Bagua Map Placement – A Snapshot View

by Heather Melcer.

I recently received a question via e-mail and in composing my reply I wanted to include a note to the person about assessing a particular area of their home in relation to the Bagua map to see if that could help give some insight and a possible solution. Not knowing if this person even knew what the Bagua Map was, I went to the internet looking to find some kind of quick picture or post that I could include a url link to in order to illustrate my reply. Much to my surprise, I clicked on link after link, post after post, image after image but didn’t quite find anything I personally considered to be user-friendly enough to demonstrate my point clearly so ended up just writing out my explanation. Needless to say, I knew exactly what my next blog post would be!

Bagua Basics – A Quick Overview

There are many tools that we use in Feng Shui to bring balance and harmony to our homes and lives, the Bagua Map is one of them. I’ll keep it brief and spare you lots of theory at the moment, but in a nutshell our home is divided into 9 different sections that correspond to 9 different areas of our lives. These are the general category titles as well as their corresponding colors and it looks like this (for now you can just focus on their literal, and somewhat obvious, meanings):

You lay it down over the floorplan of our home based on the position of our front door in relationship to how you enter your home. Your front door will almost always fall into one of the three bottom categories, Knowledge, Career or Helpful People.  (Note: there are many different methods of Feng Shui that may lay it down differently, but here in the West many do it this way).

Start by drawing the floorplan of your house or apartment. You don’t need fancy blueprints, your own simple hand drawing will do just fine.

And then you basically divide your home into 9 equal parts (squares or rectangles stretching it out depending on the shape of your house) and lay the Bagua map down on top of it like this:

Now you can begin to assess the Feng Shui of your home and look at what is going on in the different areas of your house and think about that area of your life. Remember in Feng Shui your home (or office) is a mirror reflection of who you are and what is going on in  your life at any given moment. So go ahead and take a good look around. Can you start to see any connections or patterns in your home and life? For example, are there certain areas of the Bagua map that are filled with clutter? Or maybe it’s the opposite and completely unfinished or never used? Or used all the time? Bright and lively? Dark and dreary? Are you starting to get the point now?

I know many houses aren’t perfectly square or might have some twists and turns at the entrance, so if that’s the case just lay the map down over one room for now to get started (the door to the individual room being one of the three bottom areas). Also for the moment let’s just focus on the first main floor if you happen to have a multi-level house just to get things going. We’ll talk about additional levels another time. (Oh, and if you can enter your house directly from the garage it is included as shown above, if you can’t it would not be part of your floorplan when you draw out your map.)

Of course this is a simplified starting point, but my goal here is to just give you the general idea, a quick snapshot if you will, and get the wheels in your mind starting to turn. So go ahead and make some changes. Move a few things around, whether it’s some furniture, a few pieces of artwork or just cleaning things up a bit and you will surely shake up your energy and get things flowing.

Enjoy!

p.s. – If you would like a more in-depth guide with diagrams of all different shapes, sizes and deeper explanations of each area and what to put in each, feel free to consider my .pdf download eGuide “Feng Shui NOW: Mapping Out Your Home for Harmony  Success”.