The Bagua is an octagonal chart which encloses the yin/yang symbol while its 8 sides represent the 8 compass points, each of which rules an important life issue. The Bagua is symbolically laid over the floor plan of a building and/or each room in that building. The front door or the main door of a room is always the starting point and corresponds to the bottom of the Bagua, the direction of north and the career area of your life. Each area of the building or room will fall under the other areas, or compass points in the Bagua.

In order to make it easier to visualize, some people like to imagine the Bagua as a grid of squares, 3 by 3 totaling 9. The middle square on the bottom row would be the career area and relate to the direction north. This can make relating the Bagua to the shape of rooms or a building easier to 'see'.

If you are laying the Bagua over your home, you would do it for the entire house, starting with the front door, but also each level as well as each room, always starting with the career area at the bottom middle. Sometimes another level of your home will have its main entrance area in a different direction than the front door and the Bagua would then have to be adjusted appropriately. The same is true for each room.

There are times, when laying the Bagua over the building or room, that the main door isn't located in the career area. It might be to the left or right in the knowledge/spirituality or helpful people/travel areas. This is fine, but keep in mind that the main entrance must be in one of these areas for the Bagua to have been laid properly.

Often the shape of a building or room is not a perfect square and the Bagua has to be adjusted accordingly. If you are imagining the 9 square grid and you have a rectangular room, adjust it mentally or if you are working with a floor plan, draw it in in appropriate proportions to the room, keeping each area relatively the same size. So in the case of the rectangular room the squares would become rectangular themselves to accommodate.

When the room or building is irregularly shaped, say with an indent or extension, the corresponding area is said to be missing or enhanced depending. Missing an area is not ideal, but there are 'cures' or techniques to symbolically bring energy to the missing area. Whether you would count the area as an indent or an extension is usually governed by the one third rule. Therefore if you have a room with an extension that isn't larger than one third of that portion of the grid, or line of three squares, it is an extension to the corresponding area. Whereas if the extension takes up two thirds of that portion of the grid, like two squares in a line, then the square it didn't occupy would become missing rather than the two it did being an extension.