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The Practical Encyclopedia of Feng Shui

The Practical Encyclopedia of Feng Shui

List Price: $35.00
Your Price: $23.10
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Beginner's begin here!
Review: I have just started learning about Feng Shui. Before I was interested in it but thought it was much too complicated and dificult for someone who just wants to do it for fun. It does look hard at first when you take numbers and direction into consideration. But it's not, the basics of Feng Shui are very simple and with a book like this you will learn in no time!

Hale goes over the Bagua, the funky octagon shaped diagram you've probably seen before but didn't know what it was! Well it's a tool for Feng Shui and it's called a Bagua. Each side represents an element, color, and a part of your life like work, money, romance, etc. He breaks the Bagua down and makes it very easy to understand. Think of the room you want to "Feng Shui". Then imagine an invisible octagon on the floor of this room, each side representing something. How do you know which side goes where? Hale makes that easy.

You discover what your "Kua" number is by adding the numbers of the year of your birth until you reach a single digit. Then for men you take this number and deduct it from ten. For women you don't deduct but you add five instead. Once you have this number you can discover what directions are best for placing your bed, your desk, things like that. Hale provides a list and all you need is a compass. Your head should point in this direction and your desk should face this direction. Once you know which direction is best for you, you can start with that "side" of the Bagua. Then the other areas of the room, what place is what, fall into place! And you can decorate accordingly and he offers suggestions and explains symbolism. There are lots of tips and taboos in this book, like windchimes stimulate the good "Chi", no mirrors reflecting the bed, always have the door in sight, no open shelving facing the bed or desk.

This is turning out to be much easier than I thought and very fun. I highly recommend Hale's lovely book which is large and very illustrated so you can understand what he is talking about. He shows you how to feng shui a bedroom, entire house, garden, office, everything! Just a really pretty book with good ideas.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Words and pictures flow as wind and water...
Review: I went from a curious neophyte to a well-informed practitioner!
(Well actually, just really good at noticing all the Feng Shui faux pas around me! AND BEING ABLE TO EXPLAIN THEM!)
The case studies, the diagrams and detailed chapters are a joy to experience. I call this an "armchair book", just as enlightening as a beloved novel. Everything is included and categorized to the point that I felt as if I was reading an enjoyable college text. If they have Feng Shui as a college course, this better become the required text-book.
All this book needed was the review questions at the end of every chapter! Hah!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A dictionary of Feng Shui in Chaos
Review: The writer seems to have collected a large set of Feng Shui facts. Lots of cool pictures. The order of information and lack of continuity between subjects makes me think that the author does not know feng shui as much as she thinks she might. For example, try switching positions of the last two columns of the table of relationships of the five elements.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Practical and Comprehensive Feng Shui
Review: This book is thorough and detailed. It provides information that is not readily available in other Feng Shui books. The illustrations and pictures are very insightful and helpful. It has a good blend of content and depictions. The only drawback is that it is a big and bulky book. Considering the depth of the material, maybe big and bulky is unavoidable although I don't like it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best Visual Guide to Feng Shui
Review: This is a beautiful coffee-table book on Feng Shui, with literally hundreds of excellent color photographs, drawings, diagrams and other illustrations to help make visual sense of the concepts. One of its greatest assets is that it generally supports the excellent writings of Sarah Rossbach and Master Lin Yun on the subject, while some other illustrated volumes I've seen completely contradict them. Gill Hale knows his subject and writes with common sense and authority. The book is arranged logically, with chapters on clarifying your personal preferences (or type), placement of the home on the property, treatment of each major room, a major section on Feng Shui in the garden, the uses of water, color, sound and other enhancements and cures, and a concluding section on Feng Shui in the workplace. It features a wealth of design ideas that can be incorporated into real-life settings without costing a fortune.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Covers many areas of Feng Shui
Review: This is a good book to get started into Feng Shui with. It contains many ideas, pictures, diagrams and suggestions to solve many basic feng shui problems. However, it didn't seem to address enough in some areas. For instance, my home faces south, yet almost every diagram for arrangment of garden features is for a north facing home, I'm left not really knowing what to do with my yard, how do I handle feng shui principles for my south facing property? Additionally, ideal gardens and homes are lavish, expensive things, and there isn't much for someone on a more limited budget to do with thier yard.

Many charts for figuring interactions between people, directions, ideal arrangements are also given, but again, little information to fix whatever may already exist.

The book itself is easy to go through to get ideas from the many beautiful pictures, but the print is rather small for a typical hardback book. Even with perfect vision, I had to hold the book too close and strain too much to read it. Overall a good start, somewhat overwhelming with so much information at once, and it left me feeling like I needed to consult an expert in Feng Shui for the next step.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Covers many areas of Feng Shui
Review: This is a good book to get started into Feng Shui with. It contains many ideas, pictures, diagrams and suggestions to solve many basic feng shui problems. However, it didn't seem to address enough in some areas. For instance, my home faces south, yet almost every diagram for arrangment of garden features is for a north facing home, I'm left not really knowing what to do with my yard, how do I handle feng shui principles for my south facing property? Additionally, ideal gardens and homes are lavish, expensive things, and there isn't much for someone on a more limited budget to do with thier yard.

Many charts for figuring interactions between people, directions, ideal arrangements are also given, but again, little information to fix whatever may already exist.

The book itself is easy to go through to get ideas from the many beautiful pictures, but the print is rather small for a typical hardback book. Even with perfect vision, I had to hold the book too close and strain too much to read it. Overall a good start, somewhat overwhelming with so much information at once, and it left me feeling like I needed to consult an expert in Feng Shui for the next step.


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