In feng shui, the Bagua is a sacred compass that helps us balance our personal space. Whether you’re renting or leasing your home and don’t have free rein over its design, you just want to ensure that your living quarters are as beneficial as possible.
Incorporating the Feng Shui Bagua map in your home is an excellent way to start to Feng Shui your home, and it is an essential skill to have if you're practicing Feng Shui.
Here are the top tips for placing the traditional Bagua map onto your home's floor plan.
1. Rotate the Floor Plan So the Door is at the Bottom
Floor plans are displayed differently, especially when architects decide to be fancy. What's important is to rotate the floor plan so the front door or the house-facing side is at the bottom.
Positioning it this way feels more realistic, as if you're literally standing right in front of the house as you're about to enter it.
2. Use an Accurately Scaled Floor Plan
Scales and sizes are vital aspects of all architectural structures because miscalculations reduce the integrity and quality of the bagua mapping. If you follow all the Feng Shui tips here, but you didn't have the proper calculations of the floor plan, you have a higher chance of ending up with wrong calculations and conclusions.
Double ensure that the ratios and dimensions are correct so you can go confidently use the bagua map on your floor plan!
3. All Living Spaces Must be Included
Living areas that are within the walls of your home should be included when you do bagua mapping. This begs the question - what about garages, balcony or patios that are attached to the home? Are they considered living areas?
Strictly speaking, if they are not within the walls and confines of your home, they shouldn't be included in the bagua map. There are cases, though where people use the garage as a living area. In that case, the garage should be included.
One rule of thumb is that the confines of the walls are what keeps the Chi inside the home. If the area is within the confines and also a living space, then the area should be included in the bagua map.
4. Use Your Home's Facing Direction
This is an addition to tip #1 above. Sometimes, the front door is NOT the Feng Shui facing direction of a home. Generally speaking, for single-family houses, the side where the house faces the street is usually the facing direction of the home. It is the side where a guest would walk up to your home if they were to visit your place.
For homes where the front door and the home's facing direction are different, rotate the floor plan so the home's facing direction is at the bottom. This way, it gives you a realistic feel as if you're entering the house from the streets, similar to tip #1.
If an individual messes up this area, they can disperse that positive energy before it enters the home. This is the reason the front door is also called the mouth of Chi.
5. Using it for Houses and Apartments
Using the Bagua map is different for houses and apartments. For apartments, align the bottom of the bagua map with the wall where you enter your home. This will put your front door in one of the following areas: career, helpful people, or knowledge/self-cultivation area.
Image by Jenny Chang-Rodriguez / mbg Creative
For houses, align the bottom of the bagua map with the wall of the home's facing direction, as mentioned in tip #4.
6. Fix Missing and Extended Areas
Unless your house is a perfect square, there might be some locations where one area is larger than the others, and some areas are smaller compared to the other areas. If there is a cut out in the original space, that is called a missing area. In contrast, if the area extends to the other part, it is called the extended area. Luckily, there are ways to fix both of these problems!
Fixing Missing Area
- Amplify the energy of the room by using the Five Elements theory to boost that area's energy.
Fixing Extended Area
- An extended area means you have the potential to have more energy in that area. If there is too much energy, don’t forget to harmonize and maintain an overall balance by using the Five Elements theory to weaken the energy.
2 comments
Hi! Hope it’s not too late to answer your question. But hopefully can help :)
I’m not an expert in Feng Shui, but I’ve been reading about quite a bit for many years and have practiced on and off. I’m currently back at it. The layout above is the Bagua map to use as a guide just to identify what lays on each aspect of those categories. It doesn’t mean your bedroom has to be there in such corner. All architecture homes and living spaces in general are different and would be crazy to make them fit as a Bagua layout. That said, what you do is enhance each room of your home regardless in which category falls. For example if you have office or garage right in your Love & Marriage then you add elements to balance the energy; that’s by looking at what colors you need to add or remove, or matter, or what needs to be reconfigured or replaced. Also frames, pictures, glass, pointy stuff, all of that influences the energy of your room. before any adjustment always start by purging anything old, broken and dirty. you don’t want anything of those in your house. Blessings
Please help me understand the bagua map because I see a lot of information on placing the map over a floor plan with the front door to the south, but what about when designing the floor plan? Does it mean the master bedroom should be in the top right corner of the house, or the nursery in the middle right, the office to the bottom middle, or the front door to the top middle, it seems upside down to me.