Dog Shit in My Bagua:
Thoughts on Feng Shui and Panic Attacks

by Erin Quinn

It had been six years, six beautiful long years, since I had my last panic attack. Okay, maybe not every moment of those six years was beautiful—there were the usual trials and tribulations, stumbling blocks and successes—but they were, for the most part panic-free.

So much so, that I slowly but surely reverted to my old ways. Staying up late at night, drinking coffee, writing stories for deadline in the wee hours when the rest of the house was sleeping. There were times when I drank too much Merlot, let the bills stack up, and left our converted chicken coop of a house unattended. I became comfortable living in dirt and chaos. It was our dirt, and our chaos, so really, how unhygienic or unruly could it be?

The clutter piled up, the winter clothes mixed in with the summer clothes all heaped together in various small and large masses— decorations from a birthday party left hanging from the walls, even though the party had ended three years before.

Thankfully my husband has less tolerance for dirt and disorder than I do. So more often than not, the dishes were done, the burners cleaned, and his domain, Le Cuisine, was in fairly fine shape. The rest of the house, well, I liked to think of it as creative bedlam, the emphasis of course, from my vantage point was on creative.

As a writer and wife and a mother of three little tykes, domestic tasks were at the bottom of the list. In fact, they didn’t even make the list; even though there wasn’t a list. But had there been a list, they wouldn’t have made it anyway.

Then my panic demons decided to have a reunion. I didn’t invite them. They just secretly plotted to surprise me one day when the kids were napping. Hands sweating, heart racing, the fight or flight reaction raking my body—that feeling of being unhinged from reality and the sensation that a bear was eating me alive. Altogether, a lovely state. One that made me want to run screaming naked into the middle of the road and call out to Jesus, Allah, Muhammad, hell, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon—anything or anyone who might have the ability to save me and make this stop.

Like most people, I have suffered many humiliations in my life, small and large, but none nearly as humbling or as paralyzing as a panic attack. My one friend calls them “ragers” and once had to leave a wedding because all of the bridesmaids were dressed in yellow satin dresses that started to take on a life of their own and began to dance. She walked away quickly, mumbling under her breath, “Sorry. Gotta go. Those yellow dresses are bringing on a rager.

Later, when I ran into her at a martini party she corrected me. “It wasn’t just the yellow dresses,” she whispered, staying very close to the front door incase a rager were to come on unexpectedly. “It was the heat! They were dropping like flies. Everyone at the wedding was a god damn doctor and they kept saying ‘clear the way, I’m a doctor!’ I knew I’d be next only I would DIE, because I couldn’t get enough air.

Then she looked at me strangely. “How in the hell can you suffer from panic attacks when I just saw you get up and do karaoke in a crowded room? Don’t you have air issues?”

That made me laugh. Not that there’s anything funny about panic while you’re in it— or that having a fear of never getting enough air is a pleasant way to wake up to life or go through parties and weddings— but that as fellow sufferers stumbling along the same path, we could poke fun at one another and draw lines in our ever changing psychological sand.

“I don’t suffer from social panic,” I admitted, both of us knocking on the nearest piece of wood. “It’s thruways, and strip malls and big-box retail shops. It’s the homogeneity of rest stops and stores where the shelves are taller than NBA basketball players. It’s when everything finally calms down and gets quiet and I realize how god damn tired I am.”

In fact, the humility inspiring panic attacks and the primal fear associated with them, led me quickly in two directions. First, towards a greater empathy towards the entire human race.

“I wouldn’t even wish this on George Bush Jr.,” I said to my friend Carole, a boisterous Bush hater. “Not even his cabal!”

“Well, I would!” she responded, “Better them than you.”

I felt great sympathy for anyone’s scrape or bruise or twisted ankle, their attempts to quit smoking or drinking, their compulsion to wash their hands too many times or fear of flying…Being in such a vulnerable state, I cast aside any of my usual reading material that dealt with the daily harsh realities of the world, or even the harsh non-realities of the fictional world. The only thing I could bring myself to read, in a good moment, was People or Us magazine, where I began to cultivate a deep sympathy for Jennifer Aniston after her ex-husband, Brad Pitt and femme fatale/humanitarian Angelina Jolie announced they were expecting a child together.

I worried for James Frey and the scandal that had surrounded his book, Million Little Pieces, a best-selling memoir of his experience in rehab. So what if it wasn’t all true? I screamed at no one in particular. The guy’s going to go of the f—ing wagon if The Smoking Gun keeps this up. It’s his god damn memoir and if he wants to bend it or tweak it or use a little post-crack-addiction literary license than so the f—what.

That was the first direction. The second was to do anything, stop anything, fix or repair or be receptive to anything that might help make the panic dissipate. All pretensions were cast aside. Yes, I’ll go to the doctor. Yes, I’ll go to therapy. Yes, I’ll stop drinking coffee and wine and will bow to the god of herbal tea and essential oils—remedies I had only scoffed at as sissy-stuff months earlier. Herbal tea and cat lovers had been, for a long time, in a category that conjured up disdain in my mind—but no more. They were now examples of people living a more balanced life, sipping and purring themselves into a heavenly state of harmony.

My mother, being a holistic counselor had plenty of advice to offer. I soaked it up like a sponge left out too long in the blistering heat.

“It’s too much dear,” she said. “You have too much on your plate with three babies and a full-time job, a diabetic dog and an international marriage…”

I could see her point, but doesn’t everyone have a full plate? Don’t most people suffer from the daily stresses of work and family and financial pressures that cave in from time to time like a roof-leak gone unattended that finally gives way under a heavy rain?

“I think it’s the only thing that makes you stop,” offered my friend Carole, who had helped guide me out of the haunted hell house that was my brain six years ago when I first experienced a case of the PA’s. “In some ways, I think it’s good. Not that it feels good, but it is so incapacitating that it actually forces you to stop and make changes and take care of yourself instead of taking care of everyone else.”

Well, that was one way of looking at it.

My mother decided to skip the whys for a while and began giving commands. Her first instruction, although coated with a soothing voice, and related with kindness, could not mask her sense of urgency. “The first thing you need to do, dear, is to CLEAN THIS HOUSE!”

Okay. I accepted that edict. Action was good. Inaction was bad. If it meant cleaning the house to get the bear off my face, then I’d clean the house. I’d clean the house and go to the doctor, go to therapy and drink herbal tea and turn the lights off no later than 11pm. I wouldn’t get a cat, but I would clean out the mouse shit in our kitchen pantry. It was a start.

In an effort to help and inspire me forward on this long, dusty and scum filled road of cleaning that I had pledged my allegiance to, my mother began loading me up with numerous Feng Shui texts.

Among the stack included titles like How to Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui, Feng Shui and Sacred Space, Feng Shui for the Soul, Feng Shui for Dummies, The Practical Encyclopedia of Feng Shui, Feng Shui and Health, Western Guide to Feng Shui…the list went on.

I put down my People magazine and began to devour these books. My mother instructed me to read the one on “Clearing Your Clutter,” first. “Before you can even begin to look at your Bagua [The Bagua Map originates from the I Ching and is used to map out the eight basic directions associated with specific treasures or life energies] or do any Feng Shui interventions or enhancements; you must clear your clutter first.”

I must admit that I’ve never been on top of pop-culture trends. I always come to things late—sometimes only a few months late, but more often than not, I come to them years or even a decade late. 

Such was the case with Seinfeld. While in college at the University of Oregon, everywhere I went, including coffee houses, bars, French feminist theory classes or the swimming pool, people were talking about the latest episode of Seinfeld. They were laughing, repeating lines, interjecting stories of their own lives that were JUST LIKE THAT CONVERSTAION BETWEEN GEORGE AND ELAINE!”

I didn’t have a TV in our rented house, nor did I necessarily like TV, particularly sitcoms, so I had absolutely no idea what everyone was energized about nor what this show was that brought them all into near hysterics recounting it.

Approximately seven years later, when pregnant for the first time, and living in my little one-room studio while my soon-to-be-husband was in Paris preparing to close up shop and move to the States, I began to indulge in late night TV to stave off the insomnia and sense that there was an extra-terrestrial in my belly preparing for a sudden landing.

So, it was in 1999 that I came to watch my first episode of Seinfeld. It was the high-talker episode. Then came the muffin top episode, George working for Steinbrenner, the case of the missing bag of letters. I couldn’t get enough. I laughed so hard I cried.

I called friends, the same ones that I grew up with, went to Oregon with, and moved back to New Paltz with. “Did you see that Seinfeld episode about the high-talker?” I’d exclaim. “I dated some one just like that…looked like a JCrew model, but the minute he opened his mouth and that high squeak came out it was over! Ha-ha, ha-ha.”

They were tolerant. They listened and laughed along with me, possibly at me, since what I was watching were the Channel 11 re-runs of old Seinfeld episodes now that the show had gone off the air.

Well, it’s been the same experience as Feng Shui. I believe the Western Feng Shui craze reached its peak somewhere in the mid-1990’s. Not exactly sure, but that’s the conclusion I came to when looking at the Copyright dates of the books stacked on the end of my bed. Of course, as we begin the year 2006, all I want to do is read about Feng Shui, talk about Feng Shui, commit random acts of Feng Shui, and turn just about any move or purchase I make into a verb. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, when someone asks me what it is I’m up to I simply say, “I’m Feng Shuing!”

Granted, I’m in an emotionally raw state, one that leaves me open, very open and impressionable, so much so that I recently warned my husband not to let me open the door when the Jehovah Witnesses knock, because I might just go with them and begin prophesizing Armageddon door to door.

But I am not so self-deluded that I can’t recognize that I’m co-opting the chic sounding name of a 3,000 year old Chinese science to help me glorify that more mundane, gender and class-loaded verb “to clean.” To make my efforts sound less desperate and more fashionable, I’ll call it Feng Shui and say that yes, I did start clearing clutter. Every day, bags and bags went out to the local thrift store. The great clutter mantra one book gave me was “if you don’t love it, need it, or you use it, get rid of it.”

Depending on how seriously you take that mandate, and I took it fairly seriously, our small house soon became like an echo chamber. I was never one to consume much of anything except for books. So all I needed was a little ancient permission to get rid of clothes, toys, unseemly furniture, random objects and I was on my way….

The next step, I didn’t enjoy as much. It was that “deep cleaning” aspect of things. Washing floors and scrubbing cabinets, using cleaning products that hitherto had been foreign to my touch. I found that while the house smelled like my tenth grade science laboratory when we were forced to dissect a fetal pig (one of the possible original sources of my tendency towards panic attacks—but not one that has been definitively proven) and that the act of deep cleaning required great force and stamina, it did make me feel better. Okay, a little bit better, splinter-sized better, but I’d take it.

At some point, no matter what book you’re reading on Feng Shui techniques or practices, you will come to the subject of “Ch’i.” This, according to the various gospels is the Chinese word for life force, the energy in all living and non-living things and how that Ch’i flows into and out of and through a house, from room to room, corner to corner, road to the front door, back door to garden and out into the immediate and larger environment.

I found that the concept of Ch’i was easier to get a grasp on than the various color schemes, directional pulls, elements and corresponding “magic numbers” based on your spiritual Chinese animal dictated by the year you were born in were.

Since the whole point of my entrée into the world of Feng Shui was an attempt, albeit feeble, to keep the panic at bay another hour or another day, I reminded myself to go slow. “Let’s just start with the Ch’i and go from there,” I counseled myself.

After my daily attempts to clear clutter and scour floors I felt that my Ch’i must be flowing fairly well. Hell, I’d even watered my nearly-dead plants and purchased some tulips from the local florist to “enhance” various corners.

To test my progress, I asked my mother to take a tour of my post-panic house state. Although she was not a professional practitioner of the art, she knew a hell of a lot more about Baguas and Ch’i’s and directional pulls than I did.

She walked through our house, kindly admiring the work I had done, and attempted to apply a basic Bagua map to our not-very square shaped house. (It began as a servant’s house in the turn of the century and through the next several decades had various rooms added on. The fact that it was built by people of modest means and then inhabited by more generations of people with modest means, including our family, left us with only a crumbling concrete foundation, no attic or cellar. In some respects I felt lucky, because attics and basements, according to my various Feng Shui texts, were two very symbolically significant and clutter-heavy rooms that I would not, thankfully, have to clean.

She gestured with broad, vague sweeps of her arm.

“This is your career path, this is your helpful friends and travel section, this is your creativity and children room, your marriage and relationship corner, your fame and reputation area, your family and ancestry area and your—oh my!”

“What?” I asked nervously, like a patient awaiting a diagnosis.

“Well, it’s just that, hmm, nothing honey, it can be fixed.”

“What can be fixed? Is my Bagua f—ed up?”

“No. I mean yes. But everyone has a problem area in their Bagua. You just have a missing knowledge and spirituality section.”

No wonder I’m riddled with panic and can only read People magazine, I thought. I have no knowledge and spiritually section. I AM BRAIN DEAD AND WITHOUT A GOD.

My palms started to sweat, my heart race and my throat close.

“What do I do?” I asked, in a whisper, afraid that there was no cure for me after all.

“Oh sweetheart, don’t worry. All you need to do is to clear out the front of your garage, put in a wind chime and a water feature and you’ll be fine. You just need to stimulate the Ch’i.”

Stimulate the Ch’i. Well okay. I’d try.

The problem was that the missing section—the front of our garage-turned office— was filled with crap. Icky crap, like broken strollers and bags of moldy hay. There were also a fleet of garbage and recycling receptacles and a large cedar box that contained various lawn-taming and garden instruments.

This was beyond me. This required my husband’s cooperation. I began hounding him to make a trip the dump. He would, he said, when he could, but right now he was very busy building a log house in Hunter, N.Y. and didn’t quite have the time. When hounding became more hysterical, he tried to calm me by saying, “Mon Cherie, you haven’t cleaned the house in more than a year and now all of a sudden you’re becoming obsessive.”

Obsessive? Me? Never. Obviously, he was missing the point.

I tried to explain to him that if he just cleared out the clutter in and around our house, particularly his storage shed which was smack in the middle of our finance and wealth section, that neither of us would have to keep working so hard for so little.

“If you can organize that shed and get rid of the crap outside, all you have to do is hang a round-faced crystal by a red string in the corner and we’ll have to shut the god damn windows because of all the money and riches that will come flooding in!”

He smiled and left for work.

The phone rang. It was my mother.

“Honey, I just realized something.”

“What?” I asked hopefully. Maybe she’d tell me that we were positioned towards fortune or that the year of the dog corresponded with my fame and reputation corner. At this point I had become so confused as to which direction was good or bad or what color scheme worked when compared to the compass and my magic numbers and the varying earth/wind/fire/water elements that I was completely lost—drifting aimlessly in my own Bagua— with no sense of how to achieve the harmony they so clearly illustrated in the accompanying photos to the Feng Shui books now taking over my night stand.

“Phelan’s dog closet is right in the middle of your career path,” she said ominously. “That’s not good.”

“Well, what can I do about it?” I said defensively. “She’s big and old and smelly and diabetic and blind? If I don’t give her that closet under the stairwell then she’ll just stink up all of our couches. She’s too old of a dog to learn new tricks.”

“I’ll consult with my friend,” she said and hung up.

Great, Phelan’s dog house was in my career path. My fortune was being blocked by my husband’s stock pile of paints, ladders, buzz-saws, electric screwdrivers and other gadgets. My spirituality and knowledge section was missing, or not exactly missing but filled junk to heavy for me to lift and too irreparable to donate, and I couldn’t remember whether or not red was the right color for fame and reputation or for walls that faced south. It might be good for both. Or not.

I stood outside on the porch, not even sure what section it was in, and looked out over the lawn trying to re-orientate myself so that I could find my way back towards my Feng Shui, panic- free path.

That’s when I noticed the bird bath. The bath part had toppled over and was lying on the ground, upside down, next to the garden.

To be honest, I never liked this bird bath. Two years earlier when my husband had asked what I wanted for my birthday, the only thing I could think of was a birdbath for my garden, which at that point was well attended to, not the case now.

I had imagined one of those Renaissance looking birdbaths with a small Greek column holding up a wide, shallow plaster bowl. A visually pleasing piece, something that might actually inspire birds to drink or bathe. What I received was one of those Home Depot type knock offs that was a sickly yellow with green etchings of birds and vines. It was hideous, but it was given with great affection. I had no choice. I smiled and oohed and aahed appropriately and placed the poor imitation of my desired birdbath at the western end of the perennial garden.

Regardless of my fondness or lack-thereof for the birdbath, it was, to my knowledge, our only real water feature. Having learned how important water-features are, particularly if you don’t have the good Feng Shui fortune of living ocean side or lake side or having a stream or burbling brook running through your property, the best you could do to bring fortune and harmony to your otherwise earthbound dwelling was to have water features.

I feared that having our water feature, even though it was winter, turned upside down, was something that would not stimulate Ch’i or bring harmony to our abode. I began to march towards it to correct this folly, at first feeling thankful for the light winter because the snow had melted and the lawn was fully visible and thus, I imagined, easy to cross.

Not so, my friends. Not so.

What I found were piles of dog shit, deposited throughout the winter but deceitfully disguised by the once, new fallen snow. I hopped and stepped left, then right, and tried to negotiate a real pigeon-like walk, trying to avoid these troves of excrement so that I could triumphantly place the bath to my birdbath right-side-up.

As I tried to map a shit-free walk back to the house an ominous thought began to descend upon me.

“There is dog shit in my Bagua! My Ch’i doth not floweth!

I could have picked up the shovel, I was going to pick up the shovel, but decided instead to call my sister, who lives in Northern Vermont where she bravely endures six months of winter with five children and three dogs. I confided in her about the dog closet in my career path and the organic deposits on the lawn.

“Tell me about it!” she said. “Dog shit is like the suburban Vietnam. Twenty years later you’re still dodging landmines. The kids went out to play baseball yesterday because the snow had melted and every single one of them and their friends came traipsing into the house with dog shit on their shoes. The house still stinks.”

That made me feel better, not that her house stunk, but that dog shit was a universal phenomenon and not something ascribed solely to my Ch’i or lack thereof. I turned to a card a 60 year old friend had given me on panic attacks. It was a “seven things to do” when experiencing a panic attack and “seven things to know” about panic attacks. She confided in me that she had suffered from them her entire life, even having been hospitalized. Back in the day, they didn’t know what they were, not that they know much more now, but at least there’s a name, and a how-to card, and several books on the subject.

Number seven held some wisdom, at least for me.

“Be patient with your progress. ‘Slow’ will get you results; ‘fast’ will get you frustration and failure.”

“Go easy,” said my friend Amy, who is quitting smoking and having a hell of a hard time. “I just keep telling myself, ‘go easy.’”

“I cleaned the top of my refrigerator today,” I offered.

“You’re so brave,” she said.

“Not really. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

We laughed. And at the end of the day I realize that we’re all just milking the same air and doing the best we can with whatever we got. Dog shit in my Bagua notwithstanding, my house is a little cleaner, my friendships deeper, my empathy greater, and I think I’ve finally figured out which direction our house should be facing—south.

Only we’re facing West.

That’s why it’s important to have multiple sources, not just for journalism but for guidance. Feng Shui for the Soul encourages devotes to “work with what you have.”

So I decided that when I finally get the courage to pick up the shovel and unhinge the dog shit so that the Ch’i can flow, I will face South while doing it and soak in the sun to stave off the stench.

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