1) Don’t stop exercising just because you’re depressed that you lost your job or work is down.  If you are getting bored with doing the same old routine, try something new. If you’ve been running on the treadmill or at the park, try including yoga twice a week. Not only does it reduce stress but it will in time make your body much more flexible. A flexible body leads to a more flexible mind. A flexible, calm mind is less reactive to your partner, not to mention more attractive than a couch potato body.

2) Reduce your caffeine and sugar intake in a time of stress.  Increase your magnesium intake. Most people living in western civilization are magnesium deficient. It is a critical mineral for our bones for sure, but our nervous system needs it to thrive as well. My colleague, Dr. Hyla Cass, has a wonderful brain formula that I would recommend to people who are in a LifeQuake –CassMD.com.  There are many nutritional supplements that can nourish your adrenals and nervous system so that you are able to adapt more easily to a time of transition. A calm nervous system can minimize the crisis response to this upheaval. You will find yourself less argumentative with your partner if your body is balanced even if the outside looks like total chaos.

3) Meditation or guided visualization can be extremely beneficial to moving through a LifeQuake. This allows you to awaken to the new level of your evolution without tremendous resistance to letting go of the old life.

4) Examine your beliefs about receiving help from your partner. You can’t ask for support, be it financial, emotional, or physical if you aren’t first comfortable with receiving it.

5) Explain to your partner that you need to change the definition and expectations of your relationship. You may need more alone time. If you ask for it, you don’t have to get it by picking a fight and alienating your spouse.

6) When we are in transition, we often feel a loss of identity and self worth.  Find new ways to feel valuable besides your career such as being a more supportive partner. If you have more time now, write little notes to your significant other letting them know how appreciative you are for your relationship and their love for you. Do things for your partner that you didn’t have time to do when you working at a higher capacity.

7) Get out and donate your time to a charity. Giving back to others transforms you from one who is going through a change to one who is a change agent for the world. This level of generosity attracts opportunity to you and moves you into discovering your vocation of destiny. When we are passionate about our work, we are passionate in our relationships. Yes, altruism can be sexy!

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist, in practice in Santa Monica, Ca. She can be reached for consultation at 310-712-2600. Her new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist who has just published a book called The LifeQuake Phenomeonon. The thrust of her work is to assist people in releasing old beliefs that keep them from living a life that is authentic and joyful.
For more information: go to her website, www. LifeQuake.net or call
310-712-2600 for personal consultation.

Factually, spring is here. Traditionally, it represents the season of change. Unfortunately, this year our country appears to be in frozen emotional paralysis—people aren’t spending money, changing careers, or leaving dead relationships. This month’s column is dedicated to moving out of a winter mentality and the stasis it imposes. Look at it as my version of the stimulus package, one guaranteed to thaw the endless chill, while arousing those emotions in us all that both affirm and support life.

Dear Dr. Toni:
My husband of sixteen years and I have been sleeping in separate bedrooms for about a year. I had an affair two years ago for eight months and it made me realize that I no longer love my husband. I went back to him because we have a fourteen – year old daughter who really loves her father. We went to counseling and it was no use. I am just not in love with my husband anymore. I was planning to tell my daughter but as the economy has worsened, we just can’t afford to get divorced. What should I do—wait three years until we are out of this slump and my daughter graduates?
Georgia in Sedona

Dear Georgia:
First, let me just say that you are not alone in this dilemma. Many people are choosing to stay together for economic reasons right now. You don’t indicate in your letter how your daughter feels about you and her father sleeping in separate bedrooms. Has this been discussed? More importantly, what is the emotional climate in the house? Are you two conducting a cold war or living as amiable roommates? Have you discussed possible alternatives with each other? If you are absolutely certain that you cannot afford to provide two households for yourselves and your child, then I would suggest having a family meeting in which you openly discuss restructuring your marriage and your family.

Be honest with your daughter about the fact that although you are still a family, you and your husband are no longer functioning as husband and wife. Although this may seem obvious, giving her an opportunity to talk about her feelings about the arrangement is a gesture of respect for her as well as role modeling honest communication.

Dear Dr. Toni:
I know that food, drugs, and alcohol are the usual things people can become addicted to but is it possible to be addicted to YouTube? I am bored with my job. It no longer challenges me. I get all my work done, so it doesn’t interfere with my competence or performance and my boss doesn’t care as long as I get the work done. Do I need to be concerned?
Tube Boob

Dear Reader:
The fact that you are asking the question tells me you know something is up here. Addiction has nothing to do with how much we consume or what we consume. The issue is what are you using your addiction to avoid? Arguably, there is some real feeling you are unable to confront. Try this: Go cold turkey. No YouTube for three days. Notice what feelings come up. Write about these feelings in a journal. What are you afraid of that you are not facing? I am not suggesting you leave your job. Just give yourself a chance to address these newly discovered feelings with no judgment about that they mean. To counteract the boredom you described, now take some time to notice what in the course of your day interests you. Jot that down, too. Do this exercise for three days. Is there a connection between the things you do find interesting? They could be a clue to your vocation of destiny. For further information on preparing for change, you might find some useful tools in my blog: LifeQuake.wordpress.com, dated Mar 9-13. I dedicated five articles to this subject. When addictive habits show up at a time when you should be making changes, often the central belief is that change translates as loss; that you will lose your security if you make a change.

However, all addictions, even Internet ones, can be clues to what you are to do next with your career. Perhaps you should be involved in video or film production, for example. Many people who were corporate executives found their calling as recovery counselors after they went into treatment. All addiction has within it the power to create great transformation if we use it as a sign to get treatment and un-thaw the feelings it has numbed out. Embracing our fears both personally and globally will take us out of winter and bring on an “evolutionary spring”.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist, public speaker, and the author of her new book: The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval. The LifeQuake Phenomenon can be purchased through her website www.LifeQuake.net or the online bookstores. For those seeking private consultation, she can be reached at 310.712.2600. To submit questions for Ask the LifeQuake™ Doctor, contact Dr. Toni Galardi through DrToni@LifeQuake.net (no period after the Dr).

In September, as I was finishing the final edits on my book, the newspaper headline read,  “Wall Street Quakes!” and I thought, oh, it has begun. For some people, the stock market crashing meant the end of their life savings, for some, the end of a dream to retire, and for others it meant a crossroads.

A LifeQuake is not a mere crisis but an awakening to a new level of consciousness that can come from a crisis.
So for some, who use this crisis to learn how to adapt to change on the spin of a dime, the stock market going up and down can be a lot like our emotions over the course of the day. Do you react to every event that you didn’t expect from fear or do you respond with the attitude that somewhere in this upheaval there is good? If we declare that no matter what happens, we are always winning, it doesn’t matter how the outer events unfold, you will experience your life as a winner. On the other hand, if your happiness is dependent on the DOW instead of the other Dow spelled “ Tao” that teaches us all that peace and security is always available, then your life and your inner state will always be like its own personal stock market: a rollercoaster.

Further, you will get trapped in seeing Wall Street as your Holy Grail instead of discovering the purpose of all this chaos – to know you are safe and secure no matter how life shows up and that love is all that really matters.  As someone who has lost everything a couple times over, I can tell you from personal experience that this economic crisis can take us from loss to liberation.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of her new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How To Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval. To order her new book or read her blog, go to www.LifeQuake.net.

So here is what I came up with along with some suggestions for deciding when it is time to put the fino on the vino.  Women who are mothers today represent the largest educated population of women in history. Since the 60’s, we have been given a choice about when and if we even want to have children. Most women have a career and some kind of life after leaving their parents home now for at least a few years. They know what freedom over their lives and bodies are, even if they have a job. In today’s world, when you have children you are signing up to be a chauffeur, a tutor, a teacher ‘s aid in the classroom, a school volunteer, and be responsible for your child’s play dates and social activities.

When I was a child, we lived around the corner from the school so my mother didn’t drive us to school.  I never asked my parents to do my homework with me, and all activities I was involved with usually involved a school bus or was in our neighborhood. My mother did not organize my social life. I had a social life if I could get a ride.  It is a tough job being a stay at home mom. The demands of raising children today are huge but what makes it more difficult than balancing career and home can be found in one word: identity. You lose your sense of self when you don’t have an identity outside of motherhood.  We are after all animals, mammals, but none – the – less, animals. We need reinforcement. When you perform well at work, you either get acknowledgment, a promotion, a raise, or all of the above.  When you’re a stay at home mom, you’re lucky if you get an occasional acknowledgement from your kids.

So how do you know when your “mommy medicine” is a problem?

1) For the most part, quantity is not the main issue. Dependence is. If you have three glasses of wine over the course of a long Sunday family dinner like they do in Italy, it may be fine if your state of mind is celebratory. If you have three glasses of wine every night before and at dinner, you might want to ask yourself,  “are you tired of being the one who makes dinner every night and/ or has to listen to everyone’s complaints about their day?”

2) Do you really, really look forward to that glass of wine at night and if you had to go without it for a week, would it bring up some intense emotions?

3)  Is your wine drinking at night, the only time through the course of the day, that you feel happy?

4) Are you using it to numb out other yearnings, like to go back to school or go back into the workplace?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, perhaps it is time to include more time for yourself to contemplate what gives your life meaning outside of being a mom and what brings you joy. On my website, under the media page at the very bottom is an exercise I did for You Tube called “Connecting the Dots” that can help you discover what gives you energy and passion and perhaps even can lead to finding your other life purpose.

If your alcohol consumption is getting out of hand, perhaps it is time to consult a therapist or attend an AA meeting.  People are out there to help.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of her new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval.  On her website www.LifeQuake.net, she outlines on the “seven stages” page how addiction can be part of the awakening process of a LifeQuake.

Anyway, he contacted me again today inviting me to be a part of the Galardi Family where 30 people all named Galardi were listed. At first, I almost didn’t accept.  Although I do business under the name Galardi, my legal last name is Gagliardi but people don’t know how to pronounce it correctly in this country (phonetically it is pronounced Gaul-yar-dee).  When  I started doing media appearances twenty years ago I shortened the name so it wouldn’t be pronounced Gag -liardi.

But in looking at all these pictures of people with my current last name, it made me think about how the word family is changing. Now with Facebook, we really are connecting with each other all over the world every day and the idea of a global family is no longer just an ideal concept. We are meant to transform our definition of family as we make this global leap in evolution.  The evolutionary biologists tell us that we are all connected to ancestors in South Africa. So I decided that whether my name is Galardi or Gagliardi, I am connected to these people in Torino. The irony is that my grandmother’s second husband John Sorgini was from Torino.  Although we were not blood related, he was the only paternal grandfather I ever knew. Six degrees of separation…

Dr Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist and Change Expert.  Her new book The LifeQuake Phenomenon is available through her website www.LifeQuake.net or the online bookstores.  To contact Dr. Galardi for a consult, call 310-712-2600.

For the past three years I have either been working on writing, editing, or marketing my book and have not been entertaining. Given how much time I spend at my computer, I began having regrets this morning that I had planned a luncheon at my house for four friends… on a work day.  As I was rushing around cleaning, I kept muttering to myself I must be crazy to have taken this on in the midst of several deadlines I had for articles. I continued this inner dialogue walking to and from the market until I got in my kitchen and started chopping the tomatoes, pressing the garlic, and boiling the water for the pasta. Suddenly I became a different person, a familiar person, but one I hadn’t met for a while – I call her my “Italian mama” sub-personality.  I was in heaven.  As I played Romanza on my Ipod, I began to feel ecstatic.

My girlfriends arrived. I got up and down a million times to serve them and could not have been happier as we broke in my new Crate and Barrel dining room table. As I was finally sitting and enjoying the meal with them, I had the thought that cooking for others is really therapeutic for me. I had been feeling burned out by functioning so much in the intellectual realm and was out of balance. In spite of the  fact that it added a lot of work to my day, I was so much more joyful at 3:00 when they left.  As someone who believes in what I call “divine coincidences”, I thought it was an interesting omen that as we were finishing, a hummingbird came to the window. In Indian Medicine, the hummingbird brings the medicine of joy. How fitting…

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

There is a feeling in the country of anxiety and emotional paralysis. Everyone is waiting for the next guy to stimulate the economy. Now, I’m not saying go out and spend money you don’t have to get the economy going. What I am saying is that if you feel frozen to take any action in your life, change from within. Go even deeper into non-doing.  Spend 15 minutes a day in quiet. As you inhale, bring the oxygen all the way down into your gut.  As you focus on your breath, put your hand over your heart and imagine your hand is a wand of light that is radiating all the fear you are feeling, transforming it into peace. Now, go to the top of your head with your awareness and set an intention for your crown to open and receive light from the universe – the sun, the air, all of nature, etc. Believe it or not, you can be inside your office or home and still have access to this source. Once you feel calm, ask the question, what is one thing I can do today that I don’t normally do that will support my life?

The temptation when we feel paralyzed is to self soothe through food, sex, alcohol, surfing the net for hours, etc. While in stage two, so much amazing healing work can be done if we allow ourselves to turn within for comfort; simply by partnering universal consciousness with our own breath and heart. Tomorrow I will give you some techniques for remembering your dreams and using the dream recall to prepare for change.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice in Santa Monica, Ca and is the author of the newly published book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to thrive (not just survive)in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval.

In this blog the focus is on something Americans have an almost phobic fear of -death.  At one time, the three things one never spoke about in public conversation were sex, death, and money. Well, now that you see on day time tv what was only possible in soft porn films, sex is most definitely out in the open. One never discussed salaries in polite conversation and now people talk blatantly about what they lost in their stock portfolio as if they are talking about yesterday’s news.  And yet, confronting death is something people do only when forced to through a diagnosis or tragic loss.  There is death inside of natural life cycles that we also resist.

In the Native American tradition there is a saying “It’s a good day to die.” It was used when a warrior went forth into battle with dignity and acceptance of his fate but I use it as an opening to emotional release work with my clients when the battle we are confronting is the negative ego that is resisting change. Ask yourself the question, “ What beliefs am I holding onto that need to die?”  What needs to be released from my life that no longer supports my growth?  For example, perhaps it’s the way you’ve made your living or if you’re an entrepreneur, the marketing techniques you have used in the past for your product. If you lost your job or sales are down for your company, it may be time to let an old method go. Companies are famous for continuing to put out a product using a tried and true marketing strategy only to find it isn’t reflecting the needs of the consumer. Think General Motors, for example.

Anyway, the next task in preparing for change is to look into your life at what is defunctional – obsolete – and get rid of it. Spring is coming.  Is the soil in your garden made up of elements that can produce an abundant crop or do you need to get out there and weed out the beliefs that are suppressing your fertile soul?  If we make every day “ a good day to die” we can surrender to change and produce a new world where everyone has clean water and goes to sleep with a full stomach. It is possible…

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

Step 2 involves observation. Observe everything you experience in your life all day long in terms of the emotions they trigger. The first stage that begins the onset of a LifeQuake (the chaos that comes with your soul awakening to its next level of evolution) is boredom. When a cycle of our lives is closing and we cannot grow any longer in the form that it is in (ie. relationship, career, health habits, etc.), the first symptom that shows up is boredom. On the emotional tone scale, ecstasy is at the top, despair is at the bottom, and boredom is in the middle.  Boredom is considered a transition emotion. If you begin to assess what you are bored with as well as what interests you now, (instead of trying to artificially stimulate excitement through sex, drugs or alcohol for example), there are clues to your next destiny.

By observing where your emotions move up the emotional tone scale from boredom to let’s say, mild interest you can see what is beginning to enliven you now.  When I work with a client either by phone or in person, I always suggest doing this exercise for three weeks. Keep a tape recorder or pad of paper with you and quickly make a note of billboards you are drawn to, colors that attract you now, television programs, movies, conversations that you found particularly compelling, etc. Next to the description of what you were interested in, note the specific feeling it evoked.

After three weeks of observing what interests you in your life now, enlist the aid of a friend or coach to assess what connects the dots of your interests and write a paragraph describing a kind of vocation or lifestyle that would most enliven you now. Place it on your desk and spend five minutes a day envisioning yourself inside the life that best represents some or all of the elements most common to the theme you discovered when you connected the dots of your interests. You don’t have to know specific details such as the career that most expresses what gives your life meaning. It is enough to envision a kind of environment you want to work or live in, such as with a team of people or outdoors in nature and then allow the feeling you want to have inside that career or relationship to emerge and feel it with every fiber of your being, for five minutes.  Although it may seem far away, ‘the visionary life” cannot be had until you dare to dream it.  In the next blog, I will discuss how to acknowledge and dignify the dying of the life you are still in that is coming to an end.

Dr. Toni Galardi, better known as “The LifeQuake Doctor” is a change expert, psychotherapist, and columnist. Her new book The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive )in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval is now available through online publishers and through her website www.LifeQuake.net.