GEOMANCY
FENG SHUI: THE BAGUA MAP Each room in your home represents a different aspect of your life, which means that your happiness is largely dependent on your home decorating skills. Samantha Wong reports
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Photos courtesy of unsplash.com
n order to successfully apply feng shui in your home, you need to determine where each room is located on the bagua map. This is simple enough to do but first you need to decide whether you are going to follow the Western (BTB) bagua or the traditional bagua. Both BTB and traditional baguas are divided into nine squares (see the BTB map overleaf), with each square representing a different aspect of your life – wealth, fame and reputation, love and marriage etc. Each square also corresponds with one of the five elements and a colour or colours. Simply put, the bagua connects aspects of your life with areas in your home. This allows you to work on specific areas in your life by improving the energy in the corresponding area of your home. You can do a BTB bagua reading in three easy steps. Step 1: Draw the BTB bagua map on tracing paper. Step 2: Superimpose your map over your floor plan, aligning the bottom
row of your map with the wall of your front door. Step 3: Note down which parts of your home ‘fall under’ and are therefore governed by which sections of the bagua map. A traditional bagua reading works in much the same way, except it takes the points of the compass into account. You need to take the compass reading of your front door in order to line up a traditional bagua map with your floor plan. If your floor plan is not a perfect square or rectangle, sections of the bagua will be foreshortened or missed out altogether, and you’ll have to work at filling in the space (and therefore the energy) that is lacking. Remedies include introducing potted plants to activate the area or hanging crystals, especially when there is a window. If a whole section is missing, place mirrors on both walls of the interior corner to expand the area. Extensions, like a bay window or balcony, are a positive in feng shui
even if they fall outside the bagua map. This is because they extend the good energy that you are creating within your home.
Plotting your course In many ways a bagua reading is so literal, you can work out how to boost the energy in a room intuitively. Worried about your health? Revamp the decor in the centre of your home (which falls under the health section of the bagua map). Hoping to travel again soon? Decorate the travel corner of your home (bottom right on the map) with photos of the countries you want to visit. Sex life in need of a boost? Place candles and flowers in the love and marriage section of your home (top right). But there’s more to the bagua than that. You’ll see from the map below that each bagua square corresponds not only with an aspect of your life but also with one of the five elements. So, once you know where a room fits in the bagua map, you’ll know which
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