Q&A Sunday: The Knowledge Area

Guest User November 8, 2020

I noticed that there’s a “knowledge” area on the feng shui map, and I’m wondering what that means?

In case anyone isn’t familiar with the feng shui bagua map, it’s a tool that feng shui practitioners use to assess and adjust the energy of a space. It’s usually depicted as a three-by-three grid, and it’s made up of eight life areas around a center.

One of these life areas is the knowledge area. It’s called Gen in Chinese. It’s also about self-knowledge, self-cultivation, and skillfulness. It’s represented by the color dark blue, the number eight, square and flat shapes, and the element of yang earth. Yang earth is like a big mountain, one that you might climb to the top of to meditate.

To find the knowledge area of the bagua, stand at the front of your home or bedroom looking in, and imagine a three-by-three grid laid over the home or room. The corner that is closest to you on the left-hand side is the knowledge area.

This area of the bagua is related to your spiritual development as well as your skills and wisdom in mundane areas of life such as your career. It’s a great place for a library or a meditation space. Both books and meditation are related to the knowledge area. Reading books can be educational, and meditation assists in your spiritual development. Experience and practices like reading and meditation are really the most impactful way to cultivate yourself, and they may be especially effective if you do them with intention in the knowledge area of your home.

If you want to take it a step further and incorporate color, try a dark blue bookshelf or meditation pillow, since dark blue helps to activate the knowledge area.

by Anjie Cho

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

Q&A Sunday: Feng Shui for Love?

Anjie Cho May 13, 2018

A friend of mine is not having any success in finding love and has been down about it lately. Is there any Feng Shui that can help her?

Kristina O., New York City, NY

I’m sorry to hear about your friend, and it’s kind of you to ask for her. Feng shui can definitely help with finding love, but I need to know more about the situation. Based on my intuition about this given situation, and as a general suggestion, take a look at KUN which is the Relationship area of the feng shui bagua map. Then look diagonally across from it, you will find GEN which represents KNOWLEDGE, specifically self-cultivation. The first suggestion I would make is that if she works on improving the GEN/self-cultivation area, it indirectly improves KUN/relationships. This is actually more effective than going directly to KUN/relationships.

Feng shui is not a magic pill, but it can help improve areas like love, relationships, and “feeling down." It requires some work! My suggestion in this case is to work on self-cultivation by placing a feng shui crystal (available in the Holistic Spaces shop here) in the GEN/Knowledge area of her home to enhance, clarify and focus self-love and self-care.

In addition the what I’ve mentioned above, there are some other basic feng shui adjustments your friend can do in her bedroom. I was actually single when I started learning about Feng Shui, and it absolutely helped me to bag my husband! The first thing I did was make sure I had open space on both sides of my bed. It’s also important to have a nightstand and lamp on each side, if she has the room. This tells the universe that she’s ready to create some space for an equal partner to come into her life.

Good luck to your friend!

by Anjie Cho

Thanks for reading our "Q&A Sunday". We will be answering questions submitted by our readers. Click here to submit any Feng Shui or Green Design questions!

Note: To locate the KNOWLEDGE or RELATIONSHIPS areas of your home, please refer to the Feng Shui Bagua Map here. New blog post to come soon discussing the Feng Shui Bagua Map!

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Q&A Sunday: A Kickstart for My Kickstarter

Anjie Cho October 1, 2017

How can I expand the mouth of qi for my Kickstarter? Anything, actually, to make it more successful!

Christy P., West Tisbury, MA

Hi Christy,

Thank you for your question about how to make your Kickstarter more successful. Kudos to you for using some feng shui terminology! The mouth of qi is the front door, or a portal, to a space and is an entry for energy to come into your life or home, or in this case, your Kickstarter. So really, this is a question of how to get more energy for your Kickstarter and make it more successful.

In feng shui, we use the bagua map, and there are three different areas that can help create a more successful Kickstarter project. Kickstarter is a place for you to attract Benefactors, so this would be one area for you to work on and improve: your Benefactors area. Next is the Recognition area, so that people know the Kickstarter even exists. And if you look at the bagua map above, we can create a triad (a triangle) including the areas of Benefactors, Recognition and Knowledge. These are the three ideal bagua areas for you to focus on. We actually refer to this as the Three Harmonies of Fire, and it can create a lot of recognition and fire for support.

In order to get helpful people to support this project, you, of course, need to attract more people, but to do this, you need to be seen, which is where Recognition, Fame and fire come in. The last area is Knowledge, which includes skills and self-cultivation. Here, I encourage you to consider if you've done enough research and looked into ways to get your Kickstarter noticed. There is a lot of help available through feng shui, but my teachers have always said that the mundane solution is more important than the transcendental solution. So the magic will work, but you also need to do some heavy lifting yourself.

Start with researching how to improve your Kickstarter (which you may have already done! But do it thoroughly). That, in correlation with the feng shui adjustments, can create success for you. Feng shui-wise, you can create more recognition by activating the three harmonies of fire in your office and/or on your desk. It can be as simple as, in the whole office space, adding a green plant. A living green plant can add fuel to the fire. If you're working with your desk and there isn't room for plants, you can use instead one nine-inch red ribbon in each of the three areas to activate them. The desk and/or office are spaces that connect to your career and business.

Your product, electronic cases that protect us from EMFs, seems to be really interesting, and I hope that making these adjustments draws more attention to your campaign so that we can see these come to fruition!