Since T. Raphael Simons’ book, Feng Shui Step By Step, is filled with odd and alternative ways to diagnose a house, it necessitated more than one review. Part One clocked in at nearly 1,500 words, so here goes Part Two of my review.

In Chapter Eight, he asks the reader to take their personal Year Star and pair it with their main door’s direction. For this, the author notes that his previous list for finding your personal Year Star needs to be altered if you are the 5 Earth star. He reverts to the more conventional Ba Zhai method where a 5 star male morphs into a 2 star person (Kun gua) and the 5 star female morphs into an 8 star person (Gen gua).  There is no explanation for why he uses the conventional Eight Mansion method here, but the semi-borrowed practice from Nine Star Ki elsewhere.

With no 5 star person, there are just eight stars instead of nine, paired with eight directions. He arrives at 64 different interpretations of how a main door could influence a person. I suspected that perhaps the 64 different door readings may be linked to the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching. But after inspection, his list of 64 possibilities does not seem related.  For myself, I looked up the direction of the main door for my past six homes.  Did the interpretations ring true?  So-so.  The author tries to make it clear that the “direction” you intend to use is the direction you would face if standing at your main door and looking straight out. This is different from the LOCATION of your door. Because the author never mentions the location of a sector, I wonder if he ONLY uses the DIRECTION.

He does show illustrations, where a directional sector has a door with a different “facing” direction, such as with a southwest facing door within a south sector (page 131, Fig. 83).  And to that extent, he uses the “pie shape” sector method to divide up floor plans (common with Flying Star Schools), when the Eight Mansion School he refers to typically uses the Nine Palace Grid method.

For example, let us say that your door is over in the Northeast corner of the front of your East facing house. The door could be facing the street, like the whole house, to the east (within the Northeast sector). Within the Northeast sector the door itself could be turned facing North. The door could even be angled to northeast. In other applications of Feng Shui, it is also important to make this distinction between DIRECTION and LOCATION. As well, you may arrive at a different LOCATION for a door, depending on whether you use the pie shape sector method or the Nine Palace Grid method.  I will give Simons credit for using the pie shape sector method.  With a careful compass reading, that will at least be a more accurate division of the floor plan.

He advises the reader to take compass readings from the center of the house, but I tend to advise against this. I think you will get a more accurate compass reading if you stand outside a house or building and away from any large sources of metal, which can throw a compass off.  All you need to do outside is figure out the direction of the building or the house as a whole.  Then, when working with a to-scale floor plan, you can grid out the floor plan and know exactly the location and direction of all walls, doors and windows. I place a compass transparency right over the floor plan to know how to grid the directional zones.

Further into the book, he discusses three different ways to diagnose a living space.   What he calls the “Eight Point” Method is really just the Black Hat School. He takes this New Age Ba’gua and outlines the floor plan with the Eight Life Stations. In the Black Hat (BTB) School, those folks usually label the entrance as the “Career” area, regardless of where the door is and regardless of what direction it is. With Simon’s Eight Point Method, he lines up the “career” station with the facing wall. This means that, depending on where the door is located, the door may be off to the left in the “Knowledge” area, smack in the middle in the “Career” area or off to the right in the “Friends” area.  This is also called the “Helpful People” area for those who use the BTB School.

He describes another way as the “Stick Figure” method. The shape of the home has a stick figured person superimposed over the floor plan where the “head” of the stick figure is aligned with the door, almost like placing a constellation of stars over the floor plan. Except that it strikes me as juvenile and a bit “voodoo.” It may in fact ring true on a whole other “talismanic” level, but this is not the traditional Feng Shui, to say the least.

Assumptions are made about the occupant based on where the head, torso, and legs areas of the stick figure land within the floor plan, with correlations to the Eight Life Stations.  This takes the concept of a house being a bigger version of the body to a more literal level.

The third technique is “reading your space with the Five Elements.”  This is the only one I can semi-vouch for since he is taking literal directions into consideration. However, what he does with that information is not necessarily what I, nor what other traditional practitioners would do either.

What comes next is a chapter about clutter. Here he defines what clutter can do to a person in very specific ways. We can generalize and say that hoarding-level clutter in any location in the house is bad and unproductive for the occupant.  And if we agree that clutter is one form of “sha qi,” or negative energy, then the sha qi of any kind can create a predictable outcome if we factor in the location.  For example, the direction of Northwest is related to the head and lungs.  If someone has chronic clutter and broken items in the northwest sector of their home, they may also suffer from head or lung ailments.

After that comes a chapter regarding inauspicious window and door locations. I agree with some of the ideas presented; however, he limits the interpretation of windows to energy escaping from those openings. Fact is, the air currents (qi) can also ENTER from a window location, so his examples are limited in their scope.   At this location in Simon’s book, I have a feeling that I put it down back in the 1990’s when I read it for the first time.   Once the Black Hat stuff is mentioned in any feng shui book, my interest wanes and the author loses credibility for me.

My enthusiasm diminishes as the author continues to give more examples of his Eight Point Method, the Stick Figure Method and the Five Element Method. None of these inspire me, as I know that they are either inaccurate or based on overly-simplified notions, borrowed then twisted versions of actual Five Element Theory.   His recommendations don’t always follow a logical path.  For example, there is a section on how to interpret missing directional sectors of a floor plan vs. extended directional sectors.  For the extended, larger directions, he assumes this is always bad and that it needs to be tempered with a reductive element in the form of color.

For instance, if the North sector is extra large, he advises to reduce its power with the wood element (green color) because water (north’s signature element) nurtures wood.  For a missing north sector, you could assume that the walls around this missing area would need metal colors to enhance the missing area. Instead, he just recommended water colors, to match the area. Why use the Reductive Element in one instance and not use the Productive Element for the opposite problem?

I agree with some of his interpretations of missing or deficient directional areas, but not by the definitions used in the “Eight Point” method (aka Black Hat Ba’gua). This book has a fair amount of Black Hat School practices without naming them as such.  There is a whole section on the use of mirrors to compensate for missing areas of the floor plan.  The Black Hat people refer to mirrors as the “aspirin of Feng Shui,” which implies that use of mirrors addresses many problems, even if only an illusion of more space has been created by the mirror.

Another contradiction is how he handles the eight basic directions. First off, the areas he deems “negative” are based on door direction and if the door direction is from the East Group or West Group designations.

For virtually every other Ba Zhai School practitioner, the good and bad zones within a home are based on the SITTING direction and sector of the house and not the door direction.

For example, if a house “sits” with its back wall to West, it is considered a West Type House, regardless of where the main door is. The best directions within that house, based on that system would be the westerly directions of: West, Northwest, Southwest and Northeast.  And yet, with Simons’ brand of Feng Shui, if the door location in that West Sitting House were in the Southeast, he would consider the best areas to be from the East Group: East, Southeast, North and South.  This is the exact opposite of what the popular Ba Zhai (Eight Mansion School) teaches. 

Further, he gives color recommendations to solve what he thinks are these elemental clashes between the person and place. In Flying Star School, we try to use the real element (like real water H2O) and only use color as a back-up re-enforcement or when it is impossible to use the real element. The elemental adjustments are based on the unseen magnetic field of the home. That magnetic field is determined based on when the house was built and the compass reading for the whole house. This traditional method is more specific, nuanced and accurate.

Simons’ recommendations for numerous different colored accent walls could make a house end up looking like a Rubik’s Cube turned outside in. Some houses would end up with a conspicuous amount of mirrors.  I appreciate that he tried tying together three different methods for assessing a house to convey that there are in fact multiple layers to any assessment. The problem for me is that these methods either overly-generalize or they contradict the very schools and practices they have been extracted from.

What follows toward the end of the book includes recommendations for furniture placement. Some of this is standard and universally agreed upon principles of qi flow, which you can find in most beginner’s books on Feng Shui. He gives honorable mention to space clearing and dowsing, which I have no objections to, but they are separate practices and not integral to Feng Shui. Simons also gives credence to the worst of the popular feng shui kitchen myths. Some of this is a gross misinterpretation of Five Element Theory and it drives people away from studying feng shui further.

Author: Kartar Diamond

Company: Feng Shui Solutions ®

From the Feng Shui Book Review Blog Series