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What is the bagua map, and why does everyone draw it as a square of nine boxes with a different part of your life in each one? The bagua — eight trigrams arranged around a centre — is the oldest diagram in this tradition. Laid over a floor plan, it turns a building into nine…
Why does a small apartment feel heavier than it looks? Often because the space is doing a job it was never meant to do. A container holds what it is given, and a home holds a surprising amount: the things you use daily, the things you keep for a season, the things you are keeping…
Does your house have a type of its own? Most people who measure a home stop at the front door. They note which way the door faces, decide the house is “south-facing,” and go back inside. In the Eight Mansions school of feng shui, the direction that matters is the other one: the direction the…
If you have searched for feng shui directions, you have probably seen the words “Kua number” and then closed the page when it asked for your birth year, your gender, and a compass reading. It sounds like homework, but it is simpler than it looks. A Kua number is just a personal direction code. It…
Why do some bedrooms make you want to lie down and stay, while others make you restless the moment you close the door? In feng shui, the bedroom is the most important room in the home, and the bed is the most important object in the bedroom. It is where the body repairs itself, where…
The indoor form of feng shui is often reduced to a list of lucky objects, but the real work is closer to home. It is about light, air, and the way objects shape the space between them. In a small apartment, these three things are the whole practice, because there is no landscape to read…
There is a lonely kind of room that gives everything away before its owner says a word. The bed is pushed tight against one wall. There is one bedside table, one lamp, one pillow dented in the middle. A single chair faces the television. Nothing in the room is prepared for a second person, and…
If you have spent any time reading about feng shui, you have almost certainly seen the bagua. It is the eight-sided map that divides a space into zones for career, relationships, wealth, health, and the other parts of life, and it is one of the most useful tools in the whole tradition. The problem is…
There is a particular feeling that comes with an open-plan home, and it is not always the one you were promised. Open spaces are bright and social, but they can also feel restless, the way a room without walls sometimes feels like it has no place for you to settle. The reason is chi, the…
