More Americans Are Making Space for Vastu

Now that we’ve learned how to pronounce feng shui and hung mirrors and crystals all over our houses, there’s another even more ancient domestic science winging its way from East to West promising harmony and prosperity. Can you say vastu?

Dig out your compass and clear the coffee table for two new books out this fall explaining the intricacies of a Hindu system of philosophy based on the belief that we can improve our lives by rearranging the spaces where we live and work.

Vastu principles date back thousands of years to the Vedic civilization. Vastu is practiced widely in India, where there are vastu experts with weekly TV shows and well-known vastu consultants with long waiting lists.

The philosophy uses the five basic elements--space, air, fire, water and earth--to align spaces to maintain harmony with nature. Like feng shui (pronounced “fung schway,” for those who may not have been paying attention), the Chinese art of placement, vastu teaches practitioners to examine their environments and make the most of cosmic influences on their homes.

Feng shui, which has inspired harmony-seeking Americans to install fountains in their living rooms and hang mirrors over their stoves, is believed by scholars to be a distant cousin of vastu. Both practices are based on a set of principles that are meant to restore the balance in the home and bring success, happiness and spiritual well-being.

Placement is everything in vastu: Location. Location. Location. Put the photos of your grandparents in the southwest section of the house, because this is where you can tap into their wisdom. Paint your home office yellow to stimulate creative thinking. Don’t put your guest room over your veranda or basement, unless you want guests to suffer from mental instability. Site the living room on the west part of the house to promote memory and intelligence and enliven social activities.

In India, bookstores carry shelves full of books on vastu and its holistic effect on architecture and design. But until now, there wasn’t much material on vastu available in the West.

Two books, both written by women who have spent many years living in India, are being published within a few months of each other. Kathleen Cox, a journalist who has written about India extensively for Fodor’s travel guides, has penned “Vastu Living: Creating a Home for the Soul” (Marlowe & Co., $16.95, 247 pages). The “Vastu Vidya Handbook” (Three Rivers Press, $18.95, 160 pages) by Juliet Pegrum, a London-born textile designer, is due in December. Both women are vastu consultants in New York.

Cox has been living in India on and off since 1985. She became intrigued with vastu when she noticed her Indian friends rearranging rooms in their houses to achieve what they said was a more grounded inner peace.

“I always felt good in those houses,” says Cox. When she returned to America a few years ago, she noticed that so many New Yorkers were stressed out and complaining that they could not relax. And she also noted the rise of interest in yoga, holistic healing and Indian philosophy, as well as feng shui. “I thought that vastu could help people who had a lack of calm and tranquillity.” So she returned to India with the purpose of writing a vastu book.

Cox lives in a one-bedroom apartment in New York’s Gramercy Park, arranged in accordance with the codes of vastu. She has created a zone of tranquillity in the northeast corner, the direction of enlightenment. Here at her desk, she says, she can look at a beautiful plant, a photo of her daughter and the man she is about to marry, photos of friends and three tiny glass parrots from India. “Put your personality on display, and your guests will feel comfortable in the presence of the one who lives there.”

Pegrum spends several months each year in India working on textile projects and studying vastu. She says the growing interest in Eastern philosophy in America and worldwide encouraged her to write the handbook. As for the inevitable “son of feng shui” labels, Pegrum believes that people can practice both feng shui and vastu. And Cox says that the two approaches have similar goals but that vastu explores spirituality more deeply.

“You don’t need to go out and buy any wind chimes,” says Cox. “Just buy into the belief that you can manipulate your space. And believe that it makes sense to have your home in harmony with the rhythms of the universe.”