Q&A Sunday: Feng Shui, Color, and the Bagua Map

Guest User October 17, 2021

I’d love to learn more about using color in feng shui.

This is a popular topic! Laura and I actually just recorded a whole podcast episode about feng shui and color. I’ll share a few ideas about this here, and if you want to dive deeper, I would encourage you to check out the episode.

One way to approach feng shui and color is to look at how colors relate to the bagua map. The bagua map, in case you aren’t familiar, is a kind of energetic map that feng shui practitioners lay over a space. It has eight areas around a center.

Something that I noticed recently is the connection between the center of a flower and the center of the bagua. The bagua is a mandala, just like a flower can be. The center of the bagua, called the Tai qi, is yellow, which is often true for the center of flowers as well. In feng shui, yellow represents the earth element. Earth is connected to stability and feeling grounded, and the center of the bagua affects all of the areas that surround it.

One of the most popular areas of the bagua is the purple area, or the abundance area. It’s called Xun position in Chinese. In addition to abundance, it’s related to the eldest daughter and your feelings of wealth and prosperity, which go beyond financial wealth. It’s also about having a feeling of abundance, a feeling of enough. It’s the opposite of a poverty mentality. Xun is also deeply related to self-esteem and self-worth.

Purple is also the combination of red, which is the fire element, and blue, which is the wood element. (There’s a misconception that blue is the water element, but it actually represents wood in BTB feng shui.) Purple brings together the kindness, flexibility and growth of wood with the inspiration, passion, and protection of fire. This makes purple a wonderful color to work with in your home, if these ideas resonate with you. Some easy ways to incorporate purple into your home are through small decor accents, like a throw pillow or blanket.

Sometimes people think that you need to paint a whole room the color that corresponds to the feng shui bagua map. The way that I teach my students at Mindful Design Feng Shui School is to realize that you don’t want to activate every single area of the bagua map. Not only is it unnecessary, but the I Ching, which is one of the foundations of feng shui, teaches that there’s no such thing as perfection. Everything is always in transition and always moving. If you try to make everything perfect, the only place to go from there is down, so aiming for perfection will actually work against you. Painting your walls according to the bagua map is also not the most skillful way to work with this tool, and it probably won’t work very well from a design perspective.

Another way to work with feng shui and color is to make your own art and explore different shades of a color. If you want to work with purple, for example, it’s really fun to get a watercolor palette and create purple with red (fire) and blue (wood), and see how these work together. Make it a fun, exploratory activity, and see how that correlates with your feelings of abundance. Once you’ve made some purple art, you might want to place it in the abundance area of your bedroom.

I hope that helps you as you’re thinking about feng shui and color, and if you want to learn more, be sure to listen to the podcast!

by Anjie Cho

If you’d like to learn more about feng shui, check out Mindful Design Feng Shui School at: www.mindfuldesignschool.com

The Dark Side of Feng Shui

Guest User July 14, 2021

The title of this post is a little misleading, because there isn’t really a dark side of feng shui! However, I was recently reminded about the importance of looking at your darker side. I pulled the sorcerer card from one of my favorite decks, the Mystical Shaman Oracle Deck. It’s from Four Winds School, where I studied shamanic healing. This card is about looking at your darker side, and how you may be harming yourself, or maybe setting yourself up to feel as if there’s not enough in the world.

In reality, the world is an abundant place. The universe is abundant and it wants to support you. One of the ways that I have a poverty mentality is that I start to worry about not having enough time. I often try to multitask and do two things at once. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. The world is an abundant space, and I don’t need to try to fill it up.

How does this reflect in our feng shui? Most obviously, we clutter up our homes. If there’s an empty space in a client’s home, they often ask what they should put there. Sometimes, space is all you need. Are there areas of your home, life, or schedule where you’re always trying to fill up space? How can you feel more abundant by being more spacious?

I invite you to do this with your home, and to also do it in tandem with your internal environment. One way I’m going to work with this is to let go of nine things a day for a certain period of time to create more spaciousness in my home. I’m also going to work on saying no and letting go of schedule obligations. I can also be more generous to myself by not trying to multitask, and by doing things I love just for the sake of doing them.

Does this resonate with you? If so, I invite you to also take a look at your dark side, and see how you can be more spacious!

by Anjie Cho

If you’d like to learn more about feng shui, check out Mindful Design Feng Shui School at: www.mindfuldesignschool.com

How to Work with a Bathroom in the Wealth Corner

Guest User June 16, 2021

If you stand in the doorway of your home looking in, the far left corner will typically be related to Xun position, also called the wealth area or the abundance area of the feng shui bagua map. People often get very worried if there’s a bathroom in this area, because it can mean a drain on your resources, or a drain on your wealth and prosperity.

I also want you to keep in mind that this area is not just about money. It’s also about abundance in all areas of your life, as well as how you value yourself, so it is important to notice if there’s a bathroom in that area of your home.

If you do have a bathroom in the wealth area, the first thing you want to do is make sure your bagua is laid correctly. If you’re not sure, I encourage you to join one of Mindful Design’s Practical Feng Shui workshops. We have one almost every month, and when you join you get a quick feng shui reading, and we lay the bagua map on your home so you can see if you’ve done it correctly. Especially if you have an unusually shaped home, we recommend working with a trained practitioner who can lay the bagua accurately. In Practical Feng Shui, you can also ask a feng shui question and you’ll see eight other floor plans, so you learn a lot about how to lay the bagua map.

If your bathroom is indeed in the wealth position of your home, there are a couple of simple fixes you can do. The easiest is to put a mirror on the outside of the door, which energetically erases the bathroom from that area of your home. You can also put a plant in the bathroom to uplift the energy of the space. Ideally, a real plant is best. If you don’t have any natural light in your bathroom, you can also include artwork of green plants.

by Anjie Cho