Psychology of Place (Scientific Feng Shui) by Jan CISEK, MSc

I'm going to demonstrate how much there's overlap between feng shui and environmental psychology and other disciplines that are studying feng shui in other ways. But scientifically, I'm going to propose something completely different. And probably you haven't heard scientific feng shui. And that's this kind of first introduction to this subject. And to put it in perspective, feng shui's legacy is about 4,000 years old. So a long time. Environmental psychology has been around only for 50 years. And scientific Feng Shui is about 25 years. And 25 years, because that's how I've been doing feng shui. And I sort of, when I start doing feng shui, I start to read about environmental psychology, cognitive ergonomics, sort of other designs of ecological design in order to understand how feng shui works and where is the overlap. And there's some other, obviously disciplines like, have you heard of biophilic design? Biophilic design incorporates nature in designing your houses and hospital designs. So for example, they add, they've added in some hospitals, labyrinths. And that help people to kind of calm down, recover better. It kind of creates the better atmosphere for working. Environmental aroma has been used in many hospitals successfully. Space syntax, it's another scientific discipline. It looks at relationship between human behavior, layouts of cities and forms of buildings, this architectural psychology. And the most prominent is environmental psychology. That's been going on for quite a long time. Actually, the person who started environmental psychology lived here in this country and was Winston Churchill. During the war, when I think House of Commons were destroyed or bombed, he started one of his speeches with famous saying that we all use now in feng shui, we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us. And that actually prompted a lot of interest in how environment can affect people's behavior. So we could say that Winston Church was grandfather of environmental psychology. Lots of books on the subject, probably more books on environmental psychology now than on feng shui. And you can learn a lot. And you go online and you can just Google tons and tons of research. And I'm going to present some of that research. But the word scientific, people, people sort of have different views of that word. And what is scientific? What is scientific? What makes something scientific? How medicine that evolved over thousands of years become suddenly scientific. Before it wasn't scientific, what was it before? When you look at sort of people who have illnesses, obviously, and then there were some anecdotes about those. And then gradually over the time, anecdotes become case studies. So medicine, in a sense is anecdotal in order to become. And actually anecdote comes from a Greek word meaning not published. So it's evidence that it hasn't been published. So obviously collectively, feng shui has a lot of anecdotes. There's so much knowledge involved with feng shui. And I think with feng shui so tight, we're striving to really put that together and really put forward the concept of feng shui as a very valid discipline. Although in some circles it looks kind of magical. But now I will try to demonstrate how scientifically is feng shui. And obviously if you're doing feng shui for some time, you recognize most of the things, you've been doing those things, and without knowing that they're actually scientifically validated. One of the key questions I use to figure out how feng shui is, what does feng shui do? It's actually if you take out one question out of this talk, this is the question, what does it do? Because it will really focus your attention how feng shui works. So I kind of split feng shui for all kinds of reasons. I'm not going to go into that, but into traditional feng shui and modern feng shui. So traditional feng shui is really my definition of traditional is physical affirmation. And the purpose of that. The function of traditional feng shui is to make places safe, give hope, give energy. One of the key concepts, and Simon demonstrated nicely, is energy qi that we all experience. It gives direction, but most of all makes thought physical. So this building was constructed twice, first in somebody's mind and then physically. So the manifestation is actually the second step in manifesting. And feng shui is such a physical activity. It's not a. Obviously it's mental and spiritual and all the other realms are there, but. But we do something physical within the realms of physical environment. Modern feng shui kind of move it forward a bit. It's about self actualization, transcendence. And I'm sure people who have been doing feng shui can relate to this. At some point you transcend feng shui, you can live in any environment. Is that beautiful? You can go beyond. Obviously we like nice environments, so we strive to create the best environments we can. But really it can go beyond the physical environment. And there's some actually scientific evidence that that's what's happening collectively as species. So what does it do? Enlightens, helps people to get more enlightened, actually brings more light into homes as well, opens consciousness, it shifts paradigms, helps to grow, connects and neurofeedbacks. It's an environment. Now we got a lot of neurofeedback with global issues and environmental issues get a lot of feedback for behaviors that we're not aware of and optimizes environments. But the key thing is really help us to grow and become enlightened. And to put it in perspective, you've probably seen this classic muscles hierarchy of needs. So we start with physical needs. It's a triangle. So the basic needs are much bigger than the top of the pyramid. So physiological needs, safety, security, food, etc. Social needs and an esteem. And then he goes into self actualization, self transcendence. In other words, enlightenment. So I think feng shui can help. And I'll demonstrate how certain elements of your harm can help you to become enlightened very easily. Homes are so important to us. Moving home is one of the most stressful events in our lives, almost on the same level as death. Seriously, that's what the research suggests. So for a lot of people, for some might not be such a big deal, but we put a lot of sort of emotional energy. Why is that? Where does it come from? What is your first home? The womb. See, we all came, whether it was a woman or man, we all came from a. For a female. For a woman. Yeah. And who then creates a nest in your home? Women. So and looking at the audience, what's the percentage of women? Men? It's like 99% women. Because it's important to you. It's your biology. It's deep inside. You can't help it. It's what you do best. Create nests, create life. So again, those two questions, what does it do? So you go to a place, so you see something and ask yourself, what does it do? First question then, what does it feel? What does it make you? How does it make you feel? How does it feel? And it'll give you a lot of information. Just doing that, just using those two questions, you can differently. Seriously. So once you start to shift your paradigm to feng shui kind of sense, that's a good name for a clock. Feng shui sense. That would be my next Feng shui sense of Feng shui eyes you. You start to see the reality in completely different way. You'll never see space the same. It's never ordinary. So much happening. And you start to see energies, see more, more going on. So it's an amazing field, amazing field. And so I propose that feng shui works with symbols, energies, affects, anchors, and so on and so on. But the most important thing really is if you really want to advance your feng shui practices to start to focus on how to do it, not what to do. Because obviously, science is asking those two questions, how and what. And sometimes what you do will make a huge difference, but most of the time, how you do it will make even a bigger difference.