Episode Transcription:
You’re listening to the Holistic Spaces Podcast brought to you by Mindful Design Feng Shui School.
Episode 120 USING THE FENG SHUI BAGUA MAP TO SPARK CHANGE
Welcome to Episode 120 of the Holistic Space Podcast where we hope to inspire, educate, and empower you to create your own holistic spaces that nurture and resonate with you.
Anjie Cho and Laura Morris are the founders of Mindful Design Feng Shui School. Together they have over three decades of experience designing harmonious spaces. Anjie and Laura have guided thousands of people to shift their energy and revitalize their lives. Mindful Design School offers feng shui courses and certifications. Check us out at mindfuldesignschool.com and the podcast is hosted at holisticspaces.com.
A: So Laura, how’s it going?
L: It’s going pretty well. How are you?
A: It’s pretty good. We’re in May now. And it’s starting to get warmer and warmer closer to summer. But you're further up north than me, so how is the weather typically in May?
L: I think I'm probably honestly like 4 hours, 5 or 6 hours from you. If I could fly straight across from Lake Ontario, I’d get to you pretty quick. But because I'm on the other side of the lake, maybe it’s a little colder, but not that much. May is a pretty nice month.
A: Okay because when I chatted with our colleague Christie, she was saying that in May, people are just starting to feel spring.
L: I guess that’s true. May 24th, we call it May 2-4 here, for all the Canadians you’ll know what that means, that’s the main weekend we are officially supposed to start planting things. Because before then, all bets are off right? You might get frost.
A: Also when I’ve been in Vermont, May is when it stops snowing.
L: Yes, well let’s hope so.
A: See, in any case we wanted to talk about how to spark change using the Feng Shui Bagua. And as we are getting warmer now, it doesn’t have to be seasonally at this time in your life, it could be energetically the time in life that you want to spark something new and create some shifts and changes. Transition is when people are really coming to feng shui. It’s a great tool to work with when you are going through transitions.
So Laura and I wanted to have an episode where we go through the bagua area, every bagua area and just talk about each area and you could listen and see which area resonates with you the most based on what it is you want to enhance. So for instance, if you are starting to look for something new in your life or you want to kickstart some growth and creativity, the New Beginnings area, or the Family area, which is typically depicted as green, is kinda the space you want to enhance. So for everyone, unless you are a seasoned practitioner, like one of our grads, Laura and I always recommend 1) use the bagua in your bedroom, and then Laura can you explain to them why we don’t want to bagua every area?
L: I’ll just back up for one second too. So for those who are newbies to the practice, and the bagua is still a pretty new practice, if you go to our blog page on our website mindfuldesignschool.com, you will see there's a free download there that will walk fairly top line, on how to lay a bagua, what is a bagua and how to lay it because as what Anjie was saying, we recommend the bagua to start with because two reasons 1) just start simple and it’s pretty easy, it’s a hard room to mess up because they’re generally pretty uniformly shaped, either rectangular or square and 2) it actually makes a pretty big impact. Because it is you, it's very close to you because it’s where you spend a lot of time. So don’t feel like you need to do the whole house if you really want to start trying some of these, what we are talking about today, do it in the bedroom to start.
A: And I'll also add, if you are a listener, be sure to sign up for our newsletter list. Because we’ll send out in our newsletter a link to a blog post that actually outlines almost everything we’ll talk about today. Plus it has that link to that free bagua map download and that’s probably the easiest because it'll just come into your mailbox. We give easy clickable links so be sure to sign up for our mailing list and you can do that by going to mindfuldesignschool.com and scrolling down to the bottom. And there should be a place to sign up or just go if you’re listening on Stiture, or iTunes, or whatever Apple Podcasts, you can look in the show notes and there’s a link to directly sign up for our newsletter there.
Okay, Laura came up with this technique that we want to invite you to all do before you just jump in, because you’re so excited to spark this new thing, but we want you to actually relax a little bit, take a yin approach rather than just plowing right into it. But actually set a timer and take 5 minutes to tune into yourself and focus on 1 word or 1 thing that arises in your mind. And then don’t do that if you’re driving. Take some time and do it. You can pause the podcast and come back and then now we are going to go through all of the bagua areas and I want you to see what area most connects to that word or thing.
We want you to be guided by your own experience first though, okay.
One last thing is if you don’t know how to lay the bagua map and you need help. Laura and I have a class called Practical Feng Shui and you can sign up for that and we lay the bagua on your house. Otherwise we recommend the bedroom.
So let’s start with the New Beginnings area which is Family. This is called Zhen position and it’s a great one if you want to feel inspired to create something new. To have the energy to get things done. Also if there’s something you want to work on that is connected to family, harmony, and healing because the New Beginnings area is called Family. But it’s also related to this wood energy which is super healing. Some easy ways to activate this is to consider placing green plants in this area of your home. Or if you don’t have sunlight, you can also add images of green plants. Or you use the color blue, green, or teal.
L: Well you covered a lot of them there. So this is also a good area if you wanted to again focus on the family. So this area is also the number 3. It’s about 1, 2, 3. 3 is starting something new. It’s really this new beginning where you’ve got this triad now. So it could be about starting a family or about having your family come together. So if that’s something you’re looking at, it’s a good place to have family photos if it happens to work with your space. And I know that I often get clients that say “hey, I have this stack of these family photos that they got really nicely done.” And it actually seems to work sometimes that it’s either a staircase or a big blank wall, and that’s where we put it in the house, overall in the house. It seems to work well. So a good place to sort of put family photos, that’s what I would say.
So Abundance is the next area. And it is also a Wood area. It’s Yin Wood. If you want to work on big big money here. Well of course everyone loves this area. But I would say one thing. Let’s think of it a bit more broadly. Let’s not get too hung up on abundance and money. Let’s think of it as prosperity, a broader way to look at it. That really allows you to bring in more elements and other things into this area to kickstart it. So it could just be simply adding in the Wood element which would be a plant. That’s a quick easy way. But you could also add in the Water element too to feed the Wood. But get creative with this area. Something that really clicks with abundance.
A: Yeah, and one of my favorites for the Abundance area is using crystals because everyone loves crystals right now. They’re having their moment. And amethyst is a beautiful purple crystal that is easy to find, relatively inexpensive, everyone loves it and it also resonates with this kind of feeling of abundance and spiritual abundance. So not necessarily about cash money abundance because those things go hand in hand so I love that.
Alright the next area is called Health, it’s also called Tai Qi or your overall well being. And if you really want to kickstart and spark some change in your health, this is a great area. This is actually the center of your bedroom and some ways you can work with the health area is to add a piece of something that’s square shaped or related to earth tones like yellow or brown or something made of earth and ware or like a stone or rock and sometimes you know since Health is in the center of your room, I do recommend just a square rug, like a square yellow rug. Because sometimes it doesn’t make sense to…
L: To put a rock in the middle of your bed? Don’t touch the rock
A: A rock in the middle of your bedroom?
L: That’s great advice. Put a rock in the middle of the bed. Don’t touch the rock. I’m just kidding. No, it’s probably more practical to work with color or shape in that case, in the center of the bedroom. Just one last thing on the center, Tai Qi, it’s really the center of all things. Anything you do in the middle, in the center, of your bedroom or your home is really powerful. So if you want to do something else to sort of modulate everything around the area, you can hang a feng shui crystal from the center of your bedroom. Right from the ceiling it's a cut glass sphere or ball and you can find it on the holisticspaces.com site too if you wanna see what it looks like.
A: It’s different from a natural occurring crystal. It’s a man made glass crystal. Alright, let’s move onto the next area. It’s called Benefactors, in Chinese it's called Qian, it’s also known as Helpful People, Travel. And the color of this area is gray. So if you want to attract more helpful people, more benefactors. I think all of us want to travel more. You could use that color gray in this area. You can paint the wall gray or have gray objects, but you could also bring in metal elements like a wind chime and Laura had this great idea, why don’t you talk about that idea you added in the blog post?
L: Oh symbols of where I want to go? Well I know that I keep fantasizing about where I’m going to go next and putting together my magical list, my wish list. If it were me and I were going to add some of those, I would pick pictures of Florence, maybe some pictures of Scotland in that area, and really almost using it as a way to really focus on that, because that’s somewhere I would want to go. So travel photos in this area or vacation souvenirs for places you want to go back to, places you have a connection to. That’s really powerful too.
So the next spot is Completion. So completion is also called Children, productivity, and sometimes, Anjie is gonna yell at me, sometimes called Creativity but it’s not creativity
A: Don’t go there..
L: Quiet, it’s gonna be fine. It’s something you make. You completed something. Something has been finished. You produced something. Something has been wrapped up. It’s the harvest, it’s the finish, okay. So let’s think of it that way. Let’s park creativity. So the children are also in this area too, and children are also something you know that you produced, made, want to do well, want to complete, want to keep going. So you could put Children’s work there, that’s a popular thing to put up in that area. But you might want to think about this a little bit broader, because if you are thinking about something in a business or project sense, this is where you want stuff to be completed. Like be finished, be produced, done, you really have completed this amazing project. You finished it. So that is where you want to use the Metal element. And I would say again, bells, or a wind chime in this area is also good. Especially ringing that, when you want to, sort of seal the deal. When you want to finish something.
A: Yeah, and this area is also a good one. If you do have children, if you want to provide a little bit more support for your children. I’m not a mother however, but I do understand that part of motherhood, having had a mother, is that you want to support your children however, with a light touch. You don’t want to necessarily always work directly, and sometimes the indirect route is more subtle and more effective. So working with the completion or children area of the bagua map of your bedroom, can be a way to provide more energy, more support for your child or for your children without necessarily directly affecting them, but indirectly. It’s like not taking the direct route, which is often a lot of what you see in these Asian modalities. For instance, I know I always talk about my tea classes. I take tea ceremony classes, and sometimes it's easier, we have the chawan, the tea bowl. If you’re on Youtube, you’ll see me holding it. I have a chawan and there’s a little chaken, which is the napkin in which you clean, and so I can just go straight across, I can go from here to here, to place it on my tray, but actually you’re supposed to go this way and around. And you actually move your body back, so anyway, the point is that sometimes, we think that the most direct route is the best when in fact, something like working with your children, I understand that being indirect can also be more skillful
L: Sometimes your children don’t listen to you, that’s what you’re saying basically. And you know what, I can attest to that. If you tell your children “you need to do this”, I will 100% guarantee you that won’t happen. So what you’re saying is coming from another different perspective and I appreciate that as a mother. Thank you
A: Alright, next area is Knowledge. So Knowledge is called Gen. And it’s also sometimes labeled as Skillfulness, Self Cultivation, Spirituality. Actually the image of this gua is actually a big mountain. So you can imagine climbing a mountain to meditate on top and that journey. Even if you are climbing a mountain with friends. You are climbing it alone really. So it’s kind of like a solo journey. Even when you are with companions, so that is one of the qualities of the Knowledge area. So if you really want to inspire some growth, some self cultivation, you’re really going to work on yourself. And you’re really looking to climb this intense, huge mountain, with the intention that you want to cultivate yourself and you’re up for that challenge because that’s where you’re at in life. This is a great place to work with. And Laura, what are some ways to work with this.
L: You can use color and the color for this is Dark Blue. So you can add in Dark blue. You can also do an image of a mountain. If you have a nice image of a mountain, you know, something that you really love.
A: Are you judging people’s mountain images?
L: No, I’m not. People can do what they like to do. If you want to print a photo of a mountain and paste it there, that’s good. But I think take a little more time to find something you love and integrate, but I think overall though that’s my general feeling. That the color Dark Blue is this area. It’s also self cultivation on a really deep spiritual level. So meditation. So sometimes it happens to work out where it’s a really great place to set up an area to meditate and sit. So that’s just one other little takeaway for that area.
So Fame, or Reputation is all about being seen. Going out there and getting yourself out and about in the world and being visible. And this could be really hard for people. We think of fame as glamorous, right? But really it is about getting a light shone upon you and being seen. And that could be really hard for some people. But it’s a really important part of really starting something in your life. Getting out there and getting noticed. If you really wanna spark something, this is a big spark area. It’s also Fire. it’s connected to this so It all comes together here. If you’re someone who says “oh i don’t know, I don’t want to be seen” you should probably take a look at that and maybe play around with this area. And the easiest way is the color red, adding that to that area, a subtler way is to add in a plant that feeds the fire in that area.
A: Also you can go real simple, like light a candle in that area. It could be a small tealight with the intention that you want to take a moment, make a ritual out of it and maybe light that candle one evening, and journal about what it is that you want to have recognition for, because a lot of times when our clients and our students or whoever come to us wanting a lot of change, sometimes it has a lot to do with not being recognized or not being seen. Or like Laura touched upon the fear of being seen, so that’s a big one, especially for women, I think.
Alright moving on, the next area is called Career. It’s also called your Path in Life. It’s also called Kan position. And that's the Chinese name. This represents your journey and how you move through life. So it doesn't have to be a job but it’s your reason for being in the world and you can work with this area, you can put a vision board in this area that’s related to career. So of course you have to spend the time making the vision board and you can place this in your career area to activate what it is you want to achieve in your life to spark that change.
L: Yeah, sometimes people ask us where to put the vision boards. Because most people are doing vision boards to move their life path forward, to do something new, going down this road. I would also say that this area is about deep wisdom, sometimes people put wisdom with the knowledge area. But wisdom is really its own thing. Wisdom is a deep knowing, it’s like you’ve gone down really deep on something. You’ve learned this, you’ve found something, you’ve discovered something. And sometimes you have to go into really dark places to find it out and that’s why this area Career, or Kan, is connected to the Water element, but it’s also represented by the color black. So really think about the deep dark water that you really come down and discover something really deep about something you really want to do and bring about in the world. So the color black is something you can add to this area. And generally this area is going to be in the front of the house or right near the front door of your bedroom. So you can add a piece of artwork with a black frame or you can add the symbol of Water. You can just use Water imagery too. Keep it pretty simple.
Last one, Relationships or Love or Partnerships. Also called Kun is the Chinese name referring to this gua. And this is all about not only attracting a partner but about coming together in partnerships. It could be business partnerships. It could be romantic ones. But really think of it also as a place where it’s about nurturing. About taking care of yourself, loving yourself. There’s deep love and compassion for yourself. So it’s got a really broad, a lot of layers to it. All of these guas have tons of layers FYI. We’re really hitting the high points on these. So just know that each of these have tons of layers and you’ve studied them for years, and stuff is still coming out because this all comes from the I Ching, and I mean, which in itself, is a practice you can study for your entire life. So if you want to activate this area, a simple way, and if you’re thinking about love, you can add in the color pink, you can add in pairs, two of hearts, two rose quartz hearts is a nice way too.
A: Yeah, and you can also work with the color pink, even wear it on your body and images of couples and pairs and things are great. In this bagua area if you want to invite in a relationship and Laura also talked about working on yourself. So if that’s something you’re working on, self love, then you can try just one piece of rose quartz.
L: One thing, we always say this every single time we talk about the bagua, please don’t activate all 9 areas. Please sit down and think about what you want to activate and only do one or two.
A: Oh yea, I asked you to talk about that in the beginning,
L: I think I just talked about the bagua itself. First thing was the bedroom. So the second thing is start really simple. Please don’t do all 9. You can do all 9 over a period of time. But start right now, pick 1-2.
A: Yes, we’ll talk about why another time. So thanks for listening to this episode of the Holistic Spaces podcast. You can tune in every Monday for a new podcast episode. If you like our podcast and this episode, please share it with others, subscribe, leave a review, you can find all the show notes on this episode including the information if you visit our blog, the best way to also get more information from us is to sign up for our newsletter. And you can do that by going to mindfuldesignschool.com. And if you scroll all the way down to the website, there is a box where you can join our mailing list. And then you can always keep touch with everything that’s happening.
You can support the podcast by checking out our certification and many courses at mindfuldesignschool.com. If you would like to explore the world of holistic spaces and feng shui on an even deeper level you can visit our website online store and blog for more information on feng shui and holistic living at holisticspaces.com. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you next week!
