Righting energy fields keeps feng-shui-ers busy

By MIKE ECKEL

Associated Press

FAYSTON, Vt. _ The energy field that comes from Sonia and Nils Behn's round table is all wrong.

The low, rough-hewn wood beams on the ceiling are oppressing the energy in the room. Shelving on the north wall blocks light from coming in. Worst of all, Sonia sits at her desk with her back almost to the door.

It's no wonder that there's sense of stress, struggle and unease in the Behn's household.

Enter Carol Wheelock, an energy-flow troubleshooter who knows when it's blocked, when it's rushing, and when it's just off balance. In other words, she's a practitioner of the ancient Chinese art of feng shui.

"It's takes energy to deal with the struggle," Wheelock tells the Behns. "It's wasted energy."

More and more homeowners, business owners and just average people looking to put a finger on whatever in their lives just doesn't seem right are turning to feng shui. For homeowners moving into a new home, feng shui is becoming as routine as dry-cleaning the drapes, dusting the corners or scrubbing the tub. For some businesses, it's an investment of sorts in potential prosperity. Even people with desks cluttered with piles turn to feng shui to help in organizing themselves, explains Wheelock, of Warren.

"When you move into your new home, you clean dust and dirt. Look at this like you're getting rid of energetic dirt," she says.

"It's not just the hippie element who is responding to this," she says.

Feng shui (pronounced fung-SHWAY) deals with energy, but it isn't your typical electrical energy current of watts, amps and volts. This is chi (pronounced CHEE), a Chinese word that roughly translates as energy, and believers in feng shui say all objects in the world, animate and inanimate, have this energy field.

Practitioners of feng shui try to balance this energy, make it flow and harmonize a person's surroundings. By doing so, they say it can bring prosperity, mend relationships, improve health, increase business, or just brighten a person's outlook.

Wheelock, 55, says many practitioners don't have any certification or license to practice and there's certainly no state agency that regulates the practice. She herself got her certification from a California feng shui school only last year, though she says she's very much self-taught. The decision to become a feng shui practitioner she made after leaving her job as a school teacher and librarian, and having breast cancer surgery.

"I wanted to make a difference in people's lives," she says, "by healing their spaces, making the spaces all they can be, to support that person."

There are elements of landscape architecture, forestry, interior decorating, psychology and even business development in feng shui, but much of it is just common sense, says Patricia Pati-Theodore, a psychologist by training who runs a feng shui consultancy as a side business.

Pati-Theodore, 51 of Essex, says there's also a strong spiritual element to it. For that reason and because many more people are searching out religion or some other deeper meaning in their lives, she says, demand for feng shui services is growing.

"I suspect there's just more knowledge about it, and there's more media attention being paid to it," Pati-Theodore says. "It's also promoting personal growth, part of the new century, people are really looking for spiritual growth and personal development."

Nick DeNoia and his wife Marie turned to feng shui about a year ago as they were considering expanding their dry cleaning business. Their 17-year-old operation, which employs 17 people and has stores in Montpelier, Stowe and Morrisville, was solvent, but not that successful.

"We never felt that we were over the hump, never felt comfortable, we were always struggling," DeNoia says. "So we felt, eh, let's see if we can get the energy flowing in our way."

They had their three stores and their home feng shuied. Since last year, sales have increased 40-50 percent, he says. He won't attribute all the growth in sales to feng shui, but it's a large part of it, he says.

For Laurie Lawrence-Pepin, the process of moving into a newly built, 1,900 square-foot ranch home in Essex was fairly routine. Based on a feng shui consultation, she rearranged furniture, did some landscaping work, and repainted her front door. Again, many of the changes were intuitive, but it helped to have someone on the outside come in and help guide the process.

"I live a pretty busy life, I enjoy my home, I wanted it to be my haven, and anything to make it more a haven, I'm all for it," says Lawrence-Pepin, who works as a manager at IBM's chip manufacturing plant.

Granted feng shui still makes more than a handful of homeowners leery, particularly when the discussion turns, for example, to superimposing the bagua over your home, balancing the five elements, righting the chi and harmonizing the yin and yang.

But even real estate agents say they're getting more calls from prospective homebuyers and clients looking to feng shui their homes. That's helping to bring the practice more into the mainstream.

"For people buying a house, it's not like buying a commercial building or an office, it's quite often an emotional decision," says Staige Davis, president of Lang Associates Realtors in Burlington. "If someone feels a greater sense of comfort, if they've had the house vetted, so to speak, then that's terrific.Who am I to judge that?"

For that reason, Wheelock anticipates that she'll see even more demand as feng shui sheds its image of being hippie-dippie, alternative medicine or healing art. She already does between 12-15 consultations in a month, as well as workshops and lectures.

With feng shui, Wheelock says, "you can look at a house and say `it's ugly.' I can look at a house and tell you why it's ugly."