The Western Guide to Feng Shui – Book Review

In her book, The Western Guide to Feng Shui, Terah Kathryn Collins defines Feng Shui as a circle that is constantly turning with each rotation building on the one before it to achieve perfect harmony. Feng Shui means wind and water and observes the relationship between seen and unseen forces in nature. She goes on to say you are the wind element and your environment is the water element. Feng Shui enhancements do not offer a quick fix; the relationship between the person and the home brings seen and unseen forces into harmony and creates life changes for the better.

When you open your Feng Shui eyes, you will see that everything is alive with energy or chi, connected and constantly changing. You develop a sense of aliveness, connectivity and change in everything around you. Things that seemed inanimate are suddenly living with vital energy. All the material items, plants, and even your home are alive with your thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. These objects are interconnected with you and with each other and affect your life. With this in mind, you need to assess your material possessions to find out exactly what they are saying to and about you. Do they hold bad memories and feelings or good memories and feelings? Let go of those things that are negative and hold on to those that are positive. When you can recognize what needs to change, whether you or your environment, and bring about that change, you will be much happier and healthier.

When you put good Feng Shui into practice, you should live with what you love, put safety and comfort first, and simplify and organize. Terah has an excellent set of ‘clear the way’ questions to help you clear the clutter and establish a new order in your home and life.

According to Terah, one of the most important tools in Feng Shui is the Bagua Map. The Bagua Map has helped people solve many problems by showing the correlation between the way your home is designed and your successes or failures. I like the fact that there are explicit directions on how to apply the Bagua Map to several different home designs and layouts. By following these directions one can map their Bagua and provide enhancements for problem areas.

Yin/Yang and the Five Elements are discussed along with some suggestions for using these in each room of your home. Terah also discusses the nourishing and controlling cycles of the five elements and provides a quick reference for working with each cycle.

This book has a chapter for adding romance to your environment using color, crystals, lighting, plants, mirrors, sound and water which I found quite interesting. Other chapters cover each room in your home and ways to enhance and create positive chi so your home is in harmony with each member of your family. Each chapter has a quick reference guide for working with that particular area of the home. Also included in the book are suggestions for garages, attics, basements, laundry rooms, storage areas, stairways, windows, and doors.

A serene home is important to me so I especially liked the chapter on blessing the home and chi replenishing exercises.

There are lots of photographs to show the effects of good and bad placement of objects. A lot of the photographs are in black and white and a bit dated but the book was written in 1999. I would like to see a revision of this book with updated photographs and I would rather all photographs be in color since I feel black and white photographs do not do justice to a Feng Shui book.

I purchased the Kindle version of this book for my personal digital library.

Published in 1999, The Western Guide to Feng Shui by Terah Kathryn Collins is a 255 page book and can be purchased at Amazon in either hard copy or for Kindle.