My journey with feng shui didn’t begin with books, or courses, or a teacher sitting across from me in a quiet studio.
It began with my mother.
She never called it feng shui. She never used that word. But looking back now, everything she did — the way she arranged the furniture, the plants she kept near the entrance, the things she refused to bring into the house, the rituals she quietly observed around the home — it was all feng shui. She just lived it, naturally, the way you live something that has been passed down so many times it stops having a name.
This is very much a Filipino story.
The Philippines is a deeply Catholic country, and yet its culture is woven through with Chinese influence — in the food, in the language, in the traditions families carry from generation to generation without always knowing where they came from. Feng shui is one of those things. It found its way into Filipino homes not through study, but through practice. Through mothers and grandmothers who knew, without explanation, that certain arrangements brought ease and others brought tension. That a home could welcome life in — or quietly push it away.
I grew up inside that knowing.
And then, forty years ago, I moved to Sweden.
I carried very little with me — but I carried this. The instinct my mother had given me. The quiet awareness of how a space feels, how energy moves through a room, how the places we inhabit shape the people we become.
In Sweden, something shifted. Away from the familiar, I found myself reaching deeper into what I had always sensed but never fully examined. I began to study — really study — the philosophy, the principles, the ancient wisdom behind what my mother had always simply practiced. I read. I observed. I applied. And year after year, decade after decade, the understanding grew.
What started as a culture became a calling.
What I learned from my mother without words, I have spent forty years learning to put into language — so I can share it with you.
That is why I study feng shui. Not just as a discipline, but as a living inheritance. A thread that connects the home I grew up in, the country I came from, and the life I have built — across oceans, across traditions, across time.
This is what Feng Shui Insights by Ophiria is about. Not just the principles of feng shui — but the living, breathing, deeply human story behind them.
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