This is Karen Kingston's account of her own Feng Shui journey, explaining how she first developed Space Clearing and what it is...

EARLY BEGINNINGS

One evening in 1978, I was driving over to visit a couple of friends who had just moved into a new apartment when an idea occurred to me which - did I but know it - was to change the course of my life.

I arrived on their doorstep and explained to them what I had in mind. Rather than have them show me around their new home, I asked them to allow me to explore it blindfolded.

For a few years I had been developing my ability to read energies around people and objects with my hands. I usually describe the technique as being able to read information with my hands in the same way that I might read a book with my eyes. I had practised a lot in my own home and public buildings, but had never tried it in anyone else's home before, and never blindfolded.

They were as interested as I was to try this little experiment, so they hunted out a thick black silk scarf and tied it tightly around my eyes. Then starting at the front door, we began our journey around the apartment, following the inside perimeter of the walls.

I led the way, moving very slowly down the corridor and into the front room. With my hands acting as antennae, I followed the contours of the walls, furniture and other objects, never quite touching them, just sensing the energy lodged in them.

The first thing I discovered was that I could mostly tell which pieces of furniture belonged to my friends and which belonged to the landlord. The pieces belonging to my friends had a warm, familiar energy to them, whereas those belonging to the landlord had a much duller, more ponderous vibration.

We all started to get excited. "See if you can tell us what pictures we have on the wall," my friends challenged me.

This took a while longer, but I discovered I could feel very precisely where there were pictures on the wall, and when I fine-tuned I was able to tell them what colour the pictures were, and sometimes the content of the picture too. They had several framed photographs of people around the apartment and I was able to name who some of them were.

"Let's see what else you can do," my friends encouraged me. They were totally fascinated now. They asked me to sense which ornaments were theirs, and we were all dismayed when my accuracy rating fell dramatically with this. At first we couldn't figure it out, and then they realized that many of their ornaments were antiques that had had previous owners and so were imbued with the energy of the previous owners too. It was this that had confused me.

This gave me the idea to go around the space again, sensing in a completely different way. This time I focused on what had happened in the space before they had come to live there. Now we were really heading into the unknown because none of us knew anything about the history of the building. I felt I was guessing but I described some of the vibrations I was picking up as best I could. One very strong signal was what I could only describe at the time as 'mental hardness'. I also registered painful aches in my bones, especially my finger joints.

I spent the whole evening sensing the different energies, and didn't take the blindfold off until I went out of the front door and said goodbye. A week later I got an excited phone call to tell me that they had checked with the landlord and discovered that the previous tenant had lived there for 20 years and had been a very stubborn old man with severe arthritis, especially in his hands!

Later Developments

The experience of that evening really gave me the impetus to go on and develop my skills even more. I continued to deepen my ability to do etheric sensing through my hands and skin, and also through the senses of sight, hearing, smelling and tasting.

These were the years of 'you name it, I sensed it!' - the best of the best and the worst of the worst. I etherically sensed all kinds of people, animals and plants, in varying stages of health and sickness. I visited sacred sites and accident black spots, powerful temples and ghastly dungeons, beautiful mansions and derelict slums. I went to hospitals, palaces, junk shops, cemeteries, prisons and caves. The world was (and still is) a feast of etheric impressions, just waiting to be explored.

As my ability to read energies in buildings developed, I began to realize that a lot of it was unsavoury and undesirable. In particular, I wanted my own home to be as free from other influences as possible. It was therefore a natural progression to learn ways to cleanse and clear the energy of buildings, and I called these techniques 'Space Clearing', which seemed to describe the process very aptly. It became fundamental to my life to clear any space before I lived in it, and then to create and maintain high level energy in that place.

Something I began to practise a few years down the line was what I now know as 'the art of placement'. I learnt that when I arranged things in a certain way in relation to each other and to the spacial dimensions around them, something amazing happened with the energy.

I began to use it to create incredible results in my life. Whenever something wasn't going quite right, I would go home and rearrange or change my furniture and ornaments until suddenly I registered a 'click' in the energy fields, as if everything had suddenly come into alignment. After that, everything worked better in my life. Later, as I developed this even more, I acquired a reputation amongst my friends for my ability to manifest the seemingly impossible in my life again and again and again.

All this was immense fun, a fantastic voyage of discovery. I played with the energies, and tried out new ideas to see what worked and what didn't. I learnt how to change atmospheres, how to soup them up

and tone them down. People would come to visit me and would stop in their tracks and say, "Wow! What an amazing place!" or "What a lovely feeling there is here!" and they never wanted to leave when it was time to go. It happened so often that I knew for a fact that I was producing tangible results.

After I had been doing all this for about ten years, a friend of mine put a book under my nose which was a huge illustrated volume containing a chapter on something I had never heard of called Feng Shui. He said to me, "Look at this! The Chinese were on to all this stuff about 3,000 years before you!"

I read the chapter with interest, but it seemed very complicated and didn't make a lot of sense to me at that time. However it was wonderful to know that some research had already been done in this area, and later when I came to understand it more it was great for me to check out and augment the work that I had already developed by myself, working purely from the energy standpoint.

As the years went by, I continued to develop new skills. I trained as a bodyworker. I found that I could run my hands over people's bodies several inches away from their skin, and could read memories and traumas stored in the body tissues, and help people clear them. I learnt how to work with the breath and became a professional rebirther, teaching people how to use the breath to find their own answers from within.

I became skilled at knowing what a person was feeling and experiencing simply from the way they took in energy by breathing, and could help them release long-standing energy blocks by becoming conscious of them. I combined body harmony, other forms of bodywork and spiritual counselling into my rebirthing sessions to obtain very powerful results.

All the time I was working with the energy of people, I was also progressing my skills working with the energy of places, never expecting that anyone would ever actually be interested in learning about it. It has been very exciting for me to be at the leading edge of the recent explosion of interest in the subject in the western world, and to find that all my skills suddenly have a use and a value to others too.