Feng Shui Mallorca

Mallorca-based feng shui expert Natalie Jürges reveals the secret of harmonious living.

Enter a room that’s been planned and designed based on the principles of feng shui and you’ll feel comfortable, without knowing exactly why. You don’t even need to believe in feng shui. It’s simply that the combination of colours, positioning and furniture creates an environment of harmony and warmth that any visitor will find inviting.

This summary of the effect of the empirical science of Chinese philosophy is one Natalie Jürges believes wholeheartedly. The Mallorca-based German feng shui consultant says that “one doesn’t notice feng shui in a room if it’s well done.”

Natalie is a recognised specialist in the principles of the philosophy. Along with the feeling of wellness, her clients are promised another serious benefit: higher earnings and more output from their employees.

The attractive Cologne-born woman applies feng shui professionally and not just as a popular science. For her, “it’s not enough having read one book about feng shui and then applying it here and there.” Feng shui – the Chinese science of harmonising homes and buildings – is something quite complicated, with formal criteria for its application.

Natalie knows these criteria well, having graduated from the highly-regarded German Feng Shui Institute in Freiburg. At the same time, she took lessons in “therapy of feelings”.

“This is a very natural, humanistic kind of psychotherapy,” says Natalie. “It combines well with the demands of feng shui.”

Besides psychology, an important element of feng shui for companies (or business feng shui) is marketing. This special form aims to maximise profit and improve employees’ efficiency: “Not aggressively but, rather, for everybody’s benefit,” explains Natalie. “Employees are likely to work with more enthusiasm and customers are more inclined to buy, in rooms with a positive atmosphere on entering. I like business feng shui, because in applying it I can reach many people.”

When she enters a room to analyse it, she investigates how the cardinal points can be reconciled with feng shui’s five elements – water, wood, fire, earth and metal – in the best way possible. Therefore, she always has a compass with her. The collected data is applied to a feng shui room diagram that looks like a coloured geometrical chart – because the elements are symbolised by colours.

“This technique is purely schematic and it’s nothing to do with religion or esoterics” says Natalie, explaining that more than 3,000 years ago, Chinese people had been contemplating the interaction of nature, man and animals. Finally, they divided everything into the five categories and combined them with the yin and yang philosophy of harmonising opposites. This is an oversimplified description because of a lack of space here to explain feng shui fully.

Another component in the analysis of rooms and houses is at least as important: the people living and interacting in the rooms. Natalie prefers to consult every member of a family about their sleeping habits and possible conflicts. In companies every employee is asked whether they feel well in their working environment and what kind of changes they might like. Natalie is aware that some of these responses could be sensitive:

“Other people aren’t fed this information. Like doctors, we keep professional confidentiality.”

Together, all these elements lead to an entire feng shui concept, that can be used to restructure rooms completely. And feng shui doesn’t only apply to interiors, but also to gardens and estates. Ideally, the movement of people between interior and exterior should be fluid: “very smooth without obstacles,” is how Natalie describes it.

Natalie tells us why she loves Mallorca: “The island is so beautiful and diversified and feng shui elements are very pronounced here. My personality responds to visual pleasures and the natural beauty makes me happy. Mallorca has a bright perspective and one should save some minutes each day to contemplate that.” On the negative side is the fact that “Mallorca is overcrowded and everyone needs a lot of energy to achieve their own free space.” Natalie claims that’s the reason why feng shui is so popular here.

Furthermore, the elements of water (blue in colour) and fire (red) are dominant on the island and it isn’t necessary to strengthen these here – unlike in England or Germany, where the climate and geography are different. In these countries, an overall analysis for a house doesn’t exist, and has to be decided by the particular environment.

Natalie herself decided in favour of water and fire. For almost five years she’s lived on Mallorca, in Sa Cabaneta. To enable her to concentrate fully on feng shui and offer her customers the best solutions, she developed a partnership with German interior decorator Carde Reimerdes. Designs don’t necessarily look oriental: “Feng shui is adaptive to every style of interior or garden design,” says Natalie.

She has the self-confidence to tell us why she’s successful in feng shui: “One needs the ability to think analytically. My ego disappears while I’m doing a feng shui analysis. I open my mind and watch everything that’s happening around me.” A good feng shui consultant is able to “sense things”, being harmonised themselves.

According to Natalie Jürges, feng shui is mainly “the art of listening to our instincts again.” In modern western Europe, we have tended to abandon our instincts – as a result of industrialisation, rationalisation and simply “a lack of space in densely populated Europe.” Instead of finding a compromise, people have preferred to eliminate instincts completely.

There are many benefits to restoring this lost facet of human existence – particularly when applied to the place closest to ourselves: our home.

Text by: Roland Kroiss