Can You Feng Shui Your Way To Love?

by Penelope Green

As any Chinese restaurateur or Hollywood mogul knows, feng shui is Chinese medicine for the home. Simply put, the placement of your stuff—and the walls around it—are loaded with energetic meaning, some of it good, some of it quite gnarly. (The title of a popular book on the subject says it all: Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life.)

Reiko arrives at my apartment one Friday afternoon with her lo pan, a compass that functions sort of like a sextant does for a celestial navigator. Its readings help feng shui practitioners arrive at an equation that is the energetic blueprint or diagnosis for you and your home. From the lo pan, Reiko gleans all sorts of useful stuff, such as the facts that my daughter and I are already sleeping in the proper direction for our birthdates (good) and that the ideal spot for me from a relationship standpoint is in my neighbor’s front hall (bad).

“Honestly,” a friend snorts later, “do you really believe that stuff?” Do I believe it? Let me just say that, given the landscape of my relationships with the opposite sex, it certainly makes a heck of a lot of sense that the real estate that supports romance would belong to someone else.

But Reiko isn’t daunted. No matter, she says, there are other areas that might be ramped up. My bedroom, for example. It is sparsely furnished, with nearly bare walls and a gritty sisal rug, its dark-wood bed dressed in the plain white clothes it acquired two apartments ago, when I slept in the living room—my daughter had the sole bedroom—and I was trying to make the bed as couch-like, public, and unfussy as possible.Though we were married then, my daughter’s father traveled so much I can barely remember him ever sleeping on it. Come to think of it, the mattress and bed pre-date him, and have not played host to too much drama. Do I get to keep it? (I like my mattress; it’s relatively thin, in contrast to the pneumatic, fat mattresses that are standard these days and for which I’d have to buy new sheets.) Reiko says she’ll think about it. She finds the room a bit sterile, though. “It’s also very exposed, isn’t it?” she says.

It is set on a corner overlooking Second Avenue and 11th Street, with windows facing west, over St. Mark’s in the Bowery Church, and north, from where the churning, south-moving river of traffic that is Second Avenue seems to pour its entire contents into the room. Today, like every cloudless day, it is also ablaze with afternoon sun. That’s good, right?

Reiko hesitates. “From an energetic perspective, this room could be good for romance,” she says. “It is certainly charged energetically.” She’d like to see it as more of a cocoon, however, with soft things underfoot (rather than the punitive prickle of sisal) and blackout shades on those windows. “What’s this?” she asks, peering under the bed at the boot boxes, old picture frames, and radiator cover that I’ve (cleverly) stored there. “That’s no good,” she says, shaking her head. “That’s stuck energy.”