Different kinds of Feng Shui
Jan 8th, 2005 | By Aisling | Category: Feng Shui basicsNo matter how you approach Feng Shui, it is always based on harmony and balance, and the sense of energy in your environment.
Over the thousands of years that Feng Shui has been practiced, different schools of design have emerged. Each school is important, and many of them work together. The basic principles of Feng Shui are the same, no matter which school you prefer.
The following is a very simple overview of Feng Shui schools.
Intuitive Feng Shui*
Intuitive Feng Shui is the newest and trendiest “school.” But, it is more of an approach to Feng Shui than an actual school.
Most people who practice intuitive Feng Shui have a traditional foundation. But, the practitioner also relies on intuition for guidance when an area of a home or business needs to be fine-tuned.
For example, he or she might say, “Traditionally, this area should feature the color red, but my instinct tells me that yellow and orange are more appropriate. Let’s give that a try.”
Black Hat Sect Feng Shui
Commonly called “Black Hat Feng Shui,” or “BHS Feng Shui,” this is one of the most popular forms of Feng Shui, especially in the USA. Developer Thomas Lin Yun combined traditional Feng Shui with concepts borrowed from Buddhism and Taoism. He simplified the design guidelines, and discovered immediate success when he applied them.
The Black Hat school uses a traditional nine-section grid to assign design principles within a home or office. Instead of using compass directions, BHS Feng Shui starts with the location of the main door to a room or building, and organizes design elements relative to that.
Compass School
Also called “Traditional School,” the Compass School is thousands of years old. It uses the Eight Trigrams of the I Ching and other important tools to determine the innate flow of energy in a home or office.
As the name suggests, the Compass School relies on compass directions–and calculations using 24 subdirections–to determine the best design concepts for each area of a room or a building.
Within Compass School, there are several areas of advanced study, including Eight Mansions and Flying Stars, which study the placement of buildings and how energy affects people in them. These schools use Chinese astrology and other resources to discover each person’s lucky direction. Some families use this to assign bedrooms to children, so that they spend most of their time in their personal lucky area. In an office, this might help you place your desk so that you have good fortune in business.
Form School
Form School is one of the oldest styles of Feng Shui. This school observes the physical landscape and its relationship to the buildings in it. In traditional China, the landscape was treated with great respect. Stories were created to describe lakes, mountains, and other features of the environment. Some landscape elements–and the four major compass directions–were described as animals. The west is a white tiger; the east is a green dragon. The north is a black turtle, and the south is a red phoenix.
When choosing a place for a new home, someone might use Form School guidelines and look for “dragon points” where the grass seems to be especially green and vibrant. This indicates stronger positive energy, and a good place for a home.
These are the primary schools of Feng Shui; there are many others that specialize in a particular aspect of Feng Shui. Each school has its own merits. Generally, it’s smart for beginners to choose either Compass School or Black Hat Feng Shui, and learn the basics before making decisions about interior design.
*Although a Connecticut practitioner has claimed a service mark for the name “Intuitive Feng Shui,” many of us who talk about the popular intuitive approach to Feng Shui are not referring to his specific training program. In this article and others, we are talking about an innate–perhaps intuitive–awareness of the environment and how specific elements work together.
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