How an MS Diagnosis Led Me to Feng Shui & Changed How I See My Home

A routine eye exam. That’s all. My left eye needed a new prescription.

The skin on the back of my thighs melted into the chair as I waited for Dr. Beisel. I should have worn pants, but the thick, sticky Savannah air heading into Labor Day weekend suggested otherwise. 

The annual test began, and my mind immediately entered a familiar battle.

Did I read the letters correctly?

I loathe being in my body during these moments, where my soldier parts take us all hostage. I could feel my shoulders starting to hunch, weighted down by the uncertainty of whether I passed that test.

One exam remained. The red light. Then, I could finally step off the battlefield. My body awaited the moment it could retreat, and we could get to the fun part: shopping for new eyeglasses.

But I didn’t see red.

The string of words that fell out of Dr. Beisel’s mouth created an immediate cease fire.

“I think you have MS,” he said.

Then silence. Not only in the small sterile room but in every cell of my being.

I don’t know where I went. I know I wasn’t there.

Well, one part of me remained.

This part can make everything in me disappear, including all sensations and thoughts. I didn’t freeze or go numb. I wasn’t wanting to run or hide. I was floating. Floating above my body. Watching myself.

It gets very quiet when this part is the only one present. This eerie stillness, echoing within as if I’ve become a hollow tree. This magician is a master of illusions, and I willingly surrendered my body to it. 

As I got shuffled up to the second floor of the Georgia Eye Institute for an ultrasound of my optic nerve, tiny pulses slowly sparked throughout my hands. My wiring started misfiring. I proceeded to pick at my cuticles, desperately wanting to hush the erratic electrical noise flickering through my fingers. Bits of skin left hanging begged me to yank it off. I pulled eagerly.

Dragged into a different room, I waited for Dr. Ray, the special eye doctor. I spent the time sitting there alone, ruminating about how I ended up here on the second floor. Thighs fusing with a different chair, my body felt like it had been strapped into a Graviton seat at the county fair while my fingers pulsated from having ripped off too much skin. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold on.

Sitting, sticking, and spinning, it came to me: I had a severe ear infection in my left ear earlier that month. I decided to hold onto that fact — to keep the magician and soldiers at bay. I mumbled repeatedly to myself, you had an ear infection in the left ear, as if I was saying the rosary.

That evening I returned to Memorial Hospital for my first MRI while Dr. Ray’s office scheduled an appointment with a neurologist, Dr. Carter, the following week.

I repeated my new mantra throughout the Labor Day weekend of 2012, especially when I got pulled back on the Graviton, or when the urge started to pick at the pink, raw sides of my fingers. It wasn’t the typical long weekend spent out on the south-end beach of Tybee Island or grilling out at our house. That weekend, a darkness loomed over me.

I continued to find myself floating amidst the heaviness continuing to swell in my left eye.

By the time I arrived at Dr. Carter’s office that Tuesday, hope slowly started to fill in portions of the hollow tree that I had become, despite the increasing pain in my eye. I allowed myself to believe this was all a misunderstanding and connected to that nasty ear infection.

Dr. Carter settled in beside my husband and me, the MRI results illuminating the screen between us. Her finger pointing at the active lesions on my brain.

Each time her finger lifted and then moved to another area, I felt each of her taps on my chest — knocking, knocking, knocking, knocking.

The hollowness returned instantly.  

But this time, no magician, no soldiers, no anything. Just empty.

She realized, or at least suspected, that no one had actually given me the diagnosis. And a familiar silence returned to fill a different medical room.

She asked, “Has anyone told you?”

“No,” peeped out of my lips.

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed Dr. Ray confirmed the diagnosis with you. But yes, you do have Multiple Sclerosis,” she said.

Tears poured down my face, from the very place in my body that broke.

A new mantra formed. Those tears were medicine. So, I let them flow — until later that week when I lost the vision in that eye completely.

The throbbing pain in the back of my eye, seeing nothing but black, consumed me. It pulsed just like my heart. I started to notice the stabbing sensation move to different parts of my body. It felt like fireworks exploding in my calves, my hands, across my back. Amidst all that activity, I felt barren. Everything taken from me.

Very quickly though something else tapped on my chest. I followed the nudge and signed up to learn Transcendental Meditation, which led to the paleo diet, then weekly massages, and finally a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner.

As I entered her practice for the first time, I stepped into a scene from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Walking through her courtyard to find the red hidden door (instructions from the website), I swore Minerva would appear, the voodoo priestess, herself. And I was looking for a spell, a potion, a remedy — anything to undo this madness.

From the moment I met Fawn, I knew I was in the right place. I fervently started getting acupuncture four days a week, along with some woo-woo treatments, which I never questioned. The magician wasn’t living in my mind any longer; this magician appeared as a real person, and this magician had good magic.

The Wizard of Oz is one of my top three movies of all time. I’ve always identified with Dorothy and the Tin Man. Unlike Dorothy, I wanted to go home but hadn’t found the home I wanted to return to. And now rust had accumulated, too, and I needed someone to grease my parts before I became immobile. Fawn became my Glinda the Good Witch. She had all kinds of potions, and I said yes to drinking all of them.

One of those early remedies she suggested: Feng shui. I knew absolutely nothing about it, and my takeaway from the first extensive introductory lesson seemed clear. Disinfect my house! I filled a bucket with water and some bleach, unfolded the step ladder, and proceeded to scrub every inch of my house, starting at the ceiling and working my way down the walls to the floors. As my hand glided over the yellow plaster walls, I wiped away the doom that had settled within me and into my home. I felt empowered, channeling my grief into the wax-on-wax-off motion my body performed that afternoon.

I should point out that washing your house with water and bleach has nothing to do with feng shui, and I would later learn neither do a lot of “tips” floating around online. But at the time, that is what I needed.

I continued to learn more about feng shui through a very Westernized approach. My appetite expanded. Learning more about this unfamiliar practice felt like peanut M&M’s for me; I have no willpower to stop eating them (especially as a calming treat on a hard day). But instinctually I knew feng shui wasn’t a treat-yourself-on-a-bad-day type of activity.

For the 14 years since, I consumed education and digested learnings about the art and science of feng shui, helping me to reclaim my sense of agency by partnering with my home as a container to create safety and security. I finally now can embody Dorothy’s mantra: there’s no place like home.

I will always be a student of feng shui, and my home will always be a living laboratory. Feng shui isn’t a practice that allows you to stick a plant in a particular corner of your home or make sure your toilet lids are closed and call it a day. Energy is fluid and requires you to engage and participate. I’m grateful the door opened for me to dive deep into this practice. That door first appeared in the black of my left eye, the uninvited guest of MS, transformed into a red door in a garden, and then opened my awareness into an ancient practice that holds a key to transform the energy within our homes, and therefore, in our lives.

Welcome to home & flow, a space where we can step past generic trends and look at the true, classical science of how our spaces shape and support our lives.

By the way, I’m Athena, founder of home & flow.