VINCENT J. Lin’s greatest joy is helping people become happier. The 42-year-old New Yorker might not have expected though that he would find his passion and inner peace in Shanghai as a feng shui and meditation teacher.

An American of Chinese ancestry, Lin moved to Shanghai about 12 years ago. He speaks only simple Mandarin but leads a more Oriental lifestyle than many locals. He loves the fragrance of aged Pu’er tea, the scent of incense as well as the sight of symmetry and harmony.

“The reason I learned about the0se things is very natural. Most people think it’s interesting, but for me it’s ... because I can sense things that not everybody can sense,” Lin says.

With these “super senses,” Lin claims he can detect properties in food without tasting them, as well as character traits and health complaints in people.

For Lin, this self-knowledge came to light many years ago during a chance visit to a crystal shop. Someone put a crystal sphere in his hand and asked if he could feel anything. “I thought it was funny,” he recalls.

Nevertheless, he closed his eyes and tried to feel something. “And I could. I felt a kind of vibration just like when you put your hand in front of a speaker,” he says.

Lin explains that everyone is capable of feeling such vibrations in crystals — traditionally, crystals are thought to contain mystical energy in both Eastern and Western cultures — albeit at different degrees of intensity.

“A very big key is how relaxed you are. Some people who smoke or drink coffee are tenser, while some are more relaxed, which would make them easier to sense (vibrations) even without much practice,” he says. “So meditation is very important. When you calm down and empty yourself, you can sense other things.”

This experienced opened a new world of mysticism for Lin. Afterward, he says he started to develop his extra-sensory abilities by studying meditation, yoga, tea and feng shui, an ancient Chinese practice that attempts to dispel negative energy by placing beings in harmony with their environment.

“It’s all about whether you are able to relax enough to sense,” he says. “Most people could sense things but they just never think about it and never do it. Or maybe they never have someone that can show them how to.”

Lin sees religions, philosophies, yoga and feng shui as all paths leading toward a happy, harmonious life. And the thread connecting these various paths is meditation.

When meditating, Lin encourages people to empty themselves. “The situation for most people is that they never get to zero; they are always floating up and down like they are on the sea, never reaching stability,” he says. “Meditation helps us become zero. The more we become zero, the more we can see things clearly.”

However, in this fast-paced modern world people seldom have time to slow down and clear their minds. One of Lin’s students once asked him an interesting question: Is it better for modern people to be able to meditate or to be active and productive?

Many people think you can only be one or the other, but according to Lin: “You can stay still or move quickly when you want to. This is a skill in life people should learn when the situation is correct. I think it’s the key to a happy life.”

After studying meditation, Lin began to study feng shui under a master with decades of experience in the field.

While a portion of his feng shui knowledge is derived from reading texts such as the “I Ching,” (“The Book of Changes”), an ancient Chinese text which outlines the basic concepts of feng shui, Lin says most of what he knows about this time-honored practice comes from his mentor and was gleaned through personal experience. With time, Lin says he has also learned how to use his alleged heightened senses to deploy his feng shui learning in different situations.

“My teacher doesn’t have my ability to sense things, but he’s got experience and knows the logic,” Lin says. “Since he’s been doing it for a very long time, he has something to reference.”

But as Lin moved deeper into a realm of heightened senses and unseen forces, it wasn’t always easy to communicate his experiences. Even with his own mother.

“At the beginning, I didn’t tell her because I had no way to explain,” says Lin.

One day though, on a trip back to New York, Lin explained to his mother that he could see and feel things that were hidden to many people. The first thing his mother did, says Lin, was presenting him with some 20 different teas and asking him to describe their taste without drinking them.

According to Lin, his answers were accurate. “For each one, I told her how it would taste. Sometimes the most difficult people to convince are your parents. And now she believes me and can see that I’m helping people.”

The help that Lin provides now in Shanghai centers on giving his students the skills to bring positive energy into their homes and lives through practices like feng shui and meditation.

Having engaged in feng shui for more than a decade, Lin is happy to share his knowledge. His first book, “Headache Free for Me,” is now available to purchase as a digital download. The book explains how feng shui techniques can be used to reduce headaches. It also offers a number of easy, practical methods to relieve and prevent headaches efficiently and naturally.

Lin says the book draws from the natural and medical sciences as it explains how to relax one’s body and mind through massage, air pressure, nutrition and feng shui, among other things.

“The inspiration for the book is feng shui, but the information is supported by medicine,” Lin says. “People might have doubts about me as I’m not a doctor, but I advise them to read the book and then talk with their doctors. I care about what the doctors think, so I wrote this book very carefully.”

Avoiding headaches is just one step toward leading a carefree life. The feng shui teacher’s true focus and ultimate goal is to help people improve all aspects of their lives by harnessing good energy. This wide-ranging topic, Lin says, will be the subject of his next book.

“With all these wonderful things — feng shui, tea, meditation or yoga — what connects them all is the ability to help people live lives that are filled with happiness, blessings and radiance,” he says.