Basics About Classical Feng Shui
This is our Luopan, a compass used in classical feng shui. You can use a military or hiking compass to easily obtain the magnetic sitting direction for your own home.
Feng Shui is really about finding the right home and creating the right environment for yourself.
Classical Feng Shui aims to counter, harmonize, or adjust elemental energies within architecture, interior design, and landscape to enhance personal well-being and fortune.
This ancient practice recognizes that buildings absorb and retain the energy present during their construction. While the home has a fixed energy, the energy outside the home changes, and it is important to understand these time-based influences acting on the occupants of the home
Looking at the home from the viewpoint of a drone shows us how the landscape can direct positive energy to or away from a home.
Some of the Core Principles: The Land
We usually start with the land that surrounds the home. Are there bodies of water? Are there mountains or hills? What do those lands look like - are they green and lush or dry and rugged? How about trees, plants, and landscaping? These inform the practitioner about what type of energy is present and if it is positive or not.
Do you ever walk down the street and one side just looks nicer than the other? There’s more to that than you think. (I’ll do another post about the four house types.)
In cities and urban landscapes, we can apply principles of landform feng shui: roads are like moving water (moving energy), and buildings are the mountains.
Classical Feng Shui Uses a Compass
By using a magnetic compass along with the construction date, Flying Star feng shui reveals both fixed and dynamic energies associated with a specific building. Every structure possesses a fixed energy signature (chart) that remains, barring any significant renovations.
Feng shui is most impactful when it can account for changes in time and energy. Energy associated with time is cyclical and changing, as represented by the Chinese calendar system of Stems and Branches. Certain energies of the day, month, and year are considered potent activators to the energy that exists in the home. This can be very influential and should not be overlooked.
Here’s a photo of my military compass.
Time-Based Energy Influences
Three key temporal energies impact a home:
The current 20-year period (Period 9, began February 4, 2024)
As we get closer to these bigger changes, we can start to feel things in the new energy.
With Chinese metaphysics, everything is layered with meanings. Trigram 9 (Li) is symbolic of many aspects. I’ll touch on some in the next section.
The annual energy cycle
The monthly star influences
The annual and monthly stars serve as potent activators or catalysts for existing energies. Through careful observation over centuries, practitioners have identified predictable patterns and outcomes from these elemental interactions.
(Image by Cullen Smith- Unsplash)
Current Cycle: Period 9
We now exist in Period 9 (since February 4, 2024, and lasting until 2043), governed by the Li trigram, which embodies the fire element. Evidence of this shift appears in climate patterns and collective human behavior. As we get closer to these bigger changes, some can start to feel things in the new energy’s influence.
With Chinese metaphysics, everything is layered with meanings.
Trigram 9 (Li) is symbolic of many aspects, including:
Middle-Aged Female
9 represents Fire, the summer season - think abundance and growth
Fire is excitable and changing
In the body, it represents the eyes, the heart
The front door is not a determining factor for a home in classical feng shui. The sitting direction is.
Methodological Focus
Flying Star feng shui, the primary methodology employed by Balance By The Bay, accounts for energy's cyclical nature. Both Eight Mansion and Flying Star systems emphasize a building's sitting direction—often the back of the structure—with the facing direction directly opposite.
Importantly, the facing direction may differ from the front door location.
Foundation for Practice
Proper alignment of these elements establishes the essential framework upon which all other classical feng shui principles build. We use Magnetic North and the sitting direction—not the front door location—as they are fundamental to our analysis.
That’s all for now.
