Dr. Ani Kalayjian came to the United States with the hopes and the dreams of being free, to receive a good education, find a good occupation, and exercise her human rights. While transcending adolescence and gender discrimination in her former country, she has found a higher level of caring and healthy practices for the prevention of disease and promotion of holistic health, educating the mind and the heart. Her “Peel the Onion” theory described in one of her books, Forget Me NOT, 7 Steps for Healing Our Body, Mind, Spirit, and Mother Earth depicts how she found her inner core, the gem, the jewel, and the diamond that world has come to know her as.
Her life lessons and her insights related to trauma have given her the ability to reach out to help humanity around the globe through establishing the Association for Trauma Outreach & Prevention, the Armenian American Society for Studies on Stress & Genocide, and Meaningfulworld, organizing more than 100 humanitarian relief missions to transform human suffering from victimhood to victorhood.
Dr. Kalayjian has reached thousands of people around the world, with her 7-Step Integrative Healing Model, as described in her previous books. She has created & used this model in close to 50 countries, reaching more than a million people. The work she has done has helped others to survive many human-made calamities such as incest, domestic violence, physical and emotional abuse on the individual level, as well as political wars, genocide, terrorism, and other state-sponsored violence on the national level. Her 7-step model has also been used in natural calamities such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, tsunamis, and floods.
The photographs displayed in this book, A Journey of Empowerment, Healing, & Transformation, 35 years of Humanitarian Relief Outreach were taken during Meaningfulworld’s Humanitarian Relief missions to over 50 countries from 1988 thru 2021, and continuing still today. Dr. Kalayjian’s lectures and outreach is world-wide. She depicts the challenges people in these countries have confronted as the result of natural and human-made disasters.
Meaningfulworld is passionate about sharing these moving photographs to both educate as well as nurture a dialogue around humanitarian challenges, and how to transform pain and trauma, derived from any disaster, into peace and meaning-making through emotional intelligence, mental health, empathy, forgiveness, mindfulness and social and racial justice.
Finally, Dr. Kalayjian’s model has been used by and has been effective with multiple religious belief systems—which includes Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Jainism—with enormous success. Her life is a testament to how she overcame many obstacles and used her experiences to help everyone on this planet if they so desire, to transform from victim to victor.
In the words of Amazon Bestselling Author JohnEgreek, “Dr. Ani Kalayjian is a Hero, a freedom fighter for health, justice, and liberty for all mankind.”