The four celestial creatures of exterior feng shui are the black turtle behind a dwelling, the green dragon on the left, the white tiger to its right, and the red phoenix in front. Their symbolic presence brings good fortune.
The white tiger is the embodiment of yin energy. It complements the yang of the green dragon.
3 – the second aspect: interior feng shui
This is taking a detailed feng shui perspective of an interior setting, looking at the chi energy flow inside houses, apartments, and office buildings.
This deals with the layout of rooms, the flow of traffic, the arrangement of furniture, the selection of colors, shapes, dimensions, and decorative materials to ensure that auspicious chi gets created within homes, and inside the rooms of offices and apartments. Interior feng shui is usually well within the control of most people. From a practical perspective, this is the branch of feng shui practice that offers the most scope for individual solutions and creativity. Taking a feng shui view of the living space therefore is primarily about interior feng shui.
Rooms in the house
Interior feng shui involves looking at the position and orientation of the front door, how the chi energy flows in, and how it enters all the rooms in the house. Any obstructions, such as pillars, beams, or badly placed staircases, are neutralized with feng shui cures such as windchimes, crystals, and plants. It is learning to train your eye so that you can easily spot problems in each area or room of your home, knowing how to position your bed auspiciously, and hang mirrors to advantage.
In interior feng shui, the front door should open inwards. An auspicious painting in the hall, such as this fish, symbolizes wealth coming into the mouth of the home.
Check out the view from your front door. A curved path and healthy plants bring in good chi energy, while a straight path or telegraph poles will create negative chi for your home.
4 – the third aspect: the importance of orientations
In Chinese feng shui, all the compass orientations of a house, apartment, or office play the largest and most crucial role in correct feng shui practice.
It is vital to establish orientations correctly before powerfully potent feng shui formulas can be correctly activated to bring fast results. This requires the use of a reliable compass and some basic reference points with which to demarcate your living and work areas. This can collectively be called the space dimension of interior feng shui, and to a very large extent this too is within the control of most people. So when you want to feng shui any living space, one of the first things you absolutely must take account of is the relative orientation of rooms, of doors, and furniture placement.
Taking a feng shui view of any space should always include input on orientations.
Using a compass
As is mentioned later in the book, you need to use a good Western compass to find out the orientation of your home and all its rooms, so that you can apply some of the most potent feng shui formulas. You can find out the facing and sitting directions of your home (see here and here,) and once the directions of each room have been established, you can activate the corners to your advantage. Even when you combine different feng shui formulas in your home, the compass directions are essential for accuracy of placing enhancements or cures, or as mentioned previously, to be aware of bad flying star configurations in different areas.
Using a compass to find the orientation of your living space, doors, windows, and furniture is the first step in understanding feng shui. If you can find the center point of your home, position a compass there and get the orientations of your living space from there.
5 – the fourth aspect: time dimension feng shui
Time dimension feng shui uses the powerful flying star formula, which refers to numbers of good luck and misfortune which affect and afflict the living space.
So after you have satisfactorily arranged the living space in accordance with all the rules and guidelines to create auspicious energy, it is then necessary to investigate how the luck of any living space can change merely by the passage of time. According to an important school of feng shui practice, every hour, day, month, and year exerts its special essence of invisible, intangible forces. These can bring extreme good fortune or intense misfortune depending on how the time stars affect different corners of your living space. Once again, this aspect of feng shui is well within one’s control. There are easy formulas, which I have condensed into tables (see Chapter 8) so that you will easily see what needs to be done at the start of each month or year in order to avoid misfortunes or to activate some good fortune. This branch of feng shui can often be predictive when you understand the basic formula of calculating the time dimension stars. Once you know the areas that are affected each year, you can apply a cure, if it is necessary, in the appropriate corner so that you will not be affected by the negative energy that will emanate from this space.
This is the annual flying star chart for 2002, the year of the Horse. Note that in this year the lucky sectors which are represented by the lucky numbers 8, 6, and I are the northwest, the southeast, and the northeast of the house space or any living space. The most auspicious corner of your rooms in 2002 is therefore the northwest. In that year the unlucky sectors are the north and south, which are both afflicted. North is the place of three killings, or three types of bad luck. South is the place of the illness star and east is the place of the deadly hue, yellow. From this chart you will know instantly which corners to activate and use and which corners to avoid.
6 – introducing the luo pan, or chinese compass
The compass is essential to practice feng shui correctly as orientation is the bedrock of all feng shui analyses and recommendations – the foundation of Chinese feng shui.
Other techniques that deal with enhancing your living space may not use the compass, but it is used by all Chinese feng shui masters in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Malaysia, and by those who have migrated to the West and continue to practice genuine Chinese feng shui. Their advice is based on how structures, doors, house locations, contours, and so forth interact with each other in relation to their compass orientation.
The directions indicated by a reliable compass show how chi flows within any environmental space. Every compass direction has a number of attributes that