Build One Good Thing

Webcast Transcript Courtesy of Sivan Garr

I want to go over what my intention is and what I want to create with each of you. I want to create a pathway where we can actually bring love and light and goodness into this world—and manifest it in creative ways. Organize it, structure it, feed it, nurture it, and support it. I have the intention of creating a wave of moving goodness and love in a powerful direction with a powerful force behind it. I want to create clarity for each of you tonight, about what is actually happening in the world, how it looks, and what our role is, if we want something different to happen in our lives, inside of us and in the world around us.

We know that negativity is easily spread. Let’s start simply by thinking about our own negative thoughts and how quickly those negative thoughts can multiply and expand to the point where it feels like they’re creating an incredible burden on us. And the constancy of them. We can have negative thoughts every single day. We can have the same negative thoughts consistently. We can share those negative thoughts with each other. We can then join together in this conversation, socially, globally, that can be very negative. It almost doesn’t matter what standpoint it comes from. Negativity is so widely accepted—as is destruction. It’s so much easier to destroy than it is to build.

There are so many stories about this and so many analogies. People create beautiful sand sculptures that are intricate and gorgeous. And one wave can wipe that out or one shove from someone can destroy it. This type of thing happens over and over in different areas of society.

That can happen inside of ourselves, we haven’t healed, the parts of us that feel very troubled or traumatized. We can have a good day. We can be out in the world and feeling good and excited about our lives. Then one statement from somebody, or one mean look from someone can suddenly just—boom!—put us right back into our negativity. And then, potentially, that’s the place where we stay.

I want to talk about this, because I want us to begin to see that negativity and positivity need a vehicle in order to be manifest. There are so many examples of negativity manifesting in our world in such unbelievable ways. Negativity is perpetrated and accepted by everyone. It’s either openly accepted, or it’s perpetrated by some kind of subversive confusion, by communication that taps into our weaknesses and makes us feel that something negative is positive, or simply because destruction is easier, it’s more accepted than creating something good, building something good. Building something good takes more effort.

Let’s start to look at some of the things that are going on, and how to look at it.  Let’s look at all the different ways that it’s easy to shut down goodness, and that it’s easy to build negativity. My parents were ministers at the Unity Church of Christianity. At some point, they asked me if I would be willing to facilitate a class on the Course in Miracles. Of course, I said yes, it felt like a great opportunity. I was super excited about it. I loved the Course in Miracles. This was sometime in the 80s. I started my first night, thinking, a couple of people will come and this will be easy. I was very, very nervous. I went the first night and sure enough, just a couple of people came and that felt fine. The next week, more people came. I was like, wow, I was half high, like, “Oh, look at me!” And the other half was petrified, like,”Oh my god, I don’t know what I’m talking about.” The third week, even more people came. So this intention I had of doing something was now creating more of an effort. I was having to deal with and confront all my insecurities, all my lack of feeling good about myself. This was not easy. So the fourth week, I quit. That was easy.

I’m sure we all have examples of seeing that it’s not so easy to build something good. It takes all different aspects of our being to put ourselves out there, to show up day after day after day, and to create something amazing and wonderful.

Another example of how easy it is to build something negative by preying on our insecurities and our weaknesses is smoking cigarettes. We pretty much all know that smoking cigarettes isn’t healthy for our bodies. I don’t think that is in dispute. But we do it anyway. The campaigns that they created over the years to get women to smoke were portraying that smoking was very positive. When I was a kid, there were campaigns that said things like “You’ve come a long way baby.” I remember looking at these commercials and thinking, “Yeah, that’s who I want to be. I want to be this cool, independent woman with a cigarette.” When they did some of the campaigns in the 20s, I believe they called the marketing campaigns “The torch of freedom.” They were preying on women’s feelings of wanting to be like men, and wanting to smoke like men.

Here’s something that was built and brought into society and readily accepted by everyone.  Something that wasn’t good for us. It was/is destructive. It was addictive. It is addictive. And yet, we readily accepted it and took it into our lives, whether we actually smoked or not. It just became a part of the fabric of our society, as do so many other things that are negative.  We don’t pay enough attention to that reality. Negativity is woven into everything. It’s woven into our education, into our media at every level, into our politics, into our religions and churches, into every aspect of society. Negativity has become very organized. It’s easier to tap into.

I’m sorry I’m focusing on it today—we’ll get to the positive—because so much of our daily reality is focused in our ego and our egos thrive in negativity. They breed and support the negative thoughts and ideas and beliefs that we have. They perpetrate separation and disconnection. It’s easy for negativity to get a stronghold, because our egos are readily available to buy into it, and then to help with the building of it.

I’m sharing this with you, because I want you to begin to see the amount of attention it’s going to take to build that positivity. I’ve also always said that positivity grows faster than negativity, but we have to actually focus on it. We have to be willing to birth it into the world. That’s the picture that I’m trying to create, that negativity and positivity are just two energies that don’t really mean too much until they’re activated, until they’re manifest and until they begin being channeled through various sources in the world, to create something. Negativity is being channeled in a very different way all over the place.

Not so much positivity. Positivity is being manifested in these little moments and little clumps all around the world, but not with the ferocity and the extensiveness as negativity. So I want us to take this subject of building positivity on, and build good things in the world. Not just build good things in the world, but also join together in how we’re building these good things, and join together with others, building these good things.

It would be so wonderful to imagine what it would be like just to create one good thing. This is going to be our homework this week. What is it that you would create? How can we establish what is positive? What is loving? What is healing? What is good? If you say, “I’ve already got something good built,” then, how can you fortify that? How can you make it stronger? How can you build connections with others doing these good things? This is what I would like to see us do.

Would you create good things by writing songs? By creating beautiful and healing art? Would you create good things by bringing together a group of people to play games together and love each other that way? Would you build good things by bringing beautiful recipes, healthy recipes to the world? Would you build good things by gathering good ideas and offering those good ideas to the world? Or somehow joining forces with others who can create a foundation where goodness and positivity can more easily be accessed by the world and be spread? There are so many ideas. There are so many different charities that do different things. Yet it’s not just about building a charity. And I’m not saying that’s not wonderful because of course it is. But there are so many things that you can do right now. Even if you don’t leave your house, you can build something good, something connected and something amazing. At this point, I’m using amazing in a positive way.

I wanted to talk about this tonight because there’s something about us really taking in that idea and really processing it, really digesting it, that can bring clarity to our every action and interaction and not just bring clarity, but bring motivation. This is something for us to look at as a pivotal moment for us to shift our daily routine and shift it to a solid pathway forward for creating a standard channel from ourselves as a voice and a powerful force of positivity. If we want something different to happen in the world, we have to make that happen.

For the homework, I would love each of you to come up with some idea of something that you can readily share with the world. Something that you either organize, create or offer in some way. The key is that it has to be something that you either know that you’ve gotten positive feedback about, or that you share it once you get positive feedback. The idea is that it has to be something where other people are giving you positive feedback and saying, “Yeah, that helped me.” “That made me feel better.” ‘Oh that was so joyous!”

Each of you has unlimited access to the possibility of healing. Each of you has unlimited access to the possibility of sharing healing with the world. We have that access through our hearts. Our heart is the key to us getting in touch with our strengths, our talents, our gifts. It’s also the key to us finding the pathway that we can best share those talents and gifts.

If you think about the times in your life when you wanted to do something that you were super excited about, what stopped you? You know that those ideas came from a good place. But you probably also know that your mind started to interfere, by telling you that you were a fraud. You weren’t good enough. You weren’t educated enough. You weren’t beautiful enough. You weren’t something enough for anyone to appreciate what you had to offer. And if it wasn’t a direct negative message from your ego, then possibly the ego just shut it all down and started to make you feel deadened and apathetic around it.

Either way, one of the things the ego can do is to try to snuff out anything good. And to keep you in a position where you feel small and not powerful. When you feel small and not powerful, that’s when the ego has the ability to maintain control over you. So, you have to find your inner strength and move your focus, and your attention to your communication with your heart. And in that communication with your heart, begin working to also pull in that divine energy, that light energy, that love energy, to pull it into your body. And into your consciousness and into your mind. So that you’re constantly creating the availability of an ongoing source of goodness, to support your goodness and to support you manifesting goodness in the world.

One way we can think about that is to devise practices and a remembrance of constantly connecting to our heart. Not in a kind of fake-y way—which is also something I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about how it’s also difficult to bring good things into the world, because it’s something that people readily ridicule and poo-poo and push aside. So the person who wants to bring something good, has to be so dedicated, has to be so specifically desirous to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to manifest that good thing and to not get thrown off by negativity.

You want to create practices where you find ways to stay in communication with your heart—to understand how to identify the voice of the ego, and then to figure out what the voice of the heart sounds like. One of the biggest issues that can happen when we try to access the heart, is the frustration around not hearing the heart’s voice, not understanding it, not being able to identify it. So why don’t we, this week, start a practice of sitting 15 minutes a day and opening ourselves with the intention of communicating and communing with our hearts. Slowly—or quickly—start finding the magic there.

Don’t ignore this huge resource that you have just because you can’t fully access it every second of every day. Don’t throw it aside. Don’t imagine it’s not yours. It is yours. Every single person has equal opportunity on a spiritual path. I want us all to imagine that time is of the essence and that you are more powerful than you could ever imagine and how valuable you are to this world in every way! You’re not here as a side thought. You’re here to bring something momentous to this time and space. Not everybody gets an opportunity to do that.

It’s my commitment that I want to support you in finding your goodness and finding the way that you want to bring it to the world. And to support you in making that happen—and for you to feel powerful and capable. To have it become something where you say, “Of course!” “Of course I can do that. Of course, I will do that. Of course, it’s important that I do that. What I have to offer is valuable. And it’s needed. And it’s needed now, not five years from now.”

Who knows what I could have created in the 80s, when I was in my 20s, if I was willing to just keep going, even in the face of all of my own negative judgments towards myself and my insecurities! What if I had just done it anyway? We don’t know, but let’s not waste our opportunity now. Let’s do this. Let’s do it together.

I love each one of you so much. You’re each very special to me. I honor you. I support you on your path. I love you very much.