The LifeQuake Blog

We live in rapidly changing times. The beginning of this decade and century has brought many sudden, sometimes devastating crises to which we’ve had to respond instantly. Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the earthquake in Haiti and Wall Street quaking all came, seemingly without warning. And it is predicted that we will continue to see devastating collective happenings, such as climate catastrophes and economic contractions (economists predict until 2011).

On a more personal level, there are also massive LifeQuakes that many of us are experiencing. Given this, it is no wonder that addiction, in all its manifestations, continues to skyrocket. But these seemingly catastrophic events can be a guise for something better. Through the eyes of evolution-oriented psychotherapy, it can be seen as part of a vast evolutionary shift.

Fear has always been an adaptive, evolutionary mechanism for getting our adrenaline pumping. But survival of the fittest no longer indicates who can outrun nature’s predators. Today’s survivors are those who can maintain grace under fire. For the addict, who often comes with a rigid personality structure, learning to adapt to these times of personal and global upheaval without relapsing is the true challenge.

Part of responding to crisis without hysteria is preparation. It is actually possible to intuit the signs that radical change is coming—if people in aboriginal tribes can have this instinctual nature, so can we. In fact, there are documented instances of people who intuited not to get on United flight 93 on 9/11, who sold their home before the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and who got out of the stock market shortly before September 2008.

The key to preparing for change depends on a new belief that change is gain, as opposed to loss. When you choose to change the negative association with change, you are more apt to listen for the signs that a cycle is completing and change is coming, even if you don’t know what that specific change needs to be.

In your childhood, if change always brought crisis or pain, you may have a deep subconscious resistance to major transitions and turn to addiction to cope. The irony is that if you hold onto the belief that change will be negative, it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. If your coping strategy for adapting to change is to avoid the warning signs by numbing yourself through substances or other distractions, you actually create crisis-driven transition. Even for those who are going to meetings and are not actively using, there are other subtle ways of avoiding dealing with the fear of change. A slew of parking tickets may be a wake-up call that you are over-parked in your life. If ignored, a major accident could be around the corner.

One technique to begin to transform the fear of change is to spend a few minutes every day with your eyes closed. Ask yourself, “Is there some area of my life that has become defunct, no longer functioning for my greater good?” It could be your job responsibilities, the form of exercise you do or even your sex life.

Now focus inward toward your body.

When you think about changing that routine, what feelings surface? Where are those feelings located in your body? Now, take five minutes to simply breathe into it by placing your left hand (this is governed by the side of the brain that elicits our intuitive, creative self) directly over this area. Allow your hand to get warmer. Now send an intention of unconditional love into your hand. Think about all the times you have used your hands to express love toward family members or a pet, and then transfer that same feeling of complete acceptance you have toward others you love to the place in your body where you hold the fear of change. Love the fear as it is by directing energy through your hand as you would if you were reassuring a wounded pet. End this practice by repeating to yourself, “I am safe and secure. Change now brings me gain.”

Allow yourself to either visualize or feel into your body a future life in which this change has brought peace and in which you are thriving. The key is to practice experiencing feeling the inner security of moving through change completely supported emotionally, physically, and financially, so that you can thrive after the change comes. To reprogram your body to do this, repeat this exercise as often as you feel the fear arise—for as long as several weeks—until there is no more negative charge associated with making a life change.

I have often been asked to summarize my own personal journey that led to writing The LifeQuake Phenomenon. Although most of it is revealed in the pages of this book, I decided to share just my story here in my blog. I warn you: it is the length of reading three blogs or about 5 pages of a self help book.

The LifeQuake Model was birthed after my third near fatal experience. I say near fatal rather than near death because NDE’s have a particular phenomenology highlighted by traveling through a tunnel and seeing a whitelight and family menbers or spiritual beings.

My near fatal experiences did not take me out of this life and in fact were characterized by long periods IN the tunnel, stuck between cycles of my life.

In the LifeQuake Model there are seven stages. Prior to my first near fatal experience when I was 21 years old, I was working on skid row fresh out of undergraduate school. I had moved to California six months before and finding a job had been difficult. However, having grown up in a white, middle class suburb the exposure to the mean streets of downtown Los Angeles proved to be quite the education I hadn’t received before. At first, I was fascinated by this subculture of people and their actual preference for living on the streets. There were doctors who had become alcoholics along with your usual addicts. But soon, this novelty wore off and I became bored with my job, feeling unchallenged by the work. Boredom is the first stage of a LifeQuake. Around this time I met my soon to be husband and he suggested I leave the job but I was fiercely independent and didn’t want him supporting me so I stayed. And when you don’t change your life at this stage, you enter stage two – the dying of the old life that is often characterized by depression. I started dreading going to work. I had to go to bed at 9 in order to be up at 5 and at work at 6 AM.

And then stage Three hit – the crisis and radical severance from the old cycle. One day, an addict got through reception high on PCP. I didn’t know he was on drugs. I just observed that he was causing a commotion with other patients in the facility and I went over to talk to him. Suddenly, he flipped out and started choking my throat. Everyone was stunned and paralyzed by fear except for one woman. She had been a doctor in Russia and had emigrated but had been forced to work as a phlebotomist in this facility. She was a big woman and began pulling on his arm. PCP infuses one with super human strength, unfortunately, so he threw her in one direction and me up against the wall and then ran out.

I was rushed to the hospital with hand print bruises all over my neck and began a three month course in rehabilitation. During this time, I began having nightmares in which the assault was taking place all over again. I had entered stage four. I was in a void. No job, no clue as to what to do next. My fiancé suggested I get therapy. During the course of my therapy, I started asking the therapist questions about her work and where she went to school. I had mentioned that as a kid my father nicknamed me Dear Abby because my friends would often ask for my advice. She suggested that perhaps I take a course and see if it was for me. I enrolled in graduate school and took one course. I loved it and started full time in the fall. This began Stage Five of my LQ. In stage five, you apprentice at what you discovered as your calling in stage four. Although I went on to be very successful as a psychotherapist and owning a beautiful home with two offices, stage six and seven as I came to know them did not crystallize for me until my next LifeQuake. In the LifeQuake model, stage six is the stage in which you experience life as abundant no matter how it shows up and it is this perception that creates wealth as you would have it. Stage seven is characterized by quantum altruism where the individual experiences that out of helping those they serve they themselves are served. This has a quantum effect and leads eventually to the entire planet having this consciousness of oneness.

My second LifeQuake began four years later when once again the cycle of my life was completing and I was afraid of making the change. I started feeling bored and unchallenged once again and I tried to quell the boredom with weekly shopping trips to South Coast Plaza and multiple glasses of wine every night after working all day with my patients. When this didn’t work, I started to feel like a zombie, dead man walking through my life. What ended stage two this time was a series of three car accidents in six days. In the second of the two accidents, my car spun like a tea cup at Disney land across four lanes of an eight lane interchange and stopped facing Friday night traffic. It was in the middle of this one that I surrendered my life for the first time and asked that my death not be painful.
But it didn’t fully wake me up until the third accident two days later when it now involved other people and I wasn’t even driving the car. Once again, during my recuperation, I realized my life in Orange County: my marriage, my career, and my home were all structures I needed to leave.

When I entered stage four this time, I had moved back to Los Angeles and had begun a serious search to discover who I really was. In this void, I meditated and waited to be shown my next calling. I was given these seven stages for helping me to overcome the fear of change by providing a context for holding my experience. However, this time around Stage Four was more complex. It was as though a Pandora’s box of diseases began to manifest: Epstein Barr, Hashimotos thyroiditis, candida, and a host of allergies.

I ran through all the money from my property settlement trying to find medical help for the physical challenge du jour. As I struggled to support myself, my body began to go through yet another kind of challenge. My electrical system had become extremely sensitive. Energy would shoot through my body like lightning bolts sometimes for hours at a time. I could feel earthquakes before they hit, I felt a body blow the day before 9/11 that put me in a fetal position on my sofa on Sept 10, 2001.

What I learned through the years though was to begin to notice when change was coming. So in 2001 I had my own internal tower of inferno through out the year leading up to my third near fatal experience. I had become very fatigued and was developing respiratory challenges and then unexplained rashes. I mentioned to my acupuncturist who was treating me that I noticed grey stains forming on the linoleum in my kitchen. She suggested that perhaps my symptoms had a geopathic origin. In other words, my house was making me sick. I called in an environmental consultant and was told that everything in my house was contaminated by the most virulent, toxic fungus there is. Everything would have to be torched that could not survive a 50% bleach solution.

I had to walk away from everything I owned once again. But this time there was no resistance. I walked out the door and lived in a motel for two months and it would be another year of healing and recovery and dim prognoses from doctors who did not know how to treat neurotoxins. I applied some of the visualizations I gave to my patients and began to cooperate with my own healing abilities, choosing to hold a different prediction for my health than what the medical community could provide. I realized that I had chosen at a soul level to walk the path of a wounded healer: that every illness I encountered I had to heal myself without medical intervention. Having this context to hold my journey in allowed me to surrender. I chose to hold my time in transition without my health, a partner, family to depend on, or monetary resources as a time of great prosperity and eventually it did turn.

Although I would never say I have mastered change, I have become very observant and agile, aware that it can all change in a New York minute. I notice when anything in my life is no longer viable, and that includes beliefs along with lifestyle.

Each major change has taught me to listen, observe, and adapt, listen, observe, and adapt. By listening and observing where change is happening subtly, I have learned to prepare for bigger changes coming. When you are prepared, nothing has to be experienced as a crisis. As I write this, I am aware that a big change is coming again. I am being shown through my sleeping dreams, people I am meeting, and environmental disruptions ( my house was hit by a run away car) that change is afoot and that I must detach from my life as I know it.

This road, however steep, has also taught me the true nature of impermanence– things, people, my body all will eventually disintegrate and what really matters is how I spend this moment. Am I risking telling the truth in this moment, even if it requires facing the fear of loss? Telling the truth in my career and relationships has liberated me to reveal a new life blueprint that is constantly evolving and not encased by the faulty layers of cultural programs I inherited.

Mastering the building elements of the seven stages of my book The LifeQuake Phenomenon reconstructs the foundation of your body, mind, and spirit so that it is adaptable to change and what emerges is an authentic connection to this moment.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What excites you most about your book’s topic? Why did you choose it?

Author: What excites me most about my topic is that I created a model for helping people overcome the fear of change that can have a global effect as well. If we learn to anticipate when cycles in our lives are ending, we don’t have to bring in catastrophe to motivate us to change. We can end such disasters like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina if we change how we negotiate change in our own lives. It also excites me that I have been able to use this model with individual clients, public seminars, in big business, and as a relapse prevention model in chemical dependency treatment facilities. I want people to be saved from the unnecessary suffering I went through to get this message.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: How long did the book take you from start to finish?

Author: The book itself took three years. The journey of writing the first proposal began twenty years ago.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What aspect of writing the book did you find particularly challenging?

Author: Editing out stories I had collected from all the interviews I had done to keep the number of pages manageable.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What surprised you the most about the book writing process?

Author: How much of it is editing.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Did you have any favorite experiences when writing your book?

Author: Up until 2008, every time I wrote a book proposal from 1990 to 2007, my life would go into another LifeQuake and the depth of the book would expand.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What do you hope your readers will gain from reading your book?

Author: I hope they will feel inspired to experience their LifeQuake as a rebirth not a disaster and that with this seven stage roadmap, it will get easier and easier to anticipate when to make changes and become more agile when dealing with sudden changes.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What projects are you currently working on?

Author: Most of my writing involves blogging, articles, media interviews to promote this book but I have an idea for my next book which has to de with redefining sexuality in America.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Is writing your sole career? If not, what else do you do?

Author: I am a career coach, psychotherapist, advice columnist, corporate trainer and public speaker.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Did you do any research for your books, or did you write from experience?

Author: Both. I did a lot of research into evolutionary psychology, conducted over 100 interviews, and read what had been said about mastering change in order to show the distinction in my model that addresses reconstructing the whole human at the body, mind, and spirit level. And I shared my experience.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: How did you come up with your title?

Author: I needed a word that was a metaphor for the process that interfaced humans and the earth: The earth has a core. We have a core. The earth has layers around it with faultlines running through it. We have layers of faulty programs from the old tribal paradigms. So when the soul wakes up and demands living authentically, it creates pressure in these fault lines that can translate into outer crisis if the person’s ego resists making changes. I called it The LifeQuake Phenomenon because this awakening is taking place globally. We are in a massive, collective shift that looks like economic collapse.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What books have influenced you the most?

Author: Pema Chodron’s “When Things Fall Apart” to explain the importance of resting into groundlessness and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning that teaches one to have a soul filled context for suffering and loss that give one’s life meaning.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Who was your publisher and why did you choose them?

Author: My publisher is Wheatmark Publishing and I chose them because I wanted a free hand in writing my book while getting guidance where I needed it. They provide great hands on assistance and graphic designers for the cover. I was very pleased with how the book looks aesthetically to complement the content.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Tell us a little bit about your book.

Author: The LifeQuake Phenomenon is a body, mind, and spirit method for overcoming the fear of change, eliminating crisis as a catalyst for moving on, and learning how to thrive not just survive radical upheaval.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What inspired you to create a work of nonfiction?

Author: My life and the lives of the 100 people I interviewed. “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What did you do to prepare for writing your book?

Author: I experienced physical challenges, financial ruin, and confronted addiction issues. I took a journey that Jungians call “the descent into the abyss” that involved three near fatal experiences and a birth into my authentic self. I lived this model and wrote 7 versions of a book proposal over the course of 20 years.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: How did you develop your idea for this book?

Author: I saw that there was a pattern of how change occurs when a cycle in our psyche and lives are coming to a close and a construct for developing one’s new life purpose out of the chaos that ensues. I interviewed people on a talk show I did for two years, spoke on the subject of crisis and change at conferences, conventions, and workshops and did live radio as a guest. The feedback I received confirmed I was on the right track.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: What can we look forward to in your next book?

Author: It is still marinating inside of me but I am musing the idea that we have a very schizophrenic approach to sexuality in this country and it has taken a toll on our body images. The shadow side of our Puritanism is the proliferation of pornography and child sexual abuse. We need a new model that has more respect and nurturing paid to the physical body.

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Is there anything we haven’t covered that you would like to include?

Author: We are in an exciting time. What looks like chaos, ie. climate disasters, economic contraction, and the rise of addiction are all part of an evolutionary shift on the planet that will truly unite us as a global family. Everyone I interviewed shared that without their LifeQuakes they would never have expanded their consciousness into the awareness they stepped into. However, people need a road map and an inspiring context for holding the chaotic transitions going on in their lives so that they choose evolution over trying to hold onto the past. The LifeQuake Phenomenon delivers that model and roadmap!

FASCINATING AUTHORS: Thank you for taking the time to be part of this interview!

To learn more about the book and author, please visit: http://www.lifequake.net/

Second acts
Some find upside in downsizing, as layoffs open new doors
New York Post
By VICKI SALEMI

Last Updated: 9:17 PM, November 2, 2009

Posted: 1:41 AM, November 2, 2009
When life handed lemons to Courtney Adams and Chris Merritt, they didn’t make lemonade. They made lasagna instead. Downsized within one week of each other last December and three weeks after signing their lease, the Harlem couple — she a former brand director in the music industry and he a former employee of a company that produced conferences — concocted an idea: Why not develop a business around Adams’ love for cooking?

“If there’s a passion you’ve always wanted to pursue, I can’t imagine a better opportunity to do it,” says Adams.

“You can’t spend 24 hours a day looking for a job, so you might as well make the best of your time trying to make some money on your own.”

So they created a business plan, developed a Web site and launched Uptown Comfort (“Good Food for Bad Times”), a comfort-food catering business with favorites like barbecued chicken sliders, lasagna and cornbread.

“Being unemployed has been a truly defining experience,” says Merritt. “After so many years working with many parameters and expectations, you suddenly are free to define those parameters for yourself.”

For Dan Nainan of Chelsea, a former strategic relations manager at Intel, getting the ax meant being free to hang up the corporate suit and pick up a mike. He’d started flexing his comedic muscles by performing on weekends, as his job took him around the world doing technical demos in front of large crowds. After he was given the pink slip, the action plan became a no-brainer: Nainan pursued stand-up comedy full-throttle.

Since then, he’s been booked solid. He’s performed at the Democratic National Convention, did three Obama inaugural events in January and just shot a commercial for Apple, to name a few. And he owes it to an event that at the time seemed anything but a boon.

“I loved my job and wouldn’t have had the guts to leave on my own,” he says.

Not every layoff victim ends up finding a blessing in disguise in a pink slip, but such experiences are a lot more common than one might think, says Rachelle J. Canter, president of the executive coaching firm RJC Associates and author of “Make the Right Career Move.”

“How many of us have been miserable in jobs but afraid to make a change because we don’t know how to land a new job and are often too scared to try?” she says.

When she did a survey several years ago of employees who’d lost jobs, “the vast majority said losing the job was the best thing that ever happened to them because they needed a kick in the pants to find jobs they liked much more.”

On a roll

For Michael Dolan of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the kick in the pants came the day he was downsized from his job as a publicist for a technology software company in SoHo.

“I was totally blindsided,” he said. “Things seemed like business as usual and then, boom! No job.”

Disillusioned and worried about paying the bills, he nonetheless realized he’d been given an opportunity to focus on his love for bicycle racing, something his intensive work schedule hadn’t allowed.

“For the past six months I’ve been training two hours a day and racing competitively on weekends. I’m in the best shape of my life, completely destressing and having a blast,” he says.

And biking has done more than tone his thigh muscles — it’s opened up a possible new career.

Having discovered a love for taking photos of bike races, Dolan recently landed his first paid photography gig, and is considering pursuing that line of work full-time.

“I’ve been shooting as many events as I can, sending out my photos to magazines and Web sites, and improving my post-production skills by learning Photoshop and Lightroom,” he says.

“Getting laid off feels like you’re being pushed off a cliff. I figured I would just make the best of it. Put yourself out there and you may discover a hidden skill.”

Whether he knew it or not, Dolan was following the advice given to pink-slippers by psychotherapist Dr. Toni Galardi, the author of “The LifeQuake Phenomenon,” which addresses taking advantage of times of crisis to make life changes. If you’ve got a hobby or an outlet that you enjoy, pursue it; if you don’t, find one.

“The key during career transition is to stay passionate,” she says. “The vibe you give off will attract opportunities if you’re doing something you love every day besides job searching.”

For Suzette Banzo, being able to follow her bliss was exactly what was missing from her life during the 16 years she spent working for Verizon, first in quality assurance and then doing budget analysis.

“It was impossible to get time off from my job to pursue anything of interest to me,” she says.

Getting downsized took care of that issue, and it led her in an unexpected direction — modeling. It started when she was approached at a fund-raising event by the owner of a training program for plus-size models, who suggested she could do well in the business.

“I thought she was crazy,” says Banzo — but soon she was on the catwalk. Since then she’s shot a commercial for Kodak and walked the runway for Full Figure Fashion Week, which landed her a gig as a signature model for Hearts Desire Jewelry, and a role as the company’s East Coast sales representative.

“The designer tapped into my marketing degree, and we now collaborate on promotions and marketing strategies,” she says. Once frustrated as a “creative person in a finance job,” she says, “I’ve spent the last year being everything I had put on hold for far too long.”

Even for those who are content in their careers and aim to return to their industry, a layoff can provide an opportunity to do something meaningful.

Rob Morrison, a former NBC news anchor, learned this when he was bought out of his contract last year, and found “an unexpected gift” in staying home with his 3-year-old son Jack.

Something else unexpected came out of it, when the 20-year veteran of broadcast news launched a popular blog on Huffington Post called “Daddy Diaries: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Anchorman.”

“To have an outlet like that was key, and gave me a break from Handy Manny and Mickey Mouse,” says the Upper West Sider. Plus, he notes, it was a great way to keep his name out there.

Back on his feet, now with CBS2, Morrison looks back at his 16-month sabbatical as a mitzvah.

“I logged a lot of playground hours and got to watch my toddler turn into a little boy,” he says. “It was fascinating.”

His blog came to an end when his unemployed days did, but he’s since been contacted by a filmmaker who’s doing a documentary on the recession, and is interested in featuring Morrison, and possibly using him as a writer or narrator.

Shifting gears

As the job market opens up, what happens to blossoming side gigs? In some cases, like Morrison’s, they may fade into the background. Merritt of Uptown Comfort landed a new job at Macy’s as special-events manager, but is still helping out with strategizing for the catering business.

Adams is still on the hunt. And she hopes her experience starting and running the business is an extra selling point on her resume, where it’s listed in the skills and achievements section. In an interview, she says, “I’d present it as a learning experience that culminated from not being employed and needing to direct my talents to do something productive.”

Such ambition and drive is likely to impress a prospective employer, notes Canter.

“Is there an employer who dislikes initiative or who prefers candidates that lounged around the house or perfected their golf game while laid-off?” she asks.

While Adams hopes to keep the business going even should she land full-time work, she says she’d be quick to tell a potential employer that she’d hand over management to one of her consultants or fold the business if there were a conflict.

For her part, Banzo hopes to continue finding ways to use her marketing skills within the plus-size modeling business, and is trying other things as well, including writing for a trade magazine that covers the industry. She’s not entirely sure where this new road is headed, but has no doubt it’s a detour she’s glad to have taken, even if it wasn’t initially by choice.

“I feel like I’m finally living my life,” she says.

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When life handed lemons to Courtney Adams and Chris Merritt, they didn’t make lemonade. They made lasagna instead.

Downsized within one week of each other last December and three weeks after signing their lease, the Harlem couple — she a former brand director in the music industry and he a former employee of a company that produced conferences — concocted an idea: Why not develop a business around Adams’ love for cooking?

“If there’s a passion you’ve always wanted to pursue, I can’t imagine a better opportunity to do it,” says Adams. “You can’t spend 24 hours a day looking for a job, so you might as well make the best of your time trying to make some money on your own.”
SALAD DAYS: Laid off from the music industry and looking for a job, Courtney Adams decided to parlay her love of cooking into a catering business.
Lorenzo Ciniglio/Freelance
SALAD DAYS: Laid off from the music industry and looking for a job, Courtney Adams decided to parlay her love of cooking into a catering business.

So they created a business plan, developed a Web site and launched Uptown Comfort (“Good Food for Bad Times”), a comfort-food catering business with favorites like barbecued chicken sliders, lasagna and cornbread.

“Being unemployed has been a truly defining experience,” says Merritt. “After so many years working with many parameters and expectations, you suddenly are free to define those parameters for yourself.”

For Dan Nainan of Chelsea, a former strategic relations manager at Intel, getting the ax meant being free to hang up the corporate suit and pick up a mike. He’d started flexing his comedic muscles by performing on weekends, as his job took him around the world doing technical demos in front of large crowds. After he was given the pink slip, the action plan became a no-brainer: Nainan pursued stand-up comedy full-throttle.

Since then, he’s been booked solid. He’s performed at the Democratic National Convention, did three Obama inaugural events in January and just shot a commercial for Apple, to name a few. And he owes it to an event that at the time seemed anything but a boon.

“I loved my job and wouldn’t have had the guts to leave on my own,” he says.

Not every layoff victim ends up finding a blessing in disguise in a pink slip, but such experiences are a lot more common than one might think, says Rachelle J. Canter, president of the executive coaching firm RJC Associates and author of “Make the Right Career Move.”

“How many of us have been miserable in jobs but afraid to make a change because we don’t know how to land a new job and are often too scared to try?” she says.

When she did a survey several years ago of employees who’d lost jobs, “the vast majority said losing the job was the best thing that ever happened to them because they needed a kick in the pants to find jobs they liked much more.”

*

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/jobs/second_acts_NgA55jRydcHTeGjNqgeFGO/0#ixzz0WBWhBuIn

In the past four days I have been contacted by three people who all were in vehicular accidents: two auto, one motorcycle. In the midst of this I was a guest on a television talk show called View From the Bay. see
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=view_from_the_bay/everything_else&id=7079894. I referenced having had three car accidents in 6 days and have certainly referenced it in my public speaking and other blogs. I realized however, that although I go into more depth about the symbolism of car accidents in my book The LifeQuake Phenomenon, I haven’t discussed in greater depth what they can symbolize in my blog.

Have you ever had a dream where you are the driver of a car and the brakes go out at high speed or you are a passenger and the driver is navigating recklessly all over the road? The first of these can mean you feel your life is out of control and moving too fast. The latter can mean you feel that someone else is in control, recklessly in the driver’s seat of your life. Cars in dreams often symbolize how we are moving through our lives. In the second stage of one of my client’s LifeQuake, he received four parking tickets in a two week period and then his car brake disengaged while parked and rolled into the street. My interpretation of this was that he was over parked in his life and needed to move on from a career he no longer wanted.

In my case, I needed to leave my marriage and was hit from behind three times to push me forward. You really know you need to move on when you think the answer is to stop driving and then get hit while you’re a passenger in the back seat! This was the third and final experience that got me to realize I was holding onto a life that was over.

In a city like Los Angeles, people are very identified with their cars. A car accident can represent a structural change. When a person incurs a back or neck injury, they see a chiropractor unless it requires the medical intervention of an orthopedic surgeon. The opportunity that seeing a chiropractor during a time of great transition provides is that you have to get off “the hamster wheel” and lay still while someone re-aligns your neck and spine three times a week for six weeks. The combination of this pause and restructuring can be used to contemplate the meaning of your accident and what it is trying to tell you.

I would suggest that any illness can be used to turn inward and ask what the function of this is for your life. Besides car accidents, I have found that when I’ve had the flu or a head cold that kept me in bed, I would do this little exercise.
Imagine there is a beautiful ball of light three feet above your head. Breathe in this light through the top of your head. Focus its energy on your neck and spine if you’ve had an accident or are in pain there. If your chest or head is congested ( such as in a cold) focus the light there. For five minutes, just breathe a warm, golden light into your body and then bring your awareness to your heart. Breathe the light into your heart. Now, once you feel a little peace and quiet there, imagine a spiritual guide that you either see or feel the presence of. Ask the guide this question, ” what do you want me to know right now? What is the next step I need to be taking in my life? And then listen patiently for the answer. It may come immediately and it may come at a later time when you least expect it.

When you are back on the mend, you will now be more awake and pro-active. The key to no longer needing wake up calls like car accidents and illnesses is to develop a daily practice of turning within and asking this question: what is my next step? and then decide. Everything comes from your decision. It is all you need to know because it is all you can do next.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist, transitions coach, and public speaker. She works with people all over the world by phone. 310-712-2600.

professional photo of The LQ Phenomenon

For those interested in the back story of writing this book and my writing process, I have included in my blog this interview with me by FascinatingAuthors.com

Fascinating Authors
Author Profile – Toni Galardi: The LifeQuake Phenomenon

Q: Why did you decide to write this book?

A: I wrote this book because I had gone through three near fatal experiences over the course of twenty years as a result of my fear of making big changes. I had conducted workshops and public speaking appearances and had observed that there was a viable roadmap for helping others negotiate change when cycles are over before they are forced to move due to crisis. This book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon is that seven stage body, mind, and spirit roadmap.

Q: Do you have any secret writing tips you’d like to share?

A: Find the time of day when you are most creative, stick to a schedule of writing every day, and then find an excellent editor to gvie you an objective perspective once you have finshed a first draft.

Q: Tell us a quirky or funny story about you!

A: In my public speaking appearances I give as an example how far we can go to avoid change in our irrational thinking and still, destiny will find us:

I had had a car accident, rear ended from behind pulling out of South Coast Plaza. Two days later, in a rental car, the brakes gave out on the 5-405 interchange in Orange County, my car went spinning like a top across 6 lanes of traffic and came to a standstill facing traffic. Miraculously, I was not hurt and did not cause any collisions despite being in the middle of Friday night traffic facing the wrong way.

Now, you would think this would give me pause to examine what might be going on in my life. Instead, I had family coming in from out of town two days later and when we ventured out in the rental car, I put my brother in charge of driving, I planted myself in the safest place in the car, between my mother and godmother in the middle of the back seat. As we ventured up the 405 together, five miles down the road, we were hit by a drunk driver and I re-injured my neck from the whiplash in the first accident. Upon arriving home, I called a colleague of mine whom I believed was very wise and asked him what he thought was going on. His response, although meant to be funny was right on – “God is pissed off.”

The truth in this was that when we ignore the signs it is time to change, our soul does whatever it needs to in order to get our attention, including magnetizing every car on the road to your back bumper to get you moving forward!

Q: Have you ever battled writer’s block? How do you deal with it?

A: Writer’s block comes to me mostly when I’m in burnout. I took the whole month of August off from writing because I was experiencing writer’s block. By taking time to fill the well back up again, I am able to return with the muse speaking to me quite easily now.

Q: What’s your favorite quote?

A: The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones that will give him no pain or trouble. ~Henry Miller

The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions. ~Ellen Glasgow

Q: Who inspires you the most?

A: Oprah Winfrey is my greatest living hero. A black woman who came from poverty, incest, and trauma and became not just the queen of the media but a wounded healer who shows us her struggle and her human-ness and continues to work with it while still giving her life to humanitarianism.

I just finished reading a fascinating article on the debate between selfishness and altruism in evolutionary theory.http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/altruism_vs._selfishness_case_closed/

Although the research shows that the selfish individual will out perform the altruistic individual when pitted against each other, once you put them in a group of selfish people versus a group of self sacrificing individuals, the altruistic group succeeds best. Now, this may seem obvious because it requires a certain amount of self sacrifice to be a team player but if we go into this further and look at banking institutions, car manufacturers, and government, you might wonder how those who act together in a group for the good of all people ever succeed at all.

And then there are all the non-profit groups all over the world and grass root efforts like the Green Movement, The Civil Rights Movement and The Women’s Movement that changed the world. So, which quality produces evolution, being self serving or serving the whole? I think the key to being one of those ‘Darwinian survivors of the fittest’ is to have a combination of qualities that allow you to promote and protect your own interests as well as knowing when to put aside what is good for you if it means the greater good of all humans might benefit.

In many ways, this is at the heart of the health care debate. Insurance companies have had an unchecked strangle hold on the American consumer and has taken the quality of once was the greatest health care in the world right into the toilet. That we are 37th on the list of countries is a travesty. If we don’t band together and demand more accountability, we deserve what will be a devolution not an evolution in the well being of our overall health. It cannot be an accident that obesity, cancer, and addiction are at an all time high under the current system that only supports sickness ( and even that is questionable) and not wellness education. Yes, the whole system needs an overhaul, but in reconstructing it if we don’t first educate people on eating better, penalize smokers and heavy drinkers by dropping them from being insured, or institute required courses in the same way that we require young people to take to get their drivers license, all that will happen with universal health care is more sickness and corruption at the top of whose managing it.

We know that the more educated you are, the greater your advantages. If in this new system, a wellness program is not mandated, their will continue to be a rise in disease and addiction and more importantly, corporate greed will continue. A young filmmaker I know, Cameron Pazirandeh is trying to put the word out to people to gather in their local communities in a town hall fashion like the conservatives have done and demand a better system. I want to go a step further. It is not enough to have a voice for universal health care. We need to act altruistically for the education of those who are ignorant of their health habits ( or in denial) and demand that anyone who receives national health care also go through a wellness education program to qualify. And yes, you and I will pay for it just like we’ve been paying exorbitant premiums for people who trash themselves and then need extensive medical care. However, anyone with a brain can see that requiring wellness education is far less expensive than the alternative.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a life coach, columnist, and author of The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval. Her website address is http://www.LifeQuake.net

Jason came in to see me describing himself as bored with his job. His goal for our work together was to find his purpose in life without risking any financial loss. After fifteen years in middle management in a large pharmaceutical firm that provided great benefits, he had lost interest in his work. He noticed he was mostly “phoning it in” and spending a lot of time watching You tube videos.

What made Jason unique in my practice is that he chose to seek a career transition coach before creating a crisis like substance abuse or illness as a way out of his job. Although the number one fear in America is the fear of change, (not the fear of public speaking) in the current economic crisis, people are turning to addiction as a way of dealing with boredom in their lives more than ever.

President Obama was elected as the guy who was going to bring change to the world but ironically, we are terrified to make any changes that could put ourselves at risk financially. The conundrum here is that if we don’t address boredom at its root by looking at its opposite, what we are interested in, we turn to ways to artificially create excitement which eventually leads to crisis and big financial loss.

Two different clients I have been working with are having affairs on their spouses. One is a male and upper class financially and the other is a female, and middle class and yet both will not leave their spouses whom they do not love any longer because they don’t want to lose 50% of their assets in a down economy. Now, of course eventually their spouses will find out and they stand to lose it anyway. If you were to look back at your life, way before you had a major crisis hit, how many times did it start with boredom?

There is much talk in the addiction field about gateway drugs – marijuana, alcohol, even cigarettes are now being seen as a gateway drug to deeper addictions. What if we looked at boredom as a gateway emotion? On the emotional tone scale it is often placed right in the middle with ecstasy at the top of the scale and despair at the bottom. If we begin to address our boredom head on and by the way, I am not talking about chronic boredom. Boredom as a transition emotion to change is boredom with a capital B. It has a definite onset where there once was enthusiasm. If you don’t resist this acute form of boredom and instead approach it directly with curiosity, it will move up the emotional tone scale. The key is to notice the opposite state – where is interest or passion showing up? Jot down all the times you feel an emotion that is higher than boredom and then look at your list.

Do any of these things constitute a possible hobby or avocation like charity work? For example, did you notice you were not bored when you were giving back to others or when you made your own little home movies and put them on You tube? Hobbies and and charity work can go from being an avocation to a vocation while you are still keeping your day job. Allow boredom to be the gift that shows you a cycle is coming to a close and you can now prepare for a change before it reaches sudden catastrophic levels. Your body will thank you for it, believe me!

Dr. Toni Galardi is a psychotherapist, career transition coach, and the author of her new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive ( not just survive) in Times of Personal and Economic Upheaval.

A few days ago I decided to start shopping for a new car. I have always loved BMWs but haven’t owned one for a very long time. You could say that my spiritual initiation was reflected outwardly by the first car accident I was ever in.

My “beemer” getting hit from behind was the beginning of more than a collapse of my car. It signified the collapse of a life that although highly materially successful, had become spiritually bankrupt. Now, it’s not like I was an arms dealer or something. I had a very successful private practice as a psychotherapist in Lake Forest, California. I was married, owned a beautiful home, etc but I knew this life I was leading was not working anymore.

 After walking away from all of it, I came to Los Angeles and spent the next two years trying to launch a career as a media psychologist with a talk show I had produced. The night before I was to bring my demo to a producer,I was given a dream. In the dream I was told that this was not the time for me to be in television. I was told there was a book I was to write and publish that would come first. What they didn’t tell me was that it would take twenty years and I would go through a journey that was meant to strip me of my false ego. When I had this dream I was at the end of my property settlement and I knew I still was not ready to go back to being a therapist so I took a job in a friend’s chiropractic office as a receptionist ( I give great phone) and a job as a restaurant hostess in Malibu.  My friends thought I had gone mad but it taught me something important about the uselessness of defining yourself by what you do.  

This memory came back to me when I started car shopping this week and met a very unusual BMW salesman. My first take on this guy with an Italian accent, hair longer than mine, in an Armani suit was “faux.”  This was furthered by his attitude. His opening line to me with an imperious, flat affect was ” Am I ready to buy a car or have I just started looking?” I was dressed in old yoga sweats at the time so we both were judging a book by its cover (or sartorial taste as it were). I told him my price range, at which point we went over to the used BMW lot and looked at 2008’s.

As we drove, I asked him, ‘ Are you happy selling cars because you don’t seem to be?” At which point he began to share with me his fantastic story. He left behind his very lucrative practice as a cosmetic/reconstructive surgeon with a teaching fellowship in plastic surgery in Rome so he could be here with his long lost 13 year old son. He explained how in Italy, the family comes first before the career. He had never sold cars before but it was the only thing he could do here and make good money because the licensing laws here would require him to repeat a three year medical residency .

I contemplated this after I left.  What American cosmetic surgeon would give up his practice to go to Italy and sell cars to be near his child? We have an addiction to work here and the identity it gives us.  We spend so much time working in America ( more than any other country) that we think the work is us. My time spent as a receptionist and restaurant hostess taught me so much about how I wanted to define myself.

 My biggest struggle in marketing myself now really comes from this. I have been a psychotherapist, a columnist, a public speaker, a futurist, a college instructor, and recently an author, and yet who I really am is not described by any of those labels. If you ever want to get back to your real essence, take a sabbatical from your career and go on an amazing journey.  And for those who have lost their jobs or their businesses in the last year, you can, if you allow yourself, use this time to discover who you really are so that when you put the cloak of your career on again, you will know who lives and breathes underneath it. Use this career transition so that it never smothers your life force through too much attention to career and not enough for your “famiglia” again. Heh, if a physician could give up his profession to become a BMW salesman, anything is possible.  

Dr. Toni Galardi’s new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon showcases many New Thought leaders who left behind successful careers and risked following their vocation of destiny.  Here is a link to an article worth reading.   http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_opinion/363915.html

I have resisted blogging about Michael Jackson. Not because I didn’t have my own opinions about what really killed him but it seems so opportunistic to weigh in when so much has already been said. I questioned rather my take was an offering or not and then I realized how much he represents an archetype in the American psyche that I think is hurting us all, actually. 

I don’t know the real details of his childhood but I surmise that there was  trauma that left him never able to really grow up. Whatever he did or didn’t do to the various children who stayed with him, I honestly think he really saw himself as their peer. Making the transition into adulthood usually comes in one’s thirties. It is reported that the cosmetic surgeries began in the late 80’s which is when he was entering his thirties. This is when he started to really get crazy. The reports are that there were 10 surgeries by 1990.  It is also reported that he suffered from body dysmorphia – distorted negative perception of one’s body.

Like people who suffer from anorexia, there is an arrest in development in childhood where the individual never sees themselves as an adult. Like the J.M. Barry story of Peter Pan, Michael never grew up. Dr. Judith Rich addresses this archetype we Jungians call Puer Aeternus – the eternal adolescent in her blog. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-judith-rich/it-hurts-to-be-me-confess_b_222381.html

What I haven’t seen written about is who is this eternal adolescent that imprisoned Michael that also lives inside of many of us?  In western society, we have become hell bent on staying youthful in appearance and attitude. Anti Aging medicine and the practices of cosmetic surgeons are booming. We loathe wrinkles and now both middle aged men and women are seeking sexual partners twenty years younger for the “youthenizing” effects it has on one’s sense of self. How anyone deludes themselves into thinking they are younger because they are peering into the face of a younger partner says so much about our society’s addiction to perfection. 

And so we come to the subject of addiction. Michael was quoted as saying on a number of occasions how lonely he felt in life, how painful it was to be him. And so, he found a way to numb  that pain with medication.  The lives of great artists who followed a similar path are numerous but I think it bears a moment of contemplation to look at one’s own self rejection if you are aging. What distractions/addictions are you using to avoid confronting the decay of your body?  There is nothing wrong with adopting a healthy lifestyle to be the healthiest middle to older age person you can be. However, how much time do you spend on your inner life?  Meditation, daily contemplation, connection to the soul all lead to wisdom through the enhancement of one’s intuition. Part of accepting aging is accepting the end of cycles. We have had this massive cultural belief  that our economic life, our relationships, and yes, our bodies should  forever be in harvest.  That there should be no winter, no honoring of death that brings new life if you allow it.  And maybe that’s the core of it. We fear death so we fear change. Embracing the aging process is a celebration of the elder archetype. It does mean examining what is at the heart of what we most fear about looking older: not being loved anymore…

So here’s this week’s tip: Take a few minutes in solitude. Look at where you fear or judge looking older.  Where do you hold that fear in your body? Breathe into that fear until a feeling of surrender and peace replaces it. This peace is the beginning of real self love: as you are and as you will become as you face the inevitable year by year…

Dr. Toni Galardi is  the author of The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive ( not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval.