3. ANALYZE YOUR ENVIRONMENT
There are two different "schools" that you can use to analyze your environment: the Form school and the Compass school. While it is technically possible to use both, we're gonna stick with the Compass school because it's much easier. But to be fair, here's a little background on the Form school:
The Form school of feng shui
The Form school of feng shui suggests that you use the physical environment of your land to determine where to live. The ancient Chinese noticed that people who lived on the south side of a mountain surrounded by rolling hills to break up the wind had good, prosperous lives. They also saw that certain land formations looked like animals (much like how clouds can look like animals).
In the perfect feng shui location (called "The dragon protecting the pearl"), green dragon hills lie to the east and form a horse-shoe shape with the slightly lower white tiger hills in the west, black tortoise hills are to the north, and low red phoenix hills are in the south. Moreover, a meandering river tops off this most fortunate site (remember, swift waters carry away ch'i and the good fortune associated with it). In such a site, the ch'i will pool where the loins of the dragon and tiger meet in intercourse- the male dragon provides the yang energy and the female tiger provides the yin energy. That's where your house should go! If you can't get the prime real estate of the loin area, go for the dragon's heart or stomach.
But many of us live in apartments in the city - totally far from any chance of finding dragons, tigers, meandering streams, and loins. Fear not. Feng shui principles still hold true, no matter where you live. If you're moving to an apartment in a big city, a Form school master can analyze the height of the buildings surrounding your potential apartment, and help you find an apartment with good ch'i.
Let us give you a piece of advice now: don't worry about the Form school. It's interesting, and it's useful if you are going to build a house on a plot of land, but chances are that you're not going to use feng shui to determine where you decide to live. You're probably more interested in how you should arrange your furniture within your house. That's where the Compass school comes in.
The Compass school of feng shui
The Compass school of feng shui deals with the compatibility between an individual's energy and the celestial energy from his/her environment. Basically, it uses Chinese astrology.
SOUTHLiEASTSun
Chen
Ken
K'un
Tui
Chien
The Pa-Kua
What you see above is called the Pa-Kua (pronounced par-kwar), a Taoist symbol of the universe. The eight trigrams depict the points of a compass, and make up the octagonal Pa-Kua. Each trigram is a different house: Li, K'un, Tui, Chien, K'an, Ken, Chen, and Sun.
So what you need to do is get a floorplan of your home (or dorm, or studio, or whatever you want to apply feng shui magic to), and put the Pa-Kua (or picture of a Pa-Kua) over it. If you need to sketch your floorplan on the back of a dirty napkin, that's OK too. You just need a picture of the layout of your domicile so that you can put the compass on top of it. Be very careful about direction. The North part of the Pa-Kua should point to the north of your house, not necessarily toward the top like a normal compass.
