Feng Shui ScanHow form school decides something is a problem
Form school reads a home by its shape and by the route people take through it. Traditional Feng Shui describes qi coming in at the front door and moving through the home roughly as a person would walk it. Three things are said to go wrong with that movement:
- Blocked. Something stands in the way: furniture in the first steps inside the door (a blocked entryway), or a room the path cannot reach.
- Rushed. A long straight run with nothing to slow it, as in a long hallway.
- Drained. The flow is said to leave before it has circulated, the usual reading when the front door faces a back door or window.
The fourth kind of problem concerns you, not the flow: a bed or desk placed where you cannot see the door, have nothing solid behind you, or sit directly in the door’s line. Practitioners call the arrangement that passes all three tests the command position, and a bed or desk that fails one is said to be out of it.
Triage: what to check first
- The entrance. Tradition treats the front door as the source of everything downstream, so a fault here is counted first.
- Where you sleep. Check whether the bed is in line with the door and whether the headboard is under a window.
- Where you work. The same three questions apply to a desk: can you see the door, is there a wall behind your chair, and are you out of the door’s line. The desk placement tool checks them.
- Everything else. Corridors, facing doors, sharp corners, and the mirror facing the bed, on which teachers disagree.
The order is practical as much as traditional. You pass through the entrance every day, and you spend more hours in bed than anywhere else in the home.
Most problems are furniture, not the building
Sort what you find into three piles. Things you can move, such as a shoe rack, a bed or a desk, cost nothing to fix. Things you can soften, such as a pair of facing doors, a corridor or a window behind the bed, take a curtain, a rug, a plant or a headboard. Things you cannot change, such as where the bathroom sits, usually get a closed door as their traditional remedy, and after that there is nothing left to do but stop worrying. The first pile is nearly always the largest.
How seriously to take one finding
A single problem is a traditional reading of a layout, not a verdict on a home. Practitioners weigh findings against each other, and schools differ on some of them. Nearly every rule also has an ordinary reason behind it, such as a draught, a light in your eyes or something to trip over, and that is a fair test of whether one is worth acting on.
When two rules pull in opposite directions, as when the only wall that lets the bed see the door has a window in it, practitioners generally keep the view of the door and remedy the rest. For a self-check that needs no app, try the floor plan self-check.
