Narrative Space with Laura

My Personal Journey with Feng Shui & Narrative Space

by Laura Carillo, WSFS Graduate

I would like to share one of my personal experiences with Feng Shui. I had a long standing interest in Feng Shui; the art of placement and had been reading about it for years but couldn’t fathom how one could make a career out of it. I did play around with it and experiment with my environment using my home as a Feng Shui lab of sorts. For some reason, I have always had homes where my Prosperity gua was my bedroom and the Relationship gua would be in my living-room area and work space. For many years, I worked in some sort of outside sales with a home office. The home office was inevitably in my Relationship gua.

When I first moved to LA I hired a Feng Shui practitioner to help me Feng Shui a rather tricky space. My home was beautiful but it was an L shaped apartment with the Career gua completely missing as well as the Travel & Helpful People gua. The Bagua is like a map or grid of 9 different Guas or Life Stations in Feng Shui. The nine guas are all equally important. The idea is to have all of these areas balanced and well appointed. Having a missing Career gua poses obvious problems… Having a missing Travel & Helpful People gua is just as critical though. This is the gua of synchronicity and help from the divine as well as assistance from more mundane sources like the plumber or your doctor, etc. It’s also important if traveling is your thing…

In addition to those critical gua’s missing, the numerology of the home was a 4 which is the Feng Shui number for death. Oops… I had rented the apartment from a distance based on website pictures and only discovered these details on the day I moved in… That home was like a Feng Shui worst case scenario… Anything can be fixed or at least compensated for with Feng Shui, but these kinds of challenges where beyond my novice understanding of Feng Shui at the time. I did a little research online and I found and hired Tess Whitehurst, a professional Essential Feng Shui consultant and author. Tess made some great suggestions and taught me a lot about Feng Shui in the process. Her biggest recommendation was related to my home office. I was apparently breaking a major Feng Shui rule by having my home office and desk in the relationship gua of my home. This is discouraged in Feng Shui as symbolically your career becomes your primary relationship. Interesting, since I was single and work was my primary relationship and had been for years. Since the apartment was an L Shape, my options where limited. Tess had some creative ideas and per her recommendation, I moved my desk to the family gua where I had originally had my dining area. When the Family gua is well appointed, it assures you will have the care and financial support needed for your day to day expenses and positive familial relations.

I followed Tess’s instructions to a T because I was really excited to see what would happen. A week later I was laid off from my job and my primary relationship, i.e. job, was effectively severed. It’s fair to say that the changes were transformative, immediate and dramatic. While getting laid off sounds awful, I received a substantial 6 month severance and benefits and my family was extremely supportive both financially and emotionally. I had a significant salary at the time and that money combined with unemployment and assistance from my family, was enough to live on for a year.

That was the year I began studying Buddhism, meditating, became a vegetarian and took up painting. I made some amazing friends and had a pretty good time… I don’t want to make it sound like I wasn’t looking for a job, because I was but the process was lengthy and the economy challenging. The time served as an enforced and well-funded vacation for the purpose of self-cultivation.

When I got my next job and moved to a new apartment, I hired Tess once again. This time, I made sure my apartment had a career gua and was a complete rectangle. Ideally, you want a complete square or rectangle with no holes or jutting out. Minor gaps are no big deal as there are easy cures for that. In the case of an L Shape, it’s quite challenging to compensate for entire gua’s that may be missing. When Tess came to see me, she was so impressed with my knowledge of Feng Shui that she referred me to the Western School of Feng Shui where she had her training and encouraged me to really pursue it as a career. I eventually did and now I love what I do and have a genuine interest in helping others make the most of their space.

One of the important take-away’s from this story is that certain spaces and homes that may appear to have imbalances such as missing life stations or gua’s can serve a positive purpose. With Feng Shui you can manage the imbalances and also embrace the narrative of the home itself. That apartment forced me to focus on areas of my life other than my career. I did not find gainful employment until after I gave up that home; IMMEDIATELY after. In spite of that, I look back on that time with some fondness as a period when the areas of life that home emphasized such as Self-Cultivation thrived and my trajectory was completely realigned.

What is your story? Where and how you live serves as a physical narrative. Feng Shui gives you the power to edit that narrative and that is why I call my practice Narrative Space. My job is to help you edit and curate your space from a symbolic and alchemical point of view using the principles of Feng Shui. When it’s time to start a positive new chapter, it’s time for Feng Shui.