Prayer for Amara: Sound Meditation + Whirling

Dear friends of CRS and the Williams family,

CRS invites you to join us for our monthly sound and movement meditation. We gather to remember the divine strength within ourselves and to support the family of Kenji and Sayoko Williams’ five-year-old daughter, Amara, who is growing up with a brain tumor and all the challenges that presents. Our minds will join with Amara’s prayer circle of hundreds of people around the world.

Following a crystal singing bowl meditation (CRS healer Miyoko Satoh) and prayer circle (CRS Founder Yasuko Kasaki), we’ll whirl together with live percussion by Saco Yasuma, Senko Nishimura, and friends. Whirling is a devotional dance practice that Amara’s mother, performing artist Lale Sayoko, has been exploring as a way of uniting her dance practice with her prayers for her daughter. No experience is necessary.

The participation fee is $20 with advanced registration and $25 on Dec 21. 50% of the proceeds go to the Williams family.

Through whirling, we learn to trust ourselves to go off balance, to be dizzy, to surrender control as we give ourselves over to prayer and connect with a greater power, the still center within, around which we turn, that we may share our divine strength and bear witness to the divinity in others.

If you are quiet and in a state of prayer when you Turn, offering everything of yourself to God, then when your body is spinning, there is a completely still point in the center… The heavens respond; and all the invisible kingdoms join in the dance. But the world does not understand. They think we Turn in order to go into some sort of trance. It is true that sometimes we do go into that state you call ecstasy, but that is only when we know and experience at the same time. We do not Turn for ourselves. We turn around in the way we do so that the Light of God may descend upon the earth. As you act as a conduit in the Turn, the light comes through the right hand, and the left hand brings it into this world… We turn for God and for the world, and it is the most beautiful thing you can imagine. — Mevlevi Shaikh Suleyman Hyatt Dede

About Lale Sayoko

Lale was one of the founding members of Japan’s famous Samanyolu professional bellydance group, and has since developed her own solo career touring with UK’s Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers on a 44 city tour of the UK, to Turkey’s Baba Zula, to New York’s Bella Gaia multimedia Earth from Space journey show. Appearing in Japanese and American magazines and newspapers, Lale aspires for dance to be a powerful communicator though traditional technique and spiritual embodiment. She has lately been studying Sufi dance with Rana Gorgani.
http://www.lalesayoko.com