What to know
- Feng shui is an ancient practice that measures how environmental forces interact within a space, using tools like a nine-grid system and compass to understand energy flow in the home.
- Dogs and cats have different feng shui needs. Dogs do best near their owners with a clear line of sight, while cats prefer warm, enclosed, and elevated spaces where they can retreat or observe their surroundings.
- Food, water, and rest areas should be thoughtfully placed. Feng shui practitioners recommend keeping food and water bowls separate and avoiding sudden changes to sleeping areas, as disrupting familiar setups can cause stress or behavioural changes in pets.
A Toronto-based home wellness designer is sharing how Torontonians can design their home to enhance their pet’s energy using traditional Feng Shui principles.
Like humans, pets have nervous systems too – and your home design can definitely affect them. Traditional Feng Shui, an ancient Chinese practice of anchoring environmental forces to harmonize the flow of energy, also focuses on your pet’s wellness in your home.
With the Feng Shui New Year coming up on Feb. 4, Torontonians are seeking to enter the fire horse year (yang energy) in a stabilized environment after following 2025’s wood snake year – an energy-consuming year that required lots of self-reflection.
What is Feng Shui?
Home wellness designer Tasia Keeng shares that Feng Shui measures space, like in a home.
Feng – meaning wind, and Shui – meaning water, translates to the life force of the planet. Keeng adds that these two elements, Feng Shui – where life waters the planet, are crucial to help pets flourish in their home.
There are two types of Feng Shui: western, which emphasizes symbolism, and the one Keeng specializes in: traditional. With this form of Feng Shui, she reports on her clients’ needs through a mathematical report of their space.
How does it work?
She checks the space’s environment, if it’s near nature or a water source, then she creates a nine-grid system with the number of floors in their home in each square, which allows her to mathematically calculate energy interaction.
To do this, she uses the Baku compass, which, beyond the compass in the middle, has many circular grids with writing and lines.
Keeng compares the Baku compass to the yin-yang of the binary mathematical system, revolving around Earth’s magnetic fields interacting with the sun and other energy fields, such as electromagnetic forces, atomic structures, and more.
Feng Shui matters for both the owner and pet
She highlights that a major force pets feed off of is their owners. So, she said, the first thing to do is to “ask yourself what calms you, and in which room it will calm you?”
Torontonians might wonder why their space around them is chaotic, for example glass breaking every time they enter the kitchen. Well, Keeng explains that’s their seven senses activating. Their nervous system doesn’t like something about the room, and if they walk through a cold patch, their brain interacts with something else, destabilizes them, and breaks the glass.
Another issue involving an animal is the energy around the pet owner, how they absorb it, and how that transfers to the pet. “If you moved into a condominium where the people around there were not pet-friendly, and people are giving you dirty looks… You feel very unwelcome. Your pets feel unwelcome, and you go in and out, and you’re having anxiety,” Keeng said.
Consult a professional
Keeng explains a situation where a pet owner attempted to fix her home’s energy solely by reading articles about Feng Shui.
The pet owner had read an article about moving the dog bed to a different space for better airflow, but after that change, her dog stopped eating and sleeping and started jumping on the bed and barking continuously.
Keeng explained that this small change unintentionally disrupted her client’s dog’s nervous system, as it was used to sleeping in a dog bed near her for eight years.
“There’s always a reason why a fur baby reacts a certain way,” Keeng said.
A cat’s and dog’s needs
To explain why the case above distressed the dog’s Feng Shui, dogs are beings that require social interaction. They especially need to be near their owners and have a line of sight to them.
Comparatively, a cat is quite the opposite. They need to feel that they have their own space – to lie in or hide. That’s why cats tend to hide in small spaces like closets. They also like to climb on things to have an overview of the world – so for them, an open space is more detrimental to their energy. Another thing cats love: warmth – so a fireplace or heating blanket is always ideal for their Feline Feng Shui.
“Animals are more finely attuned in the environment, and so they kind of react to it a lot faster than we do,” Keeng said.
How to apply Feng Shui for pets
As traditional Feng Shui focuses on calculations using the five elements: Water, Wood, Fire, Metal, Earth, it’s important to realize how the frequencies react with each other. The frequencies can act in one of three ways: in a productive way, where elements work with each other; weakening, backwards in the cycle; or be a destructive cycle, for example, water putting out a fire or fire melting metal.
Dr. Rona Sherebrin has been applying her knowledge of Feng Shui in her veterinary practice for years, especially since its opening three years ago at Toronto Integrative Animal Health.
She first incorporated Feng Shui into the clinic by placing the examination areas, lighting, and ventilation to make her patients feel as calm and relaxed as possible. “It can be a very scary process coming to a clinic, especially when a pet is sick, so we do our very best to make sure that our approach is very gentle… even to the colour that I chose for the walls of the clinic,” Sherebrin said.
She recommends that some Feng Shui practices be used in their homes, too. When it comes to a pet’s diet, it’s crucial to have a water fountain that’s impeccably clean, as are the dishes too.
Keeng adds that the placement of the food and water bowls is just as important. Using the knowledge from the elements, the food (Earth) should be separated from the water (water bowl). Veterinarians, rescues, and Feng Shui practitioners alike say the same thing.
When put together, it creates a stagnant energy that disrupts the cat’s instinct to avoid drinking water, leading it to drink water placed together to avoid contamination from “prey.”
A Feng Shui practice Sherebrin recommends for cats and dogs is to provide enough space for them to circulate and enhance the flow of energy. “Things like having assistive devices for elderly pets, like little steps or blocks to get up on furniture, to be able to move freely throughout the house,” Sherebrin said.
To help identify such needs, Keeng asks Feng Shui home design seekers for details on where the pet spends most of its time, whether it barks or meows at a certain spot, and similar questions.
At the end of the day, Keeng resumes that Feng Shui is designed to help Torontonians “feel loved, safe, and secure in [their] environment.”
It’s not a one-size-fits-all; not because something is facing north that it’s immediately right. The room should be designed to meet each individual’s needs, because everyone is different.
