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Initially, I also found all this room swapping and room reorganization disorientinga funny thought since orientation is an integral part of vastu. Time and again, I proved the adage that old habits die hard. Often I opened the wrong door in a friend's house to find myself in the newly designated servants' quarters or a kids playroom. But over time, I slowly realized that the changes within each room from the decor to the arrangement of the furniture almost always made me feel good. A vastu space put me at ease.
It was clear that a room's new character affected me on some deep level, where it didn't matter if I liked the Victorian-style chairs or Euro-style sofa (I prefer traditional Indian decor). When I sat on a chair or a cushion and just gazed around a once familiar space, I slowly filtered in the changes in little details. A carved deity now faced a different direction or had been removed to a new location in another room. New plants that were often imbued with spiritual meaning were now arranged in the room and seemed perfectly right, as if they grew there.

In late 1997, my time in India was unexpectedly cut short. A serious personal matter rushed me back to New York City. When I returned to Manhattan, I discovered that feng shui, the Chinese art of placement, had become wildly popular. This ancient theory of design, which evolved from Taoism and Buddhism around the sixth century BC, seemed vaguely related to vastu. But no one had heard of vastu, which a few Indian authorities date back to 5000 BC or earlier (exact dates are not known). What made this seem so remarkable was that yoga had been popular in the States for so many years. And ayurvedathe Hindu science of life introduced through the works of Deepak Chopra and otherswas also making its mark. Doctors and hospitals were even picking up on it, and companies were flooding the American market with "new" ayurveda-based remedies. Ashrams and retreats, ayurveda clinics, yoga and meditation centersclearly Americans were interested in things Indian. At the very least, I thought, these folks would be interested to know that they could be enhancing the benefits of all these other Hindu disciplines by practicing them in a setting that followed vastu guidelines.

 
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