Creating harmony in a home

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. (AP) - It so happens that the first class Susan LaForte of Amherst took at the New England School of Feng Shui in Woodbury, Connecticut, was during the weekend after terrorists felled the twin towers in lower Manhattan and plowed a plane into the Pentagon.

“During that weekend we, like everyone else, were seeking to make sense of what had happened,” she said. “We emerged with the very clear understanding that the path upon which we were embarking was one that seeks to restore balance, tranquility and safety.”

That is an ethos she brings to her practice today as a feng shui consultant who sees clients in an area from Worcester to Albany and Hartford to Brattleboro.

Feng shui is an approach to organizing your physical surroundings to be in tune with all aspects of your life.

“The goal of the process is creating a space that is nourishing and uplifting,” she said.

There are many ways of approaching or understanding feng shui, and each practitioner is unique. For LaForte, getting rid of clutter is the place to start.

Clutter, she said, is anything that doesn’t support the core of your being in the moment. That in turn, is connected to chi energy, or life force, said LaForte.

The difference between feng shui and interior decoration, she said, is “feng shui is about, ’How do things feel?’ And interior decoration is about, ’How do things look?’”

When evaluating items and objects in your life it helps to be in touch with your feelings, she says. “It helps to know if you like something or don’t like something,” LaForte said, as she sipped tea on the screened-in porch of her Amherst home. She moved into the house a little over a decade ago.

Back then, she said, she decluttered her own life. At the time she was living in a large house on Washington Avenue in Northampton having been divorced for some time and thinking about downsizing. Her job as a hospital reference librarian was vanishing before her eyes as the internet and Google were displacing people with her skills.

“I saw the writing on the wall,” she said.

Unloading half a lifetime of stuff was job one for her. She did that by asking herself, “Does it make you happy, or does it make your energy sink?” That is not something that is automatic to most people, she added, it is a skill to cultivate. “That takes a while.”

It also helps to have a spiritual orientation to thinking in terms of energy, she said. “Not everybody wants to do that.”

As a consultant, she said, she guides people to figure their feelings out. She’ll ask about a certain object, for example, a piece of furniture, a painting on the wall, and listen closely to the answer. “I can determine if it’s something that supports them or not. It’s the tone of voice, how they hold their body.”

Jettisoning beautiful pieces of furniture or treasured works of art, or children’s toys, or perfectly good but long-unused camping equipment can be difficult. So can parting with a functioning television, or a blanket that’s been in the family for decades.

It can take years to pare one’s belongings down to the essentials that affirm who you are, Forte said.

Decluttering is only one part of feng shui, but it is one LaForte has been immersed in on her current project - “feng shuiing” the house next door. She has been in a relationship with the man who lives there for 17 years. They connected around the time she took an interest in feng shui.

Jose Gonzalez, a professional musician, retired from his day job four years ago. For 24 years he taught elementary school music in Holyoke.

By his own admission, his house was “a mess.” That is one of the reasons the couple lives side by side rather than under the same roof.

LaForte said it was sheer serendipity that she was figuring out how to downsize when the house next to Gonzalez’s on The Hollow in South Amherst came on the market. When she moved in, she had clear intentions about the things she wanted to surround herself with. “I decided that whatever I do, wherever I go, I won’t bring anything with me that I don’t really love.”

And now, for the past year Gonzalez has allowed LaForte to go through his belongings, piece by piece, to thin them down to the life-affirming essentials. He had 26 years of accumulated stuff from raising children as a divorced dad while teaching and performing. He agreed it was time to dig out.

“We started with my bookshelf, which was a mess. I have a collection of Guitar Player magazines that goes back to when I was in college in the ’70s and I didn’t know what to do with it,” Gonzalez said. They were keepers, although in a much more organized form.

But there have been many trips to the landfill.

Gonzalez’s office filing cabinet was overflowing. He moved it downstairs and in the process discovered that all the things he really needed to save fit into one small hand file.

“Now my work area is so much lighter,” he said. “All my files are computerized.”

Getting rid of many items, small and large, often took more doing. “She explained to me the philosophy that when something has been used and has been good to you, it’s time to let it go and move on,” he said of LaForte. “Before I would keep every piece of furniture. I would never get rid of anything.”

As part of his new consciousness he limited the use of electronics to designated parts of the house; his cellphone stays at (his newly clean) desk when he’s at home.

One strategy he learned from LaForte is to put things that have been gathering dust for years out on the deck for a couple of weeks while contemplating life without them. “It’s kind of like a letting-go process,” he said.

Gonzalez said he found it uplifting that when he wanted to lay his hands on a particular piece of sheet music he could do it in 30 seconds rather than rummage around. “This is the same with tools, with clothes, with utensils around the house,” he said. “I’m able to access places that I haven’t been to in years.”

But it wasn’t just tidy workspaces that have had an impact, LaForte said.

The cooking area holds a special significance in an approach to the home that seeks to harmonize what feng shui identifies as the five elements: fire, earth, metal, water and wood.

The area in which you cook represents your “ability to bring in nourishment from the world,” LaForte said. “It symbolizes your ability to nourish yourself financially and otherwise.” Gonzalez’s stove wasn’t fully functional, but, she said, once he got a new stove, requests for his services as a classically trained guitarist started coming in.

And as he got rid of belongings, his phone, which had been quiet, started to ring with callers offering him gigs, a sign of the positive energy underlying feng shui, she said.

“Now he is a busy performing artist,” she said.

Feng shui uses a tool called the Bagua to analyze the home. You can think of it as a map to lay over your floor plan with different parts of the living space representing different aspects of your life, like health, prosperity, relationships, creativity and self-knowledge.

LaForte said she once consulted with a couple trying to conceive and in the course of walking around the house she saw that the room that was to be the child’s room was painted red and full of exercise equipment and extraneous junk. She advised the couple to imbue that part of their house with the kind of energy befitting a new life. They followed her advice, and when she next encountered them they had given birth to twins, she says.

Potential clients who contact LaForte often do so because they don’t love their space, or there is something lacking in their lives that they are worried about, she said.

The first thing she does is send them a questionnaire that asks about the favorite and least favorite parts of their homes along with more unusual questions like, “If you could have three wishes in your life right now, what would they be?” and, “What do you do for yourself that ’floats your cork’ - makes you happy to be alive?”

LaForte, who is seeking to expand her business (www.fengshuiwesternmass.com) is implementing a sliding scale fee structure based on a median of $185 for a consultation.. “I’ve had clients at all economic levels and am willing to work with anyone who is drawn to my practice and who I feel is a fit for my work,” she said.

LaForte is a member of the International Feng Shui Guild (IFSG), an international organization dedicated to establishing standards in the field based on a code of ethics.

There are a lot of misconceptions about feng shui, she said, which she is eager to dispel.

“Feng shui isn’t magic, much of it is practical - fix it, clean it or throw it away. If something is niggling at you in your space, it’s best to pay attention,” she said.

Some writings on the subject “give the impression that it’s an easy way to get the things you want: Just put a pair of candlesticks in the relationship corner and you’ll meet the love of your life,” she said. “Feng shui is a process and for it to ’work’ you need to be involved. You need to walk the walk.”

Gonzalez said he was a skeptic of feng shui but has changed his tune after experiencing the recent changes in his home.

“It really makes a difference,” he said. Little things, like the positioning of mirrors on the walls and keeping a gentle night light in the bathroom at all times, and keeping electronics away from the dinner table have noticeably improved the energy in his house, he said. “I’m trying to get my sons (who now have families of their own) to do it,” he said, “but they are at the same stage I was before, which was, ’yea, yea, yea .’.”

For her part, LaForte said, she has seen through Gonzalez how people can be happy in spaces that don’t necessarily follow feng shui principles. “I see things in his house and say, ’oh, this is a feng shui nightmare,’ but it really depends on the person,” she said. “He’s fine, he thrives and he loves his space and that was an important thing for me to learn.”

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Information from: Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, Mass.), https://www.gazettenet.com