Where Energy Flows

Working with the bagua in feng shui is a fascinating and multi layered process. One way to get to know the nine areas of the bagua more deeply and make them personal for your own home and life is to make a collage bagua.

To do this start with a piece of posterboard. It can be any size you choose. You can either draw an octagon on it to represent the traditional shape of the bagua or you can create a rectangular bagua to represent the shape of most modern homes. Either way divide the poster into nine areas. If working with a rectangle you can do this by visualizing a tick tack toe board.

Starting at the bottom center area and going clockwise you will have a space for each area as follows: Career/Life Path, Self Knowledge & Cultivation, Family & Ancestors, Wealth & Abundance, Fame & Reputation, Relationships, Creativity & Children, Helpful People & Travel. In the center is Health.

As with any collage there are many ways you can go about this. One way I’ve found fun and insightful is to go on a hunt for images that represent the ultimate meaning of each area of the bagua for me. For example if you are someone who loves books and learning new things from them, you could use images of books in your Self Knowledge and Cultivation gua. Or if you are someone who is determined to turn over a new leaf with your diet and start eating more healthy food, your health gua could be collaged with lots of veggies.

Each area of the bagua has a corresponding range of colors so you can play with this as well. You can use different color papers as backgrounds for each gua and then layer your symbolic images on top of the corresponding color.

And as always when you are surfing your magazines and other sources for images stay open to what catches your eye. This is how the multiple layers of the bagua will reveal themselves to you and how you will begin to learn more about yourself and your home. Remember: feel with your eyes and give your left brain a break.

© Donna Thompson, 2008. All rights reserved.

In Feng Shui one of the nine areas of the bagua is called Creativity and Children. Although all areas are equally important and interdependent for me personally this is probably my favorite area of life for I’m all about creativity. More and more as I look around these days it seems to me that the biggest thing that ails us silly humans is that we have become so disconnected from our essential creative natures.A great way to link back up with your creativity and energize this part of your life is by spending some time making a collage. Gather up some old magazines, a pair of scissors, paper and some glue. I like rubber cement. For paper you can use card stock, poster board, mat board or even plain copy paper.

With all your materials in front of you set an intention for what you would like to create. It can be a general intention such as, “I’d like to make a collage that represents creativity to me.” Some other great topics to collage on include going in search of lost parts of your soul and help from your Spirit Guides. There are infinite topics to collage and I’ll be discussing new ones here each time I blog to give you ideas.

Once your intention is set you can dive into the magazines. I like to flip through them quickly and rip out any images that say, “Yum!” to me. I do this quite fast so that my left brain doesn’t have time to analyze why I like certain images. I work by feeling with my eyes, not by thinking with my mind. To me my collage time is a sacred feast for my eyes and imagination. Collage is like a party for your right brain.

After I’ve gathered a small stack of 5-10 different images I then take a look to see if there are any themes emerging. Often the theme is a color. There will be several images either all the same color or complementary colors that are just crying out to be together in a collage.

Next I begin trimming away any excess around the image that I don’t want to be included in my collage such as words from advertisements. Then I place them on my paper surface and begin sliding them around to see where they might want to live. Often I start with a larger background scene and then layer smaller images on top of it.

It’s always fascinating to me with each collage I make that the more I can surrender to the wisdom of the images I choose, the more they guide me. They come together in mysterious ways like pieces of a puzzle to form a soul snapshot that I somehow misplaced. The more you can understand yourself on a soul level, the more balance you can bring into your home and life. Try it and see for yourself!

Collage is one of the most powerful Space Clearing tools in my Interior Alignment^TM toolkit. I’m so passionate about it that I hardly know where to begin, how to narrow my focus enough to share with you just one aspect of what I see as this multi-faceted, multi-dimensional gem that is collage. So for my premier post here on the IA Blog, I’d like to talk a little about how you can work with collage to create clarity wherever there is confusion.

It recently dawned on me that I use collage as a way to practice meditation. I was having lunch the other day with a friend who is a yoga teacher and I was describing my ongoing collage group workshops to her:

”Its basically a form of meditation because you relax and switch off the thinking part of your brain. As you relax and breath, you focus on the images of paper in front of you and you allow them to guide you. They have a consciousness all their own if you can surrender your personal agenda and simply listen.”

“Wow! This sounds fascinating!” said my friend. And I echoed her with, “Yah, wow! I never described it like that before.”

There are many different methods of meditation from sitting and focusing on breathing to walking and chanting. Some people garden, golf or fish as forms of meditation. Me, I collage. Meditation is all about getting as still as you can- relaxing the body, breath and mind and releasing our running “To Do Lists.” When we meditate we tap into Being, where there are no lists, only vast amounts of space. Space Clearing is really a form of meditation. To clear any space we perform rituals that allow us to tap into the Beingness of that place. We start with basic cleaning and clutter clearing of the home, office or property. This is Step number one.

For the past four years or so I have been doing a lot of collage work. Initially I was drawn to collage as a manifestation tool. I got into it because I needed money to take my very first Interior Alignment^TM training with Denise Linn and I heard that making a Vision Seed Map was a powerful way to manifest things. Like cash. Long story short is that it worked and I became fascinated by this new world of collage. These days I’m most interested in teaching people to use collage as a way to create sacred space with themselves. For me collage is like Space Clearing for the Soul. It has helped me release stuck chi from my life and find clarity about who I am, what I love and how I can serve the greater good. I look forward to sharing my stories here with you along with tips for how you can begin using collage as a multi-dimensional tool for Interior Alignment^TM.

Copyright Donna Thompson, 2008. All rights reserved.