What do you do when the front door faces your six killings direction?
Soy K., Pinole, CA
Hi Soy!
Thank you for asking this very interesting question. As you may (or may not) know, I’m a BTB Feng Shui practitioner. BTB is one of the many many schools of feng shui. This question is for a classical feng shui expert, so I consulted my good friend Beth Grace, who also does our yearly Chinese Zodiac readings. You can check the 2018 readings here.
By the way, I also incorporate classical feng shui here and there in my own life, but my expertise is in BTB feng shui. And in regards to advising others, my teachers have said a beginner (like someone who’s read a book) may know just enough to be dangerous. Of course, it's beneficial to try techniques out and see how they work for yourself. For instance, in BTB and in Buddhism, you are encouraged to experience and work with all the dharma teachings. Keep what works, discard what doesn’t. But when teaching others, your karma mixes with theirs… and it’s a big responsibility! So with that, I am so pleased to share what Beth offers us.
Beth reminds us that in all the schools of feng shui (she’s been educated in quite a few!), the front door to your home is very important. We want the qi, or life energy, coming into our home to be positive, which is good feng shui. Liu sha is translated into English as the “six killings”. Beth says the meaning is “distorted in translation”. The English word “kill” or “killing” provokes fear in us. Instead, Beth and I wish to reconsider this fear-based way of looking at the world. The six killings is not about anyone being killed, but about six negative activities that can be brought on: lawsuits, bodily injury, need for surgery, robbery, scandals and adultery. Of course these are still undesirables, so what to do? I quote Beth: “All is not lost; we have tools!”
In classical feng shui, there are eight directions, four are positive and four are negative. The six killings is one of the negative directions. Beth tells us that each sector, for instance the North, is divided further into three sub-sectors, North 1, North 2, and North 3. An experienced feng shui practitioner can determine which sector the front door actually falls into. Your door may not be in a problematic area.
But if you do find out the door is still in the six killings direction, you can further fine tune your feng shui with Xuan Kong Da Gua, which divides your floor plan into the 64 hexagrams. There are smaller sectors and with this technique, if required, you can change, tilt and/or alter the front door to welcome better energy into your home (and life) based on your personal astrology. For example you can match your personal hexagram(s) to your front door.
That said, with this fine tuning, I cannot emphasize enough that it’s very important to engage an experienced feng shui consultant for something as specific as this. Be careful!
And many, many, many thanks to the beautiful and wonderful Beth Grace for sharing her knowledge and expertise with us! Be sure to check out her website; she has a great monthly newsletter with Chinese Astrology predictions every month. I highly recommend you sign up! Don't forget to check out your Chinese Zodiac for the Year of the Earth Dog, also thanks to Beth!
by Anjie Cho
