Building Hope

Webcast Transcript Courtesy of Sivan Garr

I want to remind you that the reason why I’m doing this work, and this particular webcast is to create an actual way that I can send out a vehicle of healing. To not only create a healing vibration, but to create a band of healers, where we’re all connected, joining our forces to heal the world and to begin moving the world in a positive direction.

With that in mind, I want to start by talking about hope. Hope is something that we don’t give enough credit to. Yet, it is so powerful. Hope is that feeling that something good can happen to us and/or in the world, even when it looks like there’s no way something good is going to happen. Hope is that feeling that there’s an answer for us to get out of a bind or predicament, even when we feel like there’s no answer. Hope allows us to dream, to imagine, to be creative, and to feel like we can become something bigger than we are. Or that we can have experiences in our lives that we feel would otherwise not be available to us. Hope is so important because it creates the foundation for the pathway that can take us somewhere positive, somewhere good, and somewhere better than where we are.

I think that all of us would agree that right now, collectively, most of us want that. We want a better future, a better vision for our future. Hope can start the engines that can take us there. The truth is that there are moments in our lives that we’re also hopeless, and experience that hopelessness in such a huge way that it feels like there is no light, no way forward, nothing that is going to happen that is going to change our destiny.

At this point, when we’ve put all of our energy into finding hope, attaching ourselves to hope, and growing hope, like that moment where that’s just not happening and we’re just in this hopelessness state, then the next experience that we can think of moving to would be acceptance. I have talked about acceptance and surrender before and the power of it. So I’m not going to talk about it a lot tonight. Just that in this experience of hopelessness, if we can manage to find a way to move through every aspect of our lives with a sense of acceptance—in other words, imagining the way my life is right now, or the way the world is right now, no changes are going to happen and I need to accept exactly life as it stands right now and my life as it stands right now.

At the very same time, I’m going to actively pursue change. I’m going to still seek for hope. As I’m doing those things, I’m going to continue to bring acceptance into the conversation inside of myself, in order to create the possibility that I can find a little bit of peace, and a little bit of happiness, and a little bit of something good within the circumstances that I’m in right now.

So tonight is a special night because I decided to do something that I’ve publicly never done before. That is to tell the story of my own enlightenment. I wanted to do that because it’s a story of hope, hopelessness, and a miracle.

I want to start, more or less at the beginning, which is when I was very young.

I looked around the world and felt very confused, very trapped here. I felt very concerned, for my safety, for the safety of others. “Upset”, is a word that just doesn’t cover it, in the reality of what was on planet Earth, and I wanted a way out. As I started studying, talking to people, and reading, it felt like the books that I read about spirituality, were the only books that made sense in terms of actually creating a hopeful path out of a heaviness, and the darkness, of what it means to be human on planet Earth.

I pretty quickly realized that I needed to have a teacher. I read so many books of teachers or of disciples that had teachers. I realized one, of course, that it seemed that was the fastest way to grow, but also two, that I was ill-equipped to teach myself to evolve. I certainly tried because I was all I had at the time. But I could see my own limitations. I could see that just trying to will myself to change, to become better, to become kinder, to become more connected just wasn’t enough. So I would really pray to somehow find a teacher. I went to meet so many different people that came to my neck of the woods and didn’t really find anyone that I felt held the level of peace and freedom and love that I believed existed.

I began each year on the last day of the year, New Year’s Eve, writing a wish list for the year. That list could have included anything. It could have included a new car, it could have included more money, it could have included a washer and dryer. The list was pretty long when I started out, probably at least about 20 things. Somewhere on the list, I would put, “I want to find a teacher.” Over the years, that desire for a teacher went up on the list. As it was going up on the list, I registered the fact that I wasn’t making it my number one desire. I did have a question in the back of my mind about that. But what overrode that question was the diminishing of my hope.

When I was young, I was hopeful, I would talk to family members or friends that were also spiritual seekers, and create these amazing, magical conversations that painted pictures of magical journeys in the world and in consciousness. I felt very hopeful. But as the years went by, that hope started to go away. No teacher was coming. I wasn’t hearing of anyone that I believed or felt was a real teacher. I began to feel that it just wasn’t going to happen for me in this lifetime. Even so, every year, on the last day of the year, I put the desire to be a teacher, or to have a teacher higher on the list. Finally, it got to the number one slot. I only put about three things on the list that year. Then, when I turned 30, I made it the only thing on the list.

During this time, still feeling like this just isn’t something that’s going to happen for me.

Then when I turned 32, I didn’t put anything on the list. I still had the list, because what we would do is we create the list and then we burn the list and do a whole ceremony. So I just took an empty piece of paper. I folded it up. I didn’t share it with anyone. I put it in the fireplace. That, I decided, was going to be the last year I ever asked for anything, even in that way of just sending an empty paper, an empty prayer.  A surrender of sorts.

Four or five weeks later, I met my teacher. This was my first incredible answer to a prayer, answer to hope, answer to a dream I had for a lifetime. It felt so beyond what I can explain because I literally felt like something impossible happened. I felt that something out of this world happened.  Something otherworldly.

I want you to imagine that reality in your own life. Because right now, I know that each of us is looking at the world and the wide variety of circumstances that are happening right now that seem very dark, very destitute, and very hopeless. I want you to see that the impossible can happen. I want you to see that something otherworldly, something beyond what we can imagine can happen. And can happen in a magnificent, exciting, and ‘wow’ way. Something that allows each of us to feel empowered, in love and goodness, and in the creating and co-creating of something miraculous on this planet. Each of you is partaking in that.

That was my first answered prayer and my first moment of losing hope. But in that losing hope, still being willing to move forward, still being willing to meet somebody that I sort of heard, was a healer, and having something huge happen, that set me on a path of changing my life forever.

Then moving on, as my path went forward, I got to a point where I was changing, healing, evolving, growing, and all kinds of things were happening to me. I stopped being depressed. I lost so many of the barriers that had been holding me back in the world. But I still felt a lot of darkness. I reached a point on my path that I felt absolutely doomed forever. I felt like I hit a wall and that hitting that wall, I was absolutely never going to reach enlightenment. I was never going to reach love and I was never going to reach my freedom. It didn’t feel to me at the time like there was any hope at all.

Now, in this timeframe, as the days went by, I went deeper and deeper into this very intense place of darkness, hopelessness, loss that felt like I would never get another chance ever in all eternity to find my way to enlightenment. I felt very strongly that I had gotten this once-in-an-eternity chance and then I had hit a wall and was unable to move forward. The chance was now gone. I was just going to have to decide what I wanted to do with my life at that point.

Every day, as I would sink deeper and deeper into this darkness, my mind would run around in this kind of crazy way, trying to find any tiny little ray of light. Any ray of hope, any possibility. I really looked at every single possibility. It was completely unimaginable. Every day, all day long, I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t find a way out. I couldn’t find a ray of light, a ray of hope. I just found more walls, more darkness that I sank deeper into.

During this time, I became quieter and quieter. The pain of this experience was too excruciating to describe, to even have a conversation with anyone about. So I didn’t. I stayed quiet and alone in this torturous time.

I’m going to speak metaphorically about this next part.

Then one day, going through my day, in a usual way, with my mind every now and then scrambling around and scrambling around and scrambling around. This particular day, at a very particular moment, I suddenly saw an almost imperceptible dot of light. It wasn’t even a ray. There was no shine beaming off of it. It was just very tiny and almost imperceptible. It looked like a doorway. Hope can be a doorway. And yet, it was too tiny for me to fit through that doorway. As I stared at this almost imperceptible light, and put all of my attention into trying to figure out how I could get to that light, how I could move through that doorway, it was almost like the little dot of light started giving me feedback. I clearly understood that I could go through that doorway, that little tiny, tiny, tiny, almost imperceptible doorway of light. But if I wanted to go through that doorway, I could not take anything with me. I couldn’t take my darkness. I couldn’t take my personality. I couldn’t take my memories. I couldn’t take my ideas, my dreams, my beliefs. I couldn’t take anything.  I had to strip off ‘Me’. And mind you this just happened in one flash of a millisecond. So at that moment, I decided to set everything down and take my chances. I had no idea what it meant to leave everything behind. Did that mean I was going to die physically? Did it mean that I was going to wake up somewhere else, as someone else? I honestly had no idea. Certainly, my mind tried to go through what those possibilities were. But where I was in this state of doom in darkness, I didn’t feel that I had anything to lose. I felt that I should take this chance. So I laid everything down. I went through that little tiny hole of light.

What it felt like for me were many things. It felt like I woke up in light. It felt like suddenly, life was breathing through me and a new life and a new heartbeat was given to me.  This experience I could talk about for the next forever days. But I want to say that it’s an experience that only grew from there. It only got bigger from there. It’s an experience that very few people get to have in this lifetime. It’s an experience that I want each of you to have and I believe that you all can. It’s an experience that’s extraordinary, that’s otherworldly, that’s miraculous, that’s impossible. It’s amazing that these things can happen on planet Earth, that we can actually have experiences that can change our lives forever.

We can do this now, each of us with ourselves and with the world. We can change the direction of this world forever. We can bring love and compassion, light, forgiveness, goodness, generosity, and positivity into every area of life. As it stands right now. We can put down our weapons, whether they be physical, or energetical, or verbal, or with our thoughts. We can think and act in love. In doing so, create the hope that we need to change directions.

So this week, I want us all to build that hope, to look inside and see, can we make our hope bigger? Have you ever done that? Have you ever seen that you do have hope in its little, but you just really say, “I want to have hope.” Then as you think about your future in a hopeful way, suddenly a sense of peace and a sense of real strong belief comes over you that yes, something good will happen. Let’s create that this week for each of us and for the world. If you find that you are moving into hopelessness, then practice bringing acceptance into your mental conversation about your life and the state of the world. See if you can create a pattern of moving from an attempt to find hope into deep acceptance of your life and the world as it is. Actively move through this process creating a feedback loop that will eventually lead you back to hope which will eventually lead you to a miracle.

I love you. And I appreciate each one of you so much.