Written by Isa Moon
There are figures and a glossary included to make things easier. Should you come across a word you don't understand just click it.
Feng Shui is the art of living in harmony with the earth. Literal translation of the term is wind and water. Like in paganism, the Chinese have five elements represented by a circled star. Though, their elements are different, they are the elements of creation or destruction depending on how they are represented.
Here is the Cycle of Production:
Being an apartment dweller is only slightly different from a Feng Shui point of view. There is less we can do with building structure, placement, and such. We will now wander through my home room by room to show how it works.
We will begin outside. If you haven’t read the definitions I suggest you do it now or you might get very lost. You may want to begin using your pa-kua
The lay out of the land is important too. It is preferable to have a mountain behind and a river or body of water in front. My father did this to his new property without knowing. The mountain behind you protects from things attacking from behind and the water, which represents wealth, brings luck to the property. Our apartment has a mountain on two sides, behind and one side, a road in the front, and the driveway/parking lot to another apartment/business on the other side. The road posses no real threat to us. If you are located across from an intersection, such as our neighbor, this could cause ch'i problems, though I’m sure they already have enough ch'i problems as they live above the local funeral parlor. Now we’ll enter the building. Firstly, all doors should open in, that is, when you open the door it should swing into the room. If it opens out, it confuses and redirects the ch'i so it won’t enter the home. Luckily, all our doors open into our rooms. Being on the second floor means our door opens into a stairwell. Front doors are tricky things, this is where most of your energy will be coming from and the whole point is to have it linger in the home. Straight lines are bad you don’t want your door to open to a window, stairs, or, worst, the back door. If your front door opens directly to the back door or a window find a way to hide or block it from the front door view. Should you open to a staircase, which is our problem, you’re not so bad off, unless there’s a window at the top. Our stairs are split you climb up half, hit a level, then continue the climb in the opposite direction. To help the ch'i find it’s way up to the apartment we’ll place a mirror, wind chimes, or crystals from this wall. We will do the same at the top of the stairs to direct the ch'i into the apartment through the door on the left.
Another important thing about Feng Shui is space, or, the avoidance of clutter. In apartments that can be difficult. Right now our problem may be too much furniture an amazing idea but true. Once in the home, you want the ch'i to wander, not traveling in straight lines, through the space.
Now we’re in our kitchen/dinning/living area of our apartment. We live in the upstairs of an old house and our entire apartment consists of three rooms. Now, you’ll want to pull out your pa-kua again. If you have the plans for your space, great, if not a rough sketch will do. You can use the pa-kua over the whole home or just the individual rooms. Shape of homes now becomes very important. Square or eight-sided (pa-kua shaped) homes are the best. Our apartment is L-shaped, our north corner missing. Placing the pa-kua over the lay out of the entire apartment I have found that we enter our home in the helpful people corner, which is interesting as we both have many close friends and there is already a mirror set into the wall at this spot. On the other hand, our entire wealth corner is non-existent, which is not what we need since we have to pay rent on this place. Instead, I’m going to divide the apartment into sections: kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom.
In Chinese culture, the kitchen is the center of the home and the most important room in the house. The stove is the center of the family’s wealth and who ever is cooking should be able to see who’s coming into the room. Our kitchen is long and narrow. As you walk in the door the refrigerator is to your left, our kitchen continues to the left around in a U-shape ending right across from the fridge. Adair and I both like to cook and we enjoy cooking together, this kitchen will be a true test of our love for each other. Our stove is located in the bottom of the U anyone coming in could startle the cook. The remedy for this is to place a mirror over or beside the stove so who ever is cooking can see who’s coming in. Starowl gave us the idea of getting narrow strips of mirror, attaching them to magnetic strips, and placing them around the hood located above the stove.
The dinning room is another important space. We don’t have a real dinning area but there is an open area at the end of the kitchen where the door is. This is a perfect spot for our small table as it is located in the helping relationship section.
We have four windows in our apartment. Two of which are located in the living area directly across from the door. We will try to encourage the ch'i to move by placing crystals or wind chimes in front of them. Both of the windows are located in the fame/recognition area, though neither one of us have any wish to become famous or recognized right now, this would be the area we would fill with things to charge it, such as pictures of famous people, crystals, chimes, plants, etc. To the right of the window is our marriage corner. In this corner we’ll put things that represent our relationship. The pictures of the two of us and things that are sentimental to both of us. Beside our marriage corner, along the wall, is our children area. We do not want children any time soon so we will do nothing to stimulate this area but if you wished to placing toys, pictures of children, and such will do the trick. Moving down again we reach another helpful people area. We are now in the area that is open to the kitchen/dinning area, this would be a good place to put some chairs or our couch to create a sitting area, it would also help to separate the two areas of the apartment.
Going back to the windows and moving to the left we have our wealth corner. Here we’ll put a fountain (water symbolizes wealth) or green plants. The middle area is our family area. Adair and I are both very close to our families and this is the perfect place to put picture of them. The knowledge area is the perfect place to put our computers, which we’ll be using for school, a bookshelf, or a study area. The area between the knowledge and helpful people areas is career. This is a good place to put your computer if you work from it. The center of the room is the health area. Though this is normally left empty filling it with healthy living things is a good idea. Remember that you don’t want the area to look cluttered, just inviting.
There is a short narrow hallway that leads off the kitchen/living areas into the bath and bedroom areas. This hallway is dark, another thing that is not good for the movement of ch’i. We’ll probably string this area with white Yule lights since there isn’t a lot of space and the lights can easily be tacked up. With the pa-kua lined up so that the entry of the hallway is the entry into the space we’ve drawn a sketch and done this whole area as one room. Our wealth, fame, and marriage areas are located totally in our bedroom. Our health and family areas are shared with the bathroom, and our children with the hall, but as I said before, this is not an area we want to energize. Knowledge is located entirely in the bathroom and career is mostly in the bathroom. Mentors is in the hall.
Having our health, family, knowledge, and career areas in the bathroom could lead to serious problems in these areas. Water is wealth, and not just monetary, and to flush water is to flush the wealth in these areas. Our toilet is located in the health area, the sink in family, and the drain for the tub in career. Pipes should not show but the pipes under our bathroom sink do. I plan to fix this by using fabric and some Velcro. I’m not too concerned about the toilet, but should we start to have health problems we’ll keep the lid closed and put a plant in there.
The bedroom, another tricky area, as you don’t want your bed to be in direct line with the door, nor do you want it under the windows, nor do you want it under a slanting ceiling. Unfortunately, we have all three. Though, I think the easiest way to solve our problem is to put the bed in front of the window and, since it’s a canopy, we can hang fabric or curtains from the end by the window. This will also help with the ch'i as the door opens directly into our other two windows. Again, fame is located in front of the windows, wealth to the left and marriage to the right. We’ll put more sentimental things from our relationship here: gifts, handfasting ribbons, our handfasting ritual, and other things we wouldn’t want on public display. This would be a wonderful place for a love alter. In the wealth corner we may put a fish tank. Fish, especially goldfish and other carp, are very good for Feng Shui as they live in water.
We do have some pretty serious shars in our apartment. We have slanting walls on the east and west sides of the living room and the north and south side of the bedroom (the L-shape forms in the hallway). These are shars in themselves, but mild and are easily overpowered by charging the areas under them. The slanting walls do create a very large and very negative shars where the north and west meet. Instead of pointing out this corner points in to a very sharp straight edge, this can be made "invisible" by hanging mirrors on both sides of the angle. I’m not a huge fan of mirrors so I plan on softening the corner with some fabric. (I like to sew!)
Another shars that can be a problem is homes is beams. This is a problem in my parents log home where they put large beams crossing their living/kitchen/dinning areas. But in this case, it is part of the architecture as the building itself is a log cabin. It is preferable that you don’t sit directly beneath the beams though. The beams can be fixed by hanging crystals, hanging plants, or bamboo flutes from them. Beams in the bedroom are the worst and beds should not be placed under them.
If you wish to learn more about Feng Shui, I suggest visiting a bookstore. Feng Shui books can usually be found in the home sections. Information for this write up was from Feng Shui for Apartment Living by Richard Webster.
