Feng Shui on the Football Field?

Riiiight. Feng shui on the football field. Talk about feng shui becoming mainstream. You don’t get much more mainstream in this country than football. So, what, am I saying? That the guy playing “Center”, the one who hikes the ball, starts each play – that one action which colors the very essence of how things will flow for that moment of the game – is in the career area? The Quarterback is in the center of things. Wait a minute... isn’t that kind of how things are? Isn’t the quarterback the one around whom it all revolves? When the quarterback is strong and stable, the whole team can be strong. An unstable or ineffective quarterback makes the whole team off balance. Just like the center health area in feng shui. Right? And the Running backs - in the power spots: wealth, fame and reputation, partnership. It’s all fitting together for me now. Hmmmm. Taking this a little too far? Absolutely. Just like feng shui. You can drive yourself nuts. Not every player on the field fits a feng shui meaning. Not every item in your home is a feng shui adjustment. But it is important to know which ones are making the biggest impact in moving you toward (or away from!) your touchdowns in life.

How did we get onto football you ask? Well, my career as a football mom is two games from being over. My sons are college seniors and after twelve or so years of football games between them it is about to come to an end. What got me going on the connection between feng shui and football happened a couple of weeks ago while sitting in a booth at Snuffy’s restaurant. We were glowing after a good game, about to reward ourselves with some very highly evolved hamburgers and malts, when the son who plays small college football tossed a folded up piece of paper across the table to his twin brother. “Check this out.” On the page were 25 to 30 single spaced lines each describing a football play. Not unusual to have to study the team’s plays. What was unusual was the instructional paragraph at the top:

Carefully read through each of the following, visualizing yourself in this setting and performing these plays with precision and accuracy:
On Saturday, October 13, we will be at X Stadium at XX College in St. Paul, MN. The weather is expected to be in the mid 50’s with mostly sunny, partly cloudy skies. There will be a crisp autumn breeze of 15 mph from the south east. The opposing team will be wearing their red home jerseys and our team will be wearing our white away uniforms. Etc...
See yourself accomplishing your part of each of these plays to perfection.
1) The sticky finger: snap to center. LB drops to right and runs up middle.
2) The four wheel sloop: snap to RB, spins and passes to TE.
Etc... (These are fictional examples of football plays. Any resemblance to real football plays is purely coincidental – and frankly miraculous because I wouldn’t know how to write a football play if my life depended on it.)

Check this out indeed. Check out the use of intentional visualization. When I teach about intention in feng shui I always comment on Olympic athletes and other peak performers who utilize “mental rehearsal”, as the researchers call it, to improve performance. They don’t do this just for the fun of it. They do it because research shows it improves performance. Really. In feng shui we suggest using visualizations of your intentions to empower your adjustments. This not only helps you to have meaningful physical reminders of your goals in your space, but research shows it helps your brain actually create new neuro-pathways for your successful patterning. So, it is actually making your space powerful -- to help you impact your life. Thousands of years of wisdom, boiled into a mainstream modern moment. That’s what I love about feng shui.