge. There is something in this. Edward Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis and Jay Appleton’s prospect-refuge theory do describe, in modern terms, what the armchair configuration and the feng shui preference for greenery and views were describing in older ones, and it is fair to say that the tradition observed these patterns long before anyone measured them. But the tradition also accumulated claims that have not survived contact with evidence, and a tradition that keeps everything it has ever believed is not proactive; it is merely old. The value of the modern work is that it lets us sort the inheritance: this part is supported, this part is untested, this part is culture-specific formula, this part is superstition (I keep a running list in Feng shui myths, superstitions and false problems). Science does not validate feng shui wholesale and it does not refute it wholesale. It helps us tell the difference, and that is a gift to practitioners rather than a threat.

4. Good models and great models: knowing your own limits

A good rule and a great practice
Hoffman draws a distinction between a good theory and a great one. A good theory gives you tools to organise the phenomena in its domain. A great theory also gives you the tools to discover the exact limits of its own assumptions.

A good feng shui rule gives you a checklist: put the desk so that you can see the door with a solid wall behind you; put the bed in the command position with a proper headboard. These are good rules and I teach them. A great feng shui practice knows when and why such rules stop working. The command position is worthless if it places you under a heavy beam or heavy oppressive features, beside a source of electrical interference, or in a draught from a badly sealed window. A water feature that a formula recommends for one sector may be exactly wrong for a person who finds moving water unsettling, or for a room that already has too much movement in it. An open, welcoming entrance hall that “collects qi” on paper becomes a wind tunnel in practice if the doors align. The boundary conditions are not failures of feng shui; they are where the discipline becomes a discipline rather than a set of slogans.

Five principles that recur across every school
This is why, when I teach, I keep returning to the small set of principles that recur across every school of feng shui I know, and that also happen to be the ones I can test: sit and sleep in the command position; have something solid behind you; bring nature in; avoid sharp angles and oppressive features pointing at you; and keep what serves you while clearing what drains you. Everything else is an elaboration or a special case, and the mark of a good practitioner is knowing which is which.

What feng shui does not do
It is also why I am explicit about what feng shui does not do. It does not guarantee wealth, health or love. It does not replace medical, legal or financial advice. It does not work through fear, superstition or rigid rules. What it does is support the conditions for a good life, direct attention and intention, and grow awareness of how you actually live and work. A model that overclaims is a weak model, in science and in feng shui alike.

5. Breaking points: laboratories, real homes and the Planck scale

Where great theories admit their limits
Hoffman’s final illustration is from physics. General relativity and quantum field theory both assume space and time as their foundation, and both work superbly in their domains. Yet their own mathematics indicates that this foundation ceases to be usable at the Planck scale, the almost unimaginably small lengths and times at which the two theories cannot be reconciled. Far from embarrassing these theories, this is what makes them great: their internal logic reveals where their starting assumption reaches its limit.

The laboratory’s breaking point
Evidence-based research on environments has a breaking point of its own, and it is worth naming. Laboratory studies require control. You isolate one variable, hold the rest constant and measure the difference. That is how we know, with reasonable confidence, that people tend to prefer curved forms over angular ones, that a view of greenery is associated with faster recovery and lower stress, that a room with plants tends to lift mood and attention, and that a disordered desk can be good for creativity as well as bad for a sense of control. Each of these is a real finding, and each was obtained by narrowing the world down to something measurable.

Real homes are not narrow
Real homes and workplaces are not narrow. A bedroom is not isolated from the road outside, the history of the building, the neighbours, the weather, the relationship of the two people who sleep in it or the state of their working lives. A dozen factors interact at once, and this is exactly the territory in which feng shui has always operated. When people say that feng shui “cannot be tested”, what they usually mean is that the whole system cannot be tested in one experiment, which is true of any complex practice, including medicine and architecture.

Testing one principle at a time: my PhD
What can be done is to test the principles one at a time, under controlled conditions, and then to ask how they combine. That is the logic of my own doctoral studies: image surveys of bedroom and workplace designs to establish what people prefer, followed by virtual-reality rooms in which participants’ physiological responses are recorded while they experience feng shui-compatible and incompatible designs. Virtual reality is a compromise. It gives control that a real house never could, at the cost of some realism. But it lets us measure not only what people say but how their bodies respond, and it moves the conversation from opinion to evidence, one principle at a time.

When does a practice become evidence-based?
There is no magic number of studies at which a practice crosses the line, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. What the evidence-based movement in medicine actually asked for, when David Sackett and colleagues defined it in 1996, was not a quantity of research but a habit: making decisions by combining the best available evidence with professional judgement and the preferences of the individual, and being sincere about how good that evidence is. The GRADE system that grew out of it rates a body of evidence high, moderate, low or very low according to how the studies were designed, whether they agree with one another, whether the effect is precise and whether the results could be explained by bias, and a claim rises through those grades mainly by being tested in ways that would have allowed it to fail, by being replicated independently, and by being pulled together in a systematic review that weighs all the studies rather than the flattering ones. Psychology learnt the hard way why this matters: when a large collaboration tried to reproduce a hundred published psychology experiments in 2015, fewer than half replicated, and John Ioannidis had already argued a decade earlier that most published findings in small, flexible, fashionable fields are likely to be false.

So the answer to “how much research is needed” is: enough independent, well-designed studies that a sceptic cannot explain the pattern away, which in practice means several replications from different research groups rather than one impressive result.

Environmental psychology is a useful example of a practice-adjacent field that made that journey. Architects, planners and psychologists had been observing how buildings affect people for decades, but the field became a science between roughly 1968 and 1981 by fulfilling a recognisable set of criteria: it defined its subject matter (the transactions between people and their physical settings) and stopped borrowing its questions from adjacent fields; it produced theories that made testable predictions, such as prospect-refuge, attention restoration and stress recovery; it developed instruments whose reliability could be checked, from environmental preference scales to measures of place attachment and perceived restorativeness; it adopted methods that other researchers could repeat, including field experiments and later physiological measurement; it created the institutional apparatus of a discipline, with its own peer-reviewed journals (Environment and Behavior in 1969 and the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1981), review chapters in the Annual Review of Psychology from 1973 onwards, and a division of the American Psychological Association; and, crucially, it began to accumulate and audit its own findings, so that by 2010 systematic reviews could ask whether contact with natural environments really does improve health and answer with a qualified yes, and by 2014 Robert Gifford could assess forty years of the field’s achievements and its unresolved problems.

Feng shui is not going to become environmental psychology, nor should it, but the five principles I test are being put through exactly that machinery, one at a time, and the only respectable claim to “evidence-based feng shui” is the one that can say, for each principle, which grade of evidence it currently has.

The future of feng shui is measurable. As virtual reality lets us build the same room in a feng shui-compatible and an incompatible version and swap between them at will, and as psychophysiological measures such as heart rate, electrodermal activity and facial muscle response, together with eye tracking and wearable sensors in real homes, let us record what the body does in those rooms rather than only what people say about them, feng shui will for the first time be able to state its claims in the language of effect sizes and mechanisms, so that a practitioner of the next decade may be able to say not “the command position brings good fortune” but “sitting with a wall behind you and the door in view lowers arousal by roughly this much, for most people, through this pathway, and here is the evidence”, which is a smaller claim than the tradition makes and a far stronger one.

Research on feng shui is already here and accelerating.  A title search of the academic literature now returns hundreds of papers with feng shui in the title, spanning architecture, environmental psychology, tourism, business, health and cultural studies, and they come from both directions at once: from universities in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea, where feng shui is being re-examined as part of a living design heritage, and from Europe, North America and Australia, where environmental psychologists and designers are asking why so many of its principles look like their own findings arrived at by another road. And the early results are encouraging. Where feng shui’s core principles have been put to the test, mostly under other names, they have held: people do prefer a protected position with a view of the room, they do respond to curves over sharp edges, contact with nature does lower stress and speed recovery, and the bedroom conditions feng shui has always prescribed are the ones sleep science now recommends. In my own doctoral studies, which place feng shui-compatible and incompatible bedrooms and workplaces in virtual reality and record how people’s bodies respond, the preliminary findings suggest that most people prefer the feng shui-compatible settings, and the psychophysiological data will show whether the body agrees with the vote. This is one of the first attempts to test the principles this way, and I intend it as an opening move, not a last word. The instruments exist, the questions are sharp, and the field is wide open: to every researcher, practitioner and student reading this, the invitation is to take one principle, design a study fair enough that it could fail, and publish what you find, whichever way it goes. Every positive result won that way is worth a hundred testimonials, and every negative one tells us where the tradition needs to grow. The question is no longer whether feng shui can be studied scientifically, but who will do the studies, and how well.

What the evidence currently supports, and what it does not

Because the argument above can be misread as licence to claim anything, let me be concrete about where things stand as I understand them.

Well supported
Well supported are the environmental principles that feng shui shares with environmental psychology and ergonomics: contact with nature and views of nature; a preference for curved rather than sharp forms; the psychological value of a protected, supported position with a view of the room and the door; and the overlap between feng shui bedroom advice and what sleep science recommends about darkness, quiet, cool temperature and the absence of screens. Reasonably well supported, though correlational, is the link between a sense of spiritual connection and reported wellbeing, which is relevant because feng shui has always had a spiritual dimension.

Preliminary
Preliminary and person-dependent are the effects of clutter, which cut both ways, and the mechanisms by which small environmental changes produce disproportionate shifts: the redirection of attention that any change brings, the priming of goals by what we see every day, and the role of expectation and ritual, which can change experience, behaviour and even physiology. These are plausible and partly evidenced, but not yet demonstrated for feng shui interventions specifically.

Not established
Not established are qi as a measurable quantity and the health effects of sleeping with the head in a particular compass direction, for example. I do not say these are false. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and I use precautionary measures in my own home. What these claims have in their favour is a long tradition and a great many individual reports, and the previous section explains exactly what those are worth: they are evidence that something happened, not yet evidence of why, and they cannot rule out attention, expectation or the ordinary tendency of bad patches to pass. They are also where the next studies should start. A practitioner who records the situation before a change, alters one thing at a time, asks the client to keep a simple diary and, where practical, returns to the old arrangement for a week before settling, turns a story into a small n-of-1 experiment; enough of those, gathered and reported whichever way they turn out, are how a claim moves from the “not established” column into “preliminary”, and then into the laboratory. Read above Do single cases count as evidence?

The rule that ties it together
The principle that ties this together is simple: evidence for one environmental principle does not validate the whole feng shui system, and a failed superstition does not refute it. Some of feng shui overlaps with established findings, some awaits testing, and some belongs to tradition and meaning rather than to measurement. All three parts are legitimate; the error is confusing one for another.

So what is feng shui for?

If feng shui is not a science, and if only part of it has scientific support, why practise it at all? Because there is one question and two answers, and both are worth having.

First answer: everyday harmony
The first answer is everyday harmony: healthier, safer and calmer homes and workplaces; better sleep, focus and performance; more energy. This is the practical, visible, testable side of feng shui, and it is where the evidence is strongest. If you do nothing else, arrange your bed so that you can see the door with a solid headboard behind you, take the screens out of the bedroom, put your desk in the command position, add one plant or one picture of nature (a jade plant is the classic choice; see Feng shui money plants), and clear one small area that drains you. None of this requires belief. It requires attention.

Second answer: self-discovery
The second answer is self-discovery. Your home is a metaphor, and we are all in the habit of projecting feelings, intentions and identities onto the spaces we inhabit. Every room communicates, through colour, form, material, scale, texture and light, a message that your nervous system reads all day. Feng shui, at this level, is a practice of intention, attention and ritual: what you place is what you attend to, and what you attend to shapes where you go. It is, in one phrase, a physical affirmation. Used this way, feng shui becomes a practice for personal growth, self-understanding and, for those who want it, a spiritual and transpersonal awareness of being part of something larger than the individual self. The tradition began as a spiritual practice, rooted in cosmology and in the careful siting of dwellings within a living landscape, and that layer has never gone away.

Conclusion: models are interfaces, not cages

Hoffman’s lesson for cognitive science is also the lesson for feng shui. Our models, whether they are equations, perceptual systems or the bagua, are interfaces for navigating reality, not literal descriptions of it and not dogmas to be defended. Single exceptions do not destroy good systems; they push them towards better ones. Systems earn their keep through internal consistency and usefulness, not through claims to absolute truth. Changing environments oblige every living discipline to keep evolving. And the best systems tell you plainly where their rules stop working.

Feng shui at its best has always known this. It is why the same tradition can hold a formula and the discernment to set the formula aside. The disempowering version of feng shui trades in superstition, fear, bad numbers and bad directions, and in borrowed formulas applied without looking at the person or the space. The empowering version treats every space as an autobiography, addresses root causes, uses evidence where evidence exists and experience where it does not, and leaves you freer than it found you. Do not put your life into feng shui; put feng shui into your life. The choice of model, and of level, is always yours. That, in the end, is the real freedom beyond feng shui.

If you would like your own home or workplace looked at with this approach, in person or remotely from a floor plan, you can contact me here.

References and further reading

Appleton, J. (1975). The experience of landscape. Wiley.

Aronson, J. K., & Hauben, M. (2006). Anecdotes that provide definitive evidence. BMJ, 333(7581), 1267–1269. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39036.666389.94

Bar, M., & Neta, M. (2006). Humans prefer curved visual objects. Psychological Science, 17(8), 645–648. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01759.x

Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1207–1212. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02225.x

Bowler, D. E., Buyung-Ali, L. M., Knight, T. M., & Pullin, A. S. (2010). A systematic review of evidence for the added benefits to health of exposure to natural environments. BMC Public Health, 10, Article 456. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-10-456

Craik, K. H. (1973). Environmental psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 24(1), 403–422. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.24.020173.002155

Gifford, R. (2014). Environmental psychology matters. Annual Review of Psychology, 65(1), 541–579. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115048

Guyatt, G. H., Oxman, A. D., Vist, G. E., Kunz, R., Falck-Ytter, Y., Alonso-Coello, P., & Schünemann, H. J. (2008). GRADE: An emerging consensus on rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations. BMJ, 336(7650), 924–926. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39489.470347.AD

Guyatt, G., Sackett, D., Taylor, D. W., Chong, J., Roberts, R., & Pugsley, S. (1986). Determining optimal therapy: Randomized trials in individual patients. New England Journal of Medicine, 314(14), 889–892. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJM198604033141406

Hoffman, D. D., Singh, M., & Prakash, C. (2015). The interface theory of perception. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 22(6), 1480–1506. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0890-8

Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine, 2(8), e124. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

Koenig, H. G., King, D. E., & Carson, V. B. (2012). Handbook of religion and health (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Kratochwill, T. R., Hitchcock, J. H., Horner, R. H., Levin, J. R., Odom, S. L., Rindskopf, D. M., & Shadish, W. R. (2013). Single-case intervention research design standards. Remedial and Special Education, 34(1), 26–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932512452794

Matthews, M. R. (2019). Feng shui: Teaching about science and pseudoscience. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18822-1

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716

Popper, K. R. (2002). The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge. (Original work published 1959)

Sackett, D. L., Rosenberg, W. M. C., Gray, J. A. M., Haynes, R. B., & Richardson, W. S. (1996). Evidence based medicine: What it is and what it isn’t. BMJ, 312(7023), 71–72. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.312.7023.71

Stokols, D. (1978). Environmental psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 29(1), 253–295. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.29.020178.001345

Taleb, N. N. (2007). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable. Random House.

Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420–421. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.6143402

Vandenbroucke, J. P. (2001). In defense of case reports and case series. Annals of Internal Medicine, 134(4), 330–334. https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-134-4-200102200-00017

Vartanian, O., Navarrete, G., Chatterjee, A., Fich, L. B., Leder, H., Modroño, C., Nadal, M., Rostrup, N., & Skov, M. (2013). Impact of contour on aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in architecture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(Supplement 2), 10446–10453. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301227110

Vohs, K. D., Redden, J. P., & Rahinel, R. (2013). Physical order produces healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, whereas disorder produces creativity. Psychological Science, 24(9), 1860–1867. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613480186

Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Harvard University Press.

Related reading on FengShuiLondon.net

• Summary of Feng Shui: Teaching About Science and Pseudoscience by Michael R. Matthews
• What is feng shui? What is feng shui for? Short answers
• Feng shui means wind-water, not wind and water: here’s why
• Feng shui myths, superstitions and false problems
• Dirty electricity
• Feng shui money plants
• Feng shui consultant near me: contact and floor plan reviews

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Part 1: Historical Foundations, Feng Shui and the Question of Whether Places Remember

Introduction: when buildings seem to repeat the same stories

Most people have had the experience of walking into a building and feeling something before they know anything about its history. A house may feel peaceful, heavy, neglected, bright, oppressive, joyful, sad, charged, empty or strangely familiar. A business premises may feel lively and prosperous, or stagnant and defeated. A treatment room may feel calm even before a session begins. A church, temple, library, theatre, courtroom or hospital may carry an atmosphere that seems to exceed its physical dimensions.

In ordinary language, people often say that a place has a “good feeling” or a “bad feeling”. In feng shui, one possible way of approaching this is through what some contemporary practitioners call predecessor law: the observation that the history of a place, including the experiences of previous occupants, may appear to influence what happens to later occupants. A home associated with divorce may later host another divorce. A business premises associated with bankruptcy may seem to produce another failed business. A house in which illness repeatedly occurs may lead people to ask whether there is something in the building, the land, the layout, the environment or the subtle atmosphere that is contributing to the pattern.

At first glance, this may seem like superstition. However, the matter is more complex. Repeating patterns in places can arise from many sources. Some are entirely physical, such as mould, radon, asbestos, polluted air, poor lighting, damp, noise, inadequate ventilation or other environmental hazards. Some are architectural, such as lack of privacy, poor spatial flow, oppressive proportions, insufficient daylight or stressful relationships between doors, beds, desks and circulation routes. Some are psychological, involving expectation, suggestion, attachment, memory and meaning. Some are social, as buildings carry economic, family and community histories. Some are symbolic and cultural, because humans do not live in neutral space but in places filled with stories, rituals, names, associations and inherited meanings.

Feng shui adds another layer. It proposes that places are shaped by qi, form, orientation, time, use, pattern and relationship. In this view, a building is not merely a container for human activity. It is a field of influence. It can support, weaken, disturb or refine human life. This does not mean that a building mechanically determines destiny. Rather, feng shui suggests that people and places participate in one another. The person affects the place. The place affects the person. Over time, repeated patterns may become more visible.

This article explores predecessor law as a serious and multi layered concept. It does not reduce all inherited place patterns to superstition, nor does it claim that every intuitive impression is objectively true. Instead, it asks a more precise question:

How are patterns stored, reinforced, transmitted and transformed within places?

That question allows us to examine predecessor law through several complementary lenses: classical feng shui, environmental psychology, place attachment, environmental hazards, architectural design, space clearing, space conditioning as proposed by William A. Tiller and colleagues, and morphic resonance as proposed by Rupert Sheldrake. Each lens contributes something different. Some are supported by mainstream research. Some belong to wisdom traditions. Some remain speculative but meaningful. Some may point towards phenomena that have not yet been adequately researched.

The practical purpose is not to create fear of places. The purpose is to understand that the past of a place may matter, but the future of a place is not fixed. Feng shui, space clearing, environmental assessment, renovation, ritual, intention and conscious re occupation can all be understood as ways of recognising and changing the condition of a space.

What is predecessor law in feng shui?

Predecessor law, in its simplest contemporary meaning, is the idea that the experience of previous occupants may leave a pattern that later occupants can repeat. For example, if previous occupants divorced, later occupants may be more likely to experience relationship difficulty. If a business failed repeatedly in a particular unit, a new business owner might ask whether the premises carry a pattern of commercial instability. If several people became ill in the same property, one might ask whether the cause is environmental, architectural, psychological, energetic or some combination of these.

There are at least two interpretations of predecessor law in modern feng shui.

The first is the residual influence interpretation. This is close to what many Western feng shui and space clearing practitioners mean when they speak of predecessor energy. In this interpretation, previous occupants leave emotional, psychological, symbolic or energetic traces. These traces may influence later occupants unless they are cleared, transformed or overwritten by new patterns.

The second is the structural qi interpretation. In this interpretation, the recurring pattern is not necessarily caused by the previous occupants themselves. Rather, previous occupants may have experienced the same problem because the building already contained a feng shui pattern that predisposed them towards that outcome. For instance, if a building has an inherent configuration associated with relationship instability, then several couples may experience difficulty in that same home, not because the first couple left divorce energy behind, but because the house itself repeatedly activates the same kind of relational stress.

This distinction is crucial. Without it, predecessor law can become too simplistic. It is not enough to say, “The previous owner had financial problems, therefore the house contains financial failure.” A more careful feng shui reading asks:

• What happened here before?
• Was the previous event caused by personal circumstances, by the building, by environmental factors, by wider social and economic conditions, or by several of these at once?
• Is there a repeating pattern across several occupants?
• Does the layout, orientation, form, landform or time cycle of the building support the pattern?
• Are there physical explanations, such as damp, toxins, noise, pollution or poor ventilation?
• Are there psychological and symbolic explanations, such as stigma, expectation, reputation or inherited stories?
• Is space clearing needed to release old emotional residues?
• Is deeper space conditioning needed to establish a new pattern?

This approach makes predecessor law more useful and less superstitious. It becomes a diagnostic concept rather than a fatalistic belief.

In practical feng shui, predecessor law encourages us to ask about the history of a home or business before moving in, buying, renting or investing. Why did the previous occupants leave? Did they move because they became successful and needed more space? Did they leave because of divorce, bankruptcy, illness, conflict or repeated misfortune? Was the building previously used for healing, learning, worship, creativity, care, trade, gambling, violence, debt, isolation or institutional control? The answers do not automatically prove anything, but they provide meaningful diagnostic clues.

A mature interpretation of predecessor law should therefore hold three possibilities at once.

First, the previous history may reveal something about the building itself.

Second, the previous history may reveal something about the people who occupied it.

Third, the previous history may reveal something about the relationship between people and place.

It is this third possibility that is most important. Feng shui is not simply about buildings. It is about relationships between human beings, land, time, orientation, form, symbols, memory, intention and qi.

The historical roots of feng shui: wind, water, qi and place

Wind Water: Why a Small Translation Detail Matters

The term feng shui (風水) literally means “wind water”. The original Chinese contains no word corresponding to “and”.

This may appear to be a minor linguistic detail, yet it highlights a much larger issue concerning how feng shui is understood and taught. The familiar English translation “wind and water” has become widespread in books, courses and articles. However, the insertion of the word “and” subtly changes the conceptual framework through which the discipline is viewed.

Wind and water suggests two separate things joined together.

Wind water suggests a relationship, a continuum, a dynamic process.

In classical feng shui, wind disperses qi and water gathers qi. The emphasis is not merely on two environmental features but on their interaction, relationship and continuous transformation. The focus is on patterns, flows and processes rather than isolated objects.

WARNING

When studying feng shui, pay close attention to seemingly small details. They often reveal whether an author has deeply engaged with the original concepts or is merely repeating interpretations inherited from other sources.

Ask yourself a simple question:

Would you trust a source that cannot translate the two words that form the name of the discipline without altering their meaning?

This does not automatically mean the author is wrong about everything else. However, it should immediately encourage caution. If the foundational concept is misunderstood, simplified or repeated without examination, then the entire framework built upon it may also be distorted.

In any field, whether science, philosophy, psychology or feng shui, conclusions are only as reliable as the assumptions upon which they are built. If the starting point is flawed, every step that follows may move further away from the original meaning.

A useful analogy is a map. Two maps may describe the same territory, but one may be more accurate, more detailed and more useful for navigation. If your map omits a river, a mountain or a road junction, you may still reach your destination, but you are more likely to take wrong turns along the way. In the same way, a subtle misunderstanding at the foundation of feng shui can influence how later concepts are interpreted and applied.

The point is not that “wind and water” is completely wrong. The point is that it guides the reader towards a different conceptual framework. In disciplines concerned with relationships, patterns and systems, small shifts in the underlying framework can produce very different interpretations.

This distinction is particularly relevant to predecessor law. If feng shui is understood primarily as a study of relationships and patterns rather than isolated objects, then the history of a place becomes more than a collection of past events. It becomes part of an ongoing process through which places, people, activities and meanings continually shape one another across time.

Interestingly, much of the scientific literature writes fengshui as a single word. This reflects the fact that it is treated as a single concept, even though it is composed of two Chinese characters. Whether one writes feng shui or fengshui, the term refers to one integrated system rather than two separate subjects artificially joined together.

One of the hallmarks of serious feng shui study is attention to detail. Small linguistic distinctions often reveal deeper philosophical distinctions. Those who overlook them may inadvertently overlook some of the most important insights hidden within the tradition itself.

Although contemporary feng shui is often presented as interior design, its historical roots are much older and broader. They include burial practices, cosmology, divination, landscape observation, astronomy, settlement planning, agricultural life, ancestor reverence and the Chinese philosophical concern with harmony between Heaven, Earth and human beings.

One of the most important classical texts associated with feng shui is the Zangshu, usually translated as The Book of Burial. It is traditionally attributed to Guo Pu, who lived from 276 to 324 CE. The text became central to later feng shui because it articulated the relationship between burial, qi, landform and the prosperity of descendants. Its influence is especially important because feng shui was not originally only concerned with the living house, but also with the burial site. In traditional Chinese thought, the correct placement of ancestral graves could influence the wellbeing of descendants. This is sometimes called Yin House feng shui, in contrast to Yang House feng shui, which concerns dwellings and other buildings for the living.

This historical background matters for predecessor law because it shows that feng shui has long been concerned with continuity across time. A site was not seen as neutral. Landform, water, wind, direction, burial, ancestors and descendants were linked. A place could carry influence forward. A grave could affect a family line. A landscape could support or weaken a settlement. A house could shape the life of its occupants. The idea that a place has consequences beyond the immediate moment is therefore not a modern invention. What may be modern is the specific language of “predecessor law”, but the broader concern with inherited place influence is deeply consistent with feng shui history.

Historically, feng shui developed through several related streams. The Form School emphasised visible landscape forms, such as mountains, rivers, protective embrace, open space, water flow and the symbolic arrangement of dragon, tiger, tortoise and phoenix. This approach is observational and ecological in spirit. It asks how the forms of the land gather, move or disperse qi.

The Compass School developed more technical methods using direction, calculation, cosmology, the luopan compass, trigrams, stems and branches, time cycles and other systems. Later systems, including Flying Star feng shui, introduced more elaborate ways of relating buildings to time, direction and changing qi patterns. In this context, the history of a building can be read not only through previous occupants, but also through construction date, major renovations, orientation and period influences.

This helps clarify the structural interpretation of predecessor law. A building may repeatedly produce similar outcomes not because one occupant leaves a residue for the next, but because the building contains an enduring pattern. If a particular configuration repeatedly weakens relationships, finances or health, then different occupants may activate similar themes. Their personal stories differ, but the building pattern remains.

This is one reason why predecessor law should not be treated as merely ghostly or sentimental. It can also be understood as pattern recognition across time.

Tian, Di and Ren: Heaven, Earth and Human

A useful way to understand feng shui historically is through the triad of Tian, Di and Ren, meaning Heaven, Earth and Human. Heaven refers to time, cosmic order, fate, cycles and larger forces beyond immediate control. Earth refers to landform, orientation, building, environment and material conditions. Human refers to action, intention, ethics, behaviour, perception and choice.

Predecessor law sits precisely at the intersection of these three domains.

From the perspective of Heaven, a building exists within time. It is built during a particular period, occupied during particular cycles, inherited through particular historical circumstances and used during specific social and economic conditions.

From the perspective of Earth, the building has a physical reality. It has shape, orientation, structure, light, air, materials, landform, water, roads, neighbouring buildings and environmental exposures.

From the perspective of Human, the building is lived in, used, named, remembered, interpreted, loved, neglected, feared, renovated, blessed, argued in, slept in, worked in, sold, inherited and transformed.

A place develops meaning because these three domains interact. A divorce in a house is not only a personal event. It may also involve the bedroom position, the stress of the neighbourhood, the financial pressure of the mortgage, the history of the family, the symbolic condition of the home, the quality of light, the lack of privacy, the previous stories attached to the property, and the intentions brought into it by the couple. In feng shui terms, the event is not isolated from place.

This does not mean that the house causes divorce in a simplistic way. It means that places participate in the conditions under which human lives unfold.

Predecessor law and the history of use

One of the most practical questions in predecessor law is this: what has the place been used for?

A former monastery, school, pub, hospital, care home, shop, prison, factory, office, funeral parlour, family house, artist’s studio, retreat centre or gambling venue may carry very different patterns of use. Some of these differences are physical. A factory may contain pollutants. A pub may have noise patterns, alcohol related associations and late night social energy. A school may carry intense patterns of learning, discipline, socialisation and childhood memory. A hospital may carry care, suffering, recovery, grief and institutional stress. A retreat centre may carry meditation, silence and spiritual intention.

From a purely environmental perspective, previous use can matter because buildings retain physical residues. Materials, surfaces, ventilation systems, soil, water and air can all be affected by past activity. A building may literally contain its history.

From a psychological perspective, previous use matters because people respond to stories. If a house is known locally as “the divorce house” or “the unlucky shop”, this reputation can shape expectations, decisions and behaviour. Even if the physical building is sound, a negative narrative may influence confidence. Conversely, a place known for creativity, healing or success may inspire occupants to behave differently.

From a feng shui perspective, previous use matters because repeated human activity conditions qi. This is where predecessor law begins to overlap with space clearing and space conditioning. A room used for meditation for many years may feel different from a room used for conflict. A place where people have studied, healed, prayed or created may accumulate a different quality from a place where people have struggled, fought or despaired.

Wisdom traditions across the world have recognised this in different ways. Churches, temples, shrines, pilgrimage routes, ancestral homes, burial grounds, sacred mountains, wells and ritual sites are not treated as neutral locations. They are treated as places where repeated human attention, reverence and activity have created a distinctive field of meaning. Whether one explains this through qi, spirit, memory, cultural symbolism, place attachment or morphic resonance, the human fact remains: people experience some places as carrying accumulated significance.

Genius loci: the spirit of place

The idea that a place has a distinctive character is not unique to feng shui. In Roman religion, the term genius locireferred to the protective spirit or presiding presence of a place. In modern architecture and phenomenology, the phrase has been reinterpreted to mean the unique atmosphere, identity or character of a place.

Christian Norberg Schulz developed this idea in Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1980). His central concern was that architecture should not be reduced to abstract form or technical function. It should help people dwell meaningfully. A building should belong to its place, reveal its character and support human orientation in the world. In this view, architecture is existential as well as practical. It shapes how people experience being somewhere.

This is highly relevant to predecessor law. If places have character, then the history of that character matters. A place is not only a point in space. It is a lived world. It includes landscape, light, material, memory, use, cultural meaning and human experience. A house is not only bricks, wiring, plumbing and square footage. It is also an atmosphere, a biography and a field of lived associations.

The phrase “spirit of place” can be interpreted in different ways. For some, it is literal and spiritual. For others, it is phenomenological and psychological. For others, it is architectural and cultural. A respectful article on predecessor law does not need to force one interpretation. It can acknowledge that human beings have long experienced places as more than inert matter.

This is not a weakness of human perception. It may be one of the ways humans recognise complexity. We often sense patterns before we can analyse them. A person may feel uneasy in a building before discovering damp, poor ventilation, oppressive proportions or a history of conflict. Another person may feel peaceful in a chapel, library or meditation room before knowing how long it has been used for prayer, study or contemplation. Intuition is not always correct, but neither is it always meaningless. It may sometimes be an early form of environmental perception.

Christopher Alexander and the quality without a name

Christopher Alexander’s work provides another bridge between feng shui and architectural theory. In The Timeless Way of Building (1979), Alexander proposed that some buildings and places possess a living quality that cannot be reduced to style, taste or fashion. He famously called it the quality without a name. He associated this quality with places that feel alive, whole, free, exact, comfortable and deeply fitting, although no single word captures it fully.

Alexander’s relevance to predecessor law lies in his insistence that buildings can be more or less alive. This does not mean alive in the biological sense. It means that built environments can support or obstruct the unfolding of life. A well formed place strengthens human presence. A poorly formed place weakens it.

For feng shui, this is a familiar idea. Good feng shui is not merely decorative. It is the creation of supportive relationship between person, place and purpose. A bedroom should support rest, intimacy and restoration. A workplace should support clarity, focus, authority and creativity. A front entrance should support arrival, welcome and opportunity. A kitchen should support nourishment and vitality. When these relationships are coherent, a place feels more alive.

Predecessor law adds a temporal dimension to this. If a building has supported life well for many years, it may acquire a positive character. If it has repeatedly obstructed life, or been used in ways that create distress, neglect or fragmentation, it may acquire a more difficult character. Alexander helps us describe this without reducing it only to superstition. The “memory” of place may partly be the cumulative effect of form, pattern, adaptation, use and care.

A building that has been loved, repaired, adapted and inhabited consciously often feels different from one that has been neglected, exploited or repeatedly abandoned. Some of this difference is visible. Some is behavioural. Some is symbolic. Some may be energetic. Feng shui works with all these levels.

Place attachment and place identity

Environmental psychology gives us another important foundation: place attachment. Place attachment refers to emotional bonds between people and places. These bonds may involve home, neighbourhood, landscape, sacred site, workplace, school, country, ancestral land or other meaningful locations. The field is multidisciplinary and includes psychology, geography, sociology, anthropology, architecture and planning.

Altman and Low’s edited volume Place Attachment (1992) helped establish the concept as a significant area of research. Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff (1983) developed the related concept of place identity, arguing that physical settings can become part of the self. Tuan’s work on topophilia explored affective bonds with environment, while Relph’s work on place and placelessness examined how authentic place experience can be weakened by standardised environments.

Place attachment does not claim that buildings literally store memories in an esoteric sense. It shows that places become psychologically meaningful. They hold autobiographical memory, identity, emotion, belonging, continuity and loss. A family home may continue to influence a person decades after they leave it. A childhood bedroom, garden, school corridor or sacred place may remain vivid in memory. Places are not passive backdrops to life. They become woven into the self.

For predecessor law, place attachment offers a grounded psychological bridge. It explains how people and places become linked through memory and meaning. It also suggests that the “history of a place” is not only in the building. It is also in the stories people tell about the building, the emotions they attach to it, the behaviours it invites and the identity it supports.

If a house is repeatedly associated with conflict, occupants may consciously or unconsciously enter into that story. If a place is associated with healing, occupants may enter into that story too. This does not prove energetic transmission, but it shows that place history can influence future experience through meaning, expectation and identity.

This also explains why rituals of moving in, blessing a house, clearing clutter, repainting, renovating, naming rooms, lighting candles, arranging furniture and creating new routines can matter psychologically. They help transfer the place from one identity to another. They say: this is no longer only the place of what happened before. It is now also the place of what we are consciously creating.

Towards a layered model of place memory

The phrase “a building remembers” can be misleading if taken too literally. Yet it is also too narrow to dismiss it outright. A more precise approach is to speak of layers of place memory.

The first layer is physical memory. Buildings retain traces of what happened to them. Damp, cracks, smells, toxins, worn thresholds, altered rooms, old wiring, soil contamination, smoke residue and structural repairs are forms of material history.

The second layer is architectural memory. A building contains patterns of use in its layout. It may encourage gathering or isolation, rest or vigilance, clarity or confusion, intimacy or conflict. Design has behavioural consequences.

The third layer is psychological memory. People attach emotion, identity and story to places. A home, school, workplace or retreat centre may carry powerful associations.

The fourth layer is social memory. Buildings belong to communities. Neighbours know stories. Businesses develop reputations. Streets and districts carry histories of prosperity, decline, migration, trauma or regeneration.

The fifth layer is symbolic memory. Objects, colours, images, names, rituals and cultural meanings shape how a place is interpreted.

The sixth layer is energetic memory. Feng shui, space clearing and many wisdom traditions propose that repeated actions, emotions and intentions can condition the subtle atmosphere of a place.

The seventh layer is informational or field memory. This is where later sections of this article will discuss Tiller’s space conditioning and Sheldrake’s morphic resonance. These are not the same theory, but both raise the possibility that patterns may be held beyond ordinary material explanation.

Predecessor law becomes more credible when understood through this layered model. It is not one thing. It is a family of observations about how the past of a place may continue into the present.

Conclusion to Part 1

Predecessor law should not be treated as a crude superstition, nor should it be overstated as a scientifically proven mechanism. It is better understood as an observational principle in feng shui: places sometimes appear to repeat patterns, and these patterns deserve investigation.

Historically, feng shui has always taken place seriously. It arose from a worldview in which land, qi, ancestors, orientation, time, form and human destiny were connected. The classical concern with burial, landscape and settlement already implies that place has continuity and consequence. Modern concepts such as genius loci, the quality without a name, place attachment and place identity offer further language for understanding why buildings are experienced as more than physical containers.

The key point is practical. If a place has a history, that history should be read. If a place has a pattern, that pattern should be examined. If a place has been negatively conditioned, it may be changed. The past of a house, business or landscape is not necessarily a sentence. It is information.

The next part of this article will examine what modern environmental psychology, building biology and architectural research can tell us about recurring patterns in places, including illness, relationship stress, business failure and wellbeing.

Part 2: Environmental Psychology, Building Biology and the Scientific Study of Place

Why Places Influence People

If predecessor law proposes that places sometimes appear to repeat similar stories across generations of occupants, then environmental psychology asks a closely related question: how do places influence human behaviour, health, emotions and wellbeing?

Unlike some debates surrounding subtle energies, this question has been studied extensively for decades. Environmental psychologists, architects, geographers, planners, neuroscientists and public health researchers have accumulated substantial evidence showing that the environments in which people live, work, learn and recover are not passive backdrops to human life. They actively participate in shaping experience.

This insight may appear obvious. Most people intuitively recognise that they feel different in a cathedral than in a prison, in a forest than in a motorway service station, or in a light filled room than in a dark basement. Yet for much of modern history, psychology focused primarily on what happened inside the individual mind. The environment was often treated as secondary.

Environmental psychology helped reverse this perspective. It recognised that human experience emerges not only from internal processes but also from ongoing interaction with the surrounding world (Gifford, 2014).

This shift has profound implications for predecessor law. If environments consistently influence human behaviour and wellbeing, then some recurring patterns associated with particular buildings may arise not because of superstition or coincidence, but because the building repeatedly exposes occupants to similar conditions.

The question therefore becomes not whether a place matters, but how it matters.

Place Attachment and Place Identity

One of the most important contributions of environmental psychology is the concept of place attachment. Place attachment refers to the emotional bond that develops between people and specific places (Altman & Low, 1992).

Such bonds can be remarkably powerful. Childhood homes, favourite landscapes, schools, universities, places of worship and ancestral lands often remain emotionally significant throughout life. These places become woven into memory and identity.

Yi-Fu Tuan (1974) described this phenomenon as topophilia, literally a love of place. He argued that places are not simply locations. They are repositories of meaning. Through experience, memory and emotion, ordinary spaces become transformed into places.

Harold Proshansky extended this idea through the concept of place identity. According to Proshansky et al. (1983), aspects of physical environments become incorporated into self-concept. Places help answer the question: who am I?

This may seem distant from predecessor law, yet the connection is profound. If people become attached to places and places become part of personal identity, then the history of a place is never merely architectural. It becomes psychological.

A family home, for example, may contain memories of births, deaths, celebrations, illnesses, achievements and losses. The building itself becomes a vessel through which those experiences are organised and remembered.

From this perspective, place memory does not require mystical explanation. Places become memory structures because human lives unfold within them.

However, place attachment also hints at something deeper. Some places seem unusually resilient. They retain their character despite changes in ownership, decoration or function. A library may remain contemplative. A monastery may retain an atmosphere of quietness. A theatre may continue to evoke creativity. Such continuity raises an important question: are these merely human perceptions, or does repeated activity gradually condition a place?

That question leads directly towards later discussions of space conditioning and morphic resonance.

Buildings as Behavioural Systems

One of the most useful ways of understanding predecessor law is to view buildings as behavioural systems.

Buildings encourage certain actions while discouraging others.

A narrow corridor influences movement differently from a broad hallway. A bright communal kitchen generates different social interactions from an isolated kitchenette hidden in a corner. A bedroom overlooking trees creates a different experience from one overlooking a busy motorway.

These influences are rarely deterministic. Buildings do not force people to behave in specific ways. Nevertheless, they shape probabilities.

Environmental psychologists often refer to environmental affordances. Affordances are opportunities for action provided by an environment. A park affords walking. A bench affords sitting. A window affords viewing. A hidden corner affords privacy.

Buildings are therefore not neutral containers. They are active participants in behavioural patterns.

This observation is highly relevant to predecessor law. If a building consistently encourages stress, conflict, isolation or poor sleep, then similar outcomes may emerge repeatedly among different occupants.

The pattern may appear mysterious until the environmental conditions are examined.

Prospect, Refuge and the Human Search for Safety

One of the most influential theories linking environmental psychology and feng shui is Prospect Refuge Theory.

Developed by Jay Appleton (1975), the theory proposes that humans tend to prefer environments that simultaneously provide prospect and refuge.

Prospect refers to visibility, awareness and opportunity. Refuge refers to protection, shelter and safety.

From an evolutionary perspective, environments that allowed individuals to observe their surroundings while remaining protected offered survival advantages.

The relevance to feng shui is immediately apparent.

Many classical feng shui principles can be interpreted through this lens. The command position, for example, places a person in a location where the entrance is visible but not directly aligned with them. The occupant gains awareness while maintaining security.

Similarly, the traditional preference for a solid wall behind a bed, desk or chair can be understood as a form of refuge.

Although feng shui and prospect refuge theory emerged from entirely different cultural contexts, both recognise a fundamental psychological reality: people function best when they feel both aware and protected.

This insight may help explain why some environments consistently support confidence, focus and wellbeing, while others repeatedly generate unease.

Nature, Restoration and Recovery

One of the strongest areas of environmental psychology concerns the relationship between nature and wellbeing.

Roger Ulrich’s landmark study found that hospital patients recovering from surgery experienced better outcomes when they had views of trees rather than views of a brick wall (Ulrich, 1984).

The finding was striking because it demonstrated that something as simple as a window view could influence recovery.

Around the same time, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan developed Attention Restoration Theory. According to the theory, natural environments help restore depleted attentional resources (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989).

Modern life requires sustained directed attention. We focus on screens, traffic, deadlines, notifications and complex tasks. Over time, directed attention becomes fatigued.

Nature appears to provide a different kind of attention. Rather than demanding effort, it gently attracts awareness through what the Kaplans termed soft fascination.

Flowing water, clouds, trees, birdsong and natural landscapes engage attention without exhausting it.

This has obvious implications for predecessor law. Buildings that incorporate nature, daylight, views and restorative qualities may consistently support better outcomes. Over many years, successive occupants may experience similar benefits.

What appears to be inherited good fortune may sometimes be the long term effect of restorative environmental conditions.

Building Biology and Hidden Environmental Influences

Environmental psychology explains some recurring patterns. Building biology explains others.

Building biology examines how buildings affect human health through physical environmental factors. These include air quality, moisture, toxins, lighting, noise and electromagnetic influences.

One of the most important lessons from building biology is that recurring problems often have hidden causes.

Consider a house in which several families experience persistent respiratory problems.

From the perspective of predecessor law, one might ask whether the house carries an unhealthy pattern.

Building biology encourages a more detailed investigation.

Is there mould hidden behind walls?

Is ventilation inadequate?

Is there water ingress?

Are there airborne pollutants?

Is indoor humidity excessive?

In many cases, recurring health problems may have physical explanations that remain unnoticed for years.

This does not invalidate predecessor law. Rather, it provides one mechanism through which predecessor patterns may arise.

The pattern is real.

The explanation may simply be environmental rather than energetic.

Mould, Air Quality and Invisible Stressors

Mould represents one of the clearest examples of a recurring environmental influence.

Occupants may experience fatigue, headaches, respiratory irritation, cognitive difficulties and reduced wellbeing without identifying the underlying cause.

Because mould can remain hidden for long periods, successive occupants may experience similar problems.

The house appears to repeat a pattern.

Likewise, indoor air quality can influence concentration, mood and productivity. Elevated levels of pollutants, inadequate ventilation and poor air circulation may affect occupants in subtle but significant ways.

A poorly ventilated workplace may repeatedly generate fatigue and reduced performance among different employees. The pattern becomes associated with the building even though the cause is environmental.

Light, Circadian Rhythms and Wellbeing

Humans evolved under natural cycles of daylight and darkness.

Modern buildings often disrupt those cycles.

Research increasingly demonstrates that daylight exposure influences sleep quality, mood, cognitive performance and overall wellbeing.

Buildings with poor access to daylight may contribute to:

• fatigue
• low mood
• reduced productivity
• sleep disruption

By contrast, well designed daylight environments support circadian regulation and psychological health.

Again, the consequences can appear as predecessor patterns.

A building repeatedly associated with lethargy may simply be a building that repeatedly deprives occupants of adequate natural light.

Conflict, Stress and the Architecture of Relationships

Not all recurring patterns involve physical health.

Some involve relationships.

Environmental psychology has long recognised that crowding, noise, lack of privacy and loss of personal control contribute to stress.

Stress influences communication.

Communication influences relationships.

Relationships influence life outcomes.

A property that repeatedly produces relationship difficulties may therefore warrant examination at multiple levels.

Are bedrooms positioned to support rest?

Is sleep repeatedly disrupted?

Is there sufficient privacy?

Are communal spaces overly crowded?

Does the layout encourage conflict?

The point is not that architecture determines divorce or harmony. Human relationships are vastly more complex than that.

Nevertheless, environmental conditions can amplify or reduce existing pressures.

Over time, these effects may become visible as recurring patterns.

Towards a Scientific Understanding of Predecessor Law

Environmental psychology does not prove predecessor law in the strongest sense.

It does not demonstrate that buildings literally remember events.

However, it does show that environments repeatedly influence human experience.

Buildings shape behaviour.

Buildings influence stress.

Buildings affect health.

Buildings contribute to identity.

Buildings support or undermine restoration.

Buildings encourage certain patterns while discouraging others.

Viewed through this lens, predecessor law becomes less mysterious.

Some recurring patterns may arise because a building continually exposes occupants to similar environmental conditions.

The same causes generate similar effects.

Yet environmental psychology may not explain everything. It explains how places influence people. It does not fully explain why some locations seem to develop unusually persistent atmospheres, reputations or qualities that exceed obvious physical factors.

To explore those questions, we must move beyond environmental psychology into territory that remains more controversial but also more intriguing: the possibility that places themselves may become conditioned through repeated intention, activity and experience.

That possibility forms the subject of the next section: Space Conditioning and the Work of William A. Tiller.

Part 3: Space Conditioning, Conscious Intention and the Work of William A. Tiller

Beyond Environmental Psychology

Environmental psychology, building biology and architectural research provide powerful explanations for many recurring patterns associated with predecessor law. Poor air quality can contribute to illness. Inadequate daylight can affect mood and sleep. Lack of privacy can increase stress. Restorative environments can support wellbeing. These factors help explain why certain buildings repeatedly produce similar outcomes across different occupants.

Yet some observations remain difficult to explain entirely through conventional environmental factors.

Why do some rooms feel distinctly different despite appearing physically similar?

Why do meditation halls, churches, temples and retreat centres often retain an atmosphere of calm long after formal activities have ended?

Why do some buildings seem to support creativity, healing or contemplation over many generations of occupants?

Why do people sometimes report noticeable changes following space clearing rituals even when no physical changes have been made?

These questions do not automatically prove the existence of subtle energies or non-physical influences. However, they invite investigation into possibilities beyond conventional environmental models.

One of the most ambitious attempts to explore such possibilities was undertaken by the American materials scientist William A. Tiller and his colleagues Walter Dibble and Michael Kohane. Their work introduced the concept of space conditioning, a theory suggesting that conscious intention may influence the informational properties of physical environments (Tiller, Dibble, & Kohane, 2001).

Whether ultimately accepted, modified or rejected, Tiller’s work provides one of the most sophisticated theoretical frameworks for understanding how places might acquire and retain patterns over time.

What Is Space Conditioning?

In its simplest form, space conditioning refers to the idea that repeated intentions, emotions, thoughts and activities may gradually influence the quality of a place.

Most people are already familiar with this concept in an informal sense.

A room used for meditation often feels different from a room used for conflict.

A library feels different from a nightclub.

A healing centre feels different from a courtroom.

A family home filled with warmth and affection may feel different from one marked by years of stress and hostility.

Conventional explanations might attribute these differences to memory, expectation, design, symbolism or social conditioning. Tiller proposed that something more fundamental might also be occurring.

According to his model, consciousness may interact with physical reality in ways that are not yet fully understood. Repeated intention may condition space itself, making certain outcomes more likely within that environment.

From this perspective, places are not merely passive settings in which human activity occurs. They may become participants in that activity.

The Origins of Tiller’s Research

William A. Tiller was not a feng shui practitioner. He was a Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

For much of his career, Tiller worked within conventional science. Later in life, however, he became interested in phenomena involving consciousness, intention and human potential.

His investigations led him to explore whether focused human intention could influence physical systems under controlled conditions.

One of the most unusual aspects of his work involved devices that he called Intention Imprinted Electronic Devices(IIEDs).

These devices were allegedly imprinted with specific intentions and then placed in experimental environments. According to Tiller and his colleagues, measurable changes occurred in some physical variables after sufficient conditioning of the environment.

Tiller proposed that repeated intention might alter the informational state of space itself, making it easier for similar effects to occur in the future.

In essence, the environment became conditioned.

This idea is directly relevant to predecessor law.

If places can become conditioned through repeated activity and intention, then the history of a place becomes highly significant. Previous occupants may influence not only the visible condition of a building but also its informational or energetic condition.

The Conditioned Space Hypothesis

Tiller’s theory can be summarised through a simple analogy.

Imagine repeatedly walking across a grassy field.

The first person leaves almost no trace.

The second follows a similar route.

The third follows again.

Eventually a visible path emerges.

Future walkers naturally follow the path because it already exists.

Space conditioning proposes something similar.

Repeated intentions, behaviours and activities may create informational pathways within an environment.

Once established, those pathways may influence future occupants.

In this model:

• repeated conflict conditions conflict
• repeated healing conditions healing
• repeated creativity conditions creativity
• repeated spiritual practice conditions spiritual practice

The space gradually acquires a tendency or bias.

Importantly, this does not imply determinism.

A conditioned path can be changed.

New patterns can be established.

Alternative pathways can emerge.

However, existing patterns may continue exerting influence until actively transformed.

This concept bears a striking resemblance to predecessor law.

Feng Shui as a System of Space Conditioning

Viewed through this lens, feng shui can be interpreted as a sophisticated system for recognising and modifying patterns of space conditioning.

Traditionally, feng shui is described as the study of qi, landform, orientation, timing and environmental relationships.

However, another way of understanding feng shui is that it investigates how places acquire and express particular tendencies.

A feng shui consultant entering a property often asks questions such as:

• What has happened here?
• How long has the building been used in this way?
• What kinds of experiences have previous occupants had?
• What activities dominate the space?
• Which areas feel vibrant and which feel stagnant?

These questions are remarkably similar to those one might ask when investigating space conditioning.

The difference is primarily one of language and theoretical framework.

Classical feng shui speaks of qi accumulation and circulation.

Tiller speaks of conditioned informational states.

Both perspectives suggest that places may develop patterns that influence future experience.

Positive and Negative Conditioning

One of the most important implications of space conditioning is that not all conditioning is negative.

Much discussion of predecessor law focuses on problems:

• repeated illness
• repeated divorce
• repeated bankruptcy
• repeated conflict

Yet positive patterns may also accumulate.

A family home may become associated with love, stability and mutual support.

A retreat centre may become associated with contemplation and insight.

A university may become associated with learning and intellectual achievement.

A theatre may become associated with creativity and artistic expression.

A healing clinic may become associated with recovery and wellbeing.

These positive examples are often overlooked because they appear normal.

People tend to notice problems more readily than successes.

Yet if predecessor law exists, it should apply equally to positive and negative patterns.

Indeed, many sacred places around the world are founded upon precisely this assumption. Repeated prayer, meditation, ritual and devotion are believed to strengthen the qualities of a place over time.

Ritual, Repetition and Environmental Imprinting

Across cultures, people have long acted as though places can be conditioned.

Ancient temples were consecrated.

Churches were blessed.

Homes were purified.

Monasteries maintained daily practices.

Shrines received continuous offerings.

These traditions emerged long before modern discussions of space conditioning.

Although the explanations varied, the underlying assumption was often similar: repeated activity influences the quality of a place.

Anthropologists sometimes interpret such practices as symbolic.

Psychologists may emphasise expectation and meaning.

Religious practitioners may view them as spiritual realities.

Tiller’s work offers another possibility: repeated intentional acts may genuinely contribute to environmental conditioning.

Whether one accepts this hypothesis or not, it provides an intriguing bridge between traditional wisdom and contemporary inquiry.

Scientific Criticisms of Space Conditioning

Any balanced discussion must acknowledge that Tiller’s work remains controversial.

Many scientists argue that the proposed mechanisms have not been sufficiently validated through independent replication.

Critics point to:

• methodological concerns
• challenges of replication
• theoretical incompatibilities with conventional physics
• limited acceptance within mainstream science

These criticisms should not be ignored.

At present, space conditioning cannot be regarded as an established scientific fact in the same way as gravity, electromagnetism or circadian biology.

However, the history of science demonstrates that controversial ideas sometimes stimulate valuable investigation even when their original explanations require revision.

For the purposes of predecessor law, the significance of Tiller’s work lies not in proving a final answer but in providing a framework through which questions about place memory can be explored systematically rather than dismissed outright.

Space Conditioning and Predecessor Law

Space conditioning provides one of the most coherent theoretical explanations for predecessor law.

Environmental psychology explains how places influence behaviour.

Building biology explains how places influence health.

Architecture explains how places influence experience.

Space conditioning asks whether places may also retain the influence of repeated intentions and activities.

From this perspective, predecessor law becomes neither superstition nor certainty.

Instead, it becomes a hypothesis worthy of investigation.

The history of a place matters because every activity leaves traces.

Some traces are physical.

Some traces are psychological.

Some traces are social.

Some traces are symbolic.

Space conditioning proposes that some traces may also be informational.

Whether future research ultimately supports or refines this idea remains uncertain. What is clear is that many cultures have long behaved as though places can accumulate qualities over time.

The possibility that they may be correct deserves thoughtful examination rather than automatic dismissal.

Space Clearing and Space Conditioning

Understanding space conditioning also helps clarify the role of space clearing.

Space clearing and space conditioning are often treated as interchangeable terms, yet they refer to different processes.

Space clearing focuses on removing, releasing or transforming existing patterns.

Space conditioning focuses on establishing and reinforcing new patterns.

A useful analogy is gardening.

Removing weeds is space clearing.

Planting and cultivating desired plants is space conditioning.

Both are necessary.

A property burdened by years of neglect, conflict or stagnation may first require clearing. Once that has occurred, new intentions, activities and patterns can be introduced and reinforced.

From this perspective, many traditional feng shui adjustments can be understood not merely as symbolic acts but as deliberate attempts to influence the ongoing conditioning of a place.

Conclusion to Part 3

Environmental psychology demonstrates that places influence people. Space conditioning asks whether people also influence places in lasting ways.

William Tiller’s work offers a provocative framework for exploring this possibility. Although controversial, it provides a bridge between modern scientific inquiry and longstanding traditions that regard places as capable of accumulating qualities through repeated activity and intention.

If predecessor law is understood as the observation that places sometimes repeat similar stories across generations of occupants, then space conditioning offers one possible explanation for how such patterns might persist.

The next section moves even further into the question of place memory by examining Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance and the possibility that habits, patterns and memories may be distributed across fields rather than stored solely within individual minds.

Part 4: Morphic Resonance, Habit Fields and Rupert Sheldrake’s Theory of Place Memory

Can Places Develop Habits?

In the previous section we explored William Tiller’s concept of space conditioning, the idea that repeated intentions and activities may influence the informational qualities of an environment. Tiller’s work raises an important question. If places can be conditioned, what exactly is being conditioned?

One possible answer comes from the work of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who proposed one of the most controversial and intriguing theories of memory, development and habit in contemporary thought.

Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance emerged from a simple observation. Nature appears to contain remarkable regularities. Organisms develop into recognisable forms. Behaviours become established. Cultural practices spread. Patterns repeat.

Conventional biology explains these phenomena primarily through genetics, natural selection, physiology and environmental influences. Sheldrake argued that these explanations may be necessary but not always sufficient. He suggested that systems inherit a collective memory from previous similar systems through a process he called morphic resonance (Sheldrake, 1981).

Whether one accepts this proposal or not, it offers a fascinating perspective on predecessor law because it addresses a central question: how do patterns persist over time?

What Is Morphic Resonance?

According to Sheldrake, nature contains organising fields known as morphic fields.

These fields are not material structures like walls, roads or rivers. Rather, they are proposed organising influences that shape the development and behaviour of systems.

The central principle of morphic resonance is often summarised in a simple phrase:

Similar things influence similar things across time.

In Sheldrake’s model, once a pattern has occurred many times, it becomes increasingly likely to occur again.

Habits develop not only within individuals but within larger systems.

The more often a pattern is repeated, the stronger its influence becomes.

A useful analogy is learning.

The first time someone learns a skill, considerable effort is required.

After repeated practice, the skill becomes easier.

Sheldrake extends this principle beyond individual learning. He proposes that nature itself develops habits.

The universe becomes increasingly shaped by repetition.

In this sense, the laws of nature may themselves resemble deeply established habits rather than fixed eternal rules.

This idea remains highly controversial within mainstream science. Nevertheless, it provides a conceptual framework that many people find useful when considering recurring patterns in places.

Memory Beyond the Brain

One of the most radical aspects of Sheldrake’s work concerns memory.

Conventional neuroscience generally assumes that memories are stored within brains through changes in neural networks.

Sheldrake does not deny the importance of neural processes. However, he questions whether memory is entirely contained within the brain.

Instead, he proposes that memory may involve access to broader morphic fields.

In this view, memory resembles resonance more than storage.

An analogy often used is radio transmission.

The radio does not contain the music.

It tunes into it.

Similarly, the brain may not contain all memory but may participate in larger informational fields.

Whether this hypothesis ultimately proves correct remains uncertain. Yet it offers an interesting way of thinking about predecessor law.

If memory can exist beyond individual brains, could places also participate in larger fields of memory?

Places as Habit Holders

One of the most intriguing applications of morphic resonance involves the possibility that places develop habits.

This idea should not be confused with superstition.

A habit is simply a pattern that becomes increasingly likely through repetition.

Consider a family home in which generations have gathered for meals, celebrations and conversations.

Over decades, certain behaviours become associated with that place.

People enter the house and naturally behave in familiar ways.

Part of this process is social and psychological.

Part may be architectural.

Part may involve memory and expectation.

Sheldrake’s theory invites the possibility that another layer may also exist.

Repeated activities may establish morphic patterns associated with particular locations.

The more often those patterns occur, the easier they become to repeat.

A place does not merely contain history.

It participates in history.

From the perspective of predecessor law, this idea is particularly relevant.

A building associated with repeated business success may develop a tendency towards success.

A healing centre may develop a tendency towards healing.

A meditation hall may develop a tendency towards contemplation.

Likewise, places repeatedly associated with conflict, fear or dysfunction may reinforce those patterns.

Morphic Resonance and Sacred Places

Many of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions behave as though morphic resonance exists, even if they use different language.

Consider sacred sites.

Pilgrimage destinations, monasteries, temples, shrines and churches often attract visitors who report unusual experiences.

Such places may be associated with:

• peace
• inspiration
• healing
• insight
• devotion
• transformation

Conventional explanations point towards architecture, symbolism, expectation, social influence and cultural meaning.

These factors are undoubtedly important.

Yet many traditions propose that repeated spiritual practice itself contributes to the quality of a place.

The site becomes progressively conditioned through centuries of prayer, ritual, meditation and devotion.

This interpretation closely resembles both space conditioning and morphic resonance.

The language differs, but the underlying principle is similar: repeated activity leaves lasting influence.

Collective Memory and Cultural Fields

Morphic resonance also offers an interesting perspective on collective memory.

Human cultures develop habits.

Languages develop habits.

Institutions develop habits.

Communities develop habits.

Neighbourhoods develop habits.

Over time, these patterns become self reinforcing.

People entering an established culture often adopt existing behaviours without consciously intending to do so.

The same phenomenon may occur in places.

A university develops traditions.

A monastery develops traditions.

A theatre develops traditions.

A marketplace develops traditions.

These traditions persist despite changes in individual participants.

The pattern survives because it exists at a level larger than any one person.

This idea resonates strongly with predecessor law.

A place may continue expressing certain qualities even when occupants change.

The continuity lies not necessarily in individuals but in the pattern itself.

Similarities Between Morphic Resonance and Feng Shui

Although Sheldrake did not develop his theory from feng shui, several interesting parallels exist.

Both perspectives emphasise:

• pattern rather than isolated events
• relationships rather than objects
• continuity across time
• influence beyond immediate physical causes
• the importance of repeated activity

Both also challenge purely reductionist explanations.

Feng shui proposes that environments contain qualities that influence human life.

Morphic resonance proposes that systems inherit influence from previous similar systems.

Neither theory can be reduced solely to physical structure.

Instead, both emphasise dynamic relationships unfolding through time.

There are, of course, important differences.

Classical feng shui focuses on qi, form, orientation, landscape and environmental relationships.

Morphic resonance proposes broader fields operating throughout nature.

Nevertheless, both encourage a shift away from viewing the world as a collection of isolated objects and towards viewing it as a network of interconnected processes.

Criticisms of Morphic Resonance

As with Tiller’s work, a balanced discussion requires acknowledging criticisms.

Many scientists reject morphic resonance because proposed mechanisms remain unclear and robust experimental confirmation has proven elusive.

Critics argue that:

• the theory lacks sufficient empirical support
• many observations can be explained through conventional biology
• experimental evidence remains inconclusive
• morphic fields have not been directly detected

These criticisms are significant.

At present, morphic resonance remains outside mainstream scientific consensus.

However, it is worth noting that the theory continues to attract attention because it addresses questions that conventional explanations do not always fully resolve.

Even critics often acknowledge that Sheldrake has raised important questions about memory, habit and organisation.

Whether his answers are ultimately correct remains an open matter.

Morphic Resonance and the Future of Place Research

Perhaps the greatest value of morphic resonance lies not in providing definitive answers but in stimulating new questions.

If places repeatedly produce similar outcomes, why does this occur?

Are recurring patterns entirely environmental?

Entirely psychological?

Entirely social?

Or do additional organising processes exist that have yet to be adequately investigated?

Scientific progress often begins with anomalies.

People notice something unusual.

The phenomenon is initially dismissed.

Later, improved methods reveal mechanisms that were previously invisible.

History contains many examples.

Germs were unknown before microscopes.

Electromagnetic fields were unknown before suitable instruments existed.

Circadian rhythms influenced life long before they could be measured.

Whether morphic resonance eventually joins or fails to join this list remains uncertain.

The important point is that genuine inquiry requires curiosity as well as scepticism.

Morphic Resonance and Predecessor Law

Among all modern theories discussed in this article, morphic resonance may be the closest conceptual relative of predecessor law.

Both propose that repetition matters.

Both suggest that patterns can become established.

Both imply that history influences probability.

Neither requires absolute determinism.

Patterns can change.

Habits can be broken.

New tendencies can emerge.

This distinction is crucial.

Predecessor law is often misunderstood as a fatalistic doctrine suggesting that the future must repeat the past.

A more sophisticated interpretation sees predecessor law as describing tendencies rather than certainties.

The past influences the present, but it does not completely determine it.

A building associated with conflict can become a place of healing.

A struggling business can become successful.

A neglected house can become vibrant.

Patterns persist, but they can also be transformed.

This insight provides a natural bridge to the next stage of our discussion: space clearing and feng shui interventions.

If places can accumulate patterns, how can those patterns be changed?

That question lies at the heart of both traditional feng shui and contemporary space clearing practice.

Conclusion to Part 4

Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance remains controversial, yet it offers a compelling framework for thinking about predecessor law.

The theory proposes that nature develops habits and that repeated patterns become increasingly likely through resonance with previous occurrences. Applied to buildings and places, this suggests that locations may develop tendencies shaped by their histories.

Whether interpreted literally, metaphorically or as a useful heuristic, morphic resonance encourages us to take the history of place seriously. It reminds us that repetition matters, that patterns accumulate and that continuity often extends beyond individual occupants.

Most importantly, it suggests that predecessor law is not fundamentally about fate. It is about probability, habit and pattern.

The next section examines how those patterns may be consciously transformed through space clearing, ritual, symbolism and feng shui practice.

Part 5: Space Clearing, Feng Shui Interventions and the Transformation of Place

If Places Can Accumulate Patterns, Can They Also Change?

The previous sections explored a series of increasingly complex explanations for predecessor law. Environmental psychology demonstrated that places influence behaviour, health and wellbeing. Building biology revealed how hidden environmental conditions can generate recurring patterns across generations of occupants. Space conditioning suggested that repeated intentions and activities may gradually influence the quality of a place. Morphic resonance proposed that habits and patterns may become self reinforcing through repetition.

A natural question now arises.

If places can acquire patterns, can those patterns be changed?

This question lies at the heart of both feng shui and space clearing.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of feng shui is that it is fundamentally optimistic. Classical feng shui does not generally assume that people are trapped by the environments they inherit. Instead, it proposes that environments can be understood, adjusted and transformed.

This is an important distinction.

Predecessor law is not a doctrine of fate.

It is a diagnostic principle.

The history of a place may reveal tendencies, patterns and influences, but it does not remove the possibility of change.

In many respects, the practical purpose of predecessor law is not to predict the future. It is to identify what may need attention.

The Universal Practice of Space Clearing

Although often associated with contemporary feng shui, space clearing is far older and more widespread than feng shui itself.

Throughout history, human cultures have developed rituals for cleansing, blessing, renewing and transforming places.

Examples can be found on every continent.

Indigenous traditions have used smoke, herbs, prayer and ceremony to prepare spaces for specific purposes.

Christian traditions have blessed homes, churches and fields.

Buddhist traditions have performed purification rituals for temples and residences.

Shinto traditions in Japan have long recognised the importance of cleansing and renewing places.

Islamic traditions include prayers and recitations associated with homes and buildings.

Hindu traditions contain elaborate ceremonies for consecrating land, homes and temples.

Despite significant differences in belief and practice, these traditions share a common assumption:

Places are not entirely neutral.

They can become influenced by previous events, previous occupants and previous uses.

They can also be renewed.

This remarkable cross cultural consistency deserves attention. The specific explanations differ, but the underlying observation appears surprisingly universal.

What Is Space Clearing?

Space clearing may be defined as the intentional process of identifying, releasing and transforming undesirable patterns associated with a place.

The goal is not merely physical cleaning.

Physical cleaning is important, but space clearing extends beyond it.

The intention is to address the accumulated influences associated with a place, whether these are understood as:

• emotional
• psychological
• symbolic
• social
• energetic
• spiritual

or some combination of these.

In practice, space clearing often occurs:

• after moving into a new home
• following illness
• after bereavement
• following divorce or separation
• after conflict
• after business failure
• after major renovation
• when beginning a new phase of life

These transitional moments are significant because they involve shifts in identity and purpose.

Space clearing acts as a bridge between what has been and what is being created.

The Psychology of Fresh Starts

One reason space clearing may be effective is psychological.

Researchers studying behaviour change have identified what has been termed the “fresh start effect”. New beginnings often provide opportunities for behavioural transformation.

Moving house, changing jobs, beginning a new year, starting a relationship or renovating a property can create psychological momentum for change.

Space clearing may reinforce this process.

A ritual of clearing marks a boundary.

It creates a distinction between:

• before and after
• old and new
• completion and beginning

Psychologically, such transitions can be extremely powerful.

Human beings have always used ritual to mark important thresholds.

Space clearing can therefore be understood as a deliberate way of helping occupants establish a new relationship with a place.

The Feng Shui Perspective

From a feng shui perspective, space clearing serves a more specific purpose.

Classical feng shui emphasises the movement, accumulation and circulation of qi.

When qi becomes stagnant, blocked or disturbed, difficulties may arise.

These difficulties may manifest in different ways depending upon the nature of the environment and the people involved.

Space clearing seeks to restore movement.

The intention is not merely to remove negativity but to encourage vitality.

This distinction is important.

Traditional feng shui is not primarily concerned with fighting negative energy.

It is concerned with supporting healthy patterns.

The emphasis is constructive rather than defensive.

A successful space clearing therefore creates conditions in which beneficial patterns can emerge more easily.

Karen Kingston and Contemporary Space Clearing

One of the most influential figures in contemporary space clearing is Karen Kingston.

Kingston helped popularise the idea that clutter and accumulated possessions can affect the psychological and energetic quality of a space.

Her work emphasises that environments influence mental and emotional wellbeing.

A cluttered environment often reflects and reinforces mental clutter.

An organised environment may support greater clarity and ease.

From the perspective of predecessor law, clutter becomes particularly interesting.

Objects often carry associations.

A room filled with reminders of previous relationships, unfinished projects, failures, disappointments or grief may continually reactivate those memories.

Removing such objects does not erase history, but it may reduce its ongoing influence.

This illustrates an important principle.

Sometimes the most effective form of space clearing is surprisingly practical.

Before considering subtle energies, it may be necessary to address physical and psychological clutter.

William Spear and Predecessor Influences

William Spear devoted considerable attention to predecessor influences within feng shui practice.

His approach recognised that previous occupants may leave more than physical traces behind.

Experiences associated with a property may continue affecting future occupants.

Spear encouraged practitioners to investigate property histories and to consider recurring patterns.

This perspective aligns closely with predecessor law.

However, Spear also emphasised transformation rather than fear.

The purpose of identifying predecessor influences is not to become trapped by them.

The purpose is to understand them so that new possibilities can emerge.

This distinction cannot be overstated.

A house with a difficult history is not necessarily a bad house.

A building associated with problems may simply require greater awareness and more intentional intervention.

Ritual as Environmental Technology

Modern readers sometimes dismiss ritual because it is associated with religion or superstition.

Yet ritual can also be understood as a form of environmental technology.

Its purpose is to influence behaviour, attention, meaning and intention.

When viewed this way, many space clearing practices become easier to understand.

Consider the simple act of opening windows throughout a property.

Physically, fresh air enters.

Psychologically, the space feels renewed.

Symbolically, stagnation is released.

The same action operates simultaneously at multiple levels.

Many traditional space clearing methods function in this manner.

Their effectiveness may not depend upon a single explanation.

Instead, they may work through several mechanisms at once.

Common Space Clearing Methods

Space clearing methods vary considerably between traditions.

Common approaches include:

Decluttering

Removing unnecessary possessions.

Cleaning

Deep physical cleaning of the environment.

Sound

Bells, chimes, singing bowls, chanting and music.

Light

Candles, sunlight and illumination.

Fragrance

Incense, herbs and aromatic substances.

Prayer

Invoking blessing, gratitude or protection.

Intention

Consciously defining the future purpose of a space.

Symbolic Actions

Opening doors, opening windows, rearranging furniture and introducing meaningful objects.

Although the methods differ, they share a common purpose: changing the relationship between occupants and place.

Space Clearing and Space Conditioning

The distinction between space clearing and space conditioning is one of the most important concepts in this article.

The two are related but not identical.

Space clearing focuses on releasing existing patterns.

Space conditioning focuses on creating new patterns.

A useful gardening analogy illustrates the difference.

Removing weeds is space clearing.

Preparing soil is space clearing.

Planting seeds is space conditioning.

Watering and nurturing those plants is space conditioning.

Both processes are necessary.

A cleared space that is never conditioned may gradually revert to previous patterns.

Likewise, attempts at conditioning may be less effective if underlying issues have not first been addressed.

This relationship is particularly important when considering predecessor law.

If a property has developed recurring patterns over many years, those patterns may need to be recognised, released and replaced.

Creating Positive Conditions

One of the limitations of many discussions about predecessor law is their focus on problems.

People ask:

• How do I remove bad energy?
• How do I clear negativity?
• How do I stop repeating patterns?

These are understandable concerns.

Yet they represent only half of the equation.

The deeper question is:

What qualities do I want this place to cultivate?

A healing centre should cultivate healing.

A workplace should cultivate productivity and creativity.

A family home should cultivate connection, stability and wellbeing.

A meditation room should cultivate stillness and awareness.

Space conditioning shifts attention from removing undesirable patterns towards creating desirable ones.

This reflects one of the central insights of feng shui.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Removing something is rarely enough.

Something new must also be established.

The Future Is Not the Past

The existence of predecessor patterns does not imply that those patterns must continue.

History influences possibility, but it does not determine destiny.

A house associated with illness may become a place of recovery.

A business associated with failure may become prosperous.

A neglected building may become vibrant.

A property marked by conflict may become peaceful.

This transformation does not occur through wishful thinking alone.

It requires investigation, awareness and action.

Environmental factors may need correcting.

Design may need improving.

Relationships may need healing.

Clutter may need removing.

New intentions may need reinforcing.

Space clearing and feng shui become valuable precisely because they recognise the possibility of change.

They remind us that places are dynamic rather than fixed.

Conclusion to Part 5

Predecessor law draws attention to the influence of history. Space clearing and feng shui focus on the possibility of transformation.

Across cultures and centuries, people have acted as though places can accumulate influences through use, memory, intention and activity. Whether interpreted psychologically, socially, symbolically, energetically or spiritually, the practical response has often been similar: cleanse the space, clarify its purpose and establish new patterns.

Space clearing removes.

Space conditioning creates.

Together they form a powerful framework for understanding how places evolve over time.

The next section moves from theory to practice through a series of detailed case studies examining recurring patterns of illness, relationship difficulties, business failure, creativity and healing.

Part 6: Five Case Studies of Recurring Patterns in Places

From Theory to Observation

So far, this article has explored predecessor law through several different lenses. Classical feng shui suggests that places can accumulate and express patterns of qi over time. Environmental psychology demonstrates that environments influence behaviour, wellbeing and identity. Building biology reveals how hidden environmental factors can generate recurring outcomes. Space conditioning proposes that repeated intention and activity may shape the informational qualities of a place. Morphic resonance suggests that habits may become self reinforcing through repetition. Space clearing and feng shui interventions focus on transforming inherited patterns.

The challenge, however, lies in applying these ideas to real situations.

When people encounter predecessor law in practice, it rarely appears as an abstract theory. It appears as a story.

A prospective buyer discovers that three previous owners experienced divorce.

A business owner learns that several previous companies failed in the same premises.

A family notices that multiple occupants have suffered similar health problems.

A retreat centre develops a reputation for transformation.

An artist’s studio seems to inspire creativity generation after generation.

Such stories do not prove predecessor law. Nor should they be dismissed automatically. Instead, they invite investigation.

The following case studies are not presented as scientific proof. Rather, they illustrate how predecessor law may be approached through multiple explanatory frameworks, including environmental psychology, building biology, feng shui, space conditioning and place memory.

Case Study 1: The House of Repeated Divorce

One of the most common examples cited by feng shui practitioners concerns homes associated with repeated relationship difficulties.

Imagine a property that has housed four couples over a period of thirty years.

The first couple divorced.

The second separated.

The third experienced chronic conflict before eventually moving out.

The fourth begins noticing similar tensions.

At first glance, predecessor law appears obvious. The house seems to carry a pattern of relationship instability.

However, a careful investigation reveals several possibilities.

The physical layout places the master bedroom directly above a noisy garage entrance. Sleep quality is consistently disrupted.

The house contains very little acoustic privacy. Conversations are easily overheard.

The main living area is poorly connected, encouraging family members to retreat into separate rooms.

The property receives limited natural light during winter months.

From an environmental psychology perspective, these factors may contribute to stress and reduced relationship satisfaction.

From a feng shui perspective, additional concerns may emerge. The bedroom door aligns directly with the bed. Sharp architectural features point towards sleeping positions. Relationship areas of the property may be weakened or neglected.

A space clearing practitioner may also note that each couple left behind unresolved emotional associations.

A space conditioning perspective might suggest that repeated conflict gradually reinforced a particular pattern within the property.

The important point is that multiple explanations coexist.

The recurring pattern deserves attention, but no single explanation should be assumed automatically.

Case Study 2: The Property Associated with Illness

Consider a house in which successive occupants report unusual health problems.

The first family experiences chronic respiratory symptoms.

The second family reports persistent fatigue and headaches.

The third family notices recurring allergies and poor sleep.

Neighbours begin referring to the property as an unhealthy house.

Stories accumulate.

Rumours spread.

Predecessor law appears to be operating.

However, a detailed environmental assessment reveals significant mould growth hidden behind internal walls. Water ingress has remained undetected for years.

Ventilation is inadequate.

Indoor humidity remains elevated throughout much of the year.

In this case, the recurring pattern is entirely real.

The house genuinely produces similar outcomes across multiple occupants.

Yet the mechanism may be biological rather than energetic.

At the same time, the social history of the property also matters.

As the reputation of the house grows, new occupants may become increasingly sensitive to every symptom. Expectation and anxiety may amplify existing concerns.

The result is a complex interaction between physical conditions, psychological expectations and place history.

This case illustrates one of the most important principles of predecessor law:

The pattern may be correct even when the explanation is wrong.

Case Study 3: The Business That Repeatedly Failed

A retail unit in a busy town centre changes hands several times over twenty years.

A gift shop fails.

A clothing retailer fails.

A specialist food shop fails.

A travel agency fails.

Local people begin referring to the premises as unlucky.

Potential tenants become hesitant.

The site acquires a reputation.

A predecessor law interpretation might suggest that failure has become embedded within the property.

A business consultant, however, might notice several practical issues.

Pedestrian visibility is poor.

The entrance is partially obscured.

Parking is limited.

Foot traffic naturally bypasses the location.

Signage opportunities are restricted.

The layout inside the premises creates navigational confusion.

From a feng shui perspective, the entrance may fail to attract and gather qi effectively.

The frontage may appear closed, neglected or unwelcoming.

The property may sit at the receiving end of a fast moving road or other environmental feature traditionally regarded as problematic.

Over time, the physical disadvantages generate repeated commercial difficulties.

The reputation of failure then reinforces the pattern further.

Future tenants become cautious.

Confidence declines.

The story of failure becomes part of the property itself.

Again, predecessor law may be operating, but through several interacting mechanisms.

Case Study 4: The House of Creativity

Not all predecessor patterns are negative.

Imagine a large house occupied over many decades by writers, musicians, artists and designers.

Each generation appears unusually creative.

Visitors frequently comment on the atmosphere.

The property develops a reputation as a place where ideas flourish.

Several explanations are possible.

The house contains abundant natural light.

Views of nature are visible from most rooms.

There are quiet areas for concentration and larger spaces for collaboration.

The building encourages both privacy and social interaction.

Environmental psychology would predict many positive outcomes from such conditions.

Yet there may be more to the story.

The house also carries a cultural legacy.

New occupants know about previous artists who lived there.

Their expectations change accordingly.

The place becomes associated with creativity.

A space conditioning interpretation would suggest that decades of creative activity have gradually reinforced a creative field.

A morphic resonance perspective might propose that repeated creative behaviour strengthens the likelihood of future creativity.

Regardless of interpretation, the pattern appears positive and self reinforcing.

This case reminds us that predecessor law concerns positive inheritances as much as negative ones.

Case Study 5: A Healing Centre Transformed

A final example illustrates the possibility of change.

A rural property previously functioned as an institutional care facility.

Many people associated the building with loneliness, illness and decline.

When the facility closed, the atmosphere felt heavy and neglected.

Several years later, the property was acquired by a group intending to create a retreat and healing centre.

The transformation occurred gradually.

Environmental improvements were made.

Natural light was increased.

Gardens were restored.

Communal spaces were redesigned.

Extensive decluttering took place.

Space clearing ceremonies marked the transition from the previous use to the new one.

Meditation, education and therapeutic activities became regular features of the site.

Over time, visitors reported a very different experience.

The building acquired a new reputation.

The story changed.

The atmosphere changed.

The pattern changed.

From a conventional perspective, the explanation may involve renovation, environmental improvements and social reinvention.

From a feng shui perspective, the flow of qi had been transformed.

From a space conditioning perspective, new patterns gradually replaced older ones.

Whatever explanation one prefers, the outcome illustrates an important principle:

The history of a place matters, but it does not have the final word.

Common Themes Across the Case Studies

Several themes appear repeatedly across these examples.

First, predecessor law is rarely explained by a single factor.

Physical, psychological, social and environmental influences often interact.

Second, reputation matters.

Stories attached to places can influence future experiences.

Third, recurring patterns deserve investigation rather than immediate belief or dismissal.

The pattern itself may be real even when the proposed explanation is incomplete.

Fourth, positive patterns are just as important as negative patterns.

Many places become associated with healing, creativity, learning, prosperity or spiritual development.

Finally, change remains possible.

Patterns can persist for years or even generations, yet they are not necessarily permanent.

This insight lies at the heart of feng shui.

Good feng shui is not about predicting an unavoidable future.

It is about recognising patterns and creating conditions for more desirable outcomes.

What These Case Studies Teach Us About Predecessor Law

Taken together, these examples suggest a more sophisticated understanding of predecessor law.

Places are not blank slates.

They accumulate histories.

Those histories may include:

• physical influences
• environmental conditions
• behavioural patterns
• social narratives
• emotional associations
• symbolic meanings
• cultural memories

The longer a pattern persists, the more influential it may become.

Yet persistence is not destiny.

The future emerges through the interaction between inherited conditions and present choices.

A property’s history should therefore be regarded neither as irrelevant nor as absolute.

It is information.

Useful information.

Potentially important information.

But ultimately only one part of a much larger picture.

The next section moves from examples to practical application by examining how homeowners, business owners, researchers and feng shui practitioners can investigate the history of a property and assess whether predecessor law may be operating in practice.

Part 7: How to Investigate the History of a Property and Assess Whether Predecessor Law May Be Operating

From Belief to Investigation

One of the greatest weaknesses in discussions of predecessor law is the tendency to jump immediately to conclusions. A family discovers that previous occupants divorced, and the house is labelled unlucky. A business fails in a location where several previous businesses also failed, and the premises acquires a reputation for misfortune. A property develops a local legend and the story gradually becomes accepted as fact.

Such reactions are understandable, but they are rarely helpful.

A more rigorous approach is to treat predecessor law as an investigative framework rather than a belief system. Instead of asking whether a property is lucky or unlucky, it is often more productive to ask whether there are recurring patterns associated with the place and, if so, what factors might be contributing to those patterns.

This approach is remarkably consistent with both traditional feng shui and scientific inquiry. Classical feng shui began with observation. Practitioners examined landscapes, watercourses, settlement patterns, building forms and historical events before drawing conclusions. Similarly, science begins with observation and then seeks explanations through systematic investigation.

The same principle can be applied to predecessor law.

The question is not whether a place has a history. Every place has a history. The question is how that history might be influencing the present.

Begin with the Physical Environment

The first stage of any investigation should be the physical environment.

This may seem obvious, yet it is often overlooked. Many people become fascinated by stories of previous occupants while paying insufficient attention to the condition of the property itself.

If recurring illness appears associated with a building, environmental explanations should be explored first. Hidden mould, poor ventilation, radon, water damage, air pollution, excessive noise, inadequate daylight and poor thermal comfort can all produce recurring patterns across generations of occupants.

The same principle applies to commercial properties. A business that repeatedly struggles may suffer from poor visibility, awkward access, inadequate parking, confusing circulation or other practical limitations.

This does not invalidate predecessor law. Rather, it expands our understanding of it. The history of a place may reveal recurring outcomes, while environmental investigation helps explain why those outcomes occur.

A useful question to ask is:

If I knew nothing about the history of this property, what physical factors would I identify as potential strengths and weaknesses?

This encourages observation before interpretation.

Examine the Architecture

Buildings influence behaviour.

Environmental psychology has repeatedly demonstrated that layout, visibility, privacy, circulation, light, scale and spatial organisation affect how people feel and behave.

A property associated with repeated relationship difficulties may contain architectural features that increase stress or reduce opportunities for positive interaction.

A workplace associated with repeated burnout may create constant distraction, noise or sensory overload.

A home associated with poor sleep may contain lighting, noise or environmental conditions that interfere with restoration.

The key point is that architecture creates tendencies.

These tendencies do not determine outcomes, but they influence probabilities.

From a predecessor law perspective, recurring patterns may emerge because the same environmental pressures affect successive occupants in similar ways.

Investigate the History of Occupancy

Only after examining physical and architectural factors should attention turn to the history of occupancy.

Questions worth exploring include:

• How long did previous occupants remain?
• Why did they leave?
• Were there recurring themes across different occupants?
• Did significant life events repeatedly occur within the property?
• Has the building served different functions over time?

A single negative event may have little significance. Multiple similar events occurring over many years deserve greater attention.

For example, if one occupant experienced financial difficulties, this may simply reflect individual circumstances. If six unrelated businesses operating from the same premises experienced similar problems, the pattern becomes more interesting.

The emphasis should remain on observation rather than assumption.

Patterns matter.

Stories alone do not.

Researching Property Histories

Modern researchers have access to resources that would have been unavailable to most traditional feng shui practitioners.

These include:

• Land Registry records
• local archives
• planning records
• census records
• newspaper archives
• historical maps
• electoral registers
• business records

Such sources can reveal changes in ownership, use and occupancy over extended periods.

Historical investigation often uncovers surprising patterns. A property may have previously functioned as a school, workshop, religious building, care facility or commercial enterprise. Understanding previous uses can provide important context.

A former monastery, for example, may carry very different associations from a former prison.

A building’s previous function may be as important as its previous occupants.

Listen to Local Memory

Not all information is found in official records.

Neighbourhoods possess collective memory.

Long-term residents often know stories that never appear in documents.

Some of these stories may be inaccurate or exaggerated. Others may contain valuable insights.

Listening carefully to local narratives can reveal how a property is perceived within its wider social context.

This matters because reputation itself can become part of predecessor law.

A building known locally as successful, creative, unlucky or troubled may influence how future occupants experience it.

Place identity exists not only within individuals but also within communities.

The Importance of Repetition

One of the most useful principles when investigating predecessor law is to focus on repetition.

Single events may be coincidences.

Repeated events deserve attention.

A useful distinction can be made between:

Isolated Events

A single divorce.

A single business failure.

A single illness.

A single accident.

Recurring Patterns

Multiple divorces across unrelated occupants.

Repeated commercial failures.

Recurring health complaints.

Repeated reports of similar experiences.

The more independent examples that exist, the more interesting the pattern becomes.

This does not prove causation.

However, it increases the value of further investigation.

Multiple Layers of Explanation

Throughout this article, one theme has appeared repeatedly: there is rarely only one explanation.

Consider a property associated with recurring relationship difficulties.

Possible contributing factors might include:

• environmental stressors
• poor sleep quality
• architectural design
• symbolic associations
• inherited narratives
• space conditioning
• morphic resonance
• feng shui factors

Several layers may operate simultaneously.

The mistake is to assume that only one explanation must be correct.

Reality is often more complex.

Places influence people through multiple channels at once.

A Feng Shui Investigation

A feng shui investigation introduces additional questions.

These may include:

• How does qi enter the property?
• Where does qi accumulate?
• Where does qi disperse?
• How has the building changed over time?
• What major renovations have occurred?
• How does the property relate to its surroundings?
• What patterns emerge when previous occupants are considered?

Importantly, predecessor law does not replace other feng shui analysis.

It complements it.

The history of a property becomes another source of information rather than the sole basis for interpretation.

Confirmation Bias and the Need for Caution

A balanced investigation must also acknowledge the possibility of confirmation bias.

Once people believe a property is unlucky, they may begin noticing only evidence that supports this belief.

Contradictory evidence may be ignored.

This tendency is well documented within psychology.

For this reason, predecessor law should be approached with curiosity rather than certainty.

Questions are often more valuable than conclusions.

The goal is not to prove that a building carries a particular pattern.

The goal is to understand the property as fully as possible.

The Most Important Question

After all investigations have been completed, one question remains.

It is arguably the most important question in predecessor law.

Not:

What happened here?

But:

What is happening here now?

The history of a place matters.

However, present conditions matter as well.

A property may carry a difficult history and yet function beautifully today.

A property may have a positive history and yet be deteriorating.

The present always remains the point at which change becomes possible.

For this reason, predecessor law should be viewed as information rather than destiny.

Its value lies not in predicting the future but in helping people understand the patterns that may be influencing it.

Conclusion to Part 7

The investigation of predecessor law requires both openness and scepticism. A property’s history should neither be ignored nor treated as unquestionable truth. Instead, it should be examined alongside environmental conditions, architecture, social history, psychological influences and feng shui analysis.

The most useful approach is to think like a researcher. Observe patterns, gather evidence, consider multiple explanations and remain willing to revise conclusions.

By doing so, predecessor law becomes far more than a superstition. It becomes a sophisticated way of exploring the relationship between people, places and time.

The next section examines an often overlooked question: if places can inherit difficult patterns, can they also inherit positive ones?

Part 8: Can Positive Histories Be Inherited? The Overlooked Side of Predecessor Law

Why Predecessor Law Is Usually Framed Negatively

Mention predecessor law in most feng shui discussions and the examples are often strikingly similar.

A house where several marriages ended in divorce.

A property associated with illness.

A business premises where successive companies failed.

A building linked to accidents, financial problems or misfortune.

Such examples are memorable because they evoke concern. Human beings are naturally attentive to potential threats and problems. Psychologists sometimes refer to this tendency as negativity bias, the observation that negative events often attract more attention than positive ones (Baumeister et al., 2001).

As a result, predecessor law is frequently discussed as though it were primarily concerned with inherited difficulties.

Yet this emphasis may obscure a more important question.

If places can inherit negative patterns, can they also inherit positive ones?

The logic of predecessor law suggests that they can.

Indeed, many of the world’s most enduring institutions appear to operate on precisely this assumption. Universities, monasteries, libraries, temples, retreat centres, healing sanctuaries and family homes are often valued not only for their physical qualities but also for the accumulated history associated with them.

People frequently seek out such places because of what has happened there before.

In other words, positive predecessor effects may be more common than negative ones.

They are simply less likely to be noticed.

The House That Supports Family Life

Consider a family home occupied by several generations.

Children grow up there.

Relationships flourish.

Celebrations occur.

Family traditions emerge.

The house becomes associated with stability, continuity and belonging.

When future generations visit the property, they often report a strong sense of connection.

Part of this response can be explained through memory and attachment. Family stories, photographs and personal experiences create powerful emotional bonds.

Yet the physical environment may also contribute.

The layout may encourage interaction.

The garden may support gathering.

The kitchen may function as a social centre.

The house may possess qualities that consistently support family cohesion.

Over time, these physical, psychological and social influences become intertwined.

The result is a place associated with positive family experience.

This is predecessor law operating in a constructive rather than problematic form.

Universities and the Accumulation of Learning

Universities provide another interesting example.

Institutions such as University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and Harvard University are not merely collections of buildings.

They are repositories of intellectual history.

Students often report feeling inspired simply by being present within these environments.

Part of this response reflects reputation. People know that generations of scholars studied there.

However, the effect may be deeper than reputation alone.

Academic traditions, architectural settings, social expectations and institutional culture combine to create environments that encourage learning.

The places themselves become associated with inquiry, reflection and intellectual achievement.

Successive generations inherit not only buildings but also patterns.

Whether one interprets these patterns through environmental psychology, place identity, morphic resonance or space conditioning, the outcome remains similar.

The institution develops a recognisable character that persists across time.

Libraries as Memory Structures

Libraries occupy a particularly interesting position within discussions of predecessor law.

A library is, in one sense, a physical embodiment of memory. It preserves knowledge across generations.

Yet libraries often possess atmospheres that extend beyond their collections.

Many people describe feeling calmer, more focused and more reflective within libraries than in other public spaces.

Part of this response can be explained by architecture, acoustics and social expectations.

Part may arise from repeated patterns of use.

Generation after generation enters with the intention of learning, researching, contemplating and studying.

The environment becomes associated with these activities.

Over time, the place acquires a distinctive identity.

This example illustrates an important principle.

Predecessor law may involve not only specific events but also recurring intentions.

Monasteries, Temples and Sacred Places

Perhaps the strongest examples of positive predecessor effects come from sacred sites.

Across cultures, people have long believed that repeated spiritual practice influences the quality of a place.

Monasteries, temples, churches, mosques, shrines and pilgrimage destinations are often regarded as possessing special qualities.

Visitors frequently report:

• peace
• stillness
• clarity
• inspiration
• emotional release
• spiritual connection

Sceptics may attribute such experiences to architecture, expectation and cultural conditioning.

Believers may interpret them as evidence of sacred presence.

Environmental psychologists may emphasise atmosphere, symbolism and behavioural cues.

Space conditioning theorists may point towards repeated intentional activity.

The important point is not that everyone agrees on the explanation.

The important point is that people consistently report similar experiences.

The recurrence itself is noteworthy.

It suggests that repeated human activity may contribute to the emergence of enduring qualities within places.

Healing Centres and Therapeutic Environments

Healing environments provide another compelling example.

Hospitals, clinics, therapeutic retreat centres and wellness facilities often develop reputations that extend beyond their technical functions.

Some places are repeatedly described as nurturing, supportive and restorative.

Others feel institutional, stressful or impersonal.

Research within healthcare design has demonstrated that environmental factors influence patient outcomes. Natural light, views of nature, noise reduction, privacy and supportive design can all contribute to recovery (Ulrich, 1984).

However, many healing environments also develop cultures of care.

Staff, visitors and patients participate in patterns of compassion, support and attention.

These patterns accumulate over time.

The environment becomes associated with healing.

In predecessor law terms, this represents a positive inheritance.

Creative Environments

Artists often speak about places that inspire creativity.

Writers describe favourite cafés.

Musicians become attached to particular studios.

Painters return repeatedly to certain landscapes.

Creative communities frequently emerge around specific locations.

Environmental explanations are often available. Light, acoustics, social networks and architectural qualities all matter.

Yet creativity also appears to attract more creativity.

Once a place becomes known for artistic activity, further artists are drawn to it.

The pattern reinforces itself.

The history of the place becomes part of its future.

This dynamic resembles both morphic resonance and predecessor law.

Repeated activity increases the likelihood of similar future activity.

The Positive Feedback Loop of Place

One way of understanding positive predecessor effects is through feedback loops.

A place supports a beneficial activity.

The activity strengthens the identity of the place.

The strengthened identity attracts more of the same activity.

The cycle continues.

For example:

A meditation centre attracts practitioners.

Meditation becomes associated with the site.

The reputation grows.

More practitioners arrive.

The association becomes stronger.

Over time, the place develops a stable identity.

The same process can occur with learning, healing, creativity, hospitality, community or spiritual practice.

The pattern becomes self reinforcing.

Feng Shui and the Cultivation of Positive Patterns

This perspective aligns closely with one of the deepest aims of feng shui.

Popular discussions sometimes portray feng shui as a system for avoiding problems.

Classically, however, feng shui is equally concerned with cultivating beneficial conditions.

Good feng shui supports:

• health
• relationships
• learning
• prosperity
• creativity
• wellbeing
• spiritual development

The goal is not merely to remove difficulties.

It is to create environments in which desirable patterns can flourish.

This distinction is essential.

A house free from problems is not necessarily a thriving house.

A workplace free from conflict is not necessarily creative.

A building free from stagnation is not necessarily vibrant.

Positive predecessor effects remind us that the highest aim is not simply the absence of negatives but the cultivation of positives.

What Would a Positive Predecessor Law Look Like?

Imagine approaching a property not by asking:

What went wrong here?

but by asking:

What went right here?

Questions might include:

• What achievements occurred here?
• What qualities did previous occupants develop?
• What positive traditions existed?
• What strengths became associated with the property?
• What beneficial patterns might be worth preserving?

Such questions shift the focus from fear to possibility.

They recognise that every place possesses not only problems but also resources.

The task of feng shui may therefore involve identifying and strengthening existing positive patterns as much as correcting negative ones.

A More Balanced View of Place History

A mature understanding of predecessor law requires balance.

History can burden.

History can support.

History can constrain.

History can inspire.

The same property may contain both positive and negative inheritances.

The role of investigation is not to reduce the history of a place to a single narrative but to understand its complexity.

Places are rarely entirely fortunate or unfortunate.

Most contain layers of experience accumulated over time.

Recognising these layers allows more informed choices about how to engage with them.

Conclusion to Part 8

Predecessor law is often framed as a warning about inherited difficulties. Yet many of the most remarkable places in human history suggest a different possibility. Positive patterns may also accumulate, strengthen and persist.

Family homes may cultivate belonging. Universities may cultivate learning. Libraries may cultivate reflection. Healing centres may cultivate recovery. Sacred sites may cultivate contemplation. Creative environments may cultivate innovation.

Whether explained through environmental psychology, place attachment, space conditioning, morphic resonance or feng shui, the underlying observation remains similar: repeated activities appear capable of shaping the identity of places over time.

This positive dimension is perhaps the most hopeful aspect of predecessor law. If beneficial patterns can accumulate, then every action contributes not only to the present experience of a place but also to its future possibilities.

The next section brings together the practical implications of the entire discussion through a comprehensive question-and-answer guide addressing the most common concerns about predecessor law, space conditioning and the memory of place.

Part 9: Frequently Asked Questions About Predecessor Law, Space Conditioning and the Memory of Place

What is predecessor law?

Predecessor law is a modern feng shui concept proposing that the history of a place may influence its future. The central observation is that similar events sometimes appear to recur within the same property across different occupants and over extended periods of time.

Examples often cited include repeated business failures, recurring relationship difficulties, repeated health problems, or, conversely, recurring success, creativity or healing.

Predecessor law does not necessarily imply that a building causes these outcomes directly. Rather, it suggests that the history of a place may contain valuable information about patterns associated with that environment.

Throughout this article, we have seen that such patterns may arise from multiple factors, including environmental conditions, architectural design, social narratives, place attachment, space conditioning and, according to some theories, morphic resonance.

Is predecessor law scientifically proven?

At present, predecessor law is not a scientifically established theory in the conventional sense.

There is no universally accepted body of scientific evidence demonstrating that events experienced by previous occupants directly influence future occupants.

However, several areas of research provide partial support for aspects of the idea.

Environmental psychology demonstrates that places influence behaviour, wellbeing and identity (Gifford, 2014).

Building biology shows that hidden environmental factors can generate recurring health outcomes.

Place attachment research demonstrates that places accumulate meaning and emotional significance (Altman & Low, 1992).

Theories such as space conditioning and morphic resonance attempt to explain additional aspects of place memory, although these remain controversial and are not part of mainstream scientific consensus.

Consequently, predecessor law should currently be regarded as an interpretative framework rather than a scientifically proven law.

Does a house literally remember previous events?

The answer depends upon what is meant by memory.

If memory refers to physical traces, then the answer is clearly yes. Buildings retain evidence of their histories through materials, wear patterns, renovations, environmental conditions and structural changes.

If memory refers to psychological and social influences, the answer is also yes. Places accumulate stories, identities, reputations and associations.

The more controversial question is whether places retain informational, energetic or non-physical memories. This possibility is proposed by some traditions and theories discussed in this article, including space conditioning and morphic resonance, but remains an open question.

A useful way of approaching the issue is to recognise that place memory may operate at several levels simultaneously rather than requiring a single explanation.

What is the difference between predecessor law and space clearing?

Predecessor law and space clearing address different aspects of the same issue.

Predecessor law concerns the observation that places may carry patterns associated with their histories.

Space clearing concerns the intentional transformation of those patterns.

In simple terms:

Predecessor law asks:

What has happened here before?

Space clearing asks:

How do we create a different future?

One is primarily diagnostic. The other is primarily practical.

What is the difference between space clearing and space conditioning?

Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, they describe different processes.

Space clearing focuses on removing, releasing or transforming existing patterns.

Space conditioning focuses on establishing and reinforcing new patterns.

A useful analogy is gardening.

Removing weeds, clearing debris and preparing the soil resemble space clearing.

Planting, cultivating and nurturing desired plants resemble space conditioning.

The two processes work best together.

What is space conditioning?

Space conditioning is a concept associated primarily with the work of William A. Tiller and his colleagues.

According to this theory, repeated intentions and activities may gradually influence the informational qualities of an environment.

A place used repeatedly for meditation, learning, healing or creativity may become conditioned towards those activities.

Likewise, places repeatedly associated with conflict, stress or dysfunction may develop different tendencies.

Although the theory remains controversial, it provides an intriguing framework for understanding how places might acquire enduring characteristics over time.

What is morphic resonance?

Morphic resonance is a theory proposed by Rupert Sheldrake.

The theory suggests that patterns in nature become increasingly likely through repetition. Systems inherit influence from previous similar systems through morphic fields.

Applied to predecessor law, morphic resonance suggests that places may develop habits. The more frequently certain activities occur, the more likely similar activities become in the future.

This idea remains controversial within mainstream science but continues to attract interest because it offers a possible explanation for recurring patterns that appear difficult to explain through conventional mechanisms alone.

Is morphic resonance accepted by science?

No.

Morphic resonance is not part of mainstream scientific consensus.

Many scientists criticise the theory because proposed mechanisms remain unclear and robust empirical confirmation has proven difficult to obtain.

However, the theory continues to be discussed because it addresses important questions concerning memory, habit and organisation.

Its value may lie as much in the questions it raises as in the answers it proposes.

What role does environmental psychology play in predecessor law?

Environmental psychology provides some of the strongest evidence that places influence human experience.

Research has demonstrated that environments affect:

• stress
• attention
• mood
• wellbeing
• behaviour
• identity
• social interaction

These findings help explain why similar outcomes may recur in the same buildings.

A property that repeatedly generates stress may do so because of environmental conditions rather than because of mysterious forces.

Environmental psychology therefore offers an important foundation for understanding predecessor law in practical and evidence informed ways.

Can a building contribute to relationship difficulties?

A building cannot create relationship problems in isolation.

However, environmental conditions can influence factors that affect relationships.

Examples include:

• poor sleep
• noise
• crowding
• lack of privacy
• chronic stress
• inadequate personal space

Over time, such conditions may increase tension and reduce resilience.

From a feng shui perspective, additional considerations involving layout, qi flow and symbolic relationships may also be relevant.

The key point is that buildings influence context rather than directly determining outcomes.

Can a building contribute to illness?

Yes.

There is substantial evidence that environmental conditions can influence health.

Examples include:

• mould
• poor air quality
• radon
• inadequate ventilation
• noise pollution
• insufficient daylight

Consequently, recurring illness associated with a property should always be investigated carefully.

Before assuming energetic explanations, physical and environmental causes should be examined thoroughly.

This approach strengthens rather than weakens feng shui practice.

Should I avoid buying a property with a difficult history?

Not necessarily.

The history of a property is important, but it is only one source of information.

A difficult history may indicate environmental, architectural, social or symbolic issues that deserve investigation.

However, many properties with challenging histories have later become successful homes, thriving businesses or valued community spaces.

The critical question is not:

What happened here?

but rather:

What conditions exist now, and what can be changed?

History informs decisions. It should not dictate them.

Can positive predecessor effects exist?

Absolutely.

In fact, positive predecessor effects may be more common than negative ones.

Family homes often cultivate belonging.

Libraries cultivate learning.

Universities cultivate scholarship.

Retreat centres cultivate reflection.

Healing centres cultivate recovery.

Creative environments cultivate innovation.

Such examples suggest that places may accumulate positive qualities through repeated use and intention.

This perspective provides a valuable counterbalance to fear based interpretations of predecessor law.

How can I investigate the history of a property?

Useful sources include:

• Land Registry records
• local archives
• historical maps
• planning records
• newspaper archives
• census data
• conversations with neighbours
• previous owners where available

The goal is not to collect dramatic stories but to identify recurring patterns.

Patterns are generally more informative than isolated events.

What would a feng shui practitioner investigate?

A feng shui practitioner may consider:

• site history
• surrounding landscape
• orientation
• building form
• internal layout
• movement of qi
• previous occupants
• major renovations
• recurring life themes associated with the property

These factors are then considered together rather than in isolation.

A skilled practitioner typically looks for patterns rather than relying upon a single indicator.

Is predecessor law about fate?

No.

Perhaps the most important lesson from this entire discussion is that predecessor law is not fundamentally about fate.

It is about patterns.

Patterns influence probability.

They do not eliminate choice.

A place may possess tendencies shaped by its history, but tendencies are not destinies.

People continuously interact with and reshape the environments they inhabit.

This principle lies at the heart of feng shui.

The purpose of understanding a place is not to become trapped by its history but to participate consciously in its future.

Conclusion to Part 9

The questions explored throughout this article reveal a recurring theme. The history of a place matters, but it does not stand alone. Environmental conditions, architecture, social narratives, personal behaviour, symbolic meanings and intentional practices all contribute to the experience of place.

Predecessor law is best understood not as a supernatural certainty or a scientific law, but as a useful framework for recognising patterns that might otherwise be overlooked.

Most importantly, it reminds us that places are not merely locations. They are relationships unfolding through time.

The final section of this article brings together the major themes explored throughout and considers what predecessor law may teach us about the deeper relationship between people, places and history.

Part 10: Conclusion – The Memory of Place and the Future of Feng Shui

A Different Way of Looking at Buildings

Most people think of buildings as objects.

A house is a structure.

An office is a workplace.

A school is a collection of classrooms.

A library is a building that stores books.

Viewed in this way, buildings are essentially containers within which human activity occurs.

Yet throughout this article, a different picture has emerged.

Places are not merely containers. They are participants.

They influence the people who inhabit them, while those same people simultaneously influence the places they occupy. Over time, a continuous relationship develops between occupants and environment. The history of a place becomes inseparable from the experiences that unfold within it.

This perspective lies at the heart of predecessor law.

Whether one ultimately accepts predecessor law as a literal reality, a useful metaphor or a practical investigative framework, it directs attention towards an important truth: places matter.

They matter physically.

They matter psychologically.

They matter socially.

They matter culturally.

They matter symbolically.

And perhaps, although this remains open to investigation, they may also matter in ways that science has not yet fully understood.

The Central Question Revisited

At the beginning of this article, we asked a deceptively simple question:

How are patterns stored, reinforced, transmitted and transformed within places?

The answer, as we have seen, is unlikely to be singular.

Environmental psychology demonstrates that buildings influence behaviour, attention, stress, wellbeing and identity. Architecture shapes opportunities for interaction, privacy, restoration and focus. Building biology reveals how hidden environmental conditions can generate recurring patterns of illness or wellbeing. Social narratives influence expectations. Place attachment links memory and identity to specific locations.

Beyond these established explanations lie more speculative possibilities.

William Tiller’s theory of space conditioning proposes that repeated intentions and activities may influence the informational qualities of environments. Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance suggests that repeated patterns may become increasingly likely through the development of habits within larger fields of organisation.

Neither theory has achieved mainstream scientific acceptance. Yet both attempt to address questions that many people continue to ask:

Why do some places seem unusually peaceful?

Why do some environments repeatedly support similar outcomes?

Why do certain locations acquire reputations that persist across generations?

Whether future research ultimately confirms, modifies or rejects such theories remains to be seen. What matters for the present discussion is that these questions continue to emerge whenever people pay close attention to the relationship between place and experience.

Feng Shui as the Study of Relationships

One of the most important conclusions arising from this exploration concerns the nature of feng shui itself.

As discussed earlier, the term feng shui literally means wind water. The absence of a conjunction in the original Chinese reminds us that feng shui is fundamentally concerned with relationships rather than isolated objects.

This insight extends far beyond linguistic translation.

Much popular feng shui focuses on individual cures, objects, colours and adjustments. While such techniques may have value in certain contexts, they can obscure a deeper principle.

Feng shui is not primarily the study of things.

It is the study of relationships.

Relationships between wind and water.

Relationships between landscape and settlement.

Relationships between buildings and occupants.

Relationships between past, present and future.

Relationships between people and place.

Viewed in this way, predecessor law becomes easier to understand.

The history of a place matters because relationships persist through time. Previous occupants, previous uses, previous activities and previous intentions all become part of the ongoing story of a location.

A building is never entirely separate from its history.

At the same time, history is never entirely fixed.

The relationship continues evolving.

The Limits of Reductionism

One reason predecessor law remains controversial is that it sits at the boundary between different ways of understanding reality.

A purely materialist perspective may attempt to explain everything through physical causes.

A purely spiritual perspective may attribute everything to subtle energies or unseen influences.

Both approaches risk oversimplification.

The evidence reviewed throughout this article suggests that places operate simultaneously at multiple levels.

A home may contain mould behind the walls.

It may also contain memories.

It may possess a stressful layout.

It may also carry a reputation.

It may suffer from poor ventilation.

It may also be associated with grief.

These explanations do not necessarily compete with one another.

They may coexist.

Human environments are complex systems. Attempting to reduce them to a single cause often obscures more than it reveals.

The most productive approach may therefore be one of layered understanding. Physical, psychological, social, symbolic and, potentially, energetic influences can all be considered without assuming that any one level provides a complete explanation.

This layered perspective is one of the strengths of both environmental psychology and classical feng shui.

The Importance of Investigation

A recurring theme throughout this article has been the value of investigation.

Predecessor law is most useful when it encourages curiosity rather than fear.

A property associated with recurring illness should be investigated.

A business premises associated with repeated failure should be investigated.

A house associated with relationship difficulties should be investigated.

The goal is not to confirm a preconceived belief. The goal is to understand the place more fully.

Sometimes the explanation will be environmental.

Sometimes it will be architectural.

Sometimes it will be social or historical.

Sometimes no obvious explanation will emerge.

In every case, investigation is more valuable than assumption.

This principle is particularly important because stories about places have a tendency to grow. A single event can become a local legend. A legend can become a reputation. A reputation can begin influencing future experiences.

The disciplined investigator remains open to possibilities while maintaining critical thinking.

The Forgotten Question

Much of the discussion surrounding predecessor law focuses on what happened before.

Who lived here?

What occurred here?

Why did previous occupants leave?

These are important questions.

Yet they are not the most important question.

The most important question is:

What kind of future is being created here now?

This shift in emphasis changes everything.

Instead of becoming preoccupied with inherited patterns, attention turns towards present action.

How is the space being used?

What activities are occurring within it?

What relationships are being cultivated?

What intentions are being reinforced?

What qualities are emerging?

Every day, occupants participate in shaping the future history of a place.

From this perspective, predecessor law becomes less about inheritance and more about stewardship.

We are not merely recipients of the history of a place.

We are contributors to its future.

Positive Legacy

Perhaps the most hopeful conclusion concerns the possibility of positive inheritance.

Much of the literature surrounding predecessor law focuses on problems. Yet some of the most extraordinary places in human history have acquired reputations for learning, healing, creativity, contemplation and wisdom.

Universities preserve intellectual traditions.

Libraries preserve knowledge.

Temples preserve devotion.

Retreat centres preserve contemplative practice.

Family homes preserve belonging.

Such places remind us that history can be a resource rather than a burden.

Positive patterns can accumulate.

Supportive environments can become stronger over time.

Beneficial traditions can be transmitted across generations.

This possibility deserves far more attention than it typically receives.

A New Research Frontier

From an academic perspective, predecessor law remains largely unexplored.

Environmental psychology has produced extensive research concerning place attachment, place identity, restorative environments and environmental influences on behaviour. However, surprisingly little systematic research has examined the broader question of how the histories of places influence future occupants.

This gap presents an opportunity.

Future research could investigate:

• recurring patterns within residential properties
• long term histories of commercial premises
• healing environments
• educational environments
• sacred spaces
• the effects of space clearing interventions
• the relationship between environmental psychology and traditional feng shui concepts

Such research would not necessarily prove every claim associated with predecessor law. However, it could significantly deepen our understanding of how places shape human experience.

Final Reflections

The ancient traditions that gave rise to feng shui emerged from careful observation of the relationship between people and their environments. Long before the development of environmental psychology, building biology or neuroscience, practitioners recognised that places influence life.

Modern research increasingly supports this broad insight, even when it explains the mechanisms differently.

The deeper lesson may be remarkably simple.

Places matter.

They matter because they shape behaviour.

They matter because they influence wellbeing.

They matter because they support memory.

They matter because they contribute to identity.

They matter because they connect past, present and future.

Whether one interprets predecessor law through feng shui, environmental psychology, space conditioning, morphic resonance or some combination of these perspectives, the essential message remains the same.

The history of a place is never entirely separate from its future.

Every building contains traces of what has happened before.

Every occupant contributes to what will happen next.

In this sense, predecessor law may be understood not as a mysterious force but as a reminder that places, like people, carry histories. Those histories shape possibilities, influence probabilities and contribute to identity. Yet they do not determine destiny.

The future of a place, like the future of a person, remains an unfolding relationship between inheritance and choice.

That relationship is where feng shui begins.

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Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place identity: Physical world socialisation of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3(1), 57–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(83)80021-8

Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. Pion.

Spear, W. (1995/2010). Feng shui made easy: Designing your life with the ancient art of placement. North Atlantic Books.

Tuan, Y. F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Prentice Hall.

Tuan, Y. F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

Zhang, J. (2004). A translation of the ancient Chinese The Book of Burial (Zang Shu) by Guo Pu (276–324). Edwin Mellen Press.

References (Part 2)

Altman, I., & Low, S. M. (Eds.). (1992). Place attachment. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4

Appleton, J. (1975). The experience of landscape. Wiley.

Gifford, R. (2014). Environmental psychology: Principles and practice (5th ed.). Optimal Books.

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2

Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place identity: Physical world socialisation of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3(1), 57–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(83)80021-8

Tuan, Y. F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Prentice Hall.

Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420–421. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.6143402

Ulrich, R. S. (1991). Effects of interior design on wellness: Theory and recent scientific research. Journal of Health Care Interior Design, 3(1), 97–109.

World Health Organization. (2009). WHO guidelines for indoor air quality: Dampness and mould. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789289041683

References (Part 3)

Tiller, W. A. (1997). Science and human transformation: Subtle energies, intentionality and consciousness. Pavior Publishing.

Tiller, W. A. (2007). Psychoenergetic science: A second Copernican-scale revolution. Pavior Publishing.

Tiller, W. A., Dibble, W. E., Jr., & Kohane, M. J. (2001). Conscious acts of creation: The emergence of a new physics. Pavior Publishing. Read my summary of this book and it’s available via: https://archive.org/details/consciousactsofc0000till

Tiller, W. A., Dibble, W. E., Jr., & Kohane, M. J. (2004). Towards general experimentation and discovery in conditioned laboratory spaces: Part I. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(7–8), 95–119.

Tiller, W. A., Dibble, W. E., Jr., & Kohane, M. J. (2006). Some science adventures with real magic. Pavior Publishing.

Radin, D. (2006). Entangled minds: Extrasensory experiences in a quantum reality. Paraview Pocket Books.

Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (1987). Margins of reality: The role of consciousness in the physical world. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Dossey, L. (2013). One mind: How our individual mind is part of a greater consciousness and why it matters. Hay House.

References (Part 4)

Sheldrake, R. (1981). A new science of life: The hypothesis of morphic resonance. Blond & Briggs.

Sheldrake, R. (1988). The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature. Collins.

Sheldrake, R. (2009). Morphic resonance: The nature of formative causation (3rd ed.). Park Street Press.

Sheldrake, R. (2012). The science delusion: Freeing the spirit of enquiry. Coronet.

Sheldrake, R. (2021). Ways to go beyond and why they work: Seven spiritual practices in a scientific age. Coronet.

Midgley, M. (2005). The reappearance of emergence. In P. Clayton & P. Davies (Eds.), The re-emergence of emergence(pp. 25–48). Oxford University Press.

Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford University Press.

Tuan, Y. F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. Pion.

Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980). Genius loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture. Rizzoli.

References (Part 5)

Kingston, K. (1998). Creating sacred space with feng shui: Learn the art of space clearing and bring new energy into your life. Broadway Books.

Kingston, K. (2008). Clear your clutter with feng shui (Rev. ed.). Three Rivers Press.

Linn, D. (1995). Sacred space: Clearing and enhancing the energy of your home. Ballantine Books.

Spear, W. (1995/2010). Feng shui made easy: Designing your life with the ancient art of placement. North Atlantic Books.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine.

van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)

Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behaviour. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901

Tiller, W. A., Dibble, W. E., Jr., & Kohane, M. J. (2001). Conscious acts of creation: The emergence of a new physics. Pavior Publishing.

Sheldrake, R. (1988). The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature. Collins.

References (Part 6)

Alexander, C. (1979). The timeless way of building. Oxford University Press.

Altman, I., & Low, S. M. (Eds.). (1992). Place attachment. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4

Gifford, R. (2014). Environmental psychology: Principles and practice (5th ed.). Optimal Books.

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Kingston, K. (1998). Creating sacred space with feng shui: Learn the art of space clearing and bring new energy into your life. Broadway Books.

Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place identity: Physical world socialisation of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3(1), 57–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(83)80021-8

Sheldrake, R. (1988). The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature. Collins.

Spear, W. (1995/2010). Feng shui made easy: Designing your life with the ancient art of placement. North Atlantic Books.

Tiller, W. A., Dibble, W. E., Jr., & Kohane, M. J. (2001). Conscious acts of creation: The emergence of a new physics. Pavior Publishing.

Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420–421. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.6143402

World Health Organization. (2009). WHO guidelines for indoor air quality: Dampness and mould. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789289041683

References (Part 7)

Altman, I., & Low, S. M. (Eds.). (1992). Place attachment. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4

Gifford, R. (2014). Environmental psychology: Principles and practice (5th ed.). Optimal Books.

Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place identity: Physical world socialisation of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3(1), 57–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(83)80021-8

Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. Pion.

Sheldrake, R. (1988). The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature. Collins.

Spear, W. (1995/2010). Feng shui made easy: Designing your life with the ancient art of placement. North Atlantic Books.

Tuan, Y. F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

References (Part 8)

Altman, I., & Low, S. M. (Eds.). (1992). Place attachment. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980). Genius loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture. Rizzoli.

Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place identity: Physical world socialisation of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3(1), 57–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(83)80021-8

Sheldrake, R. (1988). The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature. Collins.

Tiller, W. A., Dibble, W. E., Jr., & Kohane, M. J. (2001). Conscious acts of creation: The emergence of a new physics. Pavior Publishing.

Tuan, Y. F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Prentice Hall.

Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420–421. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.6143402

Alexander, C. (1979). The timeless way of building. Oxford University Press.

References (Part 9)

Altman, I., & Low, S. M. (Eds.). (1992). Place attachment. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8753-4

Gifford, R. (2014). Environmental psychology: Principles and practice (5th ed.). Optimal Books.

Proshansky, H. M., Fabian, A. K., & Kaminoff, R. (1983). Place identity: Physical world socialisation of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 3(1), 57–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(83)80021-8

Sheldrake, R. (1988). The presence of the past: Morphic resonance and the habits of nature. Collins.

Spear, W. (1995/2010). Feng shui made easy: Designing your life with the ancient art of placement. North Atlantic Books.

Tiller, W. A., Dibble, W. E., Jr., & Kohane, M. J. (2001). Conscious acts of creation: The emergence of a new physics. Pavior Publishing.

Tuan, Y. F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.

World Health Organization. (2009). WHO guidelines for indoor air quality: Dampness and mould. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789289041683

The post Feng Shui Predecessor Law, Space Conditioning and the Memory of Place appeared first on Feng Shui London UK • The Capital Feng Shui Consultant.

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino’s imagined cities, read through memory, movement, energy, desire, and urban life.

Invisible Cities is an ideal summer read for a feng shui-minded reader: short, luminous, and easy to pause over, yet full of questions about how places hold memory, channel movement, shape desire, and either nourish or exhaust the people living in them.

Italo Calvino did not write a feng shui manual. But his book becomes extraordinarily rich when read through that lens because it is deeply concerned with the relationship between inner life and built environment.

What This Book Is

Published in 1972, Invisible Cities is framed as a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The aging emperor governs an empire so immense that he cannot truly know it. Marco returns from his journeys and describes its cities to him.

Yet these are not ordinary travel reports. The cities are compact fables, often only a few pages long, about places governed by one strange principle: memory, desire, mirrors, signs, trade, the dead, waste, the sky, or endless growth.

The central ambiguity is deliberate. Are these actual cities in the Khan’s empire? Are they inventions Marco uses to communicate? Are they variations on one remembered city? Are they all, in some sense, Venice?

Calvino’s answer is never simple. A city is not merely streets, buildings, property, infrastructure, or a point on a map. It is also the stories people attach to it, what they long for there, what they fear, what they buy and discard, what they remember, and what they fail to see.

A place is not healthy simply because it is beautiful, expensive, old, orderly, or new. Its character emerges from the relationship among people, landscape, circulation, attention, and time.

The Hidden Architecture

The book looks dreamlike and free-form, but it is carefully constructed. Its structure is almost mathematical.

• There are 55 city descriptions.
• They are arranged across nine chapters.
• They belong to 11 recurring thematic families.
• Each family contains exactly five cities.
• The first and final chapters contain ten city descriptions each.
• The seven chapters in between contain five city descriptions each.

The cities are not presented in eleven neat blocks. Instead, Calvino interweaves the themes through the nine chapters. A city about desire might be followed by a city about signs, then one about memory, trade, or death. The reader keeps returning to the same questions, but in a different form.

Each city has an invented woman’s name and a label such as “Cities and Memory 3.” The number does not rank the city. It simply means that it is the third of five entries in that thematic sequence.

A Feng Shui Reading

Cities as Fields of Energy

Feng shui asks whether qi, or life-force, can move, gather, and settle harmoniously. It pays attention to flow, thresholds, orientation, light, shelter, openness, water, clutter, and the relationship between built space and nature.

Calvino’s cities repeatedly dramatise the same concerns, although not as a formal system of feng shui. He imagines cities where movement becomes distorted: places that are too elevated, too commercial, too crowded, too thin, too full of signs, too disconnected from the earth, or too overwhelmed by their own consumption.

These are not merely fantasy cities. They are recognisable versions of modern urban experience. A city can offer unlimited choice and still leave residents depleted. It can be highly efficient while making daily life feel rushed, anonymous, visually loud, or emotionally flat.

Memory Is Part of the Site

One of the early cities, Zaira, is especially meaningful for readers interested in place and memory. Zaira cannot be understood by measuring its streets, buildings, or walls. Its real dimensions are the relationships between physical details and remembered events: a lamp post, railing, window, wedding, betrayal, loss, arrival, or departure.

In other words, a city is not an empty container. It carries what has happened there. The same is true of homes, neighbourhoods, workplaces, and streets.

When you enter a place, you might ask:

• What happened here before?
• What do the people who live here remember?
• Which buildings feel loved, and which seem burdened?
• Where does my body relax, tighten, hurry, or want to linger?
• What story does this space tell without words?

A sensitive redesign does not necessarily erase a difficult history. It begins by recognising it. Before changing a space, it can help to understand the life already embedded in it.

Desire Can Make a City Restless

The “Cities and Desire” sequence asks whether fulfilment can ever be found through a place. In these cities, longing is often projected outward: onto objects, status, distant possibilities, beautiful views, social fantasies, or the promise of becoming someone else.

This feels especially relevant to property culture, luxury consumption, tourism, branding, and social media. A neighbourhood can become a promise: if I live there, shop there, are seen there, or own there, perhaps I will finally feel complete.

Calvino understands the trap. Desire gives cities movement, glamour, and vitality. But if it has no centre, it becomes a permanent condition of dissatisfaction.

Does this room, building, or neighbourhood support the life I actually want to live, or does it keep me desiring a different self?

A nourishing environment can contain beauty and aspiration without continually stimulating lack.

Signs Can Replace Real Contact

In the city of Tamara, objects continually point to other meanings. Signs, symbols, emblems, labels, rules, and messages stand between people and their direct experience of the city.

That is very familiar now. Urban environments are filled with advertising, logos, navigation systems, status signals, surveillance cues, screens, and visual noise. It becomes easy to experience a street only in terms of what it represents, sells, photographs well as, or signals socially.

A feng shui-inspired response is not to make every space bare or silent. It is to restore legibility and breathing room.

• Can you see where to go without visual aggression?
• Is there a genuine place to pause?
• Do light, sound, materials, and planting create calm?
• Does an entrance welcome a human body rather than merely direct traffic?
• Can a space be experienced rather than only consumed as an image?

The City Needs Both Sky and Ground

Calvino’s “Thin Cities” and “Cities and the Sky” are especially evocative for anyone interested in the relationship between people and place. They raise the question of what happens when settlement becomes detached from landscape, seasons, weather, earth, and horizon.

A balanced city needs more than density, height, efficiency, or dramatic architecture. It also needs a felt relationship to the larger world: terrain, water, trees, daylight, open sky, changing weather, and the rhythm of seasons.

In feng shui language, this may be understood as a balance between protection and openness: enough enclosure to feel held, and enough prospect to breathe, orient yourself, and imagine beyond your immediate concerns.

A small daily urban practice might be to notice whether your routine includes:

• A visible patch of sky.
• A tree, garden, river, park, or seasonal change.
• A transition between private retreat and public activity.
• A quiet place where attention can settle.
• A route that does not require constant vigilance or rushing.

The Narrative Journey

Invisible Cities does not follow a conventional plot in which Marco Polo completes a quest and reaches a final destination. Its movement is philosophical and emotional rather than dramatic.

At first, Marco’s reports give Kublai Khan a way to imagine, and perhaps govern, an empire he cannot personally comprehend. Their relationship is about communication across language, distance, power, and imagination.

As the book develops, Marco’s descriptions become less like maps and more like instruments. Each city reveals a fear, longing, contradiction, or possibility buried within urban life.

Kublai Khan gradually confronts the limits of control. Maps, names, reports, systems, and political power cannot fully explain what a city is. A city cannot be reduced to statistics, administration, master plans, property value, or a single correct model.

Marco also suggests that every description may somehow contain Venice: the city of his own memory and experience. The point is not simply that all cities are Venice. It is that we encounter unfamiliar places through what we already carry inside ourselves.

In its later pages, the book becomes darker. It considers endless growth, repetition, consumption, rubbish, alienation, and the possibility of a human-made inferno. Yet Calvino does not leave the reader in despair.

The task is to recognise, amid the inferno, the people and places that are not inferno, and to make space for them to endure.

For a feng shui reader, that may be the book’s most powerful lesson. Do not wait for a perfect city. Learn to recognise life-giving patterns where they already exist, then protect and enlarge the space in which they can survive.

How to Read It This Summer

This is a short book, but it is not necessarily a fast one. You do not need to read it in a single sitting or force yourself to understand its structure immediately. It works beautifully when read in small portions.

1. Read one to three city descriptions at a time.
2. Notice the city’s main force: memory, desire, trade, signs, sky, death, repetition, or hiddenness.
3. Ask where that force appears in your own street, home, village, or city.
4. Write one sentence: “My city is a city of ______ because ______.”
5. Return to the Marco Polo and Kublai Khan dialogues, which shift the meaning of the city descriptions around them.

For example, after reading Zaira, take a walk and ask which details in your own neighbourhood contain memory. A bus stop may hold years of departures. A shopfront may contain a family story. A neglected corner may carry fear. A square may hold celebration, grief, protest, romance, or routine.

None of that appears on a map or a property listing. Yet it is part of the place’s actual energy.

Questions and Answers

Is Invisible Cities actually about feng shui?
No. Calvino was not teaching feng shui or providing a method for arranging buildings. But the novel works very well through a feng shui lens because it treats cities as living relationships among movement, landscape, memory, symbols, human behaviour, attention, and perception.

Are the 55 cities meant to be real?
Not in an ordinary geographical sense. They are imagined, possible, symbolic, and sometimes contradictory. They may be read as different cities, different mental states, different versions of Venice, or different ways in which people make meaning from urban space.

Who describes the cities?
Marco Polo describes them to Kublai Khan. Their conversations form the frame around the city pieces. But Calvino leaves room for uncertainty about whether the stories are reports, inventions, memories, translations, or all of these at once.

Why do the cities have women’s names?
The names make each city feel personified: singular, elusive, seductive, memorable, and impossible to possess completely. A city becomes a presence rather than a neutral planning diagram or a pin on a map.

Do I need to understand the numerical pattern before I read it?
No. Read the book in its published order first. Let the themes recur naturally. Later, if you want, read all five “Cities and Memory” entries together, then all five “Cities and Desire” entries, and so on. The pattern adds richness, but it is not a puzzle you must solve before the book can move you.

Which themes will interest an urban or feng shui reader most?
Cities and Memory is ideal for heritage, home, trauma, and neighbourhood history. Cities and Desire explores property, aspiration, luxury, tourism, and consumer culture. Cities and Signs speaks to branding, social media, visual clutter, and architecture as image. Trading Cities considers movement, migration, markets, and exchange. Continuous Cities is for readers concerned with sprawl, waste, overdevelopment, repetition, and urban burnout. Hidden Cities asks the book’s most hopeful question: how can life survive inside a troubled city?

What is the most feng shui-like question in the book?
Perhaps it is this: What kind of life does a place invite? Not simply: What does it look like? What does it cost? What status does it signal? But: What habits, emotions, relationships, pace, attention, and sense of belonging does it quietly produce?

A Final Thought

Invisible Cities gives no master plan for urban life. Instead, it teaches a more subtle skill: how to see.

It asks us to notice that the most important layers of a city may be invisible: memory, longing, fear, circulation, belonging, waste, imagination, and the fragile forms of kindness that persist even in difficult places.

That is why it remains such a valuable book for anyone interested in feng shui, architecture, cities, homes, urban energy, or simply the mystery of why some places make us feel more alive than others.

Further reading:

Italo Calvino’s Columbia University Lecture (1983): This transcribed lecture delivered to graduate writing students at Columbia University is the most comprehensive recorded text of Calvino explaining his own book. He explicitly breaks down how he organized the 55 fictional cities into alternating categories, how the book “questioned itself” during composition, and how it was written with the issues of modern contemporary cities in mind.

The post Invisible Cities: A Feng Shui Summer Reading Guide and Summary of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino appeared first on Feng Shui London UK • The Capital Feng Shui Consultant.

Dirty electricity (DE), also called Microsurge Electrical Pollution (MEP), is high-frequency voltage spikes (transients) caused by plugging electrical devices into the main supply. Dirty electricity is a by-product of modern electronic equipment and appliances, such as computers, refrigerators, plasma TVs, WiFi routers, Sky boxes, DVD players, video recorders, set-top boxes, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), solar panels and dimmer switches – all of which corrupt the electricity they use. Dirty electricity can also enter homes and offices through wiring from nearby sources, including your neighbours’ WiFi, TV antennas or nearby mobile phone base stations (transmitters) connected to the power grid. Dirty electricity, also known as dirty mains, dirty power, Microsurge Electrical Pollution (MEP), or electrical pollution, refers to electromagnetic noise on the mains wiring in houses.

In simple terms, every electrical gadget you plug into your home or workplace adds different frequencies to the electrical system at 50/60Hz and changes the power factor. That kind of ‘noise’ on your electrical cables is called dirty electricity. The good news is that there is a simple solution for dirty electricity – dirty electricity filters (see below).

Dirty electricity is caused by electrical appliances and can have a negative effect on your health

Common sources of dirty electricity: solar panels connected to the main supply, energy-saving CFL lamps, mains adaptors, chargers and power supplies, TVs and video players, computers, printers, washing machines, fridges, dishwashers, tumble driers, induction hobs, electric car chargers, and so on.
Unlikely sources of dirty electricity: some incandescent bulbs, electrical fires and heaters, as well as immersion heaters, electric showers, and older-type electric ring cookers.

Bespoke EMF personal surveys for homes and workplaces are available

How to minimise dirty electricity (DE) in your home and office? A simple solution to dirty electricity: dirty electricity filters

Dirty electricity filters for electrosmog

Although dirty electricity is very common and can have ill health effects, the solution is very simple: plug in these highly recommended dirty electricity filters, which filter out all that electrosmog. Watch a video below on the electrical nature of life to understand how dirty electricity and electrosmog can affect your life. From my professional experience, most homes have typical levels of dirty electricity 3-25 times over the limit, i.e., between 100 to 800 mV, rising up to about 2500 mV from solar panel inverters. I find that DE levels are higher in towns and densely populated areas, especially in high-rise blocks. The quality of electrical wiring can affect levels of dirty electricity, with older wiring making it more difficult to reduce them.

Plug in dirty electricity filters as close as possible to their source, or it will flow backwards and forwards on the house wiring between the source device and the dirty electricity filters. If you have a lot of dirty electricity and DE filters don’t reduce it enough, try to replace some devices with similar ones that produce less dirty electricity. For example, some low-energy CFL lamps (compact fluorescent light bulbs) produce lots of DE and some relatively little. Usually, most LED lamps produce little DE, and traditional, old-fashioned incandescent lamps produce virtually none. Some dimmer switches produce huge levels of DE, and some relatively low levels. It’s possible that the quality of electrical wiring doesn’t allow for further reduction of dirty electricity, especially if it’s quite old. I sometimes find that no matter how many dirty electricity filters I plug in, the levels stay the same.

I also recommend this powerful mains conditioning filter on an extension lead (if you can find it online – it seems they don’t sell it any more and I don’t have any leads, sorry), which will greatly reduce radio-frequency noise and interference on your house mains electricity supply coming from your computers, TVs, videos, modern switched-mode mains adapters and chargers, etc. The filters are designed to dramatically reduce both “asymmetrical” and “symmetrical” interference. It uses high-frequency capacitors and an inductor/choke, as well as an earth line choke, to stop interference through the mains earth line. It uses a screened mains cable to eliminate the effects of radiated noise interference.

What effect does dirty electricity have on health?

Research shows that dirty electricity is a chronic stressor and is correlated to many diseases and conditions, including, amongst others, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, insomnia, headaches, neurological disorders, arrhythmia, autism and even suicide, as well as general electrosensitivity. (Milham & Stetzer, 2013)

Case studies
A school in Minnesota where dirty electricity meters went completely off the scale had a cancer incidence in teachers nearly three times higher than average. There were also three former students who developed thyroid cancer in their 20s. (Milham & Morgan, 2008).

However, when dirty electricity was reduced by more than 90% in other schools, the health of teachers improved significantly, as did student behaviour in both middle and elementary schools. (Havas & Olstad, 2008)

In another school, the number of students needing inhalers for asthma was reduced, and blood sugar levels for some diabetics responded positively to the removal of dirty electricity in their environment. (Havas, 2008)

An additional study into individuals with multiple sclerosis, after reducing dirty electricity levels, showed their balance improved and they experienced fewer tremors. (Havas, 2006)

“‘Dirty Electricity’ can … be used to describe electric power that has become corrupted by our use of modern appliances. Items such as CFL bulbs, cell phone transmission antennas, power supplies for portable computers, cell phone chargers, dimmer switches, variable speed fans and many other electronic devices that require a transformer to convert the voltage will ‘dirty’ the electricity that enters your home. This form of dirty electromagnetic fields (EMF) is invisible to the eye, but has a biological effect on the human body and has been associated with a wide variety of illnesses.”
Magda Havas, PhD, associate professor of Environmental and Resource Studies at Trent University

Watch Dr Devra Davis, the founding director of the Centre for Environmental Oncology, author of two important books Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Is Doing to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family and The Secret History of the War on Cancer

How can I remove dirty electricity from my home or office? The solution is very simple: install DE filters.

Fortunately, the solution to removing dirty electricity is now very simple! Once the DE levels in your environment have been measured, the correct number of dirty electricity meters can then be installed to neutralise the effects in seconds. You should always try to find out what is causing the dirty electricity levels to be high – on your electrical wiring – to establish the best way to reduce it or remove it. The dirty electricity filters, ideally, should be plugged in as close as possible to the source of the DE. For dirty electricity coming into your building from solar panels (big offenders of dirty electricity) or from the incoming electricity supply – plug in the DE filters as close as possible to the fuse box or electricity meter.

The Republic of Kazakhstan and dirty electricity 

Some countries take the health of their population very seriously. For example, the Republic of Kazakhstan. From the book called Light That Heals: Energy Medicine Today & Beyond by Donna Fisher: “The International Conference on Electromagnetic Fields and Human Health was held in the Republic of Kazakhstan in September 2003. In November of the same year, the state health department of the Republic of Kazakhstan issued sanitary norms addressing Transient EMF, a move which historically takes decades.” and “The Republic of Kazakhstan has acknowledged that there is no safe level of exposure to dirty electricity. A limit of 50 GS units (industrial) was immediately mandated to protect workers. For the public, in their homes and non-industrial workplaces, a reading less than 30 GS units is easier to achieve.” To find out more about The Republic of Kazakhstan, dirty electricity and electrosmog, read the book Light That Heals: Energy Medicine Today & Beyond by Donna Fisher.

Summary
Microsurge Electrical Pollution (MEP), also known as dirty electricity, refers to spikes and surges of electromagnetic energy travelling along power lines and building wiring. It is a type of electromagnetic interference (EMI) or electrical noise created by many modern electronics, appliances, and energy-efficient lights that manipulate standard alternating current (AC) electricity. The best way to reduce it is to install dirty electricity filters once you’ve measured the levels of dirty electricity.

Contact me if you want a dirty electricity check on your home or office: 07956 288574 or email me

You can purchase dirty electricity filters here but you may need to have a dirty electricity meter (available here) to measure the levels and how the filters are working.

Signal Tamer – WiFi Router Radiation Shield
If you’re worried about your wifi router’s radiation, you can get a signal tamer, WiFi Router Radiation Shield (in the US) and in the UK, WiFi Cover Emf Protection, WiFi Router Cover Radiation Shielding, WiFi Guard Emf Faraday Cage for Router.

References and research on dirty electricity

1. Havas, M. (2006). Electromagnetic hypersensitivity: Biological effects of dirty electricity with emphasis on diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 25(4), 259–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/15368370601044192
2. Havas, M. (2008). Dirty electricity elevates blood sugar among electrically sensitive diabetics and may explain brittle diabetes. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 27(2), 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1080/15368370802072075
3. Havas, M., & Olstad, A. (2008). Power quality affects teacher wellbeing and student behavior in three Minnesota schools. Science of the Total Environment, 402(2–3), 157–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2008.04.046
4. Milham, S., & Morgan, L. L. (2008). A new electromagnetic exposure metric: High frequency voltage transients associated with increased cancer incidence in teachers in a California school. American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 51(8), 579–586. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajim.20598
5. Milham, S. (2011). Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dirty electricity. Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 32(8), 634. https://doi.org/10.1097/DBP.0b013e31822f8da7
6. Milham, S. (2014). Evidence that dirty electricity is causing the worldwide epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 33(1), 75–78. https://doi.org/10.3109/15368378.2013.783853
7. Milham, S., & Stetzer, D. (2013). Dirty electricity, chronic stress, neurotransmitters and disease. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 32(4), 500–507. https://doi.org/10.3109/15368378.2012.743909
8. Milham, S., & Stetzer, D. (2018). The electronics in fluorescent bulbs and light emitting diodes (LED), rather than ultraviolet radiation, cause increased malignant melanoma incidence in indoor office workers and tanning bed users. Medical Hypotheses, 116, 33–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2018.04.013
9. de Vocht, F. (2010). “Dirty electricity”: What, where, and should we care? Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, 20(5), 399–405. https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2010.8
10. de Vocht, F., & Burstyn, I. (2014). Refutation of dirty electricity hypothesis in obesity: Epistemological arguments and trans-disciplinary study using an instrumental variable. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 33(1), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.3109/15368378.2013.852567
11. de Vocht, F., & Olsen, R. G. (2016). Systematic review of the exposure assessment and epidemiology of high-frequency voltage transients. Frontiers in Public Health, 4, Article 52. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2016.00052
12. Khaki-Khatibi, F., Pratama, M., & Ghosh, S. K. (2019). Relationship between the use of electronic devices and susceptibility to multiple sclerosis. Cognitive Neurodynamics, 13(3), 287–292. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-019-09524-1
13. Seker, S. S., Cerezci, O., Bayindir, M. F., & Simsek, O. (2024). Electromagnetic high-frequency transients measurements of some household devices. Electromagnetic Sensitivity and Interactions, 1(1), Article 12005. https://doi.org/10.46604/emsi.2023.12005
14. Havas, M., & Stetzer, D. (2004, October). Dirty electricity and electrical hypersensitivity: Five case studies. In World Health Organization Workshop on Electrical Hypersensitivity, Prague, Czech Republic.
15. Havas, M., Illiatovitch, M., & Proctor, C. (2004). Teacher and student response to the removal of dirty electricity by the Graham/Stetzer filter at Willow Wood School in Toronto, Canada. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (pp. 311–317), Kos, Greece
16. Dirty Electricity: A Literature Review (short slides presentation) Kar, A. (2020)

Q&A

What is Dirty Electricity?
Dirty electricity refers to irregular electrical signals or high frequency voltage transients that travel along standard electrical wiring designed for 50 or 60 Hz. These disturbances, often termed electrical noise or line noise, are considered a form of electromagnetic field (EMF) pollution within built environments.

What Causes Dirty Electricity?
Dirty electricity arises because modern electronic devices require forms of power that differ from the standard 50 to 60 Hz alternating current (AC) system used in conventional wiring. To function effectively, many devices modify incoming electricity using several techniques:

• Converting alternating current (AC) into low voltage direct current (DC)

• Drawing power intermittently by rapidly switching on and off

• Operating at higher voltage AC levels

These processes disrupt the smooth sinusoidal waveform of standard AC electricity, producing irregular spikes and surges. These disturbances are commonly described as dirty power or electrical noise.

Many contemporary devices, such as televisions, computers, and chargers, typically operate at approximately 120 V and rely on:

• Rectifiers, which convert AC to DC

• Transformers, which adjust voltage levels

For example, laptop chargers contain transformers that regulate voltage. However, these components often switch rapidly between AC and DC, generating electrical noise.

Once generated, dirty electricity travels through the building’s wiring system, reaching other outlets and potentially spreading to neighbouring properties.

Some Common Dirty Electricity Causes

Computers operate on low voltage DC but are powered by standard AC supply. Internal components such as processors, fans, and audio systems require different voltages. Multiple transformers within the device convert and regulate power, producing electrical noise as a by product.

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs (CFLs) operate using high frequency current rather than standard 50 or 60 Hz. They convert AC to DC and then back to high frequency AC. This process generates electrical spikes, contributing to dirty electricity.

Dimmer switches regulate light intensity by rapidly switching electrical current on and off. This intermittent switching alters the normal flow of electricity and generates electrical noise, particularly at lower brightness settings.

Dirty Electricity Effects
Dirty electricity can interfere with the optimal functioning of electrical devices, a phenomenon known as electromagnetic interference (EMI). Appliances connected to the mains supply may receive both standard electrical current and irregular voltage spikes, which can impair performance or lead to malfunction. Some research suggests that such electrical disturbances may also interact with biological systems, potentially affecting physiological processes. As a result, reducing exposure to electrical pollution has been proposed as a precautionary approach.

Can Dirty Electricity Affect Our Health?
Dirty electricity produces electromagnetic frequencies that contribute to overall EMF exposure. Some studies have explored associations between prolonged EMF exposure and various health outcomes, including headaches, fatigue, sleep disturbances, and other physiological conditions.

What EMF Levels Are Safe?
Determining safe EMF exposure levels is complex. Several variables influence potential effects, including:

• Frequency and waveform characteristics

• Voltage levels

• Duration and cumulative exposure

Current regulatory guidelines primarily focus on thermal effects, that is, the capacity of EMFs to raise tissue temperature. Non thermal effects, such as those associated with dirty electricity, remain an area of ongoing research and debate.

How to Minimise Dirty Electricity

Switch Off Appliances: Turning off devices when not in use reduces the generation of electrical noise and overall exposure.

Install EMF Filters: Specialised filters can be installed to reduce high frequency voltage transients in electrical wiring, particularly in areas where occupants spend extended periods. Get your dirty electricity filters today

Swap Fluorescent Bulbs: Replacing compact fluorescent bulbs with alternatives such as LEDs or incandescent bulbs may reduce dirty electricity. However, LED quality varies, and some models may also generate electrical noise, so careful selection is required.

How to Measure Dirty Electricity?
Dirty electricity can be measured using dedicated meters designed to detect high frequency voltage transients and electrical noise within wiring systems.

How many dirty electricity filters do I need?
You will typically need several. While a dirty electricity meter can help determine the appropriate number, it is generally advisable to use more rather than fewer. A single dirty electricity filter must work harder to manage the electrical pollution, whereas using two or three allows the load to be distributed more evenly, resulting in more effective overall performance.

Electrical nature of life

In this introduction to the electrical nature of life, you can get a good overview of how electrosmog and dirty electricity fit into modern feng shui and the science behind it.
Dirty electricity affects our energy – watch the part where Paul talks about dirty electricity – from 1:03:10

The post What is dirty electricity? And how to minimise dirty electricity (DE) in your home and office? appeared first on Feng Shui London UK • The Capital Feng Shui Consultant.

20 May is World Bee Day, a reminder that the tiny bodies of bees hold up a remarkable amount of our food system, our landscapes and, arguably, our collective wellbeing. The day was created to honour both the ecological importance of pollinators and the long relationship between humans and bees. For anyone interested in feng shui, environmental psychology or simply living well in place, bees offer a rich, tangible way to think about qi, reciprocity and design.

World Bee Day and why it matters

World Bee Day highlights the fact that bees and other pollinators are under pressure from habitat loss, pesticides, climate change and disease. Without them, many fruit, vegetable, nut and seed crops would suffer serious declines, and wild plant communities would lose an essential source of pollination. The day is also about empowerment: we do not have to be beekeepers to help bees. Small actions such as planting bee-friendly flowers, buying local honey, supporting organic farming and reducing chemical use all contribute to the larger web of support.

From a feng shui perspective, this is a reminder that qi is not confined to the inside of a house. The quality of energy in our homes is inseparable from the health of the wider landscape that feeds us. When we improve conditions for bees in our neighbourhood, we are indirectly tending the qi that eventually arrives on our plates and in our lungs.

Bees: small bodies, huge impact

Bees have multiple specialised eyes that help them detect movement, light and flowers. They possess two stomachs, one for their own nourishment and one for carrying nectar back to the hive, where it will be transformed into honey. Their sense of smell is highly developed, allowing them to distinguish fine differences between floral scents and to navigate complex environments. Bees can carry pollen loads nearly as heavy as their own bodies, which is an extraordinary undertaking when repeated hundreds of times across a day.

Bees are also social and communicative. They make buzzing sounds with their wings, and they perform the famous “waggle dance” to tell nest mates where rich food sources can be found. A hive responds collectively when the queen is missing, showing that this is a deeply interdependent community rather than a simple collection of individuals. Bees can learn, remember and work together in ways that are increasingly recognised as forms of insect intelligence.

In environmental psychology and feng shui, we often ask how environments support collaboration, memory and mutual care. A thriving hive is a natural example of a place whose form and rhythms are closely aligned with its purpose. It is a living model of interdependence.

Senses, intelligence and the “map in the bee mind”

Modern research suggests that bees do more than follow fixed routes. They appear to hold a form of internal spatial map. When scientists displace forager bees to unfamiliar locations, many of them can still find their way back to the hive, adjusting their flight paths using landmarks and the position of the sun. This implies that bees construct a map like memory of their territory, which they combine with sun compass information and social cues from the waggle dance.

It is tempting to imagine that this internal map somehow transfers into the honey. Biologically, there is no evidence that cognitive content is stored in honey in this way. Honey is created when bees transform plant nectar with enzymes and evaporate water, concentrating sugars and trace compounds. What we can say is that honey condenses the chemistry of a landscape. It is made from the nectars of many plants across the bees’ foraging range, gathered and reworked by bodies that know that territory intimately.

For a feng shui informed reader, this offers a powerful metaphor. Local honey can be seen as a sweet, edible expression of the surrounding field of qi. The bees have flown the territory, reading light, scent and landmarks, and have returned with a distillation of that experience. When we eat local honey slowly and consciously, we participate in that exchange.

The hexagon: nature’s efficient pattern

One of the most striking visual features of bee life is the honeycomb, with its repeating hexagonal cells. This pattern has fascinated mathematicians, physicists and artists for centuries. Hexagons tile a surface without gaps and use the least building material to enclose the greatest volume compared with other regular shapes that can tile a plane. This means bees can store large quantities of honey and brood while using a minimum of precious wax.

Studies of comb building suggest that bees may start with slightly rounded or irregular cells that then refine into hexagons under the influence of heat, surface tension and small movements. Physics and biology collaborate to produce a pattern that is both strong and economical. Hexagons also appear in many other natural contexts, including basalt formations and some bubble patterns, which reinforces the sense that the hexagon is a favoured solution when systems seek stable, efficient packing.

For feng shui, the honeycomb is a beautiful analogue for how supportive environments work. Each cell is small and modest, yet the interlocking pattern allows the whole structure to be resilient. Similarly, in a home or workplace no single object or adjustment needs to carry the entire burden of change. Many small, thoughtful choices about light, order, orientation, colour and sound can lock together like comb cells, creating a field that holds and distributes qi with minimal waste.

Local honey, place and wellbeing

Honey is more than a generic sweetener. Its composition varies with the plants bees visit, which means that each region and season produces its own flavour, colour and chemistry. Some honeys, such as manuka, heather or thyme, are known for distinctive antimicrobial or antioxidant properties related to their floral sources. Even everyday multifloral honeys carry trace elements and plant compounds that reflect local conditions.

There is popular interest in the idea that eating local honey might help some people with seasonal allergies by providing tiny exposures to local pollens. Scientific evidence is mixed and it should not be treated as a medical treatment in itself, especially for people with severe allergies. What is clear, however, is that buying and consuming local honey can support nearby beekeepers, encourage pollinator-friendly landscapes and shorten supply chains.

From a feng shui viewpoint, local honey resonates with the principle of aligning our bodies and homes with the qi of the actual place we inhabit. Ingesting the sweetness that arises from the same air, water and soil that surround our dwelling can be viewed as a gentle ritual of belonging. It is a way of saying yes to a relationship with local plants, insects and people rather than living entirely off distant, abstract supply networks.

Bees, feng shui and the flow of qi

Bees and feng shui share several themes: attention to place, sensitivity to flows and boundaries, and a focus on the quality rather than the sheer quantity of activity.

Bees as indicators of healthy qi

In traditional feng shui, observations of wildlife and vegetation were key diagnostic tools. Lush growth, birdsong and clear water often signalled auspicious qi. Today, bees offer an additional, scientifically grounded indicator. They need continuous access to flowers, clean water and relatively low levels of toxic chemicals. Their presence usually points to an environment where biodiversity, seasonal rhythm and some degree of ecological continuity are present.

When a garden, courtyard or neighbourhood is alive with bees and other pollinators, it suggests that the life force is circulating rather than being blocked by concrete, monoculture or heavy chemical use. This is entirely in line with feng shui principles that favour flowing, vibrant environments over stagnant or barren ones.

Hives as models of cooperative design

The hive is a structure where form and function are tightly integrated. Temperature, ventilation, storage and communication all depend on how the hive is built and organised. The hexagonal comb allows efficient storage and structural strength, the entrance is positioned for orientation and defence, and internal pathways support movement and signalling.

In human terms, this encourages us to think of homes and workplaces not only as collections of rooms but as living systems. Where is the entrance and how does it feel to cross the threshold? Do the main pathways allow smooth, unforced movement? Are there clear centres where people gather and quieter cells where they can rest? Just as bees maintain hive cleanliness to protect health, regular, mindful care of our own spaces keeps qi fresh and reduces the subtle stress that accumulates around clutter and neglect.

Navigation, orientation and feeling at home

Bees build internal maps that allow them to travel confidently across their territory and then return home. Humans also rely on internal maps, both spatial and emotional. Confusing layouts, blocked sightlines and disorienting lighting can subtly undermine our sense of safety and competence. Feng shui seeks to create spaces where orientation is intuitive: the front door is easy to find and welcoming, key areas are legible, and movement between them feels coherent.

In this light, the bees’ waggle dance is an evocative metaphor. It is a movement practice that encodes knowledge about the environment. Our own movements through a building, from entrance to kitchen to desk to bed, also encode meaning. If these paths are repeatedly awkward or obstructed, they tell a story of strain. If they are smooth and supported, they reinforce a sense of being “in tune” with our habitat.

Practical ways to honour bees and nourish qi

To translate these ideas into daily life, the following practical steps support bees and align with a feng shui-informed ethic of care.

Everyday choices

• Buy local organic honey and bee products when you can, ideally from small producers who prioritise bee welfare and diverse forage.

• Reduce or avoid pesticides and herbicides in your home, balcony and any shared outdoor spaces. Even small reductions lessen the toxic burden on bees.

• Plant for pollinators, even in tiny spaces. Window boxes, balcony pots and small courtyard beds can host nectar-rich plants that offer food and orientation points.

• Provide water in a shallow dish with stones or pebbles so bees can drink safely.

• Support organisations and policies that protect pollinators, such as urban wildflower corridors, reduced roadside mowing and community gardens.

Feng shui-informed adjustments

• Bring images or small objects featuring healthy bees or honeycomb into your home as reminders of cooperation, sweetness and the power of many small efforts.

• Keep kitchens and eating areas clean and well ventilated, reflecting bees’ own strong hive hygiene.

• Design workspaces with both focus and rest zones, acknowledging that, like bees, we are not made for constant, unbroken labour.

• Notice where your daily movement feels constrained at home. Where possible, clear pathways and adjust furniture to create smoother, more legible routes, just as bees depend on clear flight paths.

Q & A

Does eating local honey give me the bees’ map of the area?
No. The map exists in the bees’ nervous systems and behaviour, not in the honey itself. Honey can be seen as a condensed expression of the local landscape because it is made from many plants in the area, but the cognitive map is not transferred. Local honey remains valuable as a symbolic connection to place and a way to support pollinator-friendly agriculture.

Is the hexagon a special spiritual symbol, or just efficient geometry?
In honeycomb, the hexagon is primarily a solution to a physical problem: how to store the most honey with the least wax while maintaining strength. Many cultures later attached symbolic meanings to hexagons, seeing them as signs of harmony and balance. In practice, its power lies in showing how function and beauty can coincide, which aligns well with feng shui ideals.

Is having a beehive near my home good or bad feng shui?
A healthy hive nearby can benefit local ecosystems and symbolise lively, cooperative qi. However, practical issues such as allergies, safety and neighbour comfort are crucial. From a feng shui standpoint, genuine harmony includes good relationships with human neighbours and non-human ones, so any hive placement should be carefully considered and managed.

What if I am afraid of bees?
Fear is understandable. Feng shui does not require close contact with bees. You can support them indirectly through planting, purchasing choices and advocacy. Gentle education and observing bees at a safe distance can gradually shift perception from threat to relationship, but this should be done at your own pace.

You can celebrate World Bee Day in very simple, practical ways. Here are ideas you could use in a Q&A section.

Q: What are simple ideas to celebrate World Bee Day (20 May)?
You do not need a garden or a hive to honour bees. Here are accessible options for most people:

• Plant one bee-friendly pot
  Choose a small pot or window box and plant nectar-rich flowers such as lavender, thyme, marjoram, chives, heather or native wildflowers. Aim for something that will provide colour and bloom later into the season, extending food for pollinators.

• Buy local (organic) honey and thank your bees
  If you can, buy a jar of genuinely local, organic honey from a nearby beekeeper or farmers’ market. Use it mindfully on that day: notice the flavour, colour and aroma, and acknowledge that it condenses the flowering landscape around you.

• Go pesticide-free at home
  Commit to avoiding insecticides and herbicides in your pots, balcony, allotment or garden. Even deciding “no spraying” on your patio or houseplants is a real contribution to safer foraging routes for bees.

• Create a bee watering station
  Put out a shallow dish of water with clean pebbles or marbles so bees can land and drink without drowning. Place it somewhere shaded and refill regularly.

• Add a bee symbol to your space
  Place a small image, postcard or object with a bee or honeycomb motif where you will see it daily, such as near your desk or in the kitchen. Treat it as a reminder of cooperation, shared labour and the sweetness that comes from healthy environments.

• Share one fact about bees with someone
  Tell a friend, child, client or colleague one thing you have learned about bees, such as their waggle dance, their role in pollination, or the efficiency of honeycomb hexagons. Turning knowledge into conversation helps it spread.

• Support a pollinator-friendly project
  If finances allow, make a small donation or sign up to volunteer with a local wildlife trust, community garden or pollinator corridor project. If not, amplify their work by sharing their resources on social media.

World Bee Day (20 May) invites us to look more closely at the lives of bees and to see them not only as providers of honey and pollination, but as teachers of pattern, cooperation and attunement to place. Whether through a jar of local honey on the table, a pot of flowers on a balcony, or a subtle honeycomb motif in a room, we can choose to participate in a field of mutual support where bees, humans and landscapes all benefit.

References

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2026). World Bee Day 2026. Retrieved from the FAO World Bee Day website.

Menzel, R., & colleagues. (2005). Honey bees navigate according to a map like spatial memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Menzel, R., & colleagues. (2014). Way finding in displaced clock shifted bees proves bees use a cognitive map. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Science communication resources on honeycomb geometry and hexagonal efficiency in nature (various authors).

General educational materials on bee biology, communication and hive behaviour, including children’s infographics summarising key facts about bees.

The post Bees, Hexagons and Qi: World Bee Day (20 May) through the Lens of Feng Shui appeared first on Feng Shui London UK • The Capital Feng Shui Consultant.

You can register for this Feng Shui Summit here. The live sessions are FREE.

Fengshui is the study of environmental patterns shaping your life through space and time. Advance beyond traditional feng shui models into advanced fengshui pattern recognition, utilisation and creation – learn to read the hidden patterns of your home and workplace, understand energetic flows, feedback loops and leverage points, work intelligently with complexity, and design environments that resolve challenges at their roots and genuinely support long-term freedom, stability, growth and success.

Fengshui (wind-water) is, at its core, the study of environmental patterns. It explores how qi, or life energy, moves through space and time, shaping landscapes, buildings, organisations and human experience. Fengshui therefore works with two inseparable dimensions: spatial patterns, how energy arranges itself in environments, and temporal patterns, how energy changes, cycles and evolves.

At the foundation of fengshui lie several key pattern languages. Yin and yang describe divergence and convergence. The five elements express cyclical transformation through seasonal processes. The bagua maps energetic relationships within space. Fengshui astrology extends this into time, exploring how energetic patterns unfold across life phases. Together, these models provide a vocabulary for observing how environments function, where harmony emerges, and where imbalance develops.

This talk goes beyond using these models descriptively and focuses on advanced pattern work. You will be introduced to three interrelated capacities: pattern recognition, pattern utilisation and pattern creation.

Pattern recognition is the ability to perceive recurring structures across environments, behaviours, organisations and systems. It means seeing underlying configurations rather than isolated events. In fengshui this begins with observing flows, relationships and feedback loops within spaces. In this talk, the skill is sharpened through systems thinking, revealing how environments operate as dynamic networks rather than static layouts.

Pattern utilisation is the skill of working intelligently with existing structures. It involves identifying leverage points, amplifying supportive dynamics and reducing destabilising ones. Drawing on cybernetics, this section explores how environments self-regulate, how feedback loops stabilise or destabilise systems, and how small interventions can generate disproportionate effects. Fengshui becomes not decorative placement, but strategic environmental tuning.

Pattern creation is the most advanced dimension. It moves from responding to patterns toward deliberately designing new ones. At this level, fengshui becomes a generative practice. Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, helps us understand how environments communicate and how we actively create meaning through colour, form, material, layout and cultural cues. This dimension also integrates insights from artificial intelligence, where pattern learning and generation are central. Here, AI is approached as a creative assistant for exploring possibilities, generating variations and visualisations, which are then evaluated through fengshui principles, lived experience and symbolic coherence.

As Winston Churchill famously observed, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” This captures the central theme of the talk: environments are not neutral. They condition perception, behaviour and possibility. This insight also underpins Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, which demonstrates how recurring design structures influence human life. Fengshui stands within this lineage, offering an environmental grammar through which patterns can be read, modified and invented.

Rather than being confined by techniques or formulas, you will learn to think in patterns, work with complexity, and consciously design environments that support intelligent, adaptive and flourishing systems. By engaging fengshui through advanced pattern recognition, utilisation and creation, fengshui becomes a practical problem-solving language, giving you greater clarity, flexibility and confidence to work with any situation, transform challenges at their roots, and design homes and workplaces that genuinely support long-term freedom, stability, success and growth in your life.

Jan Cisek, MSc, is a world-leading, leading-edge fengshui consultant, environmental psychologist, PhD researcher with over 40 years of experience. A co-founder of the Feng Shui Society of Great Britain in 1993, he has been instrumental in popularising fengshui internationally. His work integrates classical fengshui, semiotics, systems thinking, cybernetics and AI-informed pattern design, extending fengshui into a transpersonal, creative, innovative, yet deeply practical environmental discipline.

You can register for this Feng Shui Summit here. The live sessions are FREE.

The post Feng Shui Patterns: Recognition, Utilisation, Creation and Freedom Beyond Feng Shui – a lecture with Jan Cisek appeared first on Feng Shui London UK • The Capital Feng Shui Consultant.

• Read an information sheet and give written consent
• Complete a short health screening and brief questionnaires
• Have simple, non-invasive sensors attached to your fingers and chest so that we can record basic body signals (such as skin conductance and heart activity). These are research measures only and are not medical tests or diagnoses.
• Wear a VR headset and look around several different virtual bedrooms and workplaces
• Rate how you felt in each environment and complete questionnaires at the end

• Are 18–65 years old
• Have normal or corrected-to-normal vision and do not need to wear glasses all the time for seeing clearly in the distance. Contact lenses are fine, and reading glasses are not needed for this study, as there will be no small text to read inside the VR headset; however, there will be questionnaires to read and complete, so please bring your reading glasses if you normally need them for this.
• Are comfortable wearing a VR headset and having sensors on the skin
• Have no known allergies to adhesive materials used for electrode attachment
• Can read and understand English and are able to provide informed consent

• Have severe motion sickness or have felt very unwell in VR before
• Have a known allergy to medical adhesive (for the sensor pads)
• Have strong claustrophobia that would make wearing a VR headset difficult
• Have a history of epilepsy or seizures
• Currently have nausea or vomiting
• Are pregnant
• Usually need to wear glasses all the time to see clearly in the distance (for example, for general daily use, walking around, or watching TV). Unfortunately, these glasses will not fit inside the VR headset.

The post Volunteers needed for  Exploring Psychophysiological Responses to Environmental Design Using Virtual Reality (VR) Settings appeared first on Feng Shui London UK • The Capital Feng Shui Consultant.

On 20 February 2026, the Sagrada Família finally reached its full height, as the last section of the illuminated cross was placed atop the central Tower of Jesus Christ, bringing the basilica to around 172 metres and making it the tallest church in the world. This moment marked the symbolic completion of Gaudí’s vertical vision for Barcelona’s sacred skyline, a fusion of stone, light and geometry that has been rising for more than 140 years.

La Sagrada Familia and spiritual feng shui

You can get to Barcelona by bus and even train to Barcelona Sants train station (via France), but air travel is the most efficient. 7.5 million tourists visit Barcelona every year, creating a buzzing nightlife. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia, which has its own language and flag (where Chupa Chups was invented).

“To do things right, first you need love, then technique.” Gaudi

Energy flow in Barcelona

Barcelona is easy to navigate on foot, but you can also hire a mini taxi, a trixi pedi taxi for a tour, an electric bike, a scooter, or a regular bike. Also, regular black-yellow coloured taxis are very easy to catch on the street or on taxi ranks, so you can get anywhere very quickly and quite inexpensively. La Rambla, the main pedestrian street running through Barcelona, incorporates car traffic and the expansive, uplifting energy of trees, channels, and distributes chi/energy throughout the city.

Barcelona’s feng shui, flowing lines and curves of modernist architect Antoni Gaudí – good chi

Directionology

The Christopher Columbus monument is pointing in the wrong direction (it should face west, towards America). The Sagrada Familia has also incorporated compass directions for specific feng shui applications and usefulness (read below about the feng shui of The Sagrada Familia).

AVE high-speed trains from Barcelona to Madrid can travel at speeds of up to 193 mph (310 km/h), and the fastest journey time by train from Barcelona to Madrid is only 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Five Elements of Barcelona

Barcelona, one of the world’s most vibrant cities, is a grand display of the five elements of Feng Shui – water, wood, fire, earth, and metal, each representing a unique facet of the city’s essence.

Water is quintessential to Barcelona, represented by the Mediterranean Sea, which borders the city. Its beautiful beaches, such as Barceloneta and the bustling Port Vell, are focal points of city life. They bring a sense of fluidity and change, mirroring the ebb and flow of the tides and the lively energy of the city’s cultural landscape.

Wood is embodied by the city’s parks and green spaces, such as Park Güell, home to Gaudí’s creative brilliance. The lush vegetation and unique architecture form a dynamic symbiosis of nature and urban design. Moreover, the tree-lined streets, such as Las Ramblas, provide shade and respite, imbuing the city with life and vitality.

Fire, symbolising transformation and passion, is a central feature of Barcelona’s vibrant festivals and nightlife. The city is renowned for its fiery fiestas, like La Mercè, where the Correfoc, or “fire run,” features locals dressed as devils running through the streets with fireworks. Additionally, the warmth of the sun, which bathes Barcelona in a golden glow, is a testament to the element of fire.

Earth is present in the city’s rich history and its architectural masterpieces. Structures such as the Sagrada Familia, Casa Batlló, and the Gothic Quarter are rooted in history, showcasing Barcelona’s stability and cultural heritage. They anchor the city’s lively and evolving atmosphere in a sense of profound groundedness.

Finally, metal is reflected in the modern aspects of the city, including its innovative art, design, and technology sectors. Structures like the Torre Glòries, a high-tech office building, represent the city’s progression and innovation. Metal also symbolises the resilience of Barcelona, a city that has continually adapted and thrived throughout its history.

Together, the interplay of these five elements, water, tree, fire, earth and metal in Barcelona, creates a unique cityscape that is a living testament to the principles of feng shui, harmonising the city’s vibrant energy with its deep-rooted traditions.

La Noche de San Juan, or Saint John’s Night – 23 June – space clearing for Barcelona, Spain and the rest of the world

La Noche de San Juan, or Saint John’s Night, is a cherished tradition in Barcelona and throughout Spain, taking place on the night of June 23rd. Rooted in ancient customs, it is seen as a celebration of the summer solstice, the shortest night of the year, symbolising the victory of light over darkness. This festival can be viewed through the lens of feng shui as a powerful space-clearing ritual, a time for renewal and transformation.

The key elements of La Noche de San Juan align closely with feng shui principles. First, there’s fire (yang force), represented by bonfires lit throughout the city, particularly on beaches. These bonfires are believed to confer protective qualities and serve as a means of purification. In feng shui, fire is transformative, symbolising the burning away of old, stagnant energy and making way for the new. Many people write down what they want to get rid of in their lives and throw this into the fire, symbolically releasing these elements to create room for fresh energy. Nowadays, there are not many bonfires visible, but lots of fireworks on display.

Water, another primary feng shui yin element, plays a vital role in this festival. As part of the tradition, people bathe in the sea at midnight, believing it cleanses and rejuvenates their spirits. Water, in feng shui, is linked with wealth and prosperity, and its cleansing properties align with the idea of clearing away negativity and attracting abundance.

The celebration also includes earth elements, such as herbs. Traditional herbs of San Juan, including thyme, rosemary, and verbena, are believed to possess special properties on this night and are often used in rituals and home decorations. In feng shui, the earth element brings grounding and stability, nurturing balance and harmony.

Finally, the celebration concludes with the rising sun on the morning of Saint John’s Day, symbolising a new beginning, mirroring the renewing aspect of feng shui. On 24 June, the ‘Coque‘, the sole official food of Sant Joan, is a bread-like cake available in bakeries all over the city. Offering a range of options, these cakes come in both sweet and savoury variants, some of which are embedded with ingredients such as crackling, fruit, nuts, or cream. However, the defining commonality across all Coques is the inclusion of anise, which imparts a unique aniseed flavour to every cake.

La Noche de San Juan, therefore, can be seen as a powerful feng shui space-clearing ritual, offering a moment of cleansing, healing, and renewal. It brings together local communities and the global population (tourists) in a celebration that transcends the physical realm, impacting individuals’ spiritual and energetic levels and the city as a whole. It’s uncommon to spot a celebrity or two (Robert Lewandowski and his wife Anna Lewandowska) enjoying this special, once-in-a-year yin and yang celebration.

Key architectural landmarks

If the Gothic architecture of Santa Maria’s church, La Sagrada Familia, or Gaudí’s designs is not your cup of tea, you can opt for a museum of football, considered by some as the cathedral of the art of ball kicking, with the FC Barcelona Stadium (capacity 99K).

Miro Museum/gallery
Joan Miró i Ferrà, a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist, was born in Barcelona. The Fundació Joan Miró was established in Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city, Palma de Mallorca.

The Mercado de La Boqueria – Barcelona’s market – feng shui

La Rambla
Stroll through La Rambla to the Mercado de La Boqueria – Barcelona’s market, excellent for shopping for fresh food and eating as well. I would rank it one of the best markets in the world – 10/10. Markets are the heartbeats of any town or city and give us a sense of the place’s vibe. Valencia is famous for being Europe’s largest market.

La Sagrada Familia – modern spirituality
Probably the most amazing church in the world – and still a work in progress… I always start my visit to Barcelona at La Sagrada Familia, including a panoramic view of Barcelona from the top (book your tickets to avoid disappointment), and finish my stay there too. Despite all the tourists, it has the most uplifting vibe and atmosphere – and a very good feng shui indeed. The light, the scale, and the richness of detail will blow your mind and enlighten you.

Gaudí’s timeless advice: “To do things right, first you need love, then technique,” describes my feng shui approach and a general raison d’etre.

“To do things right, first you need love, then technique.” Antoni Gaudi

The timeline of the construction of La Sagrada Familia, 1882 – 2032:
1882 The first stone was laid, but a dispute between the architect and the developer, who was the bookseller Josep Maria Bacabella, resulted in the architect being fired. 1883 Bacabella hires Gaudí as the chief architect. In 1926, Gaudí had a tram accident and was sent to the wrong hospital because he was mistaken for being a vagabond, and died as a result. 1930 The Nativity scene is completed. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began, resulting in the sacking of Gaudí’s studio. In 1953, a manifesto called for all the work to stop, but it didn’t. 1976 The Passion facade is finished. 1992 The Barcelona Olympics start an influx of tourism, which adds extra funds to energise the construction. In 2008, another manifesto talks about the manipulation of Gaudí’s vision, but the work continues. In 2010, the Pope visited the site to consecrate the church as a basilica. In 2011, an arson attack on the sacristy was contained. In 2016, the Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, stated that the church lacked a municipal building permit. The 2017 Terrorist bomb plot was averted. 2019: A building permit is issued. 2022 is the year the central towers should be completed. 2026 On 20 February 2026, the Sagrada Família finally reached its full 172-metre height as the cross crowned the Tower of Jesus Christ, completing Gaudí’s soaring sacred skyline. The end of the construction of La Sagrada Familia is to coincide with the centenary of Gaudí’s death. 2032 Final decorations will be completed.

La Sagrada Familia, Feng shui, Light, Energy and Spirit

The yin and yang of The Sagrada Familia
The Sagrada Familia, a famous basilica in Barcelona, beautifully embodies the ancient Chinese philosophy of yin and yang. The exterior of this renowned church represents the yang, personal aspect, brimming with personalised, intricate, and fascinating sculptures, each telling a different biblical story, forming a spiritual tapestry of stone. It is as if the chaotic and dynamic energy of life itself has been captured and frozen in time, reflecting the diversity and unpredictability of the human experience.

On the other hand, the interior of the Sagrada Familia symbolises the yin, spiritual energy. Upon entering, one is instantly enveloped in a serene sanctuary, the ethereal light pouring through the stunningly colourful stained-glass windows. These hues paint the stone walls and columns with a vibrant palette that changes throughout the day, echoing the ebb and flow of nature’s cycles. The interior’s form is uniquely Gaudí, drawing inspiration from the natural world and featuring hyperboloid structures and catenary arches, creating an organic flow that feels both rooted and divine. The emptiness within the vast space holds a profound spiritual quality, encouraging introspection and a connection to the divine.

Together, the yang of the exterior and the yin of the interior create a harmonious balance that echoes the universal principle of duality: yin and yang. This emblematic architecture, much like life, is a dance of the personal and the spiritual, the form and the formless, the dynamic and the serene. It is here, in the heart of Barcelona, that the Sagrada Familia beautifully manifests the yin and yang, captivating all who visit.

The Tower of Jesus Christ

The Five Elements of The Sagrada Familia
The Sagrada Familia, an iconic basilica in Barcelona, can also be seen as a glorious embodiment of the Five Elements theory of water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. The exterior of the basilica, representing the element of earth, is studded with intricate, captivating sculptures that recount diverse biblical tales. These earthly figures, painstakingly sculpted from stone, symbolise the dynamic and unpredictable nature of life itself, akin to the robustness and stability of the earth.

The interior, meanwhile, captures the ethereal element of water with its tranquil, sanctuary-like ambience. The vast openness, akin to an expansive ocean, and the flow of light pouring in through the colourful stained-glass windows mimic the gentle movement of water, while the vibrancy of the colours reflects the variety and depth of aquatic life.

Wood is represented in the naturalistic forms of interior architecture. Drawing inspiration from the woods, Gaudí’s hyperboloid structures and catenary arches, much like trees in a forest, reach towards the heavens, creating a connection between the terrestrial and the celestial.

The element of fire is depicted in the transformative play of light and colour within the interior. As the day progresses, the sunlight, filtered through the stained-glass windows, dances across the walls and columns, creating an ever-changing spectacle of warmth and vibrancy.

Finally, the metal element comes into play in the construction’s careful detailing and strength. As the ancient theory dictates, metal brings structure and rigidity, mirroring the steadfastness of the Sagrada Familia itself.

In this majestic basilica, the Five Elements theory finds a harmonious balance. This architectural masterpiece is more than a testament to human creativity; it is a reflection of the innate connection between humanity and the fundamental elements of existence: water, trees, fire, earth, and metal.

Nighttime illumination of the Jesus Tower and the Mary Tower

Feng shui compass directions for The Sagrada Familia
The Sagrada Familia, the magnum opus of Antoni Gaudí, is not just an architectural marvel but also a testament to the genius of its creator in harmonising the basilica with the natural elements, including the sun’s movement. Located in the heart of Barcelona, the basilica’s orientation was carefully planned in relation to the cardinal directions, integrating the building with the daily and yearly solar cycles.

As positioned for the sun rises in the north-east, the first rays of dawn illuminate the Nativity Façade, which represents the birth of Christ. This façade, facing the sunrise, is adorned with scenes and symbols of joy, innocence, and new beginnings, an embodiment of the energy and promise that come with each new day. The intricate carvings are gradually brought to life by the soft morning light, reflecting the world’s awakening.

As the day progresses, the sun moves southward, illuminating the Glory Façade, the basilica’s principal façade. This façade symbolises the journey of human life, from birth through death to final salvation, under the radiant, noonday sun. The light and shadows create a dynamic interplay on the elaborately decorated façade, symbolising the joys and tribulations of life’s journey.

Towards sunset, the sun in the west bathes the Passion Façade in a warm, golden glow. This façade, depicting the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ, stands in stark contrast to the Nativity Façade. The sculptures are austere and angular, mirroring the harsher light of the setting sun, and imbuing the scenes with a sense of solemnity and sacrifice.

Through the night, the moon and stars provide a serene illumination over the basilica, maintaining a subtle connection to the celestial sphere until dawn. The Sagrada Familia, therefore, in the grandeur of its architecture and its interplay with the sun’s journey, becomes a terrestrial clock, marking the passage of time in a daily celebration of human spirituality.

Golden beaches in Barcelona

Barcelona has several golden beaches (Llevant, Nove Mar Bella, Mar Bella, Bogatell, Nova Icaria, Barcenoleta, and St. Sebastia). One fun way to get to the beach is to take a cable car (octagonal-shaped) to Barcenoleta.

Food and drink

Catalonia is famous for its cava, a Spanish equivalent of Champagne that uses the same sparkling wine-making techniques but with different grape varieties.

New branded residences in Barcelona

Barcelona is perceived as hip and traditional. There are lots of new developments for people who want to make it home. Depending on your vibe, you can choose apartments near Passeig de Gracia, a prime boulevard in Eixample, Barcelona’s most sophisticated area, which was laid out on a grid system (similar to Manhattan) in the early 20th century. Most buildings are no more than six stories, with stylish apartments featuring high ceilings and tall windows (good feng shui). Or you can go further towards the sea, south in the Gothic Quarters, which is Barcelona’s oldest area, where you can find contemporary apartments with loft-style windows, high ceilings and of course air conditioning – all within walking distance to Las Ramblas and Barcelona beach. Mandarin Oriental Residences is opening in 2020 with 34 apartments and views of La Sagrada Familia and curves of modernist architect Antoni Gaudí on Passeig de Gràcia, and hopefully with good feng shui inside.

Map of Barcelona and top feng shui locations

FC Barcelona

Founded in 1899, FC Barcelona is one of the oldest and most celebrated football clubs in the world. Hailing from Barcelona, Spain, the club has a rich tradition of excellence, known for its distinctive playing style, often referred to as ‘tiki-taka’, an approach characterised by short passing and movement. FC Barcelona has won numerous domestic and international titles, including the UEFA Champions League, La Liga, and Copa del Rey. The club has also been home to many of the sport’s biggest stars, including Lionel Messi, Johan Cruyff, Ronaldinho, and Robert Lewandowski. As of my knowledge cutoff in 2021, FC Barcelona remains a symbol of Catalan culture and Catalanism, boasting the motto “Més que un club” (More than a club).

Famous people who lived and live in Barcelona

Many famous people have lived in Barcelona and still live there. Picasso lived in Barcelona. Guadi, without whom Barcelona wouldn’t be what it is now, lived and worked in Barcelona. Lionel Messi, a footballer, lived here while playing for FC Barcelona (he now plays for Paris). Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies and Salvador Dalí live here. Shakira lived in Barcelona while married to FC Barcelona player Gerard Piqué. George Orwell lived in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and his experiences inspired his book “Homage to Catalonia.” Robert Lewandowski, who plays for FC Barcelona, and his wife, Anna Lewandowska, and their children live here. They also have a home in Majorca. Anna, the wife of Robert Lewandowski, once said that she had always dreamt of living in Barcelona and running a lifestyle, health and training business. Lewandowski holds the record as Poland’s all-time leading scorer with 79 international goals, additionally ranking third on the list of Europe’s all-time top scorers in men’s international football. Robert’s astrocartography lines running via Spain and near Barcelona are very positive. Anna Lewandowska’s astrocartography lines are also very positive: her Sun line runs very close to Barcelona, which might explain why she dreamt of living here. Also, the same Sun line runs through Majorca, where they have their second home.

Feng shui consultants in Barcelona, Spain

A quick Google search revealed that there aren’t many feng shui consultants in Barcelona. But if you live in Barcelona and are looking for a feng shui consultant near you, with 45+ years of experience in feng shui and environmental psychology, PhD research in feng shui, feel free to call/text me on +447956 288574 for a quote for a feng shui consultation for your home or workplace. Although I live in London, I do remote feng shui consultations. Email me

Check my blogs about the feng shui of cities

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