Sitting, Facing and Symbolism
There is often confusion on which way to position yourself; with your good direction facing you or behind you? Many authors say you should face your good direction and have your back to the bad directions. This is not correct. You want to have your facing towards the opposition and be supported by your good directions. Just like a General, you want your troops behind you and to see the opposition coming. You do not want to face your troops and have the opposition coming up from behind.
A key thing to understand is that a lot of Feng Shui was passed down orally. There were a lot of symbolism in the stories. These symbolic representations meant something if you knew the key. For example, the four animals; tiger, phoenix, turtle, and dragon simply meant the four directions.
Dragon = East
Phoenix = South
Tiger = West
Turtle = North
Many people take these things literally and recommend statues of these things. This in itself is incorrect. It is the elements and the orientations that are the key to remedying a house.
Back to the question of the sitting or facing. The trigram of the house is based on the sitting. The personal directions are also based on the sitting. Many of the oral traditions were meant to mislead those who didn’t hold the keys to the deeper knowledge. Thus many “masters” do not know these deeper meanings and especially, Yin House Feng Shui (Grave Site Feng Shui). This is the method where the facing is used in personal directions. Yang House (Feng Shui for the living) is what we use to read the homes of the living. Yang house people (us, living folks) need support from the yin (sitting). Yin house people (the deceased) need support from the Yang. Fortunately, Master Larry Sang of the American Feng Shui Institute has corrected this for us. So when you are analyzing the directions, make sure that you consider the sitting as the priority.
