Last Friday’s Interact Club meeting focused on how positive thinking can affect your life.

Guest Speaker Shauna Galligan, a stuntwoman in over 140 movies and TV shows, explained this by recounting her journey to where she is today. She explained that stunt work is not a normal career and that she did not start out wanting to be a stunt worker. 

Galligan started working as an EMT on a show when a producer who saw her athletic abilities asked if she wanted to be a stunt worker.

“I didn’t get to where I am because life was easy,” Galligan said. “I got here because life was hard.”

As a child, Galligan suffered from brain lesions and seizures. She was sent to China by her mother in hopes that a form of meditation, Chigong, could heal her. Once she arrived, she saw things that she related to Marvel’s “Doctor Strange.” 

She spent a month at a Buddhist monastery, meditating and believing that she would heal, and it ended up working.

“We are more powerful than we realize, and it all starts with a thought,” Galligan said.

Galligan put what she learned from the monastery into practice by believing that one day she would start to get checks in the mail. Over the course of 14 years, she checked the mail every day, seeing bills and bills each day, until she finally started getting checks.

She also discussed how positive thinking helped her in her stunt work. During shooting, she says it makes it easier to visualize where she is landing as soft.

She encourages students to think positively to get where they want to be in life.

Interact Club meets once a month in Spanish teacher Marcela Sample’s room 643. Each meeting has a guest speaker to discuss a wide range of topics.