Chi-va Las Vegas

I took my first ever trip to Las Vegas this month and found it to be a fascinating lesson in Feng Shui.

Vegas is a city built in the middle of no-where, on land that grows nothing. It is hot, dry and desolate, hardly the sort of location that an ancient Feng Shui master would have recommended for a home or business.

However, Grandmaster Professor Lin Yun used places like Las Vegas and Dubai to illustrate the power that man has, using Feng Shui, to harness the chi from deep within the earth and draw it to the surface to create lively environments. Three types of enhancements are particularly evident in Vegas.

Light: Vegas is a city where the lights never go out! Light is controlled in Vegas to a science. External light sources are removed from Casinos so that patrons have no sense of time, and the strip is lit like a Christmas festival so that people can party into the wee hours of the morning. Light is a powerful Feng Shui enhancer. Imagine how different the strip would be if the lights went out at midnight!

Water:

There is water everywhere in Vegas, an incredible contrast to the desert which surrounds it. In the residential areas the City of Las Vegas is offering cash subsidies for those willing to remove their grass to conserve water. On the strip though, water is used to draw people like a magnet. Thousands of people gather every day to watch the famous fountains at the Bellagio Hotel. There are fountains and lagoons at nearly every hotel. If there is water, there is life and Vegas is a lively as it gets.

Sound: Vegas is loud - really loud! Sound is used to create atmosphere matching the theme of each hotel, to convince customers to visit this bar vs. that bar, and to keep you stimulated for your entire visit. Sound is nearly inescapable in Vegas. This is not the sort of sound that most of us would choose for our home, you can certainly see how important it is to bring life to the strip.

Though Vegas is a particularly surreal environment which would overstimulate most of us if we stayed for any length of time (3 days is the average stay, and likely as long as most of us could stand), it is an excellent lesson in the use of Feng Shui for environmental transformation. The addition of light, sound or water in your own environment is a powerful way to bring Feng Shui into your home, uplifting your chi and creating movement in your life.