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Living Arts
Shaken and Stirred: The LifeQuake Phenomenon
© 2009 by Michael Raysses
Every once in awhile, a book captures what’s going on within people’s personal lives, as well within the institutions that help frame those lives. The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (Not Just Survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval, by Dr. Toni Galardi is arguably such a book.
Recently, I sat down with Dr. Galardi to discuss her debut offering. (Full disclosure: I helped edit early drafts of this book.)
Vision Magazine: What is a LifeQuake?
Toni Galardi: A LifeQuake is an awakening that signals the end of an old cycle of your life. It cracks you open, propelling you into a new level of consciousness. It is an evolutionary event.
VM: How does this “awakening” manifest?
TG: Many people experience it through a major crisis that forces them to move out of their old lives and dated ways of thinking.
VM: What’s the difference between a LifeQuake and The LifeQuake Phenomenon?
TG: LifeQuakes are individual experiences that people go through when one cycle ends and another begins, launching them to their next evolutionary level. The LifeQuake Phenomenon is the newest revolutionary movement to hit the planet. In the 60s and 70s, for instance, we saw feminism and gay liberation emerge as sociological movements. In both instances, masses of people were simultaneously awakening into a new consciousness. What differentiates the LifeQuake Phenomenon is that it is a revolution borne out of evolution.
VM: So as people are evolving spiritually, they’re being thrust into a revolution?
TG: Yes, though it’s not the same for everyone. Some people are experiencing their LifeQuakes with great consciousness, thus creating new ways of living without suffering catastrophic events. But lots of people resist changing their lives and turn to addictions or less overt distractions as a means of coping. Resisting the natural chaos of deconstructing and reconstructing your life almost assures disastrous results.
VM: When is chaos natural?
TG: When anything is ending. In quantum physics, it’s called the Prigogine Principle. In ancient mythology, the Phoenix is the bird that, when no longer able to fly higher, descended into flames and reconstructed into a better form so that he could repeatedly fly higher, achieving eternal life. This is evolution’s story. A simpler way of looking at this principle is through the rose. When it reaches full bloom, it disintegrates into the ground, thus feeding new buds. This is chaos. But the flower doesn’t resist this natural cycle.
Most people don’t recognize life has many cycles and it’s possible to prepare for the end of one cycle and the beginning of another without the catalyst of catastrophe.
VM: According to your LifeQuake model, what catalyzes change?
TG: Tapping into your intuition. When the tsunami hit southeast Asia in 2004, there were intuitive people who left the country the day before. Three months before the 1994 Northridge Earthquake erupted, one of the people I interviewed for my book dreamed that he needed to leave California. His wife had a similar experience. They sold their house and moved three days before the earthquake hit.
If you’re mentally detached from a fixed picture of what your life should look like, it’s easier to intuit when to make a change. But if you don’t want your life to change, you’ll bury your head in the sand and be washed away when the proverbial tsunami hits.
VM: What kind of person will survive this evolutionary leap?
TG: Jonas Salk observed that evolution is not survival of the fittest, as Darwin theorized, but rather, it’s about what fits best. What fits best for the times we’re in is a person who can adapt to rapid change physically, emotionally, and mentally, and with great agility. My book teaches you how to do just that. Keep in mind, before we can become emotionally and mentally adaptive, we have to attend to the physical. The food we eat, the vitamins we take, and the amount of sleep we get impact our ability to anticipate change. Aboriginal tribes who live off the land are completely plugged into their instinctual nature. They can feel when change is coming and because they live simply, they’ll move to a new location without being forced out of the old one.
VM: Are we given signs that it’s time to change?
TG: Yes, I call them divine coincidences. Carl Jung called them synchronicities. I tell my clients to pay attention to wake-up calls and seeming coincidences that are showing you in advance when to change a job, a relationship, or even just the kind of exercise you’ve been doing.
Another way we get messages is in our dreams. One of my clients who is very intuitive was getting messages in her dreams that her boyfriend was being unfaithful, something he repeatedly denied. She ignored her own signals because she was working on a project and didn’t want to disrupt her life. When she finally confronted him a third time, he confessed, and her whole world unraveled. When I probed the topic, she admitted that she’d needed to end this relationship a year before but didn’t want to incur the cost of living alone. She ended up living alone in the house they’d occupied, which ultimately cost her so much more.
VM: Have you always been this tuned in?
TG: Sadly, no. I had three near-death experiences over the course of 20 years before I realized that crisis was unnecessary to get me to embrace change.
VM: What one message encapsulates the LifeQuake mission statement?
TG: The mission is to give people the tools to learn how to adapt to change of all kinds so that they can shift the gears of their life more readily and fluidly. When you know how to clear yourself emotionally as resistance comes up on a daily basis, you develop the ability to observe change coming in advance of the end of a cycle and can then make healthy choices that transport you into a new cycle without trauma and drama. In order to survive and thrive, our planet needs people who are highly adaptable to this deconstruction phase and who see past the chaos to the new world that’s coming.
The Ancient Greeks had it right: Despite believing that the gods were imperfect, they were no less divine. And for them, chaos was the place where gods were born.
My vision is to move psychology and spirituality beyond the concepts of good and evil, dysfunction and function, to an understanding of how to embrace this current global chaos as a shift that’s creating a new view of one another—one in which all of our human frailties are reinterpreted as part of our fullest potential. In my book, I talk about how our life purpose comes from embracing the parts of ourselves we have deemed shameful. Case in point: A client who was also a lawyer, confessed to me that he thought he was going crazy because he’d begun to hear people’s thoughts just before they spoke them. Then, after we did a guided imagery exercise, he remembered that as a child he’d had a psychic gift, but because he was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, he was told that psychics were evil. When he began to accept his intuitive nature, the mind-reading stopped and he started winning in court more because he’d integrated this shadow part.
The point is that we need a new paradigm for psychological health, one that includes everything we are as part of our full potential. My mission is to show people that the rise of addictions, economic challenges, and even global warming are all part of the equation for this morphing into our next evolution. This is a revolutionary concept in the field of psychology. I believe we’re on a new frontier and we can thrive, not just survive, in these times. And my book gives people the road map for getting there.
Free articles and a questionnaire to determine if you are in a LifeQuake as well as Dr. Toni Galardi’s new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (Not Just Survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval are available at www.LifeQuake.net.