All I know is that when I’m at home, I like to make it quiet, soothing, and nurturing.  Instinctively, I’ve been creating the environments  I need at home since I was a child, and I’ve had a lot of practice, moving to 27 homes across 3 states and 2 countries in the first 30 something years of my life. I was good at it.

 

That all changed when we bought our first apartment right after I got married and had my daughter.  It was like that scene at the chocolate factory in I Love Lucy when chocolate production surged on the assembly line. Except instead of clamoring to contain and package chocolates, I was trying to contain the overflowing needs of my home and the people and pets who lived in it. Most of the time I felt exhausted and overwhelmed and eventually I started getting sick -- first hypothyroidism, then a compromised immune system, then breast cancer. 

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After  I recovered, the next logical step was of course to renovate. I had to try again to create a space that could meet our needs.

 

We did that and things improved. But only after we sold the place and moved into our new apartment, two years later, did I realize: it wasn’t just me and my family that had issues - we’d literally been under the influence of our old home!

 

I felt it intuitively, and when I began to study feng shui under the masterful guidance of Amanda Gibby Peters at Simple Shui, I discovered insights and information that  confirmed  what I’d been feeling. There were so many chi challenges in our old home - it was more like funk shui. The house wasn't the cause, but it was definitely playing a part. 

 

In our new place I felt so much more at ease. Yes, we’d also learned to communicate better and gotten to know ourselves better - but I’m talking about an immediate shift that only had to do with being in a new space. In Hebrew there’s an expression: change your place, change your luck. This was that. 

 

To be clear, I don’t believe you can ever be in the wrong home. Every home teaches us lessons and the ones I learned in those first family years about giving myself what I needed so that I could joyfully give to others still serve me daily.  

 

Our new home is everything the old place wasn’t, filled with light, a view to the mountains and daily breezes from the Mediterranean Sea.  It’s not just that it has better bones. I've  transformed our new home into my own feng shui laboratory, turning up the dials on chi flow, elemental balance, and transcendental woo woo to harmonize harmonize harmonize. 

 

3 humans, 2 dogs, 1 cat and a bowl of fish in 860 square feet - and we’ve never been happier.