Tess Whitehurst - The Art of Bliss: Finding Your Center, Getting in the Flow, and Creating the Life You Desire

Tess Whitehurst is an intuitive counselor, energy worker, feng shui consultant, and speaker. She has appeared on the Bravo TV show Flipping Out , and her writing has been featured in such places as the AOL welcome page, Llewellyns annuals, and the Whole Life Times blog. To learn about her workshops, writings, and appearances, and to sign up for her free monthly newsletter, visit her online:

www.tesswhitehurst.com

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Art of Bliss: Finding Your Center, Getting in the Flow, and Creating the Life You Desire 2012 by Tess Whitehurst.

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First e-book edition 2012

E-book ISBN: 9780738732756

Book design and edit by Rebecca Zins

Cover sea: iStockphoto.conm/BingoPixel

Cover design by Lisa Novak

Interior flower ornament from the Fleurons of Hope font

Interior floor plan illustrations by the Llewellyn Art Department

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Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

I am so excited about this book!

Since authors do such things in introductions, let me begin by telling you about the events leading up to its birth.

About fourteen years ago, I had a really great translation of the I Ching. I have since lost it, and I cant remember which one it was, but I do remember the consistently clear and illuminating readings I experienced with it. At the time, I didnt know much about its origins (other than that Carl Jung liked it, which is why I picked up a copy), but I did know that I loved it. I had already been enthusiastically studying Wicca and natural magic, and I found that the I Ching helped me connect with the same type of energy I connected with during ritualsin essence, the divine energy that inspired me, uplifted me, united me with my intuition and guidance, and allowed me to consciously shift my life conditions for the better.

Five years later, I became interested in feng shui and attended the Western School of Feng Shui in San Diego. Once again, the eight trigramsthe three-line symbols that create the backbone of the I Chingappeared, this time imbedded within the hexagrams (the six-line symbols, or groupings of two trigrams) that make up the feng shui floor plan, or bagua. After learning about each life area and how it was associated with an element of nature as denoted in the I Ching (which I now knew was perhaps the oldest of all known books and the backbone of Chinese philosophy), I began to recognize the spiraling interplay of these same energies in the physical world, and I began to realize that these visible manifestations were connected to the invisible dynamics at work in my (and everyones) life.

This realization was life altering. Before the realization, I had a sort of free-floating anxiety that felt like I was driving a car but couldnt see out the windshield. After the realizationwhen I saw that everything going on in my internal world affects everything in my external world (and vice versa), and when I had tools that could help me understand and work with this connection in a powerful wayI felt so much safer and more grounded. Now these two formerly disparate aspects of lifeseen and unseen, known and unknown, fleeting and eternalwere united in my consciousness. And this felt truer, more real, and infinitely more empowering.

The more I worked with the nine areas of the bagua (or feng shui floor plan), the more I came to recognize them as far more than just simple areas of the home or answers in an I Ching reading. I saw very clearly that they comprise nine life keys that we can consciously activate and balance in order to bring harmony and success into every area of our lives. And perhaps the most exciting thing of all is that there is no end to the wisdom that they contain. The wisdom spirals endlessly and appears in an infinite number of facets and variations, not just in our homes, but also in our minds, bodies, emotions, and life conditions. Whats more, these keys are not exclusive to any one culture or tradition. Once you learn to recognize their energy, you will see that they are universal energies that can correspond with any spiritual system, healing modality, or cosmology.

Still, as a feng shui consultant and teacher, and later as a metaphysical author and lecturer, I soon learned that, while most people deeply crave the wisdom behind these nine life keys, the depth of it was often lost in the translation. In my consultations and lectures, although I often got carried away discussing the dynamics and nuances of this wisdom, I felt that I only had the time to barely scratch the surfaceto give some general information but not to teach these keys as the kaleidoscopic, scintillating language of the spirit that they really are. In other words, while I so desperately wanted to share the gift of this way of seeing and interacting with the world, I could only go so far.

Which brings me to why I am so excited about this book. It is designed so that you will not just read about the nine life keys, but you will also experience them: recognize them in your life, see them visibly at work in your home and in the natural world, learn how each key interacts with each other key, and consciously work with them to create lasting and satisfying positive change in your life. And believe me, your life will never be the same. You, too, will finally be able to see through the windshield to infinity while you maneuver the temporal vehicle that is your current life experience. As you observe that you reside in both worlds simultaneously (infinite and temporal/heaven and earth), you will find that you always have the power to change your outlook and your life conditions for the better, no matter what. You will also find that the wisdom of the nine life keys will endlessly gain depth and dimension as you progress through life, spiraling you deeper and deeper into the heart of the mystery and into bliss.

I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with truly a meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.