Earthquakes And LifeQuakes:
According to a report in National Public Radio, there’s a plan afoot among evolutionary scientists to launch a big new project – to look back in time and find out how climate change over millions of years affected human evolution. http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_climate-change-may-have-driven-human-evolution_1363244
In the first three months of 2010, we’ve had earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, Japan, Indonesia, and Turkey in addition to other minor quakes in states such as Hawaii, Alaska, Oklahoma, and parts of California. The largest quake in recent months has been the 8.8 earthquake in Chile. The quake is reported to have been strong enough to move the earth off her axis.
This series of earthquakes has brought the subject of global warming and all its controversy back into the media. Much of the news about the ecology of our planet focuses on grim statistics and the crisis state we are in. Now that this is no longer a red-hot story with the focus on the tragic and tremendous suffering of those who survived, it seemed to me that now might be a good time to revisit this subject in its imminent pertinence to each of us personally.
In my new book The LifeQuake Phenomenon: How to Thrive (not just survive) in Times of Personal and Global Upheaval, I talk about how environmental crises are linked to economic contraction, the increase in immune related illnesses, and the incidence of addictions skyrocketing. When understood, they can really be seen as just symptoms of an awakening process taking place for us humans. Scientists who study evolution might concur with me that the change in our environment and its fallout on humanity may have a silver lining. For those who choose to adopt a healthy diet, work on our addictions, and be more discerning in our spending practices without fear may be the group who adapts to evolutionary mandate and survives.
I define “The LifeQuake Phenomenon” as an extraordinary, unprecedented leap in our current evolution … one that catalyzes a critical mass to learn how to adapt and thrive in the face of accelerated change. The planet itself will go on no matter what we do to it. It has survived many environmental crises throughout its history but it often brings on major climactic changes when we as a species are in need of evolving. This one controversial issue, global warming is pulling us all together no matter what our political affiliation, racial background, or even religious belief system. Through these global crises we are moving from our sectarian, tribal mentality to an identity as “planetary family”.
However, if you are anything like me, by now, you have taken on some environmentally friendly practices like recycling, using environmentally friendly light bulbs, and maybe you even have or aspire to own a hybrid car but words like green initiative, carbon footprint, and sustainability are not a part of your every day language. In fact you might even feel pretty uneducated when it comes to “green intelligence.” As someone who feels pretty moronic on the subject of living green, I have pondered what I the average person who doesn’t really like to make changes that might involve discomfort can really do to contribute in a positive way to the environmental LifeQuakes™ taking place on the planet. There are plenty of people who can give you much better guidance on how to reduce your carbon footprint. There is however a way to live more greenly if you will that has nothing to do with your outer ecological habits. Picking up trash is great but there’s a lot of trash in your own head. It’s called, your thoughts. Thought pollution probably does more damage to the planet than something as unconscious as littering the left over paper refuse from today’s lunch on the neighbor’s lawn (shudder the thought).
What might happen if you decided to start recycling your thoughts? What I mean by that is that as a thought comes up you think of a new way to use that thought. For example: You gained ten pounds last year and keep criticizing yourself because you haven’t stuck to a diet or exercised. Instead of the endless recording that goes around and around, what if you found a new way to think about that weight gain? You aren’t getting anywhere with the self judgment so what if you decided to tell your body that it was ok to have this extra weight because you actually need it right now and when you don’t need it anymore, it is just going to fall off. Yea, every time you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see, you will affirm, this weight is helping me feel more powerful and when I don’t need it to feel powerful, it is going to just come right off. And you can apply this to any unproductive habit or addiction.
If thoughts create your reality, all those negative judgments about what you should be doing in your career or any other part of your life are just contributing to pollution, too. We all want clean air but how many of us think about a clean air space in between our ears? What if all it took for us to “save our planet” was to stop seeing ourselves as being not enough? There might be so much more room in our brains for creative problem solving. If we stopped polluting ourselves with toxic thinking, maybe the collective consciousness will shift. A massive but not crisis driven, planetary LifeQuake might quite naturally shift our ecological practices so that all the information we are being bombarded with in terms of green practices could be integrated into our lives without a lot of resistance.
Yes, it’s true, I don’t know anything about carbon footprints but I do know that we can change our psychological blueprint from the one we inherited simply by paying attention to out thoughts and refining them so that pure, energy conservation replaces negative, obsessive chatter within our inner conversations. The cleaner the thoughts, the more agile the mind becomes in traveling through our neural-pathways. The more agile the mind, the less toxic and more creative we are. The more creative we are, the more likely we will come up with solutions for our world. Since this is the season of change, perhaps our pre-frontal lobe is a good place to clean house so that we can hold a consistent vision of our planetary future as one where every human being is thriving. Imagine that…
Dr. Toni Galardi is a psychotherapist, public speaker and career coach. The soft cover of her new book The LifeQuake Phenomenon™ will be released in mid April. Her website address is www.LifeQuake.net and for phone coaching, she can be reached through her office at 310-712-2600.
