You're a Prism

I’ve heard Feng Shui described as “acupuncture for your home,” and I love that phrase for the way it suggests the body is a home and the home is a body. And it’s very accurate: that “tuned-up” feeling I get from a visit to the acupuncturist totally matches the calm that descends on my nervous system after finding juuust the right arrangement for things in my home. The crazy part is that this activity—tuning the energy flow in your home—not only feels great to live in, but can have the added bonus of changing your life in bigger ways when you do it right. Or even just start paying more attention to it.

Cultivating this relationship—where balancing energy in my home improves my overall quality of life—is counterintuitive to a rationalist mindset. Having serendipitously cool things happen to my finances or friendships, as a result of rearranging furniture or cleaning up a neglected corner, makes no sense. But it happens, and when it does, it reminds me that we live in something like a matryoshka-doll-fractal-matrix. As above, so below; as within, so without.

As a designer, Reiki master, Feng Shui consultant and Astrology enthusiast, I’ve had a vague and growing sense for awhile that design and the esoteric were connected. It eventually dawned on me that, like nesting matryoshka dolls, each of these methods adjusts energy at different scales:

Reiki

moving blocked
ENERGY in your body

Feng Shui

balancing and harmonizing
ENERGY in your space

Astrology

understanding how energy
moves through time

Design

intentional alignment
of energy

Noticing this pattern helped me clarify a new way I’ve started to live my life, which has the mantra:

I feel energy around me that I can play with

instead of:

I know this stuff around me is for using

and I’ve begun to imagine a different kind of cause-and-effect. One that goes not from point A to point B, but from inward to outward and back again without a beginning or end. It involves having respect for energy at these different scales—using Reiki for the body, Feng Shui in spaces, and Astrology over time—and witnessing the story that gets told through the events, messages and symbols that arise from each. By combining these methods, I’m cultivating an experience of intention without control and learning how to balance what I want to be and what is meant to be.

Photo by Jill Allyn Peterson, Mazunte, Oaxaca, Mexico, January 2019

ENERGETIC HYGIENE

When I went to Mexico to become a Reiki master, I met a refreshingly solid group of people. Some were professional healers, others had day jobs in tech or real estate but were exploring the prospect of taking it full-time. Reiki brought us all together, but it didn’t feel like we were there to subscribe to a specific religion or philosophy. The training felt more underpinning than overarching; an ineffable base for whatever we might build.

It was a funny-sounding workshop that deeply clarified this new relationship I was beginning to have with my body.

We each took turns leading a workshop of our choice, and one woman in the group taught us how to do “energetic hygiene.” It was a funny-sounding workshop that deeply clarified this new relationship I was beginning to have with my body. Through her very simple yet sophisticated exercise, I learned how to read my body’s “yes” or “no” answer when I asked it if something was right for me.

Blame it on Neptune (dreams) transiting my third house (daily life), but ever since I was shown energetic hygiene, I tend to rely on my intuition rather than logic for decisions both big and small. It was a process that began before I had a name for it, but naming it legitimized a new kind of decision-making. One where my body is a better guide than my mind. In fact, letting my senses reveal next steps has gotten me:

• improved relationships

• beautiful living spaces

• doubled income

• exciting travels and new experiences

• the dog of my dreams (basically an animatronic teddy bear)

• a charming and adventurous partner

• a variety of lesser miracles too numerous to explain here

Body - Space - Time
Reiki - Feng Shui - Astrology
Be - Here - Now

I was about to say that the process of “letting my senses reveal next steps” didn’t happen overnight, but it actually did. I was far from being a Reiki master, or knowing anything about energetic hygiene, when I had a very abrupt experience of it. A few years ago, I was in a situation that was no longer working for me, and my body had waited long enough for me to ask for its opinion on the matter. It began to make unsolicited demands for change.

Over the course of a few days, I started to feel a numbness growing in my chest. I’m really not trying to be poetic here—the space around my heart was literally going numb. Looking back, it is easy to see that I was emotionally shut down, not connecting with my true feelings, and that I had been hiding that from myself until the point where my body had to step in and make it obvious and literal. I had probably wanted to make a change for a long time, but my rational mind whispered just below the surface of my consciousness, you can’t manage it. It wasn’t until it was staring me in the face—or crushing me like an 800 lb. gorrilla—that it didn’t matter whether or not I thought I could.

When I took the leap my body was urging me to take, it involved leaving my home, my partner of 17 years and my two favorite canine beings. It was the scariest thing I ever experienced. Even more so than having a benign tumor removed from my spinal cord—a surgery that could have left me paralyzed—ten years prior. But, I was waking up to the idea that not only could I trust my body, I actually had to. And in doing so, it brought me into a completely different space, and set me on a completely different timeline.

If it feels good...

Literally “following my heart” made a shift that rippled out from my core, through the layers of my reality, and changed everything. Sometimes trite aphorisms don’t need caveats, and cliches are cliches for a reason. But, since I like to flatter myself that I have good taste and am not the human equivalent of an inspirational-quote-painted-on-driftwood-from-TJ Maxx, I’m gonna do a quick re-frame.

This shift in how I relate to the world—a shift from thinking to feeling—I imagine as a prism. Sometimes a prism just a clear chunk of glass. But when you turn it to just the right position relative to the light, a rainbow pours forth. All the colors, contained in their absence, revealed when bodies align.

What do you want in life? If rainbows represent that in this metaphor, it can be good to remember that rainbows are events of alignment. They are also optical illusions. You could gather all the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet things in the world, but you’d never have the rainbow. If I’m a prism, and a rainbow is what I want, then what I “want” is already inside me—I don’t need to go out and get it. I can adjust my position relative to the light.

Seeking to align, rather than gain, helps me stay detached from what I want to allow for what is. And what is seems to get more aligned with what I want the more I allow for it. The more I feel, witness, experience and reflect instead of think, do, make, plan, the easier it is to be in this crazy place at this wild time.

When I feel out of alignment, and start to grasp and overthink, I imagine that cosmic matryoshka doll. I check in with the energy at these nesting scales: in my body with Reiki, my space with Feng Shui, and this specific time through Astrology. I use design to witness the patterns, find meaning and create rituals to honor these energies. This is how I intentionally align with energy that is. This is how I be here now.