Service and Surrender

Surrender and service. They are the mantras of Gabrielle Bernstein, acclaimed spiritualist, author and podcaster, who will bring her inspirational message about accessing inner peace and resilience to the Warner Theater February 9th.

The program is sponsored by the McCall Behavioral Health Network with all proceeds from the program going to the network to support its work helping individuals heal from substance use disorders and mental health disorders.

The evening will include a pre-event shopping opportunity at local vendors’ tables followed by a talk and question-and-answer session at 7PM. During the program Bernstein will offer transformational techniques for finding serenity and happiness and conduct a guided meditation.

VIP tickets include lifetime access to Bernstein’s Happy Days digital course and guided practices album, a spiritual program to help users to transform old patterns so they can experience genuine inner peace.

Bernstein’s current star position as an international motivational speaker is a far cry from her beginnings.

A Jewish girl from Larchmont NY, she spent her youthful summers at Jewish summer camps and meditating beside her mother in ashrams across upstate New York. “I developed my own faith and meditation practice as a teen to help with anxiety and depression,” she says on her website. “In my early twenties, I turned my back on my spiritual practice and began looking for self-worth and happiness from the outside world.”

She rebelled against the spirituality of her early life, dove into the entrepreneurial world and embraced alcohol and drugs. At age 25, filled with unrecognized conflicts from her past including repressed memories of sexual abuse as a young child, Bernstein confronted the state of her life.

By then a night life publicist and owner of Sparkplug Communications, she found herself sitting on the floor of her West Village apartment one morning, still under the influence of the drugs and alcohol she had consumed the previous evening. She had hit her rock bottom.

“I broke down on the floor of my studio apartment,” she writes. “Strung out, hungover and addicted to drugs, I whispered a prayer: ‘I need a miracle.’”

She called a friend, attended an AA meeting with her that day and has been sober ever since. Six months later she was delivering talks, not on sobriety, but on spirituality, speaking about her own transformation.

Starting in a rented space that was filled by 40 people, she began her journey, booking her own speaking engagements. The momentum grew rapidly. Today she's a best-selling author of nine New York Times best sellers, flies around the world speaking, coaching and posting motivational messages to hundreds of thousands of social media fans. In 2021 she launched her own weekly podcast, Dear Gabby, spreading her message to more than one million listeners.

“The willingness to heal changed my life <Iforever,” she writes. “One day at a time, I strengthened my spiritual connection and devoted my life to personal development. Through years of trial and error, I developed methods that allowed me to manifest a life beyond my wildest dreams.”

Much of her message is about surrender—surrender of the ego, of the will to control and of acceptance of universal wisdom.

“When we are attached to the outcome, we block the universal guidance,” she tells audiences. “I prefer to let the universe to show me what to do. When we’re attached to the outcome and the way we think it should be, we block the miracle. Release (your conception) of the outcome … and give the universe a chance to reveal something better. Pray for the highest good. Our job is to stay grounded in what it means to connect and align.”

Universal guidance can come through many avenues but Bernstein says each person has a spirit guide. “They can be ancestors, angels, higher-level beings, but they are pure light. They are here for you. We have these entities that are directly in connection to us and their job is to guide us back to the presence of love,” she says, adding that her podcasts about spirit guides are among the most popular on her site. “It’s an important topic for me. The sense of knowing that force of energy and the love of the guides around me have given me totally different perspective. They move us toward grace and they are always with us.”

These guides can be a deceased loved one, she says, but they can “also be just an energy of love.” How do they affect us, move us in the right direction? “You know you are in their presence if you feel a strong intuition, maybe a physical sensation or that you are literally being pushed in different direction, or maybe it is an inner a directive,” she says.

“Most people walk around with a big disconnect,” she says. “Our prayers acknowledge that we are in the presence of the highest good and can open radical doors. When we say a prayer, we are opening doors to that guidance. Our spiritual side allows us to grow and expand our relationship with our guides.”

Spiritual guides can nudge us in the right direction but it is up to the individual to welcome joy into their lives. “If you want to attract more joy into your life, give more of what you want to receive,” she tells audiences. “Give to others in a way that is joyful to you, in the way that you can. Ask, ‘How can I be of service to you? Often, when you are caught up in your drama, the best thing you can do is to pick up the phone and see how someone else is doing.

“Ask yourself, ‘How can I serve, how can I serve more?’ Ask your higher power, ‘How will you use me? Where would you have me go, what would you have me do, what would you have me say and to whom?’ And then we open up to that service and expand our hearts and we start to give more of what we want to receive. Service is an act of surrender. When in the service of others, you don’t have time to get into your own drama.?”

Meditation is central to her list of tools for finding inner happiness and serenity. Here again, spirit guides are allowed to come through. “Sit down with a journal and thank your guides for writing through you,” she said. “Don’t think out what you write, don’t edit it. Over time you may see that the energy changes. If you start to write more often it will start to get a direction. It’s a profound way to connect.”

In her talks and workshops she offers other tools, such as breathing exercises, tapping, straight talk coaching, diet and fitness. She lists three spiritual practices that followers can use—the first being breath practice to stimulate the vagus nerve, which relaxes and puts the practitioner into the parasympathetic state. Secondly, the “chose again” method, when one recognizes a negative thought, dismisses it and chooses again. She says this allows the individual to feel more responsible for their own experiences and more empowered to change their perceptions of their experiences. Finally, she advises, seek solutions rather than problems. This is a practice of looking for solutions, the lessons that you can learn and the value gained from all situations.

Tickets for her program at the Warner Theatre are $69; VIP Admission, which includes the Happy Days Digital Course, are $129. Click here for tickets.