I’ve always been fascinated by people. Not the version they present to the world, but the version underneath.

 

And, looking back, I’ve always been fascinated by what happens to people in space.

 

In graduate school, I spent 60 days sitting in Washington Square Park, observing how people moved through it for my master’s thesis. Where they gathered. Where they lingered. Who occupied which spaces. What drew people in and what made them move on.

 

I didn’t know then that I would eventually study Feng Shui.

 

I just knew I couldn’t stop watching.

 

For more than twenty years, I’ve had a front row seat to human behavior. Some of it happened on a massage table. Some of it happened in living rooms and homes. Some of it happened in strip clubs, spiritual communities, relationships, airports, and conversations that probably should have come with a warning label.

 

What I discovered is that people are wonderfully predictable.

 

We think we’re making decisions based on logic, but we’re usually following patterns we can’t see. We stay too long and call it loyalty. We ignore our intuition and call it being realistic.

 

And our spaces have patterns too.

 

A home tells me things.

 

Where people gather. What they avoid. What has been given importance. What has been neglected. What belongs to the life being lived now and what still belongs to someone its inhabitants used to be.

 

People shape spaces.

 

Spaces shape people right back.

 

My work is helping people recognize the pattern beneath the problem.

 

Because the breakup is rarely about him. The clutter is rarely about the closet. The dream is rarely about motivation.

 

And sometimes the problem you’re trying to solve isn’t only happening inside you.

 

It’s happening around you.

 

The life that no longer fits is usually trying to tell the truth long before we’re ready to hear it.