Q&A Sunday: Nine Star Ki Order

Does the Nine Star Ki process forwards or backwards through the numbers? I have read conflicting things about how to find the elemental year and what year I am in. Any help with this would be appreciated.

Katja D., Holliston, MA

Hi Katja, 

Thank you for your question! And I'm happy that you're diving into the Nine Star Ki. I love it and use it often!

The approach to evaluating Nine Star Ki numerology, as with most things, depends on how you were taught and your interpretation of the knowledge. In the BTB Masters feng shui program that I studied in, my teacher, Rosalie Prinzivalli, taught me the Nine Star Ki numerology as she was taught by her teacher, Edgar Sung. Edgar was also a BTB feng shui master, who studied under Professor Lin Yun. He taught Nine Star numerology such that the process works this way. This is the way I practice as well, since he is part of my teacher's lineage.

There is another numerology from the classical and Flying Star schools. In this system, called the Eight Mansion, your personal Kua number, or your ming gua, is calculated by reading your numbers based on your year of birth and your sex. The calculations are similar to Nine Star Ki, however the applications and use are totally different.

So ultimately, as is often the case in feng shui and all things in life, your interpretation of how to use numerology for feng shui depends on your teacher, their teacher's lineage and your experience and knowledge using the information. As I've shared before, teachers are a very important part of feng shui, and the way you learn each part of the practice will vary depending on who you choose to study with. I'm not sure what your experience is, but I would recommend choosing a teacher you trust, who resonates with you, and learning their methods. Know that there will be conflicting information in feng shui, especially if you aren't learning from a teacher. Just another reason teachers are so important if you really want to learn true feng shui! If you'd like to learn a bit more about Nine Star Ki before you find your mentor, I can recommend Feng Shui Astrology and Nine Star Ki: Michio Kushi's Guidebook on Love and Relationships, Health and Travel and Getting Through the 1990's.

Our 2017 Nine Star Ki podcast episode also has easy directions for calculating this number in the way that I practice. Hopefully we answered your questions and this helps! The Nine Star Ki for 2018 is coming up soon, so keep an eye out!

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!

Q&A Sunday: Does the Feng Shui Bagua Map Include the Garage?

When laying out the bagua, do I include the garage?

Brandi E.N., Rosamond, CA

Hi Brandi,

Does the Feng Shui Bagua Map Include the Garage - Floorplan.jpg

This is a great question, and thank you for being curious about it and sharing your floor plan. You have an attached garage in the front of your home. The answer is…. yes! You do include the garage in the layout of the bagua map. 

I am guessing maybe you would feel bummed out that now you have a huge missing area. But, you lay the bagua at the front based on the “kan line” and that aligns with your front door. You can see it in the image here where I’ve drawn in red the bagua as well as the kan line. Since the kan line aligns with the front door, your garage doesn’t create a missing area. Instead it creates an extension of the Path in Life and Benefactors areas.

The extensions are a bit out of proportion to the rest of your home. Your garage is twice the size of your bedroom, and the extension is about half the size of your bagua. Also this creates a “boot” or “cleaver” shaped home. The very large extension in the Benefactors area may mean that there are a lot of people who offer support but it’s overwhelming or out of balance. The cleaver and boot shape may suggest sharpness or pressure in certain areas of your life according to the bagua areas that occur at the blade of the cleaver or toe of the boot. 

Take a look at the Path in Life and Benefactors areas in your life. Is there an overabundance of helpful people? How is your career? Thanks again for writing in, and please let us know if you have follow up questions! 

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!

Q&A Sunday: Mirrors and Spirits

I have recently been getting into feng shui with the background of the I Ching and qi gong and have been enjoying your podcast. I am wondering if you had heard the same thing as I have, that mirrors only reflect energy but they are doorways for spirits to walk between the world. I have personally experienced a dark spirit walking through a mirror while I was sleeping, which is very dangerous and disturbing. Have you heard of this? What are your thoughts?

Samantha B., Bellevue, WA

Hi Samantha

Thank you for your question. For this one, I thought I’d have one of my beloved feng shui mentors, Barry Gordon, provide an answer. It may be more than you expected and not what you were looking for, but I think it’s a thorough and enlightening response :)

From Barry Gordon:

There's more than one answer to this question, depending upon whether you’re looking at it from the personal viewpoint or the universal viewpoint of natural mind. I’m a physicist, Feng Shui Master, and shaman.

There is a lot of confusion about mirrors in the more traditional forms of Chinese Feng Shui. The ultimate purpose of Feng Shui is to change that Qi of the person being helped. So from that viewpoint, we need to look at the effect of the mirror on the person’s mind. When I look at a mirror, I do not experience energy coming towards me. I experience the increase in spaciousness created by the mirror effect. So mirrors do not push energy away, they actually pull energy in, because they pull your mind in.

Since mirrors create the effect of enlarging a space, they also have a feeling that one is being pulled into or could move into the mirror. So metaphorically and perhaps neurologically, mirrors can appear to be a doorway. They are not a physical doorway. They're a mental doorway.

So, in your dreams, when you’re totally in your mind, the mirror can become a doorway. Your subconscious mind cannot distinguish very well between physical imagery, your experience of the physical world through the gates of your perception, and mental imagery which has much broader and more gates of perception available. That’s why so many healing techniques and methods to create a new future use visualization.

You have personally experienced a spirit in a mirror during a dream. I’ve also experienced them in mirrors and many other objects in the waking state. There are spirits all around us all the time, but our gates of perception have been trained not to allow them into our consciousness. They are sentient beings just like us. They just have less physical substance, so they're less physically real. But just like us, they have different levels of trauma and wounding. The more wounded ones are the ones we usually think of as dark. Their structure is created from the resonant magnetic gravity of lots of negative emotional energies that were never resolved or reintegrated into their creators before their death and are now floating around in the Tao, the zero point energy.

From another viewpoint, they are you. We have been taught and trained so deeply that there is an outside and an inside, that is, a you and other than you, that we totally believe it into reality. But the teachings of so many spiritual traditions say the opposite. And quantum mechanics says the opposite. There is no separation. There’s no real boundary, only an imaginary boundary between you and anything you experience as other. We only have mental emotional boundaries.

The bedroom, the bed, your body, your thoughts and emotions, your sense of identity, your "I" are all experienced in your mind, which, according to the last paragraph, is not really yours. It’s like when you look at one of those paintings that looks like a particular image, but the longer you look, you realize that there is also a different image than the first one seen, another way to look at it.

When you believe the ghost in the mirror to be real, you are caught in your personal addictive relative reality trance. When you step back and witness the trance through meditation or other method, you are free and fearless.

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!