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Natural Awakenings Atlanta

LifeQuakes: Awakening to Your True Purpose

Sep 30, 2020 09:30AM ● By Paul Chen
Dr. Toni Galardi describes herself as a soul purpose activator. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology, is a shamanic practitioner, a Jungian astrologer and a licensed psychotherapist. The 10th-anniversary edition of her book, The LifeQuake Miracle: Awakening to Your True Purpose in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval, was released in July. In it, Galardi presents a seven-stage roadmap with a tool box for navigating all the stages that lead to discovering one’s purpose: crisis, the “dark night of the soul,” discovery of one’s calling, how to transform that calling into a living and how to participate in positive, collective change on the planet.

I was particularly impressed with her discussion of the early stages of the process, which, if recognized and addressed, can help one avoid a lot of doubt and pain. I interviewed Dr. Galardi in August.

PC: First, tell us what the book is about.

TG: LifeQuakes are those times in your life when you have outgrown the structures — both outer and inner — of your life, and it’s time to move into a new state of consciousness. The book is about helping people dissolve their fear of change and gives tools for how to do that so they can begin to pay attention, in the first two stages of the model, to notice when the subtle beginnings of a chapter of their life is ending.

I use the body: I describe how to go into your body and go right into where you fear change — and go back to the very beginning. What was the first traumatic experience you had when change meant loss? People who fear change have had experiences where change equals loss.

If you don’t pay attention and don’t reorganize your life by stage three, the radical severance stage, then you have to go through a cataclysmic crisis. You lose a spouse, or you lose a job, or you get an illness — something happens that wakes you up.

PC: Why a 10th-anniversary edition? What prompted an update?

TG: Because I’m also an astrologer, I knew what was coming; I knew that there was a massive shift coming in 2020. I thought it was going to be another Wall Street crash that was going to be massive. But I also realized that over the course of 10 years, I had acquired a lot of understanding of the new neuroscience of mind-change mastery. HeartMath was not really in the zeitgeist yet. So, there’s a lot of new data on the neuroscience of change mastery in this book.

PC: I want to dig more deeply into the idea that you can actually notice the dark night of the soul approaching, and you don’t have to go through the intense pain of it. You can proactively deal with it. Can you give an overview of how you can avoid it if you see the signs coming?

TG: Most of the time, it has to do with your job, or it has to do with your health. A lot of people think that cancer just happens. It doesn’t just happen. Cancer typically can take about seven years before it actually manifests. It can sometimes start with trauma that’s in the etheric body that’s not been cleared. And when it stays, it can take the form of post-traumatic stress disorder and can eventually lead to maladaptive cells in the body.

PC: One sign that I found particularly interesting was that a certain type of boredom could be a sign. Could you explain that?

TG: I’m not talking about the kind of boredom that some people have where they get a new toy and then, six months later, they’re bored with it. I’m talking about an acute boredom, where what you’ve been doing was authentic to who you were, but a time comes where something shifts and changes inside of you, and you outgrow the form. Maybe you really liked doing it at one time; maybe you enjoyed the work you were doing, or you were in a good marriage. It’s when a cycle is ending.

PC: What steps can people take to overcome their fear of change?

TG: You can drop into your body, right into wherever the fear of change is, and you just breathe into it. And you keep asking the question, “How far back does this go? What is the very first time that I experienced fear around change?” Typically, something will pop through from childhood. We now see that trauma in childhood is a great predictor for the beginning of addiction in the teenage years. So, the very first thing to learn how to do is to feel the feelings that come up around change rather than self-medicating them. Be willing to sit with your fear.

PC: You write, “Learn to observe where feelings live in your body; once you have located that place, listen to their messages.” What do you mean by “listen to their messages?”

TG: I ask clients, “Where do you notice the fear of change in your body?” Then I ask them to just breathe, just keep focusing the breath right into that place and see if a memory comes up. If a memory doesn’t come up, I ask for a symbol. And so, when the symbol comes up—let’s say the symbol is a hawk—they ask the hawk, “What is your message for me?” You will almost always get some message. If you’re a visual person, you might see it written on a scroll. If you’re an auditory person, you’ll hear the message. If you’re kinesthetic, you can just feel it into your body. Like asking: “What is the hawk wanting me to know on a feeling level?”

PC: In the first edition of your book, during stage two, which you call “The Deep Freeze: The Winter of Your Discontent,” you write about the need for your body to slow down. You say, “expend as little external energy as necessary.” Why is that?

TG: One thing I talk about in the book is that stages one and two are not times to make radical changes. In stage one, I say that slowing down allows you to become a keen observer of your life. Stage two is about starting to let go, seeing what is falling away, rather. So, part of the slowing down is taking a nap in the afternoon, or, if you can’t nap, meditate. Slowing down begins to heighten your observation of what is wanting to come next. It can actually start to give you clues as to what’s dying away and what is slowly emerging.

PC: Some of your motivation for writing this book was that you went through some pretty difficult times, and you wanted to help others not suffer as you did. Can you tell us about your experiences?

TG: They happened in three different areas of my life. The first one was in my workplace. I was working on Skid Row with junkies after I finished my undergrad degree, and I had the distinct feeling that things were changing, and we needed a bodyguard. I was miserable at the job. One day, a junkie got through screening. He was high, and I tried to escort him out, but he tried to take me out of this life by choking me to death.

The second one took place in my marriage seven years later. I no longer believed in the psychodynamic Freudian theory I’d been trained in at the time, and I was miserable as a psychotherapist. I knew there was something else; there was something that could help people that was quicker. I was going on a metaphysical path, and my husband had no interest in any of it. Then I was in three car accidents over a six-day period, and I almost died in one of them.

Then, years and years later, the third experience took place in my home. I was getting a funny feeling that it was time to leave the beach [near Los Angeles], but I loved living near the ocean. I was getting sicker and sicker, and then we discovered that the walls of my home were filled with toxic mold. When the doctors did my bloodwork, they said the mold is connected to 20 different cancers. I had to walk away from everything I owned within a two-hour period of time.

PC: How did that turn into an impetus for change?

TG: When I gave my very first speaking engagement, I talked about quantum theory, chaos theory: When an organism reaches its highest level of functioning, it deconstructs into chaos so that it can reconstruct into a higher form. Because I saw what had happened in my own life, the nature of this book, my passion and mission shifted to help people prepare for and notice the early signs that it’s time to move on in your life — before you get hit over the head like I did. I was definitely one of those people who wanted safety and security and really feared change.


For more information about Dr. Galardi, visit DrToniGalardi.com. To buy The LifeQuake Miracle, visit: bit.ly/lifequakes.

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