Introduction

Take a look around you. What do you see? Whether or not you're aware of it, your environment is profoundly affecting your health, wealth, family life, relationships, and even your destiny.

Feng Shui (pronounced fung shway) is the ancient Chinese art of improving every part of your life by enhancing your environment according to principles of harmony and energy flow. Since the mid-1990s, Feng Shui has rapidly gained popularity in the West. Today, more and more people from all walks of life are practicing Feng Shui and experiencing the positive benefits of auspicious placement. Many successful individuals now create harmony and happiness in their relationships; increase their prosperity; and dissolve chronic patterns of failure, difficulty, and stress by rearranging their living and working environments according to Feng Shui principles.

Implementing the practical and effective Feng Shui methods in this book allows you to see your surroundings in a new light and notice how your home influences your job, your relationships, your personal health, and every other aspect of your daily experience. You're able to make new connections between obstacles in your physical space and recurring difficulties in your financial, professional, emotional, or creative life. By following Feng Shui principles, you can have a home environment that helps you achieve success, happiness, and prosperity. In short, through Feng Shui, you can experience how a harmonious environment allows more positive energy to flow through your whole life. And most important, you can understand why Feng Shui has been practiced for thousands of years - because it works!

Feng Shui is neither superstitious magic nor a passing fad. The Chinese have known for millennia that your physical surroundings affect both your inner and your outer life. They recognize the relationship between good Feng Shui and success, prosperity, and happiness. For example, the location of your bed affects your marriage, and the position of your desk affects your attention and work performance - which can mean the difference between a job promotion or demotion. Used by emperors and sages of the East for thousands of years, the Feng Shui principles I present in this book are as effective today as ever. And now you can find out how to make them work for you, too!

About This Book

Although many Feng Shui books crowd the bookstore shelves, finding the right one for you can be a real challenge. Some of the books are more suitable for advanced practitioners and scholars; others contain valuable yet highly complex details of historical, cultural, and theoretical significance. Trying to determine which ones actually work for you can sidetrack you from the pressing goal at hand - changing your home and life for the better.

Enter Feng Shui For Dummies, 2nd Edition, your do-it-yourself guide to no-kidding, cut-to-the-chase, hit-the-ground-running Feng Shui. I wrote this book with you, the on-the-go reader, in mind. In it, I guide you through the fascinating, mysterious art of Feng Shui and give you the practical information you need to improve your environment and life - starting now. I've shoehorned and packed every page with the most effective tips and techniques available - methods that address the issues and concerns you encounter in your daily life (don't worry; I explain them clearly throughout this book). I've used these methods in my own life and have seen them work for many. So roll up your sleeves and prepare for action!

The easy, practical steps to effective Feng Shui involve

• Feeling and assessing the energy of your home. (It's easier than you may think!)
• Recognizing specifically how your environment is affecting your life right now - and is it ever. Your jaw will drop in amazement as you recognize amazing correlations between home features described in this book and the reality of your daily life.
• Properly implementing specific solutions to change your environment so you can feel the before-and-after differences as soon as possible.

For each feature of your home environment that I address, I describe the ideal state and function of that feature. (When I use the word environment in this book, I mean your personal environment, not the rain forest or the ozone layer.) I then show you how your situation may vary from these ideal principles and explain the potential negative consequences. But I don't leave you high and dry. Instead, I provide you with practical solutions for each problem and tell you which parts of your life benefit when you perform these solutions.

Conventions Used in This Book

I use the following conventions throughout the text to make things consistent and easy to understand:

• Key words and phrases in bulleted lists and the action parts of numbered steps appear in boldface.
• New terms appear in italic and are followed closely by an easy-to-understand definition; I also use italics for emphasis.
• All Web addresses appear in monofont.

Some additional important conventions are as follows:

• The Feng Shui method I present - called Grandmaster Lin Yun's Feng Shui school - is unique in several respects. First, it combines ancient Eastern concepts and modern Western approaches. Second, it's very practical and emphasizes easy-to-implement solutions that require as little time and effort as possible. For more on this type of Feng Shui and how it differs from traditional Feng Shui (which is also effective and valid), see Chapter 1.
• When I use the term Life Area throughout the book, I'm referring to specific areas of your physical space (such as the Wealth Area), not areas of your life (such as your financial situation). Life Areas are sections of the Feng Shui Octagon that you place on the plan of your home or lot; see Chapter 3 for more information.
• The Three Secrets Reinforcement I present in Chapter 6 is an important part of all cures. It should always be performed in conjunction with the physical part of a cure, even when a particular cure doesn't explicitly say to do so.
• All hanging cures (such as faceted crystal spheres and wind chimes) should be hung from a red ribbon or string cut to a multiple of 9 inches in length, even if this step isn't specifically noted within the description of such a cure.

What You're Not to Read

I like to think that you're going to read every single word I've written in this book, but I also know that you're busy and eager to start applying Feng Shui's secrets right away. If you're short on time, feel free to skip the sidebars (those gray-shaded boxes sprinkled throughout the chapters); they're full of interesting information but aren't essential to your understanding and application of Feng Shui.

Foolish Assumptions

In this book, I make several assumptions about you, the reader.

• You're interested in finding out how your surroundings affect you and how you can affect them - and improve your life by doing so.
• You want to make your home more harmonious and beautiful, improve your luck, nurture your relationships, and increase your prosperity.
• You don't want to be overwhelmed by overly mysterious or complex theories and methods that require years of study.
• You have an open mind and are ready to discover new and interesting ways to understand the world and improve your situation.
• You're eager to act, get moving, and make things happen.

Feng Shui is action-oriented; you get as much out of it as you put into it. When you prime a pump, it takes a bit of initial effort before the water starts to flow. In the same way, after you prime your Feng Shui pump by arranging your spaces according to Feng Shui principles, the energy of harmony, creativity, and abundance starts to flow into every part of your life.

How This Book Is Organized

Like all For Dummies books, Feng Shui For Dummies, 2nd Edition, is organized to make tons of useful information easily accessible. This book includes five main parts. Here's how I divvy it up.

Part 1: Getting Started: Feng Shui Made Clear

Part 1 explains the basic Feng Shui principles you need in order to apply the practical methods found throughout this book. I explain what Feng Shui is - and what it isn't. I also explain how the main schools of Feng Shui differ from each other and where Grandmaster Lin Yun's Feng Shui school - the one this book uses - fits into the general scheme of Feng Shui. In addition, I define core concepts of Feng Shui, show you how to map the energy of your personal space by using the Feng Shui Octagon, and help you harness the energies of the Five Elements.

Part 2: Energizing Your Home's Exterior

Part 2 deals with the great outdoors - the outside of your home, that is. Just as you live in your home, your home lives in the land or property it sits on. From your neighborhood to your street and right up to your front door, I show you how to align the energies of nature to assist your personal progress. In addition, this part explains how to recognize positive and negative home positions on lot and landscape, counteract nearby negative features, and use the beneficial effects of...