The year you are born will give you a set of directions to use to affect different aspects of your life. The earth branch element will give you an element that you are probably comfortable around. For example, if you are born in a year with wood as your earthly branch you may enjoy gardens and trees and like the colour green. This is very much at a surface level and we will look much more deeply at elements for the individual when we discuss Paht Chee (personal destiny charts) later on.

Tapping into your favourable energy for individuals is how you can benefit from knowing your Kua number and personal directions.

- It is important to tap the energy which favours you as often as possible and especially when you are negotiating something important, signing important documents or in a business meeting.

- To ensure you tap into your good energy directions use one of your favourable directions to sleep, eat, to watch TV and while sitting at your desk. Infact, anywhere you spend a great deal of time.

* The element of your year of birth is different to find your self element. To find this, refer to the section on Paht Chee charts.

Now that you have found the Kua numbers for the members of your family or household you may see that some directions oppose. So what do you do? This is where you have to make some compromises as you will see from these examples.

You and your partner belong to different groups… How do you choose the sleeping direction for your bed?

It is quite common for this to be the case. No Feng Shui is perfect in any house so this is where you need to make comprises depending on the circumstances for your family.

You may have a bedroom in a sector that is favourable to one of you and the bed in a direction that favours the other for example. There are always a number of options and this is where your Feng Shui consultant becomes valuable. You will really benefit from having someone to work through the options with you and weigh up the ‘for and against’ in each case.

You may have more than one child sharing a room and the free wall space may be limited due to the placement of windows and doors. How do you choose who gets what?

Again this will come down to weighing up the options and looking at all the rooms in the house to see if a better solution exists elsewhere and how to compensate and balance energies for everyone concerned. Just like you do in every other area of family life, it is all trade-off and balance.