The Feng Shui Bagua

A feng shui bagua is an elaborate map that details the relationships between areas of your life and the areas of your home. This map can be used to view something as large as your home, or as small as your desk. Either way this map allows you to affect your surroundings in a positive way, and can also show you what is wrong with your environment.

The feng shui bagua map has nine different areas that relate to the areas of your life. Sometimes these areas are labeled a little bit differently from feng shui practioner to feng shui practitioner, but generally these areas are wealth, family, self-understanding, fame, health & balance, career, relationships, children & creativity, and helpful friends & travel. In traditional Chinese feng shui, the bagua map is in the shape of an octagon, but it is easier to use if you stretch out the corners to make it a square with nine equal parts. Since our houses, rooms and even desks are in square shapes this makes the map easier to follow and use. If you start at the top left hand side and work your way across from left to right, the areas are, wealth, fame and relationships.

The middle three squares going from left to right represent the areas, family, health & balance, and children & creativity. The final line of squares from left to right represent the areas, self-understanding, career, and helpful friends & travel. If you were to lay a copy of the bagua map over a small map of the rooms in your home, it would give you a very good idea about why certain things are happening in your life. According to the practice of feng shui, the way items are arranged in a room, and where that room is located according to the bagua map, can affect the area(s) of your life represented on the bagua map. For example, if your bathroom is in your wealth area, you'll most likely have a problem hanging onto your money. In fact it will seem like as soon as you get some it just disappears. This may be because it's being flushed or drained away every time you use your bathroom, at least in an energetic sense.

Creating a bagua map is simple and they are relatively easy to use as well. One of the best ways is to draw the map on tracing paper so you can then lay it out over a map that you draw with all the rooms of your home. This way you can see what in your home is in what relationship area of your map. Since most homes are not in a perfect square, you are going to have situations where more than one room is in more than one square or relationship area, or where areas on your bagua map are missing altogether. When this happens there are feng shui corrections you can make to bring your home into harmony. If for example, you are missing the children and creativity area, that in fact it is outside your home, but still on your property there are cures. Maybe you've been trying to have a child and have had no luck. According to the principles of feng shui, this might be why. So, in order to correct that you might put something that represents children in that area, maybe a wood or metal carving of a child, or even some toys. This would help to correct for not having that bagua in your home, and be able to take it into account.

You can also use your feng shui bagua map in smaller areas of your home such as each room separately. To do this you would go to the doorway of the room and line up your bagua map with the wall that has the entrance. Then you would mentally lay a large bagua map on the floor. You could then notice where areas were smaller or missing and add items in the lacking or missing areas if possible, to represent whatever is lacking. If your wealth area was quite small, maybe it only encompasses a corner and a bit more floor space in front of it, you could keep a small plate of coins on a table there, or have a green wall hanging, maybe even a picture of a dollar bill. Whatever represents wealth to you would work.

You can also use the feng shui bagua map on your desk at work. Want the boss to give you a raise? Add some items representing more money in the wealth area of your desk. Do you want to find more creative solutions to work assignments, but you are feeling blocked? Why not add some fun little toys to your creativity area, toys that you can tinker with when you are trying to think up new ideas.

These are only a few of the wonderful uses of a feng shui bagua map, but I have used them all at one time or another and found that they do definitely improve the quality of your life. There are those who might suggest it is all in your head, and my response to the nay sayers is always, "So what? If it works it works. I don't care how it works, just that it does."