Feng Shui for Your Property
The rules of feng shui apply not only to the inside of your home but also to its exterior setting. Feng shui provides many guidelines to help you cultivate and activate good chi and may be useful if you’re searching for a new home or are thinking about landscaping your current home.
Your Lot
According to feng shui, both the shape of your lot and the placement of your house on the lot influence the chi that your home receives.
Lot Shape
Feng shui favors lot shapes that are balanced, such as squares or rectangles. Feng shui practitioners consider triangular, trapezoidal, and L-shaped lots less favorable since the irregular contours of the lot can trap chi or prohibit it from entering.
House Placement
Your house should be located in the middle of the lot or just slightly toward the front. An ideally placed house will have some open space in front and behind the house:
- Front yard: A space that gathers and slows chi as it approaches your home. Ideally, the front yard should face south, because that direction gets the best benefit from the life energy of the sun. Your front yard should also contain your front path. (See Feng Shui for the Entryway for more information on front paths.)
- Back yard: A protected area in which chi can accumulate. The back yard should be kept clean and will benefit from being enclosed by a fence or land formation to keep the chi nestled inside.
Land Formations
Feng shui also offers guidelines on how to situate a home within the natural landscape.
The Four Celestial Animals
According to ancient Chinese cosmology, four deities exist: the phoenix, dragon, tiger, and turtle. In feng shui, each of these four animals correlates with a land feature:
- Phoenix: Represents a form without elevation, such as a river, pond, field, or road
- Dragon: Represents a long, low landform, such as a low mountain range or rolling hills
- Tiger: Represents taller peaks not as long as those represented by the dragon
- Turtle: Represents a single peak, taller than those represented by the tiger
Ideally, your home should be nestled among the four animals. This ideal spot, called the dragon’s lair, positions the house so that it’s surrounded on three sides by dragon, tiger, and turtle mountains, with a phoenix landform in front.
Though most homeowners won’t be able to situate their homes ideally, the concept of the dragon’s lair still provides general guidance on how your home should relate to the landforms that surround it:
- Mountains and hills: A location near hills and mountains is considered favorable in feng shui, but only if the hills and mountains lie behind the house. Behind a (south-facing) house, a hill or mountain provides protection against harsh winds from the north and also helps collect chi. A house facing the hill or mountain will lose light, and the chi pressing down from the mountain may overwhelm the entrance.
- Rivers and roads: Rivers and roads are considered favorable as long as they’re not too fast-moving and don’t point directly at the home’s entrance.
- Pools and ponds: Pools and ponds are particularly valuable to the south and west of a house, where they’ll cool warm summer winds. Water features such as pools and ponds should never have straight edges.
Gardens
Feng shui for the garden is nearly as intricate as feng shui for the home. Follow these guidelines to help you create a garden that generates good chi.
- Use curved paths: Twists and turns encourage chi to slow down and linger in the garden.
- Separate the five elements: Keep conflicting elements from being too close together. For instance, don’t put a fire pit near a pond or pool.
- Keep it tidy: Keep your garden as neat as you would your house. Don’t leave tools lying around or allow dead or cut plants to remain in the garden. Dead plants and messiness will attract bad chi.
Manmade Structures to Avoid
In addition to natural landforms, you should also consider manmade surroundings when assessing a plot of land. In particular, you should pay attention to manmade structures near the land that may generate bad or overwhelming chi. Structures to avoid include:
- Bridges, offramps, and tunnels: Highly trafficked areas generate a wild and overwhelming chi.
- Churches and houses of worship: Though these sites don’t attract bad chi, they can attract such intense chi that it overwhelms the chi of your home.
- Garbage dumps, sewers, and landfills: Bad chi is attracted to refuse and rot.
- Hospitals, cemeteries, and funeral homes: Bad chi clings to places of death and sickness, so it’s best not to live in a house near these structures.
- Military bases, police stations, and prisons: With their connotations of war and violence, military bases, police stations, and prisons generate mostly bad chi.
- Power stations: These stations generate massive amounts of electromagnetic energy and bad chi.
- Railroads and airports: Large, loud, fast-moving machines discourage gentle, flowing chi.
- Schools: Schools are loaded with energy that can overwhelm the chi within your home.
If you do live close to any of these locations, you can still protect the chi in your home by following these guidelines:
- Face your front door away from the location.
- Put curtains on the windows that face the location.
- Get more secure windows or double windows.
