Energy and momentum- the birth of Sahavas
The story of the Women’s Sahavas for me is… back around August 2019 in Sydney, Emily casually mentioned to me something like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to run a Baba focused retreat we could enjoy with other women’, perhaps a local or even an overseas venue, or Meher House in Sydney and stay nearby.. and then as soon as we thought of Avatar’s Abode something just clicked into place.
It seemed Baba lit a firecracker under our butts and something just HAPPENED to us, a solid and unstoppable momentum occurred, I stayed up all night long doing a website and I am a completely un-tech-savvy person. I just can’t do websites but somehow within a few days, the website you see here now was born, from I don’t know where.
The Avatar’s Abode Trust immediately approved and the ball swung in motion so fast and so furiously. There was world wide momentum and intensive interest from around the world at a level that was mind blowing to us.
We spent 8 months and SO many hours in admin and conversations just registering people and answering enquiries mainly from internationals wanting to travel here, while all the while bush fires blazed on around Australia and many internationals who had booked to come began to feel increasingly concerned.
We had 40 people booked in- exactly 20 from overseas- from India, the UK, Singapore and the US, and exactly 20 from around Australia.
Suddenly, and probably after many rain songs and prayers (which Baba said are a real thing and do work!), the heavens opened up, the rain fell, the fires calmed..
…and then a new threat trickled in….people dropping like flies in other countries with a strange new respiratory disease, spreading through the world faster than the wildfires. It stopped people, it stopped the world and it definitely stopped Sahavas.
Two weeks before it was due to go ahead we had to cancel the whole event and held a world wide group zoom meeting on the same weekend instead.
We cancelled the website, the email that we had built for the event and slowly forgot about it.
In the 5 years that followed - a worldwide covid lockdown in 2020, followed by another lockdown in 2021.
I met the man who would become my husband in September 2020 and then spent years nursing him through a vigilant battle with an aggressive stage 4 cancer that took up most of our time and attention. Eventually the cancer was somehow beaten into submission and we managed to be able to focus on other things. As part of that cancer journey we moved from Sydney to the Sunshine Coast and found ourselves living in a house right near Avatar’s Abode and we started a new life of recovering and recouping there.
For Emily too and all of us, life went on and many things happened in those next 5 years.
Every now and then people would ask Emily or I if we had any interest in running the Women’s Sahavas again and we just honestly didn’t. It had been hard work, and not easy work, but it wasn’t even that, there just was no energy or momentum inside us. It was the exact opposite to the initial surge of momentum we’d been given in 2019. Just crickets, no interest. And people asked us often. We were even asked if we would consider coming to Meherabad to run it there! (We would! one day maybe…)
We would have been very happy if someone else suddenly got the momentum and wanted to run it, but it seems that energy didn’t get birthed elsewhere either.
And then last year, on the 6th of November 2024, just over 5 years after the original momentous surge, I was sitting in Baba’s room for almost an hour when an enormous and similar energy surge started to generate inside me, the energy and idea to once more run the Women’s Sahavas.
And not just a normal Sahavas, a deeply intimate, live in, intensive experience that would take us away from our daily lives and offer an opportunity to be truly and deeply immersed in Baba without our usual worldly and daily distractions. A Sahavas where work can be done perhaps to us and through us, who knows. But the vision was clear, and the vision was strong.
I had to get my phone out and take notes as ideas were coming in so thick and fast. The date just came to me, end of March or early April. Same time as last time. Even though that was only 4 months away, exactly half the time we had had to prepare for the last one- but for some reason it felt like it had to be then.
While still in Baba’s House I thought I would text Emily and see if she was interested though I felt she would probably say no as she hadn’t sounded very keen the last time we had spoken.
But of course, how funny the Avatar is. To my surprise Emily immediately said yes!
It turns out Em had had an intense Baba dream the night before and it had given her the same strong feeling of energy and momentum that I had just had, and made her immediately agree to do it. She hadn’t had any kind of dream like that for over 10 years so you have to laugh at the timing. Though surely any of us who have walked a path with Meher Baba for any given amount of time have probably experienced similar kinds of things happening.
Universal work?
As I left Baba’s room I thought ‘Oh I hope it doesn’t invite any more world wide disasters!’ The intensity during all the prep for Sahavas last time throughout the fires and worldwide unprecedented lockdowns felt somewhat connected and related, in a way that is hard to tangibly explain.
I had experienced something similar when attending the first Young Adult Sahavas in India in 2001, when almost half of the 80 Sahavasees became very ill all at once, putting a real challenge onto the Meherabad medical staff, but there was a deeply spiritual feeling through it all that we all could feel, despite the intensity of our illnesses. We would lie on our beds and wonder if Baba was doing some ‘universal work’ through us somehow, and make jokes about ‘maybe we are saving Peru’.
Shortly after this Baba’s Eruch died and then September 11 (the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York) happened. Another event which rocked our Western world.
Leaving Baba’s room I walked down the hill and saw Diana Le Page, who had been distraught watching the emerging US election results and she said to me ‘Oh Sage, it looks like Trump is going to get in!’
Whatever side of the political spectrum you may fall into, you couldn’t deny that this would have a large rippling effect throughout the Western world in one way or another. Leading up to this time also conflict in Palestine and Israel had become worldwide and daily news with worldwide rallies for justice and a call for humanitarian compassion and unity. It also caused divisions in opinions and some very vocal, universally held oppositions.
It couldn’t be denied that there was some world wide intensity having been percolating in the background.
I could be reading into things, who knows. But sometimes you just get a ‘sense’ of something being related.
I wondered whether the old website website would be somewhere, but would need the old gmail we had made for the event which I was pretty sure we had shut down.
Amazingly they were both latent but still there. All the old emails, the website itself, laying like dormant seeds just needing a little sun and water. I was amazed!
What was even more amazing was that thanks to a leap year and a change to the days of the week that we decided to run the program, the dates fall on the EXACT dates- 27-30th March, that they were going to be run 5 years before.
All of this felt so uncanny, as if we were once again being pulled along on a string not of our own making, but recipients of ‘the call’ that for some reason, this event was meant to happen.
We had only 4 months instead of 8 this time, though it seemed as if we could just resume where we had left off- so much of the work was done- the google registration form and many other documents and lists we had made for last time.
This time the Women’s Sahavas did go ahead, with no worldwide lockdowns, though of course still plenty going on in the wide world, as there always is.
Read PART 2 here if you’d like to hear how Sahavas went!
Flowers on Baba’s bed in Baba’s room
