Avo Garboushian

Hi! My name is Avo!

I was born in Toronto on November 29, 1971, welcomed into this strange and beautiful world by two loving souls, Jerry and Astrig, shortly after welcoming my baby sister Ani. From the very beginning, I seemed to come with two built-in features: an overactive imagination and a deep inability to stop humming random melodies. I was always listening to music, way too curious about everything and probably annoying at least a few adults by always asking “why?” one too many times.

As a child, I was deeply sensitive, hyperactive, imaginative, and observant. I often felt like I was studying humanity while simultaneously trying to understand my place within it. My curiosity about everything, how things worked and why people behaved in certain ways, gradually turned into introspection, especially as I experienced being bullied during my youth. Because I was so sensitive to other people’s state of being, I always wanted to understand what could motivate someone to cause harm. It created an internal contradiction that, even as a child, I was trying to resolve. If kindness and connection felt so natural to me, why did some people choose cruelty, domination, or harm? How could someone make fun of me or be mean to me when they didn’t even know me?

I began to wonder what motivated people to project their anger, fear, insecurity, and pain onto others. It wasn’t until my late teens, when I experienced an assault in college involving people I had recently befriended, that these questions took on a deeper meaning. What affected me was not only what happened, but also the absence of the compassion and remorse I had hoped to see afterward. It was a painful reminder of how differently we can understand our own actions and the impact they have on others.

At the same time, I have come to recognize that sensitivity alone does not make us immune to causing harm. Around the age of thirteen, my classmates and I were wrestling and horsing around when we hurt another classmate. I remember feeling terrible the moment I realized he had been hurt. I had not intended to cause harm, but in that moment, I had lost awareness of what I was doing and of the impact our actions could have on someone else. Looking back, I recognize how easily we can become caught up in the moment without fully considering what another person might be experiencing.

As much as I wanted to understand why others could cause harm, I also began to recognize that I was not immune to losing awareness of my own actions. Our emotions, experiences, and insecurities can influence our behaviour in ways we may not fully recognize, sometimes hurting others without intending to. I was questioning myself as much as I was questioning the world around me, but I didn’t yet have the tools to understand what was happening within me. I was beginning to realize that understanding life meant looking beyond what we see on the surface, both in others and in ourselves.

Every Friday evening, I would lay back on a grassy mound in the middle of my community centre’s roundabout driveway, staring off into the stars while waiting for my father to pick me up. This was my way of making sense of existence. Even then, there was a feeling inside me that life had to mean something deeper than simply chasing social approval. I didn’t yet have the language for it, but the search had already begun.

These experiences during my youth helped me understand that people are not simply defined by their worst moments. Much of our behaviour can be shaped by emotions, insecurities, conditioning, and pain that we may not fully understand ourselves. This does not excuse the harm we cause, but it invites us to look more deeply at what drives our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

By my teens, that same curiosity had extended to the performance and potential of the human body. I loved skiing and cycling, especially the speed, the challenge and the feeling of pushing myself to see what I was capable of. It was also a way of releasing emotions I didn’t yet know how to express. I became fascinated by endurance, recovery, nutrition, cognition and how I could improve my performance without harming my body or my mind. I explored everything from supplements, minerals and herbs to VO2 max and lactate threshold, always wanting to understand how to increase my endurance with less effort. Looking back, I can see that sport taught me a great deal about my body and gave me an outlet for what I was carrying inside, but it could not teach me how to understand everything that was happening within me. That realization would come later, after I was hospitalized with pericarditis in 2003.

By Grade 10, I had already written a 30-page “choose your own adventure” love story that somehow became a hit with my classmates and teacher. Looking back now, I realize that little book was less about teenage romance and more about the beginning of a lifelong obsession with understanding love and the human heart. Since then, I’ve written poetry, unfinished novels, spiritual reflections and made notes about consciousness, healing, and human behaviour.

Like many people, I entered adulthood trying to build success in the external world. Yet, silently, over the years, my intuition kept pulling me toward deeper questions about meaning, healing, consciousness, and the emotional suffering hidden beneath society’s polished social exterior. Even during those years, the yearning to understand our true nature, “Who am I?”, never fully left me. It quietly followed me in the background like an inner compass waiting to be acknowledged and fulfilled.

Somewhere along the way, I realized something important: I don’t really fit into labels very well. I’ve tried them on, jewellery craftsman, photographer, salesman, cyclist, businessman, portfolio manager, trader, writer, healer, yogi, researcher, misfit, but none of them fully capture who I am. The truth is, I’m just a human being navigating the vast ocean of life just like you. What others may perceive as extreme was often just my inner compass guiding me home. Since 2003, with resistance at first, life kept pulling me in the direction of learning about my true self beyond the ego mind, pushing me to embrace the transformational power of love, understanding how to heal with honesty, and using what I learned to help others find their inner healer too.

A life-threatening experience with pericarditis, a heart condition, in January 2003 deepened that curiosity into a search for greater meaning and consciousness. Then, after a cycling accident in 2010 left me lying on the street asking myself, Who am I? I was compelled to look beyond healing the body toward understanding the deeper emotional, energetic, and spiritual patterns shaping my life.

After navigating my own journey through pericarditis, adrenal burnout, heartache, two neck herniations, and a serious illness that spiralled into debilitating chronic pain and inflammation, I repeatedly found myself facing deeper challenges while being offered primarily symptom management as the answer. Time and again, finding my own way back to health shaped me into the holistic healing practitioner and advocate for higher consciousness I am today.

Through profound healing experiences, ten-day silent meditation retreats, plant medicine, Kriya Yoga, and decades of self-inquiry and integration work, I devoted my life to understanding the deeper roots of human suffering and our innate capacity to heal.

For almost a decade, I have devoted myself to a deeper study of healing that has gone far beyond my formal training and credentials. I have immersed myself in Energy Medicine, biophysics, the science and mystery of consciousness, frequency and sound, the root causes of disease, psychology, trauma and shadow work, heart coherence, meditation, the classical eight limbs of yoga, and many other fields that explore the relationship between the mind, body, energy, consciousness and wellbeing. Much of this learning has been self-directed, driven by an insatiable curiosity and a desire to understand how healing happens from every angle, both scientific and experiential.

This work has not been purely academic. It has involved tens of thousands of hours of meditation, self-inquiry, practice, research and personal experimentation, along with the humbling experience of living through my own periods of illness and recovery. Those experiences changed the way I understand human suffering. They gave me a deeper appreciation for what it means to live inside a body that is struggling, and for the patience, uncertainty and vulnerability that can come with disease. They also taught me that no single discipline has all the answers.

I don’t see these different areas of study as separate pursuits. For me, they are pieces of a much larger picture of the many dimensions of healing. I have come to appreciate how much each can teach us when we are willing to look at the whole human being.

The more I have learned, the more I have come to respect the limits of what we know, reminding me that there is still much more for us to understand. This continuing journey is what drives me to keep learning, questioning and exploring the many dimensions of healing, while remaining grounded in compassion for those who are walking their own difficult path.

Beneath our wounds and conditioning lies a deeper intelligence, and when we learn to listen to the wisdom of the heart, healing becomes possible.

Today, I support individuals who feel called to heal physically, emotionally, energetically, and spiritually. I help them reconnect with their bodies, restore balance to their nervous systems, and awaken the inner healer within. The Love Trumpet is an extension of that calling: a global invitation to reconnect with ourselves, with one another, and with a future rooted in compassion, wellbeing, and love.

My own story is why I listen the way I do. When we work together, the focus stays on your experience, your pace and your goals. It’s why I am so devoted to the deep inner work so that what I bring into work and daily life is rooted in the present moment.

I created The Love Trumpet in answer to a clear message from my soul. To integrate everything I learned and experienced throughout my healing journey as my way of being. To truly embrace the change you desire, one must embody those experiences in daily life. Creating The Love Trumpet has been an unfolding process of everything I discovered by going inward, maintaining that devotion, and living the lessons day after day.

Before this path, I spent twelve years in high finance as an investment advisor and portfolio manager, and later as a proprietary trader, managing tens of millions in client assets and navigating volatile markets under real pressure. My broader experience in business and entrepreneurship has included helping build our family’s high-end retail jewelry business, as well as work in sales and business development, consulting, and a partnership in a software startup where I served as Director of Finance and Business Development. On paper, I had everything success was supposed to give me. But this life never satisfied my soul, and it became the catalyst for the creation of The Love Trumpet, my life's purpose, and my effort to bring awareness as a tool for healing on a global scale. That gap between success and fulfillment became the beginning of everything I do now.

I kept going because resilience was what I knew, but no result ever answered the question underneath it all: Is this really what I am here to do with my life? I was burned out from trying to build wealth, and the 2008 market collapse left me deeply disillusioned with the world I had been trying to succeed in. Then, after a cycling accident in 2010 and a ten-day silent meditation retreat, something inside me became impossible to ignore. An inner voice told me it was time to leave this work, though I still had no idea what I was being called toward. I finally left finance in March 2013, trusting a gut feeling I could no longer dismiss.

A heartbreak in June 2015 sent me searching for the source of the pain through deeper introspection. A couple years later, after some intense healing work in Costa Rica and Colombia and here in Toronto, the message my higher self kept giving me was very clear: embrace the divine love that you are, become a master of energy and see through my ego, and that was only the beginning. The guidance I received was to learn frequency, vibration and how to use them for good and for healing, starting with myself, through my own practices of meditation, discernment and shadow work. Seeing through the ego meant understanding what drives the human condition: the motivations, desires, cravings and aversions of my own ego, how my thoughts and the world around me shape it, and how every ego is searching for love in the wrong places. I have learned a great deal since then, and it is what led me to where I am today, spreading love and joy around the world through my work with The Love Trumpet. For years, my doubts and insecurities talked me out of the quiet inner calling to do what my soul was asking of me. This time I listened.

For a while I imagined a life in California, surfing and skiing while helping to build a business and, eventually, opening my own. That door closed quickly, and I came home to Toronto. There I ran a friend’s company and grew it by almost double over five and a half years. But I was exhausted and overworked, and I could not shake the feeling that there was more to life than selling things I did not care for.

Then a painful breakup stopped me in my tracks. The heartbreak was so intense that I lost all desire to work, and all I wanted was to find the source of the pain. I healed, but I still did not know what I wanted to do, so I sought out a life coach and therapist who helped me sort through my goals, my dreams and what I truly wanted to create and love for. Then I went to Costa Rica, where I worked with shamans, healed my heart and connected with myself so deeply that the message became clear: to learn about and master energy and vibration, to write a book on healing, and to spread love around the world. It grew from there.

All my life I have wanted to write. I would begin, and then stop, letting insecurity and doubt silence what my soul was asking me to express. That call first came during my heart condition in 2003, and now I am finally answering it. Today I am doing what I feel called to do: to spread love, joy and healing through The Love Trumpet, and to deepen my understanding of energy, frequency and the vibration of love through my Kriya Yoga practice. I remain open to whatever else my soul asks of me, but for now the most important thing I can do is to build The Love Trumpet and use my creative energy in ways that open people to new ways of thinking about healing and wellbeing.

When I decided to dedicate myself to my vision of The Love Trumpet, I didn't know how it would unfold or how long it would take. Along the way, there were lessons that had me re-integrate what I already knew was essential in the life I wanted to lead. I had to be firmly grounded in who I was going to become, despite the world around me not understanding why I was choosing to live a life dedicated to spreading love, joy, and healing, over the old way of life I led, which had me feeling empty inside despite every advantage I had.

How I define success now is different from how I imagined myself 30 years ago. Today, I value inner peace and the commitment to my daily self-realization practices more than any outer measure of success.

The more peace, harmony, love, joy, and wellbeing I find within myself, the more naturally I want to share those feelings with the world around me. But I have also come to understand that love is not simply about feeling good. My own journey has taught me that love can bring us face to face with the parts of ourselves we have avoided, neglected, or were not yet aware of. Sometimes the lessons that help us heal are difficult, humbling, and painful for the ego to accept. Yet through greater awareness, even these experiences can become opportunities to look within, heal what needs healing, and grow into greater peace.

I share all this because I would rather walk beside you than stand ahead of you.

Peace, for me, is an ongoing practice and not a finished state. It doesn’t mean that I am not vulnerable to slipping up but the more I progress in this daily practice of inner awareness, my compassion, my patience, my devotion, and my efforts to serve a higher purpose grows and builds a stronger will to build something that will truly add value for generations to come.

The more I experience that love and peace within, the more I want to see others thrive, to be healthy, to feel loved, and to discover their own sense of harmony and peace within themselves. I know that we are all on our own journey of becoming more aware of the grace of love, of ourselves, and of the deeper truth of who we truly are. We are not all in the same place on that journey at the same time, and that is okay.

What I share may resonate deeply with some and not with others, and that is okay too. My role is simply to offer what I can with an open heart, without expectation of how it will be received.

When something I share helps another person find a little more peace, reconnect with their joy, feel more love, or move toward greater wellbeing, I feel a deep sense of joy knowing that something I have cultivated within myself has touched another life in a positive way.

I want to see us sharing with one another, cooperating, caring for each other, lifting each other up, and remembering that we are not separate from one another. I believe that when we find more peace within ourselves, we have more peace to give. When we feel more love within ourselves, we have more love to share without expecting anything in return.

Love is not something some of us have and others lack. Love is the quiet presence within us that sees without judgment. Love is our highest truth, whatever name we give it, revealed through genuine kindness, cooperation, and care for the wellbeing of everyone.

And this, to me, is the ultimate success story. Not simply what we can accomplish or accumulate for ourselves, but what happens when we learn to heal, grow, love, and thrive together. When the love already within each of us becomes how we work, how we lead, how we care for one another, and how we shape the world around us.

This is the life I want to live. This is the world I want to help create. A world where we can all heal, grow, and thrive together, each in our own way, in the grace of love.

Learn more about The Love Trumpet Mission