Ep. 425: Spatial Alchemy with Olga Naiman

0:01Welcome to How to Decorate from Ballard Designs, a weekly podcast all about the trials and triumphs of decorating and redecorating your home. I'm Caroline. I'm on the marketing team. And I'm Taryn, and I'm a product designer. I'm Liz. I head up the creative team. We're your hosts. Join the expert team at Ballard Designs for tips, tricks, and tales from interior designers, stylists, and other talents in the design world. Plus, we'll answer your decorating dilemmas at the end of each episode. We love answering your questions, so don't forget to email us at podcast at ballardesigns.net. Now on with the show.

0:34Hey, Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up. It shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Croc store today. Today, we're thrilled to welcome stylist and interior designer, Olga Naiman, to the podcast. Olga started her career with a bachelor's degree in psychology, spending over 20 years exploring alternative healing and transformation methods, while also maintaining a flourishing design career on the side.

1:19In her new book, Spatial Alchemy, Olga shares how she combines her extensive knowledge of psychology and transformation with her design expertise to help her clients unlock their true goals by creating a home that supports their future self. Olga, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to be here. I can't wait to dive in with you. Spatial Alchemy was such a unique book. We have never had a design book quite like this one. so it was a real treat to dive into and I have to tell you what was the hardest part about getting through it for me was that I kept getting to chapters and being like oh I need to go fix this drawer and so then I would like be you know googling what thing I needed for the drawer and so I kept like thinking of little examples in my own home and life that I needed to put on my to-do list.

2:17And so then I'd be like, you know what, let me go finish the book so that I can, you know, I can, I can get there. I'll get there. But anyway, it was, there's so many great takeaways. So I'm excited to get into it. Thank you. I'm, I'm really happy that it spoke to you. And, you know, these things, you can move at your own pace because like it's, there's no pressure in like having to do all these like little things all at the same time. It's actually about doing something and then seeing what happens, doing something. It's about the cause and effect relationship between what you could do to your home and how it impacts not only how you move about your home, but other circumstances in your life.

3:02And it doesn't cost a thing to get started too. I also was moving things around consistently while reading this book. It was really, and there's a lot to get through in this book. There are so many different concepts and different exercises and different thought processes. But maybe you can get us started by defining what spatial alchemy is. Yeah. Spatial alchemy is the intersection of your home, your psyche, in your manifestation. So we all know, anyone who's into their home knows the impact that your home has on your psyche, on your body, even on your self-worth. You know, when we upgrade and move into a new home or we shift things around drastically, we begin to realize that, wow, this thing that happened, this person that I randomly ran into, I think it has something to do with what I did in my home.

4:03Like this book really shows you how to connect the dots and close the circle on that. So you're not only designing for beauty and function, which are the top two layers of design, but you're designing for your psychology and your manifestation, which are kind of the silent two bottom layers of design. Like how do all four work together? And if you're someone especially who's into manifestation and who's into like really taking an active role in self-growth or evolution, your own personal evolution, this serves as a guide for how to link your home up with that process. like Liz said, there's so much to get into.

4:48We have a lot of questions we want to ask. But before we do that, I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your background, because it seems like your upbringing, your family life, your psychology degree, all of that is really kind of foundational to the whole concept and message of the book. So I wanted to start there so that, you know, our listeners have a frame of reference for how the book evolved. Mm-hmm. So my parents are both psychiatrists and we are like refugees from the Ukraine and we came to America in the late 70s. So like kind of moving around a lot and being uprooted a lot was such a big story in my childhood.

5:32that feeling of not quite belonging and not feeling like connected to my home, being taken away from my home. So that was kind of one of my major personal woundings. And when I was in sixth grade, I discovered interior design at my local library. This was before the internet. So I would spend hours looking at interior design books, at House Beautiful Magazine, at all the magazines, and really teaching myself how to redo my room so that I could feel more grounded because I wasn't feeling rooted or grounded with all the moving around. So that was really the beginning of my relationship with design.

6:12And then I did a psychology degree at Tufts University, clinical psychology. So I was working with clients at that point in internships, but there was that love of design that was always there. And when I graduated from college, I decided I'm not going to go into psychiatry like my parents were like, you must be psychiatrist like us. I decided that I was going to try to be in the world of design, which was one of my big loves. And I got a job at House Beautiful Magazine shortly thereafter and worked as an assistant and worked my way up to be an editor and then was a stylist at domino and a freelance stylist for West Elm and CB2.

6:56And I just had a big career with a lot of editorial from, you know, El Decor to Real Simple to Bon Appetit styling their entertaining stories. So a big 20-year career as a freelance stylist and interior designer. I'm doing my own spiritual kind of practice on the side, doing my own healing work for myself, working with shamans, plant medicine, psychology, behavioral psychology, somatic therapy, all kinds of things to kind of heal my ruptured sense of self through because family trauma, you know, that happened to my family, you know, in the Soviet Union as a Jewish person, you know, in the last century.

7:42so I was doing a lot of healing over here and then my design career was over here but then when I started working with clients for interior design I began to connect their home to their future self like what are you looking to bring into your life and is your home aligning to the thing that you're looking to bring because there's so much beauty in the world we can design for beauty and that's a wonderful thing and function. But if we're not aligning our home to what we're looking to manifest in our life, we're not using an opportunity, right? So as I started working with clients and they would come to me and say, oh my God, like we redid my house.

8:28Like I took out, like a lot of things would happen when we released. That's the first step of spatial alchemy, seeing your patterns and seeing what you can release in your life. And when I showed them their patterns, oh, you're neglecting yourself here, or these items belong to an outdated identity. They don't belong to the person who's in partnership, like what you say you want. They belong to like this person, this frustrated person that can't seem to find the thing, You know, so I would show them the patterns and then we would release the patterns. And even just with that alone, seismic shifts would happen in their life.

9:12And they would come to me a few weeks later, even a few days later sometimes, like, oh my God, like, I met someone or like, I'm going on like this college person that I was never quite got with called me or, you know, just these like magical things. started happening and I started putting two and two together and started working with my own self through my house and began to like systematically realize that what we do in our home has impact in our life and then creating a system for like okay so how do we create this system so that's when I really was able to unite the two sides of myself like the psychological the spiritual the kind of self-help side that I did for myself to the design side that I was doing for clients and in my professional life.

10:07This whole approach is so highly personal. And I think everyone is going to come away with their own take on this process because it is so highly personal. And you touched on the phrase future self, and that is a key to kind of unlocking the first steps of this. Maybe you can describe what you mean by the phrase future self. Yeah, the future self is what we're trying to bring into form in our lives. Like we all have vision boards, right? We all, like we all like, in pop culture, there is this kind of desire to, when we're talking about manifestation, like who would the person that can manifest this easily be?

11:00And that is your future self. So it's like dress for success or don't dress for the job you have, dress for the job you want are examples of this. And we all inherently know this to be true. When you start bringing what you want to manifest into physical form by dressing, for example, as the person who has that more successful job, you start embodying that self. And I call that the future self. So whether it's more free time, more leisure, more abundance, more money, more success, more recognition, partnership, intimacy, or maybe healing in your family circle or healing of the body if you're having health issues.

11:53Like, for example, if you're having health issues, my future self is healthy and vibrant and has a lot of vital energy. So however you define it, yes, that is a personal thing, but you could use your home to begin to represent and align to what you're wanting to become. Right. And then by doing that, your home and the movement throughout your home and the design of your home then supports that future self. Yes. So that you then become that future self. Yes. Yes. So amazing. I'd love to give you an example of this. Please, please. So just for people to understand. So for example, if you want more stability in your life, right?

12:45You want to start looking where your home feels unstable. Do you have a lot of furniture on little skinny legs? Do you have like rickety vintage like side tables that are kind of like shaky? Like, is your foyer not really set up to ground you when you walk in? Does it feel like you're kind of constantly haphazard and unorganized and like not grounded and rooted? You want to start looking at your home through the eyes of where am I not supporting stability? And once you begin to recognize those patterns and begin to shift them, then you begin to train your body to experience the stability. And a lot of us in childhood may not have had the most stable childhood.

13:38Maybe our parents divorced. Maybe we moved around a lot. Maybe our parents were always struggling financially and we never felt stable or grounded. So you want to start seeing where you're actually reinforcing the patterns that are your biggest laments. I really, really loved this book and loved all of the different exercises that you walk the reader through, because this is a lot to take on. I mean, we are, you know, going through this process. It's the suggestion is to really unpack your inner psyche. And that's a whole lot. And that's really hard. And that's really hard work. Um, you know, so what are, what are some first steps that someone can do to kind of dip their toe into this practice?

14:34Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. Um, sometimes it's really hard to see our own patterns, but once you train yourself to see them, just like in therapy, you know, once you start seeing your life patterns, you know, as a pattern, rather than as random kind of occurrences, you begin to gain more agency over your life. So in a way, I don't even see it as hard. I see it as something that we can get curious about and realize that we're not going to realize all our patterns all at the same time. But once you start with one or two of them, you can, you begin to kind of get the hang of it and it's, and it becomes very natural.

15:22And also when we come into other people's homes, it's very natural for us to see exactly who they are, right? Because we can't see ourselves. We are, we live in our own blind spots oftentimes. But when we go into, like, say we're starting to date someone new. We walk into their house, we're like, okay, I got this. Like, I see exactly what I'm dealing with. Or a new friend or anyone, really. You can see, like, how much they value themselves, how much they nurture themselves, how, like, how they're able to express their creativity. So if you're having a hard time seeing your patterns, and I recommend like walking out of your house and coming back into it and seeing it through a stranger's eyes.

16:14So who is this person who lives here? What do they value? And are the values aligned with what they're bringing into their lives? And if one is get feeling stuck, I recommend just bringing a friend in because your friend is going to tell you immediately, oh, okay. So I feel like rather than seeing it as hard, see it as fun and like interesting and begin to see how your home is aligning with that which you want to bring into your life or perhaps aligning with that which you are complaining about a lot. Like I'm not being supported or I don't feel held. Like how is your home not allowing you to feel held if that's what your complaint is in your life?

17:04And we all have themes in our lives that we return to over and over and we complain to, to our closest people. Like, I wish I, you know, I wish I felt more fulfilled or I haven't felt fulfilled in a really long time. And how, how is your home either creating that sense of fulfillment or disrupt disrupting it. Yeah, that's really amazing. And I think it's really great to approach most problems in our lives with, with curiosity. And do we allow ourselves enough curiosity with, to examine ourselves? Yeah, that's, that's really amazing. I did end up walking through my house with fresh eyes and I always find it messier than I think that it is.

17:53But I also, you know, started seeing the things that I didn't see before because we end up walking past things, whether it's, you know, I had some branches that I brought in a little bit ago and you know what, they were past their prime, but I kept walking past them. And so I quickly got rid of them before this interview. Good job. I always tell people an easy way to start is looking at what's on your walls, the art that's on your walls, like reading it through the eyes of symbol. And we all inherently could do that. Does the art feel like I want to feel is one thing that I always tell people when they get stuck?

18:46Like, look at your art and does it feel the way you want to feel? Or is it something that's just been hanging there for years and you haven't really even looked at for a long time? Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned a great story about a client that had a picture of a goat that was looking kind of sad and she didn't realize that it was bringing her down. Yeah. This is a client that lives in Nashville. And she had this picture. It was by a well-known artist. It was like this drawing of a goat with like a little tag on its ears, like it was about to go to the slaughterhouse. And she had just gotten divorced, you know, and it had been a really rough divorce.

19:31And like the goat was like literally right by her front door. And so every time she wasn't noticing it anymore. She'd had the piece for years. And I was like, is this how you want to feel? Like this is the entry to your home. And she was like, wow, I never looked at it through those eyes. It was just this piece of art by this well-known artist that was passed to me by my parents. I never recognized that it actually was programming my unconscious mind. And she sold it, made quite a bit of money, and then was able to buy all these other things that did align with what she wanted in her life. Hey, Chicago, class it up with Crocs.

20:15You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it, style it, make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Croc store today. Yeah, there's such power in letting something go and then just moving some other things around and giving. You talk about giving things energy after you move them around. Yeah. Because it gives them different focus. Yes. Yes. When you move things around, you're moving them around, especially if you link that to your future self intentionally.

21:02Because intentionality is massive. And there's like so many scientific studies on this. I'm not even going to, you know, state this, but if you read the intention experiment by Lynn McTaggart, there's like a million scientific studies about how the intention of the observer impacts the results. So once you start recognizing that and you start designing your home with the intention of bringing that future self out of the vision board, out of the cloud and into the third dimension with you, it starts really beginning to shift things. So yes, it's a big deal. Yeah, there were so many parts of the book where I, like there was a lot in the book where I was like, oh, okay, I'm, because, you know, we have a decorating podcast.

21:52We talk about our houses a lot. We've listened to it. We've had a lot of excerpts on the show. And so I don't want to speak for you, Liz, but I spent a lot of time thinking about my house. I've put a lot of work into it. So there's a lot that I'm happy with. But I will say that reading the book, there was a lot where I was like, oh, maybe that is why that space was so successful. So for example, in my living room, it has a lightness, it's happy. And as I was sort of reading the book, I was kind of thinking of that room in mind and sort of using your descriptions and your exercises and thinking like, oh, wow, okay.

22:34I didn't necessarily do that with the intention of what she was saying, but with a different intention. You know, pre-kids, I had a lot of like neutrals in my space. And then I started having my daughters and I was like, you know, I need to have more color. Like, I need to create this happy, creative space that I want for my kids. And I think it doesn't, It just like doesn't jive to have that with like all whites, you know? And so that was sort of the intention that I was setting for my room. But then the palettes and everything had, like there was a part in the book where you talk about stability and fluidity.

23:18And like it's an active room versus a passive room. So there was a lot that I was like, oh, okay, maybe I was doing this, but not with quite the clarity that you outline. So I probably would have made a lot less mistakes along the way had I had your book to start with. But I also loved what you were talking about with your sort of like setting the time, setting time aside, your time scarcity mindset where you would put like calendar invites on your calendar to go tackle things. Can you tell our listeners about that? Because I really, you know, just loved that and felt like, OK, like this is something I'm really going to I could see using in so many ways.

24:05Mm-hmm. So many of us, shifting from scarcity into abundance is a big theme of the book. And oftentimes we have financial scarcity and time scarcity is another one that's so common to us, especially here in the US. When we're trying to juggle so many things, we always say, oh my God, I know I have to tackle this, reorganize this cabinet or do this thing, but I don't have the time. So we kind of let it slide for months and months and sometimes years. But a lot of these things are solved in 20 minutes. A lot of our design issues are solved in 20 minutes. So even if like twice a week for 20 minutes, if you just wake up 20 minutes early and set an alarm for yourself to do the thing, it's like you could do reorganize one drawer at a time or it's like to go through your papers or to like little design things to like restyle your bookshelf just to move things around.

25:12Oftentimes it doesn't take more than 20 minutes but then the key thing is you get such a dopamine rush, your brain gets such a dopamine rush after you've done it because you walk by that area or you open that drawer or you open that closet and like that 20 minutes, like twice a week, 40 minutes, like equals so much self-pride that it gets a cycle going because you want to start doing that more because you want to feel the dopamine. You know, it's just something that happens to our brains. So it's a small, quick way to shift out of the scarcity. I don't have time. I don't have time into abundance, like actually can make time.

25:56And then when I make time, like I feel this way. And after like three times of making time, oh, this thing happened in my life. Oh, I wonder if it had something to do with me making time. Maybe something that was a difficult project became more easeful in my life. And I wonder if that has anything to do with me learning how to make time instead of feeling like I don't have enough time. I think that leads into another word that keeps popping up within this book, and it's dignity and living in dignity. Can you talk a little bit about that? I feel like that word is really important. That word always meant a lot for me as a refugee, as a former refugee, not, you know, also coming to this country and parents didn't have finances, you know, feeling very scarce in finances, my childhood, during my childhood, and then learning how to give myself dignity, right?

27:00Like invite dignity in. So dignity is like the opposite of scarcity in my mind. And it doesn't have to do with money. We could not have like massive funds, but we could design our homes with dignity because dignity is what starts bringing in like self-worth. The more dignity you learn how to weave into your home, the more self-worth you start weaving into your life. And I see those two things as very related. So for example, if you are in therapy or any kind of kind of self-growth practice. And you're learning how to bring more self-worth into your life so that your self-esteem could grow or you could support yourself more.

27:50Weaving dignity into your home supports that process. So it's not like this thing that's only in your mind of like my patterns and my self-worth and my childhood. You're almost like reparenting yourself with more dignity. And And a lot of us as children might not have received that quality, but it's a very beautiful frequency dignity. When you are beginning to hold yourself with dignity, it opens a lot of doors into your life and you can begin to experiment on your own and see what happens. That's amazing. And I think another part of that is you'd also talk about taking the routine of every day and turning that into ritual.

28:38What are some things that we can, examples that we can take routine and turn it into ritual? Yeah, yeah. I love this practice and I always recommend that when people are doing spatial alchemy, they begin with their little routines in very small ways and begin to start witnessing the cause and effect relationship because that's what we're always going for in spatial alchemy. It's about the cause and effect. So once you've let go of like unwanted patterns in your home, I always suggest doing that step first, like seeing your patterns, releasing outdated identities and unwanted patterns wherever you can, wherever you spot them.

29:21Once you have done that, begin to work with like seeding new patterns by bringing dignity into your daily routines, and that turns them into rituals. So dignity turns routine into ritual. So for example, the things that you repeat daily, like putting some salt on your food, what does your salt cellar look like? Does it have dignity? The glass that you drink from next to your bed, does that glass have dignity? And does it resonate with your future self? For example, there are many kinds of glasses we could drink from. Is it like a colorful, funky, little, playful glass? If we want more playfulness in our lives, if our lives feel too serious and too much grunt work, and we want to add some energy of play, bring in like a glass that has like a quirky shape or a quirky color, like a colored glass where the light comes through it and it like beams.

30:23if you want more stability in your life, like start really working with that glass. Is it more like earthenware? Does it have a heft to it? These little choices are what turns routine into ritual. So it's not like, yes, it's about dignity and like designing it very intentionally, but what are you actually wanting to invite into your life? What quality? Is it playfulness? Is it stability? is it structure? Like some people like me, ADD, a little ADD, you know, I'm like constantly working with how do I bring more structure into my life? So maybe my glass is more like precise and there's a precision and maybe there's like a square handle to the glass rather than a rounded handle.

31:08You know, like you can begin to have fun and start thinking, okay, what kind of glass do I want to drink from? Like your bathroom rituals. Like, do you have like beautiful pumps for your dishwashing soap? What does your sponge look like? We could all, like most of us could afford to buy the best sponge that money can buy, right? It'll be like$15,$20, or like the most beautiful and exquisite tea towel, you know,$35, you know, and just begin to, and that and the tea towel could begin to like what kind of stitching does it have does that stitching relate is it like this fecund floral pattern if you want to get more into your like sensuality or is it a geometric pattern if you want more structure into your life so you want to start really thinking about the choices that you're making and that's where the intentionality comes in in tiny little ways and then you're using the tea towel many times a day and your body is like oh wow and it's really feeling the difference, especially when it's the glass and the salt cellar and the sponge and the tea towel and the shampoo pump and the little things.

32:21So start tracking what you touch more than once a day, your daily routines, and seeing where you can up-level them and seeing where the objects associated with those routines bring in the future self that you're wanting to bring in. I love that. And, you know, cups and saucers and plates are just a little easy way to kind of make that shift. I know that was one of my pandemic takeaways. I now drink champagne from teacups. From my favorite teacups. I love that. I love that. Yeah, I feel like that idea of like, you know, little things in your world matter. Yeah, and why save it for a special occasion?