This is a guest post for our blog (from 2012) by a client named Kathleen Graham. She is available for consultations here in the Prescott area and can help make your space Feng Shui.

I’ve been house-hunting lately, and I take all the principles of Feng-Shui into consideration whenever I look at a house. Feng-Shui is the ancient Chinese art of placement. It’s based on thousands of years of observation of how energy or “chi,” sometimes translated as “universal life force” flows in nature. 

When these observations are put into practice in your home or business, harmony, balance, and prosperity are said to follow. Feng-Shui uses something called a ba-gua (basically an octagonal shaped map) to help understand where and how energy flows in various areas in your home or business. It can even be applied to your desk or cubicle at work.

A flow of good, positive chi in and throughout your home will depend on many factors. Primary of these is that there should be no missing corners in your home. The ideal Feng-Shui configuration for a home is usually a square or rectangle. If a corner is lacking in a home, for example in an “L” shaped layout, the corresponding energy for the missing corner will also be absent. This can affect your finances, relationships, health, and other critical areas of your life. 

The ba-gua is used to determine which areas of your home correspond to each aspiration. Clockwise from the top side of the ba-gua, the eight areas affected are Fame, Relationships/Marriage, Children/Creativity, Helpful People/Travel, Career, Knowledge/Spirituality, Family, and Wealth. The map of the ba-gua is superimposed on a drawing of the home’s floor plan (based on the orientation of the home’s front door) to find any areas that may be lacking or need assistance in manifesting the correct energies desired. The Career area of the ba-gua is always placed at the front door of the home. So then the wealth corner, for example, is in the far left corner of the home, and the Relationship/Marriage corner is the far right corner of the home.

(diagram courtesy of www.thespiritualfengshui.com)

I once visited an office that was missing the Wealth corner. I knew that business was not going to last long, and sure enough, it did close about two months after I was there. Another client I worked with owned a business that was always suffering financially. The business itself looked fine energetically, but when I asked the owner about what he had at home in his wealth corner, he admitted he had a desk in that corner that was piled with clutter. Clutter is a big no-no in Feng-Shui, because it blocks the chi from circulating. I advised him to clear out the clutter and keep the desk area neat and organized, and as soon as he did this, his customer traffic immediately picked up.

So if your home is lacking one of the key corners, don’t despair! In Feng-Shui there are fixes (otherwise known as cures) for everything. Next time, we’ll find out about the basic cures and how to apply them.

Kathleen is available for private consultations in the Prescott area, for your home or business, at kathleenagraham@gmail.com.