The Bagua Map: What Each Area Means and How to Use It
The bagua is the feng shui energy map that links eight life areas to your floor plan. Learn what each gua means, how to overlay the grid, and simple fixes for each zone.
The bagua (八卦, bāguà) is the central diagnostic tool of feng shui. You can read every book on feng shui theory, but if you do not know how to lay the bagua over your floor plan and read what it tells you, none of that theory helps.
The bagua is an octagonal energy grid divided into eight sectors, each tied to a specific life area: career, knowledge, family, wealth, fame, relationships, creativity, and travel. A ninth area, the center, governs overall health and balance.
This guide explains what each of the nine areas means, how to lay the bagua over your home, and what to adjust when a zone feels off.
Where the bagua comes from
The bagua originates in the Yijing (易經, “Book of Changes”), where the eight trigrams (also called bagua) represent the fundamental forces of reality. For an introduction to the I Ching, see our guide to the Book of Changes. The Xici Zhuan (繫辭傳, “Great Commentary”) describes how the trigrams were first devised:
“When Bao Xi ruled the world, he looked up and contemplated the images in heaven; he looked down and contemplated the patterns on earth. He contemplated the markings of birds and beasts and their adaptations to the regions. From his own body he took the model, and from external things he took the pattern. Thus he first devised the eight trigrams.”
This passage locates the bagua’s origin in direct observation of nature — not divine revelation but pattern recognition. The trigrams are abstractions distilled from watching how water flows, how fire burns, how mountains stand, how wind moves.
The Shuogua Zhuan (說卦傳, “Commentary on the Trigrams”), an appendix to the Yijing, assigns each trigram a direction, an element, a family member, and a body part:
“Qian is heaven, is round, is the ruler, is the father… Kun is earth, is the mother, is the cloth, is the cauldron.”
— Shuogua Zhuan, Chapter 8
Feng shui practitioners adapted this trigram cosmology into a spatial diagnostic grid. By the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), the bagua was a standard tool in feng shui site analysis.
There are two schools of bagua application today, and they use the grid differently.
The two bagua systems: classical compass versus Western BTB
Before you lay the bagua on your floor plan, you need to decide which system you are using. They give different results.
Classical compass bagua (八宅, bāzhái)
The classical method uses a luopan (羅盤, luópán), the feng shui compass, used to take a directional reading of your front door. Each of the eight sectors is fixed to a compass direction:
| Direction | Gua | Life Area | Element |
|---|---|---|---|
| North | Kan (坎) | Career | Water |
| Northeast | Gen (艮) | Knowledge | Earth |
| East | Zhen (震) | Family | Wood |
| Southeast | Xun (巽) | Wealth | Wood |
| South | Li (離) | Fame | Fire |
| Southwest | Kun (坤) | Relationships | Earth |
| West | Dui (兌) | Creativity | Metal |
| Northwest | Qian (乾) | Travel | Metal |
In this system, your floor plan determines where each gua falls, but the compass direction is fixed. If your front door faces south, the career area (north) is always at the back of the house, regardless of where the front door sits on the floor plan.
Western BTB bagua (Black Hat Sect)
The Western BTB system, introduced by Thomas Lin Yun in the 1970s and popularized in English-language feng shui books, simplifies the bagua to a three-by-three grid aligned to the front door. No compass needed.
You stand at your front door looking in. The bottom row of the grid (closest to the door) holds Knowledge (left), Career (center), and Travel (right). The middle row holds Family, Health, and Creativity. The top row (farthest from the door) holds Wealth, Fame, and Relationships.
Which system is correct? Both work, but for different purposes. The classical method is more precise and aligns with the traditional trigram-direction correspondences from the Yijing. The BTB method is easier to apply in apartments and small spaces where an exact compass reading of every room is impractical. If you are a beginner, start with BTB. If you are working with a standalone house and want the traditional approach, use the compass method.
This guide describes the nine areas in a way that applies to both systems. The life area meanings are the same regardless of which method placed them on your floor plan.
The nine bagua areas, in detail
1. Career (Kan, 坎): North, Water
The career area governs your professional life, your sense of purpose, and your path through the world. It is not only about your current job. It is about whether you feel you are moving in the right direction.
Water is the element here (see the five elements guide for how water interacts with the other elements). Water imagery, a small fountain, a photo of a river, dark blues and blacks, all activate this area. The shape associated with water is wavy and irregular.
What to check: Is this area cluttered with things you meant to deal with and never did? A career area buried under old paperwork, broken equipment, or a pile of things you are “going to get to” is a career path stuck in limbo.
2. Knowledge (Gen, 艮): Northeast, Earth
The knowledge area governs learning, self-cultivation, and inner growth. It is the area for study, meditation, and skill-building. The element is earth, and the associated colors are yellows, beiges, and earth tones.
A strong knowledge area has quiet, stillness, and a sense of groundedness. Books, a meditation cushion, or a comfortable chair for reading all belong here. What does not belong here is a television, a busy thoroughfare, or anything that pulls your attention outward rather than inward.
3. Family (Zhen, 震): East, Wood
The family area governs your relationship with your family of origin, your current family, and the broader sense of community and belonging. The element is wood: think growth, upward movement, and deep roots. Greens and blues work here, as do healthy plants (wood feeds wood).
Photos of family members belong in this area, but with one caveat: only put up photos of people you have a genuinely good relationship with. A photo of a relative you resent is not family harmony. It is active discord hanging on your wall.
4. Wealth (Xun, 巽): Southeast, Wood
The wealth area is the one everyone obsesses over, but it governs more than money. It covers abundance in the broad sense: financial resources, yes, but also the feeling that you have enough, that life is generous, that you are not constantly scraping by.
The element is wood, and the color is purple (traditionally associated with prosperity in Chinese culture). Living plants are especially potent here. A healthy plant in the wealth area signals growing abundance. A dead plant signals the opposite. If you keep a plant here, you must actually keep it alive.
What to avoid in the wealth area: trash cans, drains, toilets, laundry baskets. Anything that represents things leaving, draining, or being discarded weakens the abundance energy of this sector.
5. Fame (Li, 離): South, Fire
The fame area governs your reputation, your visibility, and how you are seen by others. It is not about being famous in the celebrity sense. It is about being recognized for what you do and having your work seen by the people who need to see it.
Fire is the element, and red is the color. This area thrives with light: a lamp, a candle (real or LED), or anything that throws illumination. Animal prints, triangular shapes, and images of people whose recognition you admire also activate this zone.
6. Relationships (Kun, 坤): Southwest, Earth
The relationships area governs romantic partnerships, but it also covers all close one-to-one bonds: a spouse, a business partner, a best friend. The element is earth, and the colors are pinks, reds, and whites.
This area responds well to pairs: two candles, two pillows, two matching objects. A single object in this area suggests solitude. If you are happily single, solitude is a feature, not a bug, and the bagua reflects that. If you are looking for a partner, pairs activate the energy of partnership.
Remove anything that represents failed relationships. Photos of an ex-partner, gifts from a relationship that ended badly, objects that carry resentment; these hold the energy of the past in the sector that governs your present and future connections.
7. Creativity (Dui, 兌): West, Metal
The creativity area governs creative expression, children (both literal and metaphorical), and the act of bringing new things into the world. The element is metal, and the colors are whites, grays, and metallics.
This is the area for your art supplies, your musical instruments, your work-in-progress projects. It benefits from round shapes (metal’s associated form) and metallic objects. A creative area that has been turned into a home office where you do only admin work is a creativity area being asked to do the opposite of its nature.
8. Travel (Qian, 乾): Northwest, Metal
The travel area governs physical travel, yes, but also helpful people, mentors, and the network of people who show up at the right moment. The element is metal, and the colors are grays, whites, and metallic tones.
Images of places you want to visit activate this area. So do objects that represent people who have helped you. This is not about wanderlust decor. It is about the energy of connection that brings you into contact with people and places that move your life forward.
9. Health (Tai Chi, 太極): Center, Earth
The center is not one of the eight trigrams. It is the taiji (太極, “supreme ultimate”), the still point around which everything else revolves. It governs your overall health, vitality, and the sense that your life is balanced, not in the “work-life balance” corporate sense, but in the deeper sense of all eight areas pulling evenly rather than one area draining the others.
The element is earth, and the colors are yellows and earth tones. The center of a home should feel open, uncluttered, and calm. A center that is a dark hallway, a cramped stairwell, or a storage area packed with boxes is a home whose center cannot breathe. If you fix nothing else in your bagua, fix the center. Everything else depends on it.
How to lay the bagua on your floor plan
Take a floor plan of your home. If you do not have one, sketch the outline. It does not need to be architectural, just accurate enough to show the shape and the rooms. Mark where the front door is.
If you are using the BTB method, draw a three-by-three grid over the floor plan. Align the bottom of the grid with the wall that contains the front door. The nine cells of the grid now correspond to the nine bagua areas.
If you are using the classical compass method, stand at the center of your home with a compass (or a compass app on your phone). Determine which direction each room sits in relative to center. Then overlay the fixed directional bagua from the table above.
In both cases, you will probably find that some rooms span two bagua areas. That is fine. A bedroom might be half in relationships and half in family. Work with the zones as they fall. The areas that fall in hallways, closets, and bathrooms deserve special attention. A wealth area that lands in a bathroom is a classic feng shui problem (wealth “flushed away”), and there are remedies for it.
What to do when an area is missing
Many floor plans are not perfect rectangles. An L-shaped apartment, a house with a porch cutout, or a room with an alcove may leave a bagua area partially or fully missing. A missing area means the life sector associated with that zone has less energetic support. It is not a curse. It is just a structural condition, and there are standard remedies.
For a partially missing area, define the boundary. Place a heavy object (a large plant, a piece of furniture, a stone) at the edge of the missing corner to visually and energetically “complete” the shape.
For a fully missing area (common in studio apartments and open-plan layouts), use a mirror to symbolically extend the space into the missing sector. Hang the mirror on the wall that borders the missing area, facing into the room. The mirror creates the perception of depth where the floor plan does not provide it.
Quick diagnostic: walk your bagua
Once you have your grid overlaid, walk through each of the nine areas and ask these three questions:
- What is in this area right now?
- Does what I see reflect the life I want in this sector?
- What is the simplest change I can make today?
You do not need to redecorate your entire house. One area, one adjustment, one weekend. Start with the area that feels most stuck and do the smallest thing that shifts it.
The bagua is not a magic grid. It is a tool for paying attention. Most people never look at their own home this way. They live in their space without ever asking what the space is telling them. The bagua forces that conversation.
Read next: the feng shui basics guide for the foundational concepts behind the bagua, or the five elements guide to understand the wood-fire-earth-metal-water system that powers each gua’s element.