Should you face your best personal directions or have your back to your best personal directions? Should you sleep with your head or your feet pointing to one of your favored directions? These are questions that many people have when they are first introduced to the Eight Mansion School, aka The East-West School.

Everyone is born with certain preferred directions based on birth year. This is a branch of Feng Shui which caters to who is using the space, not just how the space is used. And you don’t just have one good direction. You have four good directions and four directions that are not supportive.

For example, a man born in 1966 is a west type person, whereas a man born in 1964 is east type. The westerly directions are: west, southwest, northwest and northeast. The easterly directions are: east, southeast, south and north. The directions which are considered good for you range from high energy-producing and prosperity attracting to tranquil or relaxing. The directions which are considered negative for your “personal trigram” can contribute to you being accident-prone, vulnerable to arguments, legal problems or financial loss. However, for anything really significant to occur, there would need to be more than one flaw in the environment.

Once you learn what your personal good directions are, they can be used in a number of different ways:

• Sleep with your head to one of your good directions, laying down top of head.
• Sit with your back to one of your good directions if you are trying to study or concentrate in solitude.
• Face one of your good directions when you are interacting with others in a business relationship, teaching, lecturing, consulting or negotiating.
• Enter a house or office through one of your good directional sectors.

These are just a few examples. It is based on the concept that the front side of your body is yang, just like the facing side of a house is the more “yang” side. The sitting side of a house is more “yin” as is the back side of your body.

• You can even choose to live in a house that matches your status as a “west type” person or an “east type” person.
• You can position a desk in a directional sector of a room that caters to your personal trigram.

In order to know where these real directions are, all relative to the center of a floor plan,you need to use an actual compass to determine this. And in Feng Shui, we use magnetic north as our reference as opposed to true north. This might create a minor to significant discrepancy depending on where you are in the world. In other words, what you see with your compass might not match up exactly with what you see on a map.

Using your preferred directions can help give you a boost. It can manifest in your personal life or give you a professional edge. Many people report getting better sleep or being calmer when they utilize their best directions. As well, success in business and being seen as more trust worthy and likeable can also be the pay off in making these subtle changes to how you position yourself at work and home.

What this does not extend to is larger geographical areas, such as what region of the country to live in. In other words, an “east type” person is not necessarily going to fare better living on the east coast compared to the west coast. That would be too generic to be meaningful.

On my website there is now an archive of articles under the category of Health and Personal Matters where you can find a detailed description of each of the individual stars, also known as the personal trigrams, with their attributes and personal best directions.

Author: Kartar Diamond
Company: Feng Shui Solutions (R) Since 1992
From the Frequent Client Questions Blog Series