The first nine houses of the bagua: water (the journey)

The first house of the bagua is Water, which represents our movement through life and reminds us from where we have come, so it is more commonly called the Journey area. It is concerned not only with our career and the profession we have now, but the bigger issue of why we are here in the world. Are we doing what we really want or are we just earning a living? The way that chi moves through the world is like flowing water, so that when life is going well for us, we can think of ourselves as "going with the flow".

• Where are you now?
• Do you enjoy what you do?
• What is preventing you from moving forward to new things?
• Is your role in life fulfilling? If not, do you know what you want?

The house of Water is associated with willpower and drive. Because it is connected with the direction of north, it is cold and dark. It represents communication, emotions and discovery.

If this area is physically missing from your home then you will find it more difficult to get onto your path. Occupants of such houses will have problems with drive and ambition; possibly there will be confusion with communication issues. You can correct thus by introducing the water element - either in the shape of a fish tank or mere images of water. Choose pictures that show some movement, which help to reconnect you with your right path; pictures of still water will, in time, lead to stagnation. Choose pictures that represent what you want to do or, if you have no idea yet what that might be, something depicting roads, routes or historical maps will act as a symbol to help you find your way. The colour blue can be used to nourish. A projection on your home in this part of the bagua will mean extra energy and focus to help you find what you really want to do in life.

• Take a look at this area in your home. Is it cluttered and consequently blocked? Is this where the front door is? Does it provide easy access in and out of the house? Does your door bell work properly? Are you available when opportunity calls?

Having a staircase here is not ideal because the energy is moving up and down too much; the energy of water needs to be more floating. If the entrance hall falls in this house, do you have more than one door that you can go through? Is this a mirror for where you are in life? Are you unable to choose the path? Keep the doors closed and open them only as you need to go through. If your hallway is outside your property but falls in the Journey - in an apartment building, for instance - decorate the external area with your own art and plants so it feels like your own space.

The bagua - a map of energy

The bagua is a map of how energy moves within a defined space. It is a template divided into nine areas which can be laid over a plan of your plot of land, tropical wooden house, apartment - even the individual rooms.

Each of the nine areas, or "houses", of the bagua has a certain set of characteristics that gives clues to what is happening in your life and how this mirrored in shape and design of your home interior. There is a certain predictable pattern to the way energy moves around a place which has been observed over thousands of years. When the invisible energy moves into the area of the bagua known as Earth, for example, its impact in the physical world involves a relationship issue. In a similar way, any disturbances to the flow of energy in the area of Wind will affect the inhabitant's fortune and finances. Each house of the bagua has many different qualities. It is named according to the trigram from the I Ching with which it is associated, and is given one of the first nine cardinal numbers.

The bagua is always oriented front the front door of your home or the main doorway into a room. Even if you rarely use your front door and always enter your prefabricated wooden house from the back, you shoulkd still use your front door to position the bagua; only use the other door as your "front door" if you absolutely never open the acknowledge one. Using the grid of magic numbers that comprise the bagua, line up the template on your floor plan so that your door enters through the grid somewhere along the areas Mountain, Water or Heaven.

Although the bagua is most powerful for the ground-floor layout of a building, its storey has its own bagua, which is aligned by using the top step onto the landing as the "front door", and then pulling back the edge of the bagua to the outside wall of your home. Remember too that you can apply the bagua to any room in your wooden house and also that doorways without doors can also be entrances. Sometimes, a room will have more than one entrance; as a crossroads room it could have three or four. You should align the bottom of the bagua with the doorway most frequently used: the door leading from the kitchen to the dining room might take precedence over the one from the living room, for example.

When evaluating your home, place the bagua over the ground-floor plan of the tropical wood house or your tropical timber bungalow to see if there are any sections missing, and think about the correlations there are with what is going on in your life. If the whole Relationship/Earth area is missing, have you been finding difficulty with this aspect of your life? When you eventually start to think about making adjustments to the interior design of your home in order to begin to make changes in your life, use the bagua for each room. Consequently, if you decide you want to enhance your creativity, check each Lake area of every room as well as on every storey of the house.

The bagua can be stretched to cover oblong and ackward shapes. As you lay the bagua over your own floor plan, you will begin to get an idea of what is missing, that is, what is called negative space. If it is less than half, than it is counted as a protusion, which means that the prevailing energy of that prefabricated house's bagua is greater. Bay windows count as small projections.

Irregularly shaped houses with spaces missing should not be viewed as bad or difficult; rather, when you see the adjustments that you can make for each of the nine houses, you will realize that they have tremendous potential.

Why are we interested in feng shui?

Today, in the West, we have become a remote-controlled, instant, fast-food, push-button society, preoccupied by technological progress. We are becoming disconnected from the natural world, surrounding ourselves with much that is artificial, and exposing ourselves to increasing levels of toxicity and pollution in what we eat and what we bring into our homes. We are creating buildings that can not breathe, which are surrounded by electro-magnetic radiation, with the result that our vital energy is becoming drained by what are now being called "sick" building.

For all the advantage of modern, technological living, we have created a way of life grossly out of step with nature and without respect to the consequences our actions will have on the environment. Most of the lifestyle problems we face today were simply not around thousands of years ago. Electricity may feed us power but it robs us of our well-being when we unthinkingly live in its force-field. Geopathic stress is also more prevalent today because it comes from a distortion of natural radiation from the earth created by digging underground channels for water, communication and travel, and scarring the land with excavations for roads and buildings. We need to develop a greater awareness of what we have done and then take steps to compensate.

There is natural order in the universe of which our ancestors were aware - it provided a code for them to live by. No wonder there is an instinctive desire within us to return to a more natural way of living, to see how we can simplify our lives, without giving up the comforts of the twentieth century. Traditional lifestyles have much to teach us.

Research shows that our homes are less the entertainment centres that they were during the consumer boom of the 1980s. Values have changed. Refuge. Sanctuary. Safety. Calm. These are they words that motivate us now, as we turn out homes into heavens of peace where we can treat from the outside world and screen all communications through our answering machines. People are now realizing that to create change in their lives they need to change their homes and it is this understanding of the link between us and our home that is at the heart of feng shui.

We have to de-clutter our spaces to create the physical space for energy to flow and for new possibilities to happen. Becoming aware of what we have around us, and the impact it has, allows us to make more conscious choices. In this way, we can learn to arrange our spaces to support our goals, whatever they are - to bring up a family in a stable and secure environment, to create a safe heaven from which to explore the world, or simply to achieve peace of mind. Collection of these articles marks the beginning of a new and exciting journey for you to look at your home in a different way, as part of your future.

Where does feng shui come from?

Like its name, much of the understanding of feng shui in the West today has come from the East, where it has been practised for thousands of years. The ancient Chinese had an understanding of the invisible world of energy that lay behind all things. Their knowledge and observations were expressed in the I Ching, a profound oracle which encoded, in the 64 hexagrams of broken and straight lines, a description of the nature of all things. This huge body of wisdom became the foundation of all traditional studies, including feng shui.

Yet the application of feng shui today need not be Oriental. Traditional peoples from all over the world have studied the relationship of humans living on earth under the influences of the forces of heaven. They have looked at the cycles of the seasons, the movements of the planets and, guided by their observations of the natural world, they have reached an understanding of the ways in which different places and homes can affect well-being and fortune.

Over time, different forms of feng shui heve developed as practitioners recorded how they understood the nature of the world, classifying the information in maps and tables. Data on the shape and form of the land (Form School) and the charting of astrological influences on the Earth (Compass School) were gathered and evaluated.

Classical feng shui, which draws together aspects of both schools, is very much alive today because there is still a huge body of the older recorded information available from the Chinese. Whereas, originally, feng shui meant living intuitively through your heart and body, the classicalk approach was much more scientific and, with its complex calculations to evaluate the quality of the energy in an environment, was more about the mind. It has continued to have its appeal through the centuries. Through the articles on this site, we look how you can be guided by your intuition to determine what feels right for you in your home. But it also actively presents a system of looking at how energy moves according to a "bagua", a map of energy thousands of years old, taking into account the importance of symbolism, and understanding the relationship of everything in terms of five types of energy.

What is Feng Shui?

Feng shui is about how the environments in which we live and work have an effect on our physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. Different places make us feel differently. The amount of natural light flooding in through the windows (or the light of a decorative wooden lamp), the colour of the walls, the type of dining chairs, the style of the pictures and ornaments, the presence or absence of living plants in a flower plant pot - each aspect affects our experience.

Feng shui is the study of the movement of energy and how it moves in patterns, affecting every aspect of our lives. Quantum physics confirms that everything is made up of energy. All physical matter, no matter how solid it feels, is, in fact, only energy vibrating. All around us, in the empty space that we can not see, energy exists as well. Feng shui is concerned with this invisible world, for it is as important to our well being as the world we can see with our eyes.

Imagine, for example, walking into a room after a fierce argument has taken place there. You can feel the tension, in fact you might say that you could "cut the atmosphere with a knive" because there is a tangible feeling of something hanging there in space. Likewise, scientific equipment has now been developed to measure the smallest movement of energy: the lie detector can register the most imperceptible fluctuation in vibrations of energy movement in the body.

Feng shui helps us to understand that our homes are direct extensions of ourselves; they are mirrors reflecting who we are. the places in which we live carry evidence and symbols of our past experiences, thoughts and dreams, and if we want to change and improve the quality and direction of our lives we need to understand how everything around us interconnects. In order to create a new future and make the things happen that we most desire, we have to consider how these might be represented in our homes now. Here, you will learn how changes the interior design of your home will be echoed by changes that are made to your life. Different arrangements will affect the movement of energy in your home and workspace. These will, in turn, be reflected in changes in your wealth, health, happines, opportunities, relationships and feelings of peace.

The goal of good feng shui is to arrange a space so that "chi", or energy, can flow harmoniously so that it feels balanced. Energy moves in spirals and waves and we feel more comfortable when we emulate nature by bringing those same curves into our homes. Smooth and soft energy movement helps us to feel relaxed. Straight lines, angular corners and sharp edges do not mirror our own natural movement of "chi", and so we can feel more stressed.

The relationship we have with a place is very personal as we bring our own unique character to it. Everybody expresses themselves in different ways with distinct preferences of colour, style, fabrics, art, and the nature and amount of their possessions. All these things create different atmospheres and have a different bearing on someone's life. So, although there are some basic principles to follow in feng shui, remember that having good feng shui is also about creating a home that reflects you and what you want. What has to be considered is what you want to use the space for, whether it is for bringing up a family, starting a new business from home, or beginning married life.