Basic Principles of Feng Shui: How to Work the Ba-Gua Chart
by Roberta Striga
The Ba-Gua chart or map will be your essential tool once you set out to apply Feng Shui principles to your home. It will help you take a look at your home and see how certain areas of your life correlate to certain areas of your home. It will also help you bring more harmony and balance into your home, improve your health and overall quality of life. Remember, it is not necessary to do everything at once–you can add stuff or remove stuff from certain areas and let your home come together in a magnificent way.
I introduced the map in my previous post The Basic Principles of Feng Shui for Beginners…or you can just go directly to the map from this link.
The Ba-Gua map is an octagonal shaped map, but to make things a bit easier you can stretch it and make corners which you then divide into 9 equal sections.
- If you start at the top left the areas that correspond to your life are prosperity (purple), fame/reputation (red) and relationships (pink).
- The middle section of the Ba-Gua map corresponds to Family (green), Health (yellow and Earth tones) and Creativity and Children (white).
- The lower section corresponds to Skills and knowledge (blue), Career (black) and Helpful people and travel (silver and grey).
Keep in mind, different Feng Shui practitioners have different names for some sections of the Ba-Gua map, but the basics remain the same.
Applying the Map
Ba-Gua map can be applied to virtually any space–be it your work desk, your bedroom, your garden or all of your home.
To determine which area of your home (your room or your desk for that matter) belong to which area of the Ba-Gua map you will want to align the bottom half of the map with the wall of your entry door. If there are more entryways the one that is more prominent or is used more often should be used as a starting point.
While it can get rather complicated from here on, for the beginning stages it helps to keep it simple. From personal experience it helped me to draw a rough sketch of my home (do not worry if you are not nifty sketcher, it is for your eyes only) and a rough sketch of the Ba-Gua map on a transparent paper and then lay it over the plan of your home. This eased the process significantly because in an instant it is clear which areas of your home are in which sections of the Ba-Gua map.
Now once you have the basics sorted, you can start applying the Feng Shui principles to bring more harmony to your life. And transform your home into a sanctuary that you will love coming home to.
What’s Next
It’s not necessary to start re-arranging your home–or to align the colors of your walls with the colors of the Ba-Gua map. Rather, the first step is just to become aware. Ask yourself these questions:
Which areas of my home are congested? Does this correspond to the themes of the Ba-Gua map?
Where do I feel most comfortable in my home? What part of the map does this represent?
What part of my home needs work? What area of my life needs work?
What areas do I need to focus on more?
Soon, you’ll be sketching out your new home with the help of Feng Shui principals.
kriz said:
Hi! Thank you for this! The information on Bagua is very helpful to me as I am new to Feng Shui. I just have 2 questions to ask. First, what do you mean by “align the bottom half of the map with the wall of your entry door?” Does the bottom half mean half of the Bagua map? My second question is that, should I change the colors and the objects placed in each section of my house according to the bagua map? Thanks for reading this.
admin said:
Hi Kriz,
Yes, align the bottom of the map with the entry of the house…basically to make sure the house and the map are in alignment. As for the colors, it all depends on how dedicated you are to the system. You can begin changing colors slowly over time and see how it goes. good luck.
Happy said:
I am getting really confused. This is not to blame this article for my delirium, since you have already confessed how Bagua “can get rather complicated from here on.”
I have read some articles about the Wu Xing, and the philosophy there is to basically color the wall in specific colors emblematic of the elements. So South wall is red. But does this not conflict with the Bagua? Once again, the coloring is not important, but red is north in Wu Xing. So what’s going on?
And I had written a research paper on Daoism, which I perceive is the vital thread that webs Bagua and Wu Xing together. The Daoists believed in simplicity. And this is beyond simple human understanding. This better be the work of nature >:(