Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name is Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform, it’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, and special weekly live shows—including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Valerie Gangas. Valerie Gangas is a speaker, a transformational coach, and an author who specializes in helping people gain a deeper understanding of who they are so they can genuinely thrive and unleash their magic more fully in the world. Valerie has taught TM meditation with the David Lynch Foundation, bringing the practice to the staff of Oprah Winfrey, and she speaks to large groups nationwide about meditation and the benefits of expanding consciousness. With Sounds True, Valerie is the author of a new book In Deep Shift: Riding the Waves of Change to Find Peace, Fulfillment, and Freedom.
Valerie Gangas is honest, grounded, and straightforward, while simultaneously talking about personal experiences that are very extraordinary, including her experience of a sudden dramatic spiritual awakening and then finding herself two-and-a-half years later in an advanced meditation training, in what she describes as a harrowing type of spiritual emergency. She’s real, and she’s committed to helping people not feel alone as they pass through what she describes as “experiences of deep shift.” Here’s my conversation with Valerie Gangas.
Valerie, your new book In Deep Shift begins with you sharing a bit about what’s happening in your life that leads you to, I would call it, a type of sudden awakening that you experience. So bring our listeners into your story. What was happening in your life that led you to this deep shift experience?
VG: Well, I’ve always been interested in spirituality, ever since I was nine years old. And then I went to college, I was a comparative religious studies major. I had a mother that was very deeply spiritual. She was a poet focusing on mysticism and always talking to me about the Spanish mystics and just things, magical things. So that was in my orbit. She was really my best friend and my hero, my everything. And she got diagnosed with stage four breast cancer when I was 20 and went into a trial. The trial worked, she lived for 14 years, and then in 2011 she passed away. And it was at that moment that I just broke. I think it was all the years of putting all my energy into trying to keep her alive and just stressing about her health and anticipating her death. And so, when it actually happened, my world just became dark.
I don’t know how else to explain it. It was like black on black on black. So that went on. She died January 25th, and I wasn’t getting any better as the months were going by. I was extremely depressed, extremely anxious. I became suicidal, and I just couldn’t pull myself out of it. So I kind of had a breakdown moment one day in the shower, and I just said like, someone has got to either help me live or help me die, because I have nothing left inside of me anymore. And it was only about a week later, I was out. My friend made me go out to dinner to leave the house and someone at the dinner table suggested that I learn transcendental meditation just so I could get some sleep. I also was like an insomniac. I was a disaster.
So there was a meditation center in Chicago, and I went there. I told the instructor what was going on. I said, “I’m really sick. I don’t even know anything about this. I don’t know if it’ll help me or the mechanics of it or anything.” And she said, “Don’t worry, I’m going to teach you how to meditate and let’s just see what happens.” And in one meditation, I went from suicidal to a state of ecstasy—is really the only way I can describe that, and it stuck with me. And from that day forward, my life changed. So it was sudden, all those years of studying spirituality and thinking about it didn’t have anything to do with it, because it was a totally different experience—nothing I could have ever read about or really understood until it actually happened to me. And that’s when my life went in a different direction completely.
TS: All right. Let’s put the actual breakthrough experience under a microscope, if you will. You learned to meditate this mantra-based meditation practice. What happened? What was the ecstasy? What broke open? And then, what’s really interesting to me is, how are you different when you stopped meditating? Meaning, I think a lot of people have experiences that, whether it’s during sex or perhaps on a hallucinogenic journey or something, where they have these unbelievable breakthroughs and they can describe it. But then they come back and they’re back into the life they were in before the experience, with all their pain and trouble. But it seems like you had this experience and it changed you. And that’s what I want to understand more, what the actual experience was like and how it changed you.
VG: So when you learn TM, they do a short ceremony, they call it a puja. I had, again, no idea what that was either. She started doing the puja, it involves a little bowl of fruit and flowers and some camphor, a candle, and she started doing the ceremony. And when she started the ceremony, the whole room went white. I started transcending before she gave me my mantra. So I had never had that experience before. I mean, maybe a little bit when I had zoned out at some point, but it was as though something took over, and I experienced a level of silence and depth within myself that I never knew was possible. And so, she gave me my mantra, I closed my eyes and I just kept going deeper and deeper and deeper. It was like I was breaking through layers of everything in my body. It wouldn’t stop, I just like sunk into the earth.
And that silence filled me up with everything. And so, when I opened my eyes, in the room we were on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, and she had the window cracked open and I could hear these children playing in a playground underneath—it was a condo building and I could hear Lake Michigan and I could hear the cars and everything sounded different. It was like I had never heard anything before in my life. The children playing sounded like cherubs or something. It was like holy, the experience. And I looked around the room and the colors looked different, like everything had changed in that moment, and I didn’t know what to say. I looked at her and I said, “I need to go home.” And I felt like something fundamentally had shifted inside of me, but I didn’t have the understanding or the words to explain it.
And I did say to her, “I feel like everything I thought I knew was wrong,” because I felt like a different person. So I went home and I slept for 15 straight hours. And again, I hadn’t been sleeping at all, I had to take Xanax to sleep at night, I was a disaster. And with TM, it’s a four-day training. Next day, come back in. I’m still in that same state. We do it again, we meditate. Same thing, even now it’s not changing, except I’m having spiritual experiences, and I had never had that happen to me either. I had an experience in the room that I felt like I saw my mom with Christ and I couldn’t believe it, but it seemed very clear to me, and on and on we went. And two weeks later, I was working with my TM teacher and Oprah Winfrey.
I don’t know. It just happened and it didn’t really leave me. It kind of just evened out after a while. But I’d say for two solid years, that magic was 24/7, it was while I was sleeping at night, during the day, I just felt like I really wanted to either meditate or just look at trees. I didn’t want to do any of the same things I used to do as far as parties and socializing. I wanted to be alone a lot. I didn’t feel like reading. I didn’t want any information. I had this feeling like I already knew everything—not like I could all of a sudden be a chemist, but I knew what I really needed to know. I don’t know. That was my experience.
TS: OK. Now, there’s a lot here that I want to tease out, but the first is, you say this lasted, this state of being you describe in your book as being “plugged in, in deep shift,” being plugged in for two years. What happened after two years?
VG: It was two-and-a-half years, and then I decided, “Hey, if I had that experience learning TM, why don’t I take this further and go on another a month-long course to learn a longer meditation?” So I was trained to be able to meditate three hours a day. And I was trained with the sutras, so I was saying more mantras in my head, and it’s a longer period of meditation. And on the course, I was meditating six or eight hours a day, and I exploded. I literally exploded at the end of that course. Maybe three days before the end of the course, it felt like I was having a nervous breakdown, a heart attack, and a psychotic break all at once. It was absolute spiritual emergency, and that was another major experience. But if one experience was “good,” this was not good—this was scary. I had a brother who had schizophrenia and I thought, “Oh, you now have schizophrenia,” is what happened to me. And that magic went away for a while. For years, I was just basically living in fear.
TS: Whoa. And so, let’s see, because now you’ve had a chance to reflect on these experiences. First of all, to what do you attribute the sudden awakening, if you will? Why did that happen to you? That doesn’t happen to, I don’t know what the percentage is, but 99 point whatever percent of people don’t have that kind of experience when they meditate for the first time. Why did that happen to you, do you think?
VG: I’ve thought about it deeply, because once I started working with the David Lynch Foundation and I was around tons of people learning to meditate, I realized, “Oh, they’re not having the same experience as me, because I was so innocent about it.” And what the conclusion I’ve come to is, in a way, I was already dead. I have a different view of people now who commit suicide, because I was so on the edge, and I felt like I had died before I died, really. And so, learning this meditation, I don’t know if it was the sound that resonated with me or something, but it just filled me up with light when all that was there before was darkness. And that’s the only conclusion I can come to, because it was just a very extreme situation, which—I don’t think most people are in that position learning to meditate.
TS: So you’re saying it was the depth of your despair that created this feeling of being dead before you were actually dead?
VG: Yeah.
TS: Is that what you’re saying?
VG: That’s how I felt.
TS: Right. The depth of your pain, and you said black upon black upon black, opened you or readied you in a certain way.
VG: I believe it did.
TS: Created a hunger in you. OK. Interestingly. All right. Then you said two-and-a-half years later, this experience that felt like some kind of combination of, I think you said psychosis and a heart attack, this spiritual emergency unfolded. How do you link that, if at all, to the first experience? Are these two sides of something? Or what do you see as the relationship? One, you broke into ecstasy. The other sounds like it was pretty challenging, distressing?
VG: Very distressing. I would like to add that it felt like I was on acid and being electrocuted. I thought my head was going to explode off my body from the amount of energy going through me. Thought about that too, it’s the reason I got a degree in transpersonal psychology. I wanted to understand what this was, and someone described me once in a casual conversation as spiritually sensitive. I was like, you know what? That’s what it is, I’m so spiritually sensitive. I’m very careful about things that I do around spirituality. I don’t overdo it. I’m very balanced about things, because I know from personal experience, I can go one way or the other, and I have no control over that.
I’ve always been very intuitive and sensitive, but I think introducing stuff like the city’s program—which was not appropriate for me, it was too much, it just made me explode. And any trauma I was holding in my body or feelings that I had pushed away, it all came out at once. So the only way I can wrap my mind around it is that I’m very sensitive to things that maybe other people—it doesn’t even touch them.
TS: For people who connect with this idea of being spiritually sensitive, what would you suggest as they approach meditation and spiritual practices and intensive yoga retreats? What would be your suggestions for them?
VG: Really to take it easy, don’t overdo it. When I meet people who are going on yoga retreats, they’re meditating, they’re doing reiki, they’re doing all these things. I want to say be careful, because it can really overwhelm the system. I mean, too much of a good thing is not good, there has to be balance. And for me, I guess that’s what the lesson was. I was thinking, oh well, if I had this experience with TM, why don’t I do something three times as long and it’ll be even better? It doesn’t really work that way, not for me.
TS: And I’m curious to speak right now to that person who might be listening, because there’s two different places somebody could be finding, there’s so many different places, there’s a multitude of places. But in terms of drawing out from what we’ve talked about, if somebody is in a place of real darkness and despair right now and they don’t feel plugged into a cosmic source of light, was it the prayer that you think, the prayer in the shower that opened a pathway? Or what would you suggest to someone who’s in that kind of pre-deep shift, just the need for a shift?
VG: I completely surrendered. There was nothing left. I surrendered to God. To whoever was listening, no ego, nothing, I didn’t exist. I just said, “Take me.” Either way, I have nothing left, And that I believe was the turning point. So there’s something about surrender that I think is extremely powerful. I think it comes on the heels of extreme pain. And what comes after that, I think, is the silver lining.
TS: Tell me more about surrender, because I think people hear that word and they wonder, am I surrendering partially all the way? What does it mean to surrender all the way? How do I do that?
VG: In my case, it was forced. I think I might’ve been pretty cocky, maybe had a pretty big ego, had problems in my life, but always thought, I can get through that, no problem. And not this time. For me, there was nothing left but to surrender. I’ve thought about addicts and stuff, that feeling of there’s nothing left, I have to surrender to a higher power. And then it helps them heal. It’s the same type of feeling, I think that you are destroyed and you finally go to fall to your knees.
TS: Now, I also want to talk to that person who relates to the notion of being in a spiritual emergency. They don’t really know what they’re going through, is this a spiritual emergency? So first of all, how do they know if it’s a spiritual emergency and not something else that needs to get attended to? Like an illness that needs to get addressed because they’re having these weird symptoms inside and nobody can quite tell them what’s going on, and they don’t quite know why they’re so X, Y, Z. First of all, how do you discern this is a spiritual emergency? And then, what do you do if you’re in that situation? You have some good suggestions in In Deep Shift for people who might find themselves in that place.
VG: I think if there’s a clear reason—for me, I was on a very intense meditation course. It was like I did one thing and then this happened. I knew through the insanity, well, there was a cause and effect. So I did still feel, because I grew up with someone who had schizophrenia, I thought, you’re not going to pull out of this. I did have all those thoughts. My best advice, if you do have an experience like this, is to really pump the brakes. Don’t keep throwing gas on the fire and keep doing all of these practices and going deeper and deeper into it. You’ve got to lean back. You’ve got to get some perspective, get grounded. Maybe find a psychologist that’s a transpersonal psychologist, someone that really understands the mechanics of this. Because if you just go to a regular psychiatrist and explain these experiences you’re having, there’s a very good chance they’re going to put you on medication.
And maybe you do need medication for a small amount of time. I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. But what helped me was talking to other people that really understood what had happened to me. And I had to search far and wide. I mean, I found a healer in Santa Fe. I was living in Colorado, and I just drove to see him at least six times a year, because he was helping me on an energetic level and really understood what had happened to me. So my advice is get grounded, pump the brakes, and find someone that understands it can help you.
TS: What did you find, in your own experience, helped you get grounded as a spiritually sensitive person?
VG: I had to do things like start eating meat again. That helped me. I had been a vegetarian since I was 15, and I started eating chicken and turkey. Everyone was telling me to eat beef, it’s going to ground you. I didn’t go that far, but maybe I should have. I felt like food helped me ground. I felt like meditating less helped me be more grounded, being around grounded people, managing my stress levels, really taking good care of myself and getting great rest. It was a very long process, and all of these things mattered. Getting exercise, moving your body, moving the energy out of your body—because when you have experiences like this, there’s so much energy in your body, it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt before. So it’s imperative that you move that energy. And staying away from drugs and alcohol, that doesn’t help, it also fuels the fire in my experience.
TS: OK. One more thread to pick up before we move on. You mentioned something magical happened with Oprah soon after you learned how to meditate, what happened?
VG: So after I had that experience where everything cracked open, there was a ton of synchronicity. It wouldn’t stop, it was all day. And I was feeling better, so I started living my life and going out. My brother’s friend was in town, he randomly asked me to go to a Foo Fighter’s concert in Chicago. And I was like, “Sure, why not?” He somehow knew the band or something, and so we were going to go backstage. And it was like 2:00 in the morning, we were waiting to go back with the band, and Wynonna Judd showed up at this very small venue that normally a band of that size wouldn’t be playing there, but she showed up. It turns out she had the same agent as them, and also it turned out that my brother’s friend also knew her. So next thing I know, I’m sitting with Wynonna Judd, my brother’s friend, and I’m staring at her because my mom was completely obsessed with a performance that she did on Oprah Winfrey’s show.
She’s sang, “I Want To Know What Love Is,” an old Foreigner song. And it was an ongoing joke in our family, we would tease my mom, “Why are you obsessed with Wynonna Judd and this song?” And I don’t know, we just would tease her, and I couldn’t believe that she was standing in front of me. I told her about my mom, I said, “I can’t believe you’re here right now and that I’m talking to you.” And I said, “I got offered a job to work with Oprah Winfrey, and I turned it down, but now I’m staring at you and I’m wondering what’s going on?” And I explained it to her and she said, “You have to take that job. This is a sign. There’s a sign from your mom.” And a week later, I started working with Oprah because I did, I took it as a real sign directly from my mom. I mean, I’m like, “What are the chances?”
TS: And what was the context in which you were offered a job to work with Oprah in the first place?
VG: Because I had this really great experience learning to meditate, I also wasn’t working, because I was not functioning. So my TM teacher was about to start working at her studio. Oprah had brought in the David Lynch Foundation for her studio and offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. She had learned TM, she really liked it, and she wanted to offer it to all of her employees. Chicago was the main office, so she had a lot of employees there. So there were six TM teachers, and they brought me in, basically, to speak to people before they learned to meditate and after they learned to meditate, and also to help coordinate the teachers too. So I don’t know why they offered me the job, but they did. And then I stayed there for two years. So I think they thought that I would be a nice balance to the team. And because I had a wonderful experience, they thought I could be helpful.
TS: For people who know just a little about TM meditation, “Oh, that’s where you get a mantra and you meditate using your mantra.” Can you shed a little bit more light on what happens in a TM meditation session—what you’re doing, what it’s like?
VG: Sure. It really is pretty simple. Like I said before, it’s a tiny ceremony, I think it lasts for less than five minutes. They give you a mantra and they teach you how to use it. For me, they gave me the mantra, and all of a sudden I could meditate. And I’ve witnessed that now and most people they’ll say to me, “I can’t meditate. I can’t sit still.” And I just laugh. I’m like, “You will be able to sit still and you will be able to meditate.” It’s the sound that completely relaxes you, and it’s almost as though you can follow the sound down into yourself and quiet the mind. And it’s as simple as that. I mean, I’ve meditated in the back of cabs in Manhattan. There’s nowhere where I can’t meditate. You have to sit in a certain position or do certain things. It’s just close your eyes and quietly think the mantra. I mean, that’s pretty much it.
TS: Now, in In Deep Shift, you write about how, after you learned to meditate, you felt like you were living in what you call “opposite land.” Why did you call waking life, and maybe waking life and sleeping life, opposite land?
VG: It goes back to that first thing that I said to my TM teacher. I said, “Everything I thought I knew was wrong.” So I thought things were a certain way, but then I had a totally different perspective, I was seeing things differently. Every situation, I started having the feeling like nothing is what it seems. I could see deeper into experiences and people like, let’s say, I don’t know, you had an argument with someone or something was upsetting. It’s like I could see, it’s not about the argument or what’s actually happening here. That person maybe is in pain or there’s something deeper going on inside of them, so it really has nothing to do with what you think it is. Or the idea of like you graduate high school, you go to college, maybe you get married, live in the suburbs—none of that was real to me anymore nor was describing yourself as like, oh, I’m an attorney. I mean, it didn’t make sense to me. It was like none of that was real anymore to me, there was something much deeper going on.
TS: You also write about how you discovered that you had the ability to communicate with people who had died. Tell me more about that, and what was the first time you were like, oh my God, I’m talking to someone who is it deceased human? So I don’t know what we want to call them—an entity in a non-physical form?
VG: It would happen to me when I was asleep, but I wasn’t really asleep, because I was actually watching myself sleep and interacting with people that had passed away, mainly family members. Sometimes I was able to see people in, let’s say, my condo at night and was able to communicate with them and help them. That went on again—
TS: Help them how? Help them how?
VG: Well, for instance, I think part of the reason I didn’t sleep for a really long time in this condo that I was living in is because there was this man who would watch me sleep at night, but then all of a sudden I could see him. I didn’t feel shaken by it, I wasn’t confused. I just said, “You don’t belong here, you really have to go.” And with that, I watched him just walk away from me and walk through my bathroom door, and I felt peace about it. I was communicating with him, and I felt like I understood him there. He was confused or something. I don’t know. But the best part about it was that I was able to connect with family members that had passed away, and they gave me advice and were explaining things to me about all sorts of things—maybe something happening in my life, what they were doing after they had passed away, what that was like. That really helped me. So it was like people showed up to help me grow, and it usually happened when I was sleeping.
TS: Now, Valerie, I think sometimes when people hear a story like that, what comes up for them is they are very eager to talk to someone they love who has passed. Do you have any suggestions, some way that somebody might be able to open that channel?
VG: I was very eager to talk to my mom after she died, and I didn’t have that ability. So personally, I went to a medium. She was really good and it really, really helped me. So I don’t know how I could teach someone to do it themselves, but I always tell people now who I love, who have had someone pass away and they’re in a lot of pain—and it’s usually, they’re also very confused about where their loved one is. I always suggest they talk to a good medium because it brings you some peace and helps you deal with that unknown.
TS: How would you say your own relationship to death and dying has changed through your TM meditation experiences?
VG: I always say now that when I die, it’s going to be the greatest adventure I’ve ever had. I feel like when I meditate—they’re almost like near-death experiences in a way—I feel like I’m tapping into that. I’m also very interested in the subject because it helped me a lot, because I was confused where my mom was. So hearing other people’s near-death experiences, I don’t know if it influenced me, but it definitely made me feel better about dying. I kind of feel like I know where I’m going, not 100 percent, but I have a good idea about it or a feeling about it.
TS: Yeah. Tell me what you know, tell me what you feel, tell me what you sense.
VG: I feel like I’ve had experiences that I’ve actually left my body and it’s calm, it’s beautiful, I’m loved. There’s everything but nothing there, it’s like filled with everything that you could want, but it’s not material goods. It’s just like the energy of all things around you, and it feels safe and holy. I mean, really unexplainable, but I’m doing the best I can. It feels like just love. And that has made me not fear death as much. I mean, I don’t want to be sick, but I feel like I know where I’m going in a way, so it’s not as unknown.
TS: Now, it’s interesting, in In Deep Shift, you write about this ability to be, if you will, outside of your body and to have the kinds of experiences you are just describing, this type of utter love and peace. But you also write about how life is not an out-of-body experience, and that it’s so important that we know how we’re being guided by bodily cues. And I wonder if you can talk some about that paradox and how you’ve come to understand both being embodied and knowing these out-of-body realities as well.
VG: I think those our-of-body experiences can be very intoxicating, and I think you can feel very drawn to them in living in that state. But at least for me, eventually that didn’t work anymore because I realized like, wait a second, I’m on this Earth. I have a body. I’m having this experience. Yes, those flashy experiences are incredible, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. They change you, but it can be a bit much after a while, and it can make you, at least in my case, isolate yourself more. You feel a little bit more disconnected from other people and other things. You become maybe a little too interested in your own experience. And after a while, I needed balance. I didn’t want that, I didn’t want to only be leaning that way. I wanted to be in my body, be present with people, really experience my life, not always be on some other planet.
TS: And when it comes to this notion of bodily cues and how you pay attention to your body, to use my language, as a type of compass or something, as a type of source of guidance, tell me how that works for you.
VG: I feel extremely sensitive to my body. I trust my intuition completely, there’s little to no doubt. Now I get signals. It’s taken me a lifetime to get here. But this compass that I have inside of me, that we all have inside of us, it’s a gift. And you have to cultivate that and listen to yourself. And I always say, if you think something and you’re unsure, write it down. Write down what you think is really going on or what you think you should really do, and maybe do the opposite and see what happens. Or just if you have to prove it to yourself, I always say write it down, because eventually you’re going to get to the point where you know, you just know.
And life becomes a lot easier when you hit that point, because there’s not as much thinking, it’s more you’re getting the information and you act on it. So I remember figuring that out after a while like, have I even been thinking for a year? It kind of felt like I just kept walking into my destiny with less effort and less thought and more intuition and acting on that intuition.
TS: How do you know your intuition at a bodily level? If you’re not thinking through things, how are you being guided?
VG: It’s a really strong feeling inside, and there must be a signal to my brain too, but I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s more like a knowing like turn right, turn left. Don’t be involved with that person. Or yes, go to that party or whatever it is, it’s like it’s constant. I guess I don’t pay attention to it as much anymore, but it’s almost like this thing inside of me is actually running the show, and I listen to it. I don’t let my mind override it.
TS: I’m curious, that person who hears a title In Deep Shift, in their experiences, if you will bear with me here, they’re kind of halfway through the birth canal. Some part of them has entered this new glorious world where they feel so connected with all of life and they’re a new being, they’re sensing how plugged in they are, but some part of them is still kind of stuck. Maybe stuck in old relationships or old patterns or old habits or old fears. And they’re like, “Gosh, I’m in deep shift. I’m in between. I’m not in this new world, but I’m not in my old world either. I’m so uncomfortable in between. Valerie, help me get all the way out and born afresh.”
VG: It’s a lot of work. I mean, I went to therapy, even though I didn’t feel like I needed it. Somewhere inside of me, I thought, you’re not done yet. This isn’t it. There’s more. So I kept going. I worked with teachers that I felt that could help me. Therapy, I just kept leaning into this thing that was a new beginning for me, and I learned things, I had experience, and ultimately it took time. It just took time because it is very confusing, like all of a sudden, you’re a different person. How do you explain that to people who have no understanding of what has happened to you, and family, friends?
I left Chicago and I moved to a town in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. People thought I was insane, but I had to do what I had to do for myself. But I did get support and met other people who understood me. It made me feel less alone. Eventually I started reading great books and just, I don’t know, it just works out after a while. But you’ve got to lean into that part, you’ve got to keep fighting for yourself, for your true self, and learn to deal with everything that’s going to show up in your life.
TS: You write about manifesting and through this new way of being, not as someone who’s like, “I want to get this,” but instead listening for what wants to be created through you. Tell people more about how you feel that works, kind of the art of manifestation with Valerie Gangas.
VG: I think when you start having experiences like this, you become much better at manifesting, because I think you’re more aligned with who you really are. So that’s step one. It’s kind of like, it just happens. In my experience, I wasn’t as interested in materialistic stuff, so I sold everything I had, I didn’t feel connected to that anymore. So the things that I wanted to manifest were on a larger scale. I was thinking more like, “How can I help the world? Where is my place in this world? What am I supposed to be doing? What is my job? How can I manifest that?” So I think your interests change. And it’s not like, I’m going to manifest a new Mercedes. I mean, you might want that, I don’t know. It’s bigger-picture things. And I think you get signs in your life and you follow those signs and it just takes you on this ride. And you end up doing very different things than maybe you first thought you would be doing.
TS: So there’s someone listening who’s saying, “Where’s my work in the world? Where’s my higher purpose? I want to contribute more.” How would you suggest, from your own experience, if someone is asking a question like that, they work with the universe for the answer to be revealed?
VG: Number one, I think you’ve got to remove a lot of the distractions in your life. Spend more time alone, spend more time in silence, say “no” to having different events all the time. Remove people in your life who are not healthy for you. You’ve got to clean your house and then you’ll have more clarity, because those things aren’t working for you anyway anymore. So I think bringing in the silence, getting rid of the distractions, you’re going to start to just know things on your own. You don’t have to push it, they’ll just show up. But if there’s too much noise, then you can’t hear anything. So maybe I took it to an extreme, moving out to a farm, because I wanted the silence. But at the same time, I felt like it was giving me everything.
TS: Now, the story of how you moved out to where you’re living now is included in In Deep Shift. Can you tell us that story?
VG: I felt like I really wanted to write my first book. I wasn’t a writer, I was in the bar and restaurant business. That’s what I did. I was always in hospitality. My mom was the writer. I did have an experience one night where she said like, “You are going to be writing and I’m going to be working through you.” And I took that to heart because it was real. And I loved my job, I felt very fulfilled, but it was time to move on. So it was that thing inside of me that I just had to listen to myself. So I sold, again, everything that I owned, all my cocktail dresses, high heels, purses, all my furniture.
Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. In a dream, I saw the house that I ended up renting, and I saw the street sign, and I randomly ended up in Fairfield, Iowa, one 4th of July weekend. I just wanted to get out of Chicago. And I came here and I ended up renting that house that I saw in my dreams. And when I saw the house, I already knew, “Well, this is it.” And so again, the signs were showing up, and I just followed them and then got rid of everything I owned. And it was beautiful, I was in a very quiet place, I could meditate, I could teach myself how to write a book. I didn’t know anyone here except maybe one person, so my days consisted of just going to a coffee shop, putting headphones on, and writing. And it was pure joy. So again, it was like the signs were showing up, things were happening, and I just was saying, yes, yes, yes, yes. You’re showing this to me. I’m going to do it.
TS: All right. I’m going to be confessional here for a moment. You said that you had an inner experience with your mom where she said, “I’m going to be writing through you. You’ve never been a writer, but I’m going to help you. I’m going to write through you.” And this is recently in my own life, working with an energy healer that I work with and bringing some business challenges that I had forward to the energy healer to help me. And she was like, “Your father is helping you, Tami.” And what I noticed is that part of me feels that and thinks it’s true, but I think a lot. And so, there’s a part of me that also says, I don’t know if that’s true. Come on. Really? So I have both of those things alive in me. And I’m just curious like, really? I mean, how do you know? Where do you get your inner confidence and evidence that, yes, this is your mother, not just you’re her daughter and you have her capacities in you because you’re her daughter?
VG: I was an awful student. I never wrote anything. My mom published four books. She was an amazing poet. The head of two major poetry societies in Chicago. She was the writer. She stayed up every night till 4:00 in the morning writing. That was her whole life. I was not the writer. So when I had this experience, and she literally showed herself at a typewriter telling me “I’m continuing my work,” even though she’s passed away, and I learned that lesson that life goes on. And then it was as clear as day like, “I’m going to help you. You are going to do this.” And at first I thought, what is going on? I can’t write.
And next thing I know, I’m sitting in that coffee shop and I’m writing every day, and it was the only thing that mattered to me. And I absolutely felt like she was working through me. I had the experience, and then I had a second experience. There was a flow that, I don’t know, I couldn’t deny, and it was so polar opposite of who I was before. It had to have been my mom. So maybe in your life there’s going to be signs and you’re going to be like, “That’s my dad.” I don’t know. I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but that was my experience.
TS: Sure. All right. What do you hope, Valerie, people will get out of reading In Deep Shift? What’s your hope for the ripples that this book will have in the world?
VG: I really don’t want people to feel alone. It can be overwhelming. It can be beautiful. It can be scary. And I’ve written the book hoping that I could be a support system or someone that at least really understands and doesn’t think you’re bananas. It’s like, no, you’re not. This is real. This is happening. I experienced it. Yes, that’s my ultimate goal: for people not to feel alone in this.
TS: OK. And then finally, a lot of people would say, I know this whole conversation is about personal evolution, personal growth and awakening, but it’s definitely fair to say that if we look around us, it appears that humans as a species are in deep shift. And I wonder how you relate to that idea and how some of the same blueprint, if you will, might apply to us as a species, as individuals, and if you make that leap, if that’s part of the work of TM, to make that leap.
VG: I learned TM, but the next person could, I don’t know, do yoga. To me, that was the portal for me, but everyone is different. It’s going to be some other path; whether you keep walking down that path is another story. And I believe there’s going to be a tipping point if there’s enough of us that go down that road, say “yes” to an inner experience, really get in touch with who we really are and change the way we live, and then influence other people, help other people. I do believe there’ll be a tipping point, and I do believe that that’s where we’re going. I mean, I can feel it.
I’m just one person and I had this experience, and I don’t know how many people I’ve touched in this short amount of time. So if everyone had beautiful spiritual experiences like that, and it opens them up, it just makes you more loving and compassionate. And I think that desire to help other people is part of this. I don’t know. I think that’s what it’s all about, actually, moving forward.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Valerie Gangas. She’s the author of the book In Deep Shift: Riding the Waves of Change to Find Peace, Fulfillment, and Freedom. Thank you, Valerie. Thank you for putting yourself out there so that people don’t feel so alone and standing in your truth. Thank you.
VG: Thanks for having me on.
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