Most books on the subject are as inscrutable as the I Ching. Paul Darby’s book, The Feng Shui Doctor: Ancient Skills for Modern Living, however, offers an organized method to bring Feng Shui into your home, office, and garden. The book is divided into three sections: The Feng Shui Basics, Room by Room, and Modern Feng Shui Factors. Feng Shui Basics gives a very brief history of feng shui, how to lay out your rooms, and the pa kua, an eight-sided diagram, showing the qualities, colors, and benefits of each direction. The next section gives basic tips for deflecting harmful chi and encouraging beneficial chi in each location. Finally, the last section has remedies for solving specific location problems, ways to enhance selling your home, and ways to deal with remodeling or refreshing your environment.

Darby’s pa kua is based on compass directions for the entire house and/or yard. Many other feng shui books I’ve read call the feng shui diagram a bagua, and it is oriented on what door you use most often to enter your home and each room. Those books use a bagua for each room that supercedes the whole house bagua. It can be complicated when there are two doorways into a room. Darby’s method simplifies that in that only the compass directions are used, but he adds his own complication when he points out that any room may have more than one direction influencing it, often bisecting a room at odd angles. I found that unusual and somewhat confusing.

Nevertheless, The Feng Shui Doctor: Ancient Skills for Modern Living offers many great ideas for enhancing the energy in your home or office. The room by room section is indispensible.