Interview: The Concept of BirthQuake

Written by Tammie Byram Fowles, PhD, LISW-CP

Dru Hamilton at "Book Talk" with Tammie Fowles, author of BirthQuake: Journey to Wholeness

Dru: What is a BirthQuake?

Tammie: A Birthquake for the most part is a transformational process, which impacts the whole person, and ultimately leads to growth. They're initiated by a significant challenge in a person's life, or what I call a quake.

Quakes occur for most of us when we're standing at a crossroad. They can be precipitated by a loss, a major lifestyle change, or even a new awareness. While the experience can be painful, the pain of a quake holds promise, because it triggers a healing process.

Dru: How is a BirthQuake different than a mid-life crisis?

Tammie: Birthquakes at a glance can understandably be confused with a mid-life crisis, because they often occur at midlife, and are initially difficult experiences. But there are a number of ways that a Birthquake and a

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midlife crisis differ, one of the most significant differences is that the outcome of a midlife crisis isn't always positive. In some cases a midlife crisis leads to a breakdown, while moving through a BirthQuake ultimately leads to a Breakthrough. Also, a Birthquake effects the whole person, it touches just about every aspect of your life.

More than anything else, it's how we respond to the quakes in our lives which determines whether we'll be diminished by our quakes, or transformed by them.

Dru: Can you give us an example of someone who's been transformed by a Quake?

Tammie: One of my all time heroes is Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist who was imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II.

Frankl was starved, beaten, frozen, he witnessed horrendous acts of violence and murder, and yet survived to tell the world his story, in his incredibly powerful book, "Man's Search for Meaning."

He lost his entire family, including his pregnant wife, to the death camps, and much of his identity was stripped away. He lost control of just about every physical aspect of his life. He had no choice over when and what he'd eat or even if he'd eat, when, where, for how long, he'd sleep, when and how long he'd work or what kind of work he'd do, and even if he'd be alive by the end of the day.

Frankl recognized that What he did have control over was how he'd choose to respond to his situation. While the guards might dictate what experiences he had, no-one but he himself had the power to decide how he'd respond to those experiences, or what meaning they'd have to him.

Dru: What do you mean when you describe the quake as connected to the loss of spirit?

Tammie: Well, I believe that most of us become so preoccupied with the every day details of our lives that we lose touch with our spirits, and we begin to function on automatic pilot, so often going through the motions that we fail to fully appreciate the incredible beauty in our world, and truly experience the moment.

I also think that as a result of becoming so overwhelmed by our culture's dominant story, we've lost touch with our own.

Dru: Can you be more specific about how our cultural story has overwhelmed us?

Tammie: We're introduced to our cultural story almost immediately. We're taught it by our families, our teachers, our peers, and most of all, at least in the case of Americans, we're taught the dominant story by the media.

A culture's dominant story comes to dictate what it's members pay attention to, what they value, how they perceive themselves and others, and even to a large extent, it shapes their very experiences.

By the time American children graduate from high school, it's been estimated that they've been exposed to 360,ooo advertisements, and on average, by the time we die, we Americans will have spent an entire year of our lives watching television.

It's been pointed out that it's the people who tell the stories who're the ones who control how our children grow up. A long time ago we acquired most of our cultural story from wise elders, and now commercial television has become our primary story teller. When you consider what the primary message of this incredibly powerful storyteller has been, it's not that difficult to appreciate how much of our soul has been lost. We've been hypnotized by a story heard hundreds of times every day in America, and the title of that story is "Buy me."

Speaking of stories, I remember hearing a wonderful story about a workshop where Joseph Campbell was showing images of the sacred to participants. One image was a bronze statue of the God Shiva, dancing within a circle of flames. Shiva had one foot in the air, and the other foot was resting on the back of a little man, who was squatting in the dust and carefully examining something he was holding in his hands. Someone asked Campbell what the little man was doing down there, and Campbell responded, "That's a little man who's so caught up in the study of the material world, that he doesn't realize that the living God is dancing on his back.

A quake is like an alarm going off, it's a wake up call telling many of us that we've lost our connection to the sacred. It urges us to attend to the sacred in our world, and invites us to evaluate the impact of our cultural story. It also calls for us to explore and even begin to reauthor our own stories.