THERE was a time when Liu Ming, a teacher of Chinese traditional medicine and feng shui in Oakland, Calif., did a few hundred prostrations a day as part of his practice of Tibetan Buddhism — full prostrations, that is, in which you begin standing and end with your head on the floor. That wouldn’t work these days, as Mr. Liu’s meditation area is on top of an eight-foot cube in his loft. Were he to stand up, Mr. Liu would hit his head on the ceiling.

To move about the meditation area, which also serves as a tearoom, Mr. Liu has to slouch or crawl. That’s fine with him: In a traditional Japanese tearoom, the ceilings are so low you have to crawl in, he says; you were meant to feel humble. Also, says Mr. Liu, who routinely goes into teaching mode, the doors of a Japanese tearoom were designed to be small, to prevent samurai warriors from entering with their swords, or at least to prevent them from drawing their swords.

All very interesting, but in a large, open loft, why would anyone want to build a cube that contains a sleeping area and a study as well as a meditation room? “Having lived in a loft for five or six years,” Mr. Liu says, “I absolutely love it.”

When he visits friends who live in large apartments, he says, “I get back pain, I think, ‘Why do you have such low ceilings?’ ”But roomier spaces have one drawback, he continues: “There is no cozy.”Since when is “cozy” a feng shui concept?

“In feng shui, we talk about the harmony in the place that you live in,” Mr. Liu says. “The cube evolved out of wanting cozy with the option of keeping a big, open space at the same time. And we added wheels for feng shui purposes. Now that it is portable, I can spin it on an axis, I can point my head and point my desk in different compass directions for different projects. If I am writing something and feel blocked, I can get up and move the room.”

Now he’s got the writer’s attention. Does it help?

“Yeah, it does,” Mr. Liu says. “And it’s playful.”

Do not underestimate the importance of playful when talking to Mr. Liu, who is not of the deadly earnest school of Eastern teacher.

Can you really make a living by teaching Chinese medicine and feng shui? he is asked.

“Yeah,” he says, “Of course, you have to live in Berkeley.”

Mr. Liu is 63 and has studied Tibetan Buddhism and other Eastern religions since he was an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (which he dropped out of, in keeping with the spirit of the ’60s).

When you see him, it is immediately evident that, despite his name, he is not Chinese. His given name is Charles Belyea, and he was born in Boston, of French-Canadian parents. His father was a businessman, and his parents spent so much time competing as ballroom dancers that Mr. Liu tells people he was raised by Fred and Ginger. The name Liu Ming was given to him by a Daoist teacher who “adopted” him when he was 31. (In keeping with the Chinese custom, his last name, Liu, comes first.)

But back to the cube: Mr. Liu and his architect, Toshi Kasai, have come to regard it as a living thing and, indeed, it has an umbilical cord: a broad, red cable connecting it to an electrical source.

“The extension is the cube’s lifeline,” Mr. Kasai says. “We wanted that cable to look like a little tail. We wanted to make sure the cube looked alive, charged by something.”

MR. LIU first became interested in the idea of using a cube to organize his living space a number of years ago, when he saw an article about a couple in Europe who had bought a barn because they needed space for a workshop, but who wanted a separate area for themselves and their children.

“They’d built a plywood cube,” he said. “There were touch doors you could open up, and a kitchen and a staircase that went to a second level, where the kids had their space. I thought it was brilliant, and it was so flexible, I tore it out and stuck it in a notebook.”

Mr. Liu moved into his apartment, an 1,100-square-foot loft in a former factory, for which he pays around $1,650 a month, about seven years ago.

Since the loft is used for living and teaching, he put up a shoji screen to separate his bedroom and private meditation space from his teaching area. But visitors, he says, were always poking their heads in, and he wanted something that would give him more privacy. Also, when classes were large, there was no way to increase the floor space.