“In my opinion the East is onto something,” says Lighthouse. “Asian culture has a more encompassing understanding of things, appreciating how energy works, how it flows. They pay attention to both the seen and unseen realms. They cultivate from the inside out rather than the outside in. Feng Shui takes this into account, and these days the West is becoming more and more attuned to that fact.”

Studying the I Ching extensively, she also immersed herself in Christian, Buddhist, and Taoist theology. Lighthouse was introduced to Feng Shui in 1991 and had her first Feng Shui consultation with Katherine Metz, who later became her mentor. Metz’s recommendations worked. “My career was flat, as was my husband’s,” Lighthouse remembers. “We barely had enough to get by. After we shifted things around, our workload tripled and continued to grow. Money came in. It was amazing!” She enrolled in the Shelter for the Soul Institute and was certified as a practitioner in 1996.

She met and began studying directly under H.H. Grandmaster Lin Yun Rinpoche, the spiritual leader of the Tantric Buddhist Black Sect Feng Shui, in 1995. They collaborated on a project to translate the precepts and theories of Feng Shui into a musical context. The resulting CD, Feng Shui Tune Up, was heralded as the . rst of its kind. They have since collaborated on a second CD, Heart Sutra, a blend of music and meditation.

WHAT
Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art of design and placement, literally translates as wind and water. That seems only fitting as wind chimes and the soothing sounds of water are some of the transcendental cures used in its practice. It is concerned with the movement of energy, or chi, through a space.

The Black Sect School of Feng Shui is unique in that it takes into consideration physics, psychology, architecture, and design in its analysis. While traditional Feng Shui relies on a compass, the Black Sect School considers the immediate environment to be more important because the chi (energy) flow of cardinal directions is influenced by so many factors of modern life—tall buildings, freeway structures, power lines, computers, televisions, etc. Black Sect practitioners study the changing dynamics of chi by examining the immediate surrounding exterior—landscape, conditions of nature, roads, neighboring structures, building design and interiors, room shapes, angles, colors, and placement of furnishings. “It’s impossible to change the architecture of a building to open up the free-flowing of energy,” says Lighthouse. “However, a transcendental cure could take the form of an object that wards off or reflects bad Chi.”