Geomancy and Feng Shui

A geomantic zone lies where underground watercourses, faults or crossings of grids run through the ground. Indicator plants often reveal them, for example trees with leaning or twisted growth. In the park of Doberan Minster, I was able to dowse plenty of underground watercourses across the spacious grounds. The leaning tree there is an indicator plant.

Many phenomena affecting a house, including underground watercourses, faults, grid structures and building biology problems, can often be detected quite clearly with a dowsing rod at its corners. I call this edge radiation. Symbols were often worked into a house corner to reduce negative influences and strengthen positive energies.

In the past, in farming country, animals that try to avoid such phenomena by instinct were often driven onto a plot. The “good places” were where sheep and cows (radiation avoiders), for example, liked to sleep and rest. Inside a house, the subject becomes underground watercourses, disturbance zones and electrosmog, which has a guide of its own.

How I work with the dowsing rod

The rod, with its aerial-like handle lengths and frequency graduations, is simply an amplifying interpreter for the finest measuring instrument we have: our bodily perception. Through neural (electrical) muscle movements, it amplifies what we would otherwise barely notice, or perceive only unconsciously. This is also how I found the “gate” of the old lime tree in Speck.

She stands hidden, at the end of a dead end in the landscape, in the village of Speck in Mecklenburg. This is no lime tree standing alone in a sunlit field. You have to look for her. Eight hundred years of life, and now she lives in seclusion, yet still powerful.

I approach her attentively and use my dowsing rod to find the “gate” through which to enter. The lime seems uninterested, neither rejecting nor inviting me. With my arms outstretched and palms facing the tree, I walk slowly towards her. A good ten metres away, I already feel a strong auric force. About three metres before the canopy, the Qi grows denser still. Everything in me tingles. I ask permission to enter her realm. There is no welcome, as there often is with lime trees, just an almost imperceptible “Oh, all right”.

The mighty trunk seems injured and vulnerable to me. Its back lies exposed like an open wound, its branches like uncovered strands of muscle. Two or three metres above the ground, a fairy gate has grown out of the overgrowth of the trunk: an oval for nature spirits, a gateway to the otherworld. I can sense nature spirits everywhere here.

For me, this lime lacks the cheerfulness and gentleness often found beneath lime trees. The feminine force is palpable, but there is also much mystery, withdrawal, scarred wounds, a sighing and rustling in the leaves. Perhaps it was a meeting place for secret lovers, a place for reflection. I also perceive animal heads and bodies on and beneath her. Did animals seek shelter here, to hide and lick their wounds?

I take my leave as I arrived: carefully. Strangely moved by a lime so different from all those I have “felt” before. I describe how I include old trees and places of power in a garden in my garden guide.