The LifeQuake Blog

Part of the process of cycles ending is that as things are deconstructing, your life may look like chaos and crisis. Whether you are married or in a relationship, this can become exponentially stressful. So what do you do to avoid your partner having a contract hit made on your life?

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

When people are diagnosed with a catastrophic illness, people rally around to support…in the acute stage. However, if that illness cannot be cured with a round of chemo and radiation it is difficult for most people to be supportive for years when the illness becomes chronic and debilitative. So how do you live with the incapacitating pain over many years when many of your friends may have disappeared?
The answer is simple, it’s the solution that is the challenge. You turn it into a LifeQuake. The difference between the chaos and stress one experiences when a crisis hits and the chaos and stress one experiences when you turn it into an awakening to a fuller potential you can be summed up in one word: context. Do you hold the experience in terms of the loss to your life as you have known it or do you choose to interpret this challenge as grace?
Here is one technique for transforming the belief that you have lost your health into taking a stand that out of this experience, you will become healthier:
Envision yourself in radiant health. What I mean by that is that you are happy and are glowing- radiating love like a person does when they are in love. Now, place your hands over your heart and imagine you are using your hands to direct love toward a pet or someone you have deep, positive feelings for. Once your hands start to get warm, direct that same intention of tenderness and unconditional love toward yourself, setting an intention that you are sending healing into your own body. After a few minutes, place your hands over your face, and keep radiating love toward your face.

Whether you have an illness or not, this technique will start to make you radiate and glow. Now go out and spread that energy through your smile to everyone you meet. This has a huge impact on the immune system, your emotions, and the well being of your fellow humans. Altruism takes many forms. When we choose to love ourselves in spite of whatever pain we are experiencing, we move the whole world forward. We assist all of humanity toward a new consciousness in which chaos and upheaval becomes the deconstruction of something that is no longer viable and the reconstruction of a new identity that is based on how much you love, not what you look like, how much money you have in the bank, or how much career clout you have.
Yes, long term illnesses can become the very thing that makes you the most powerful person imaginable.

Dr. Toni Galardi is a licensed psychotherapist, crisis coach, author of The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval and survivor of three near fatal experiences.  For personal consultation, she can be reached at 310-712-2600.

People are not sleeping well these days. My clients complain about it, my friends complain about it, and even my parents complain about it. As a former insomniac, I thought I should give some tips in today’s blog about how to resolve this important issue. Lack of sleep ages the body like no other lifestyle factor.  It lowers the immune system and interferes with the REM sleep phase which is so important to dreaming (even if you don’t remember dreaming, dreaming is essential to health). Lack of sleep is also the number one cause of auto accidents, and it retards one’s ability to adapt to daily stress.

Here are some tips that work for me:
1) Force yourself to turn off the TV and computer at least one hour before bed.
2) Go to sleep at the same time every night and wake up at relatively the same time every morning, even on weekends.
3) Listen to soothing music and read books or magazines that are not disturbing but are uplifting.
4)  Do some kind of cardio work-out at least five days a week earlier in the day.
5) Eat complex carbohydrates like rice, pasta, or potatoes at dinner. It increases serotonin, the chemical that calms the brain.
6) I have found for me, one milligram of melatonin one half hour before bed really helps. Some people find taking tryptophan, an amino acid promotes sleep naturally.
7) Scan the day you just completed. Take note of what your emotional state was at every point in the day.  Now using your awareness, scan your body from head to toe. Wherever there is pain, breathe into it until you start to feel it release a little.
8) Count your blessings instead of sheep as you drift off to dream land…

Yesterday I was contacted through Facebook by a guy from Torino, Italy who has the same last name as me. I accepted his invitation to be his friend given we have the same name. I was slightly amused by the fact that although he’s married, he listed one word under the “Your interests” category: women. But if you understand Italian culture, you don’t judge.

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.

It has been said by many that food, the right food has great healing powers. It is also said that if you want to pull out of a depression or the blues, give of yourself to others. Now I have definitely had days where I was down in the dumps and by working with a client I felt better after. Who knew that cooking could also pull you out of a low moment?

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.