The Vaastu Workbook

DESIGN / HINDUISM What makes a house a home, a place of renewal and refuge, a place of balance and peace? It is vaastu, the Indian art of environmental design, a practice that helps you create a home that is in harmony with the natural and spiritual energies surrounding it. Vaastu, like holistic medicine, focuses on addressing underlying issues for the health of the entire system--the people as well as the physical structures and property on which they live. The Vaastu Workbook not only provides the blueprint for a perfect vaastu home but also fully explains the tradition within its Indian context. It presents vaastu as it was meant to be understood--as an interconnected part of the great Indian tradition of sacred knowledge, along with ayurveda, yoga, and vedic astrology. Using more than 140 line illustrations, along with charts for scoring the vaastu of a particular site, The Vaastu Workbook allows you to apply this knowledge to quickly assess the pros and cons of any building situation. The author, who is the director of the foremost vaastu center in India, takes you through every conceivable vaastu situation, exploring the dos and don'ts of window and door placement, interior design, street focus, directional facing, landscaping, and much more, in order to maximize the potential of a given property. He shares his own personal experiences and the circumstances of others to illustrate the power of vaastu in action. Introductory chapters provide a thorough grounding in the basics of Indian astrology, the five elements, and the healing tradition of ayurveda, all of which are necessary to truly understand the importance of angles and quadrants in vaastu. He also discusses the difference between vaastu and feng shui and reviews frequently asked questions about vaastu principles. With this knowledge in hand, even a beginner can quickly learn how to design a new home--or renovate an existing one--in order to bring peace, prosperity, and happiness to those who live there. DR. TALAVANE KRISHNA practiced medicine in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom for twenty years before returning to India. He now directs the Indus Valley Ayurvedic Center (IVAC) in Mysore. The center is situated on fifteen acres, with an accompanying eight acres of gardens containing over eight hundred species of medicinal plants. In April 2001, the center was recognized as the Best Global Model in Alternative Medicine--Ayurveda, and the center is now certified for a Ph.D. program in Yoga Ayurveda. Dr. Krishna spends part of each year in the San Diego area with his wife and family. In addition to his work at the IVAC, he gives vaastu consultations and lectures around the world.