What’s the Feng Shui like in here?

This is the most common question I get whenever I tell someone I am a Feng Shui consultant. And that makes sense. I totally understand that people are curious and want to know. I want to answer them in the best way I can. And that is not always as easy as you might think.

There are several different traditions, or schools, of Feng Shui. The most well known and used in the Western world (USA in particular) is the BTB or Black Sect school. My understanding of this school of Feng Shui is that it’s a simplified version where parts of several traditional schools of Feng Shui have been mixed and that it was “put together” in China in the 1970’s or -80’s when the interest in Feng Shui started growing in the West. See, people in the West back then figured out that whatever China was doing seemed to be working, and they wanted this information. The Chinese of course, being clever, didn’t want to share too much of this ancient knowledge and “give away” their advantage in knowing how Feng Shui really worked, so they created BTB “for export”. A simplified, easy to use, relatively easy to understand form of Feng Shui built on chosen parts of traditional methods.

BTB is the “typical” Feng Shui that most people I meet have heard of and that uses the nine square Bagua where there is a “wealth” corner, a “relationship” corner etc. in your home. The thought is that you align this nine square Bagua to your front door, and from that you figure out where the nine different sections are placed in your home. If I were trained in this form of Feng Shui, I would easily be able to answer a question such as “What’s the Feng Shui like in here?”.

As you might have guessed by now, I am not trained in BTB Feng Shui. Like most other people with an interest in this area I have read several books about it, before I did my training I even overlaid the nine square Bagua on my home and on my office and my desk at work for success. My only problem was… there came no success out of doing that! Things stayed the same.

That’s when I started investigating into the world of Feng Shui a little deeper and found out that there were other, so called traditional schools of Feng Shui, and that these were said to be more accurate and providing better information as they were calculated individually and adapted to each building.

That made a lot of sense to me. I believe that the more specific I can be, the better I can help someone, or the more meaningful the information I provide will be. Compare it to getting your personal horoscope done up by a professional astrologist that takes your place, date and time of birth into consideration, or reading the general information for your star sign. Which one would be more accurate?

So I decided traditional Feng Shui was the go for me. Little did I know that my choice would make it a little bit difficult to answer the question “What’s the Feng Shui like in here?” in an easy way in conversation.

Please understand that I am not here to discredit BTB Feng Shui! It is now really big in the West and the people working with it swears by it. The consultants say it works for them and their clients say it works for them too. All good.

It didn’t work for me and that’s why I went looking for more. And I found it in the traditional schools of Feng Shui.

Form School works with the forms inside and outside your home. Everything in our surroundings can be classified into a form, or element (in Feng Shui these words are interchangeable). There are Five elements in the world; Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood. Each element has certain characteristics and is associated with certain materials, colours and forms.

To give an accurate Feng Shui reading using Form School I need to take into consideration where your home is located, what is in your surroundings and how this may affect your home. I also look at what types of Forms are in certain areas outside and inside your home. From this information I can draw conclusions as to what the energetic impact is on you and your home.

The next traditional school is Compass School. This school relates to the different compass directions in your home and what rooms and objects within your home are best placed in which compass sections and what colours are best used in which sections. Compass School Feng Shui can also be used to create support for specific family members or certain areas of your life. This will add another level of understanding of what is going on in your home energetically.

And finally we have the most accurate and advanced out of all the traditional schools of Feng Shui, Flying Star School. Flying Star school is based on numerology and is calculated for your home from its construction date and the facing compass direction of your building. Using this information an intricate energetic map is created that is then interpreted and overlaid on your home in line with the facing compass direction and from that further conclusions on the energetic set up can be drawn. Flying Star School is used to put Feng Shui enhancements in place to create balance and harmony in your home. The main areas I can work with using Flying Star school is your health, wealth and relationships.

A Flying Star reading cannot be done “on the spot” answering a question such as: “What is the Feng Shui like in here?”. And there in lies my dilemma when asked that question!

So while I am certainly able to answer the question “What’s the Feng Shui like in here?” from a visual perspective and give some ideas on furniture placement for enhanced energy flow, that is only a very small part of the whole picture. There is no way I can give a comprehensive and accurate answer to this question from a Flying Star school point of view just by stepping into the space. And in my opinion, that’s the reading that I need to do to really give a person the best possible answer to that question.

That’s how answering a seemingly simple question can be quite a tricky task!

I hope this information is useful in explaining how I look at Feng Shui and what works for me. Thank you for reading!