In this episode of Mind Power Meets Mystic, co-hosts Cinthia Varkevisser, the resident spiritual shit disturber, and Michelle Walters, an executive coach and hypnotherapist, welcome special guest Marie Bowser. Marie is a licensed acupuncturist, feng shui consultant, and expert in the five elements. She shares how her journey from engineering to Chinese medicine deepened her understanding of holistic healing, including the integration of feng shui into her practice.

Marie discusses the spiritual foundations of her feng shui practice, Black Sect Buddhist feng shui, which emphasizes intention and spiritual cultivation. Learn how your home can become a sacred altar and how small, intentional shifts can supercharge your life. The conversation dives into topics like nine-star ki astrology, connecting home energy with personal growth, and the overlap between acupuncture and feng shui.

Michelle also shares her experience working with Marie in a remote feng shui consultation, highlighting the transformational power of intentional home design.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

1. The basics of Black Sect Buddhist feng shui and how it differs from traditional practices.
2. How feng shui connects spiritual cultivation with intentional home energy.
3. An introduction to nine-star ki astrology and its role in understanding personal energy dynamics.
4. Practical steps to amplify specific areas of your home for personal growth, harmony, or manifestation.
5. How to work with a feng shui consultant remotely and what to expect in a session.

About Our Guest:

Marie Bowser is a licensed acupuncturist, feng shui consultant, and expert in the five elements. With a background in engineering, Marie shifted careers to focus on holistic healing through Chinese medicine. Her work integrates acupuncture, Qigong, the I Ching, and nine-star ki astrology to help clients align their homes and lives with their deepest intentions.

Connect with Marie:

• Website: https://thewayofease.com/
• Free Training: Introduction to the Five Elements (available soon!)
• Feng Shui Consultations: Remote and in-person sessions available.

About the Hosts:

Cinthia Varkevisser is a spiritual shit disturber, intuitive guide, and mystic teacher who helps clients break through personal stories to uncover their truth.

Michelle Walters is an executive coach and hypnotherapist who uses hypnosis and strategic coaching to help clients overcome subconscious blocks and achieve unstoppable momentum.

Special Offering:

Cinthia and Michelle's Mind Power Meets Mystic Project

A transformative one-hour Zoom session combining intuitive guidance with hypnosis. Work with Cinthia to identify and release or amplify a core issue, followed by a custom hypnosis session with Michelle. Includes actionable recommendations, a recorded hypnosis MP3, and more.

Contact Cinthia or Michelle via email (details in the show notes) to book your session.

Episode Highlights:

• 03:15 – Introducing Marie Bowser and her journey from engineering to holistic healing.
• 10:20 – What is Black Sect Buddhist feng shui?
• 18:45 – How nine-star ki astrology blends with feng shui and personal energy.
• 26:30 – Michelle’s personal experience with a remote feng shui session.
• 35:50 – Practical feng shui tips for amplifying home energy.
• 44:15 – How acupuncture and feng shui align as healing modalities.

Connect with Us:

Connect with Us:

• Cinthia Varkevisser: Website | Social Media
• Michelle Walters: Website | Social Media

Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with anyone curious about aligning their home, energy, and life.

Michelle Walters: Welcome to Mind Power Meets Mystic, the show where practical mind power and mystical wisdom collide with humor and wild curiosity. Yeah, we're not here to play it safe.

Cinthia Varkevisser: I'm Cinthia Varkevisser, your resident spiritual shit disturber. I stir things up with mystic power and bold action.

Michelle Walters: And I'm Michelle Walters, executive coach and hypnotherapist. I bring strategy and transformative hypnosis to help you turn subconscious blocks into unstoppable momentum.

Cinthia Varkevisser: Let's shake up your thinking, dive into your soul, and make bold moves in your life.

Michelle Walters: We'll take you on a journey of breakthroughs and aha moments, exploring spirit, business, love, relationships, and self-expansion. We're connecting you with your highest self and flipping fear into strength.

Cinthia Varkevisser: So buckle up. We're doing this one wild, transformative conversation at a time.

Both: Let's go!

Michelle Walters: Welcome, everyone. You are here for this week's episode of Mind Power Meets Mystic. I am Michelle Walters, the mind power part of our show. I am a hypnotherapist and human development coach. I am here with my podcast pal, Cinthia. Cinthia is our show mystic.

We are excited to have a guest—a very special guest and a good friend of mine—on today's show. Her name is Marie Bowser. Marie Bowser is a feng shui consultant, an expert in the five elements, and a licensed acupuncturist. She credits her past life as an engineer with causing stress-related health issues, and ultimately sending her on a journey to study Chinese medicine. Once she dove in, she didn't want to come back out.

In addition to Chinese medicine, she has the privilege of bringing together feng shui, Qigong, the I Ching, and nine-star ki astrology to help people achieve freedom, ease, and joy in their bodies and lives.

Cinthia Varkevisser: Welcome, Marie.

Marie Bowser: Thank you, Michelle, thank you, Cinthia. It's fun to be here this morning.

Michelle Walters: So I met Marie maybe nine months or a year ago, something like that, out there networking. Marie knows lots of people I know and is in a field that I think is absolutely fascinating, which is Chinese medicine and acupuncture. And I've been to see her in aces. Gotta go for that.

But I was so excited when Marie told me that she is creating an extension to her business and going into a topic that Cinthia and I find fascinating, that we've always wanted to have somebody on our show to talk to us about but never found the right guest. And then up here came Marie.

Marie's new business is... well, tell us, Marie, tell us about the extension to your business that you're starting now.

Marie Bowser: Yeah, well, one of the things that I love about Chinese medicine is that it's a never-ending possibility for what to learn and study, right? I can study diagnosis, acupuncture, herbs, and then there's this whole esoteric kind of peripheral content.

And feng shui is one of those things that's sort of like on the periphery of Chinese medicine. Some would even say it's part of Chinese medicine, right? Your whole entire life, you are not just a walking knee. You're not just a walking lung with allergies. You are a whole system, an ecosystem that's influenced by your relationships, by the foods that you eat, by the weather, and your home.

And you know, I encountered feng shui when I was in school. A friend of mine was practicing, and I was just starting to think about how my business was going to work, because I knew as an acupuncturist I was going to start my own business, and my husband and I were having some stress about it, you know, like money conversations.

And she helped me with some feng shui remedies to bring in a little bit more harmony, bring a little bit more strength to my own voice and my own vision. And it caught my attention. I mean, the things that I experienced with that were enough to just keep me going. And through the years, I would use feng shui in my home and in my business. And finally, I got to a point where I just wanted to deep dive in a little deeper.

Michelle Walters: Yeah.

Marie Bowser: Um, so yeah, one of the things... Yeah, my husband's an architect. That's the other thing that is interesting about my relationship with him, and the thing that made me enthusiastic about this particular style of feng shui that I practice is that it relies more on intention and kind of like spiritual cultivation than others.

And so if someone is less excited about traditional feng shui remedies—like he's very aesthetically simple in his style—I found it to be exciting and fun for coming up with creative ways of dealing with creating shifts in your home.

Cinthia Varkevisser: Yeah.

Marie Bowser: Did I answer the question? I think I just meandered a little bit, but yeah, it's really...

Michelle Walters: The thing that I really like about what you're talking about, especially bringing your husband in as an architect. Just for our listeners, traditional feng shui relies on a compass and direction. Your form of practice is that, because it's spiritually situated or, you know, spiritual cultivation, that you don't have to rely on the directions as much as you do traditionally, which means that the cures are different than what is done in traditional feng shui. Does that, for the listeners who don't know a lot about feng shui, does that sound good?

Marie Bowser: You know, there is the fun or like the palpable things we think of in feng shui. If someone wants to use crystals, we can do that. But I think the spiritual piece allows for a little more flexibility in how we work. And frankly, also, there's like a richness to it, or I would even say a quality of supercharging the work that you're doing.

When you add that spiritual layer, it's like it brings a little bit more of you, right, to what it is you're trying to shift. It's not just like, "Oh, I put two crystals in the relationship corner." It's like, "And I've added my prayers to it." That’s, it's like, beautiful.

Cinthia Varkevisser: It's a focus of energy and intention, yeah?

Marie Bowser: Yes, and in a way, what I like about it is it turns your whole home into an altar.

Michelle Walters: Yes.

Marie Bowser: Like every inch of your space has the potential to be a place to practice spirituality.

Michelle Walters: I love that.

Michelle Walters: You’ve been listening to Mind Power Meets Mystic with me, Michelle Walters, and my co-host, Cinthia Varkevisser. We want to tell you about a special gig the two of us have going on. It’s called Mind Power Meets Mystic: The Project, and it starts off on a Zoom call with Cinthia.

Cinthia Varkevisser: So for the first half of our session, you will be with me, and Michelle will be very quietly in the background, preparing to do her work. What we will do is talk about the one thing that you either want to amp up or that you want to release. Through the intuitive work, I help you boil it down to its essence and then give you an RX of three practical things to do to set you on your way.

Michelle Walters: And then I magically appear!

Cinthia Varkevisser: What is it that you do, Michelle?

Michelle Walters: I have been listening in but not participating in the first half of the call. I have an excellent idea of what Cinthia means when she says something, and I have an excellent idea of quickly getting to what my client is all about and his or her individual strengths.

I turn all of this into a 20- to 30-minute hypnosis session in the second half of the call. When we're done, I strip off and send you an MP3 that you can listen to over and over again. You also will have Cinthia's three-point recommendations and the recording of the Zoom call. It is a fantastic one-hour offering, a great gift for yourself or for someone you don't know what to get.

We've gotten such insights, and we've gotten such great reviews. So if you're interested, send me or Cinthia an email. You'll find our contact information in the show notes, and we'll tell you how to get started.

Michelle Walters: And now, back to our episode with Marie Bowser, talking about feng shui.

Michelle Walters: Marie, you were saying that your style of feng shui allows people to focus their thoughts and prayers into meaningful areas of their homes.

Marie Bowser: Yes, it’s a place to put meaningful ideas, objects, energy, thoughts, prayers that help to focus and remind you consistently of the things you’re trying to manifest in your life.

I talk a fair amount about manifesting. I do some of this by saying, “Oh, I want this, so I’m going to put pictures of this here, so that every time I see them, it serves as that reminder.”

Michelle Walters: Yep, yep.

Marie Bowser: Really, what this is doing is giving somebody a framework or a lens to formalize it a little bit more. I also like to make sure people know, you need not commit to or be practicing any of these particular religions. If someone is atheist or very committed to a particular path and concerned about deviating outside of it, we can work with that.

There are things that we can do to create and cultivate that wise, connected place, and to draw in the tradition and beliefs that you work with in order to make the work work.

Cinthia Varkevisser: That’s beautiful because, right? Every piece of your house is sacred and intentional, like you said.

Michelle Walters: And Cinthia told me about your session together. I was really impressed with your commitment to amplifying whatever it is that Michelle wanted to do and then focusing on areas of the house.

A lot of people—because I do house clearings—they want to clear the whole house. And I get it, because for me, it’s about balancing everything so that it’s cohesive, so that you can move into every space of your house, which is different than being intentional and amplifying.

Can you tell us, first of all, without getting too nosy about Michelle’s place, how you work with amplification and honing in?

Marie Bowser: That’s such a good question. The thing is, people get excited and want to do everything all at once. But healing is piece by piece. It’s way too overwhelming otherwise.

Feng shui is a system of remedy—it’s like a healing modality. You diagnose a home much the same way you’d diagnose someone dealing with a physiological imbalance.

When someone says, “I want to work on these things,” you compare their concerns with the home and come up with a diagnosis. That’s how you determine the highest priority sectors of the Bagua map to focus on.

If you try to do everything at once, it takes a long time. Even implementing one session’s recommendations can take months.

Marie Bowser: And the needs of the person can change, right? What they’re dealing with can change. They implement a remedy, and then we see what happens. It’s like, “Okay, you’ve had one session of acupuncture. We used these needles. How did you feel this week? What happened?”

Someone might come back in a year and say, “These things have changed. There’s something new bubbling up. I have different goals.” Then we focus on different areas of the house.

The other thing that can influence feng shui is that one person’s feng shui in a home might not support the next person moving into it, right? We all have a blend of elements that we express, based on our birth date.

It’s something called nine-star ki astrology. So we also look at what potential concerns, superpowers, or challenges that person has the potential to deal with. Based on that, we determine which quadrant of the house might want to be augmented to give them a little bit of a leg up as they navigate their life path.

Michelle Walters: That’s fascinating. I have a question here that wasn’t really on my intended list, but since we’ve kind of gone there—and I know you know a lot about it—can you share with us just a couple more minutes about what nine-star ki astrology is? I know you use it in your other practices as well.

Marie Bowser: Yeah, so nine-star ki astrology is often referred to as “feng shui astrology,” and it works with the Bagua map.

For those familiar with feng shui, the Bagua is the nine-square grid we use to superimpose over a floor plan. I wish I had a visual to show you, but maybe I can share one with you later.

There are these solid and dashed lines, called trigrams, that are the basis of the I Ching. These trigrams represent the five elements, but in this system, we break them down further: there are yin and yang versions of wood, yin and yang versions of metal, fire, water, and two kinds of earth.

Each of these has an energetic signature, a quality that they bring forth in nature as well as in ourselves.

For example, Michelle, may I share one of yours?

Michelle Walters: Absolutely.

Marie Bowser: One of the energies you inhabit is something called “yang metal.” It’s very powerful, very royal. In terms of yin and yang, yin is often seen as feminine and yang is seen as masculine. So this energy has an archetypally masculine quality—very regal, very powerful.

Yang metal often deals with issues around money, generosity with money, stepping into one’s power, and holding power. The archetypal symbolic image is heaven—like the highest expression of what heaven could mean to someone, such as Heaven’s Mandate or divine rulership.

Cinthia Varkevisser: Wow.

Marie Bowser: And that’s just one kind of energy. I happen to have yin metal. It’s a little softer but still has that royalty theme. Yin metal leans more toward humanitarian concerns, energetically sensitive, and wanting everyone to feel welcome. It’s like Princess Diana—soft and gentle but regal.

Cinthia Varkevisser: Oh, yes. I think of Jane Goodall, too. She’s regal, but in a very soft way.

Marie Bowser: Exactly. I don’t know her nine-star ki, but I imagine there’s yin metal in there—concern for humanity and the earth, a deep connection to nature.

Michelle Walters: This is so interesting. Let’s bring it back to how you work with clients. Can you take a moment to describe your offerings? And then I’ll take a moment to describe my experience, because people should hear about it.

Marie Bowser: Sure. I’m an acupuncturist with a brick-and-mortar practice in Albany, California. I focus on treating depression, anxiety, stress, women’s health, perimenopause, menopause, burnout, and overwork—especially for women aged 40 to 60 who are reclaiming their energy after parenting or over-giving at work.

I also offer feng shui consultations, including a really fun 100-minute remote session. People might wonder, “How can you do that remotely?” We use a floor plan and a video tour. It’s very effective and allows for more affordable sessions.

Additionally, I’m rolling out a series of online programs. By the time this airs, your listeners will hopefully have access to a free training on the five elements—perfect for those who want to geek out on this stuff.

Michelle Walters: I was the lucky recipient of a Marie Bowser remote feng shui session, and it was great. Marie had me answer a questionnaire about my goals, and then I stole the floor plan from my apartment complex and sent her a video tour.

Marie reviewed everything, created a presentation, and walked me through her recommendations. She noticed what I was already doing well, pointed out areas to improve, and gave creative solutions for suboptimal spaces.

It left me feeling empowered and excited. Have I done all the things yet? No. But I did move the big plant by the front door to improve the chi flow, and it felt good!

Cinthia Varkevisser: Marie, I’m so thankful for getting to know you and learning more about your offerings. Michelle and I are so glad we hosted you today on Mind Power Meets Mystic.

Michelle Walters: Yes, thank you!

Marie Bowser: Thank you both so much for having me. This was fun.

Michelle Walters: We’ll include your links and offers in the show notes for our listeners.

Cinthia Varkevisser: Absolutely. Thank you, Marie!

Marie Bowser: Thank you!