CRS Healing Circle: Meditation + Whirling Prayer

Join us Thursday, April 18, 2019 at 7:15 pm for our monthly Healing Circle + Whirling (Sufi Dance) Prayer led by CRS co-founder Christopher Pelham and Sufi Dance Artist Lale Sayoko. We gather to let go of our small selves and remember our divinity within.

This month we’ll celebrate the earthiness of spring with live didgeridoo sound healing by Evan Worldwind, drumming/percussion by all of us and incense handmade from local plants by Queen of Incense.

Bring in any issue — relationship trauma, #metoo, disease, money issue, depression — and surrender it to Spirit. Remember who you are. Receive new guidance. Experience love’s presence in a safe and supportive community. Heal yourself and others. We will enjoy herbal tea and a snack at the end — social time!

Please feel free to bring your frame drum, rattle, flute, whistle, chimes, singing bowl, or other instrument. You don’t need to be experienced. Together, we will learn to listen to one another, play together, and express ourselves and find Oneness of intention.

Please do not eat for two hours before the start to reduce your chance of feeling sick during the whirling, and wear only solid colors as patterns can distract the eyes of those who are whirling.

The participation fee is $20 with advanced registration and $25 at the door. Direct registration link:
https://www.crsny.org

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

Sufi Dance Instructor Lále Sayoko 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 and in April 2018 Gorgani awarded her the International Sufi Dance Certification Of Cid UNESCO, granting her authority to teach Gorgani’s method of Sufi dance training.
http://www.lalesayoko.com

Yasuko Kasaki (meditation/prayer) is an internationally beloved spiritual writer, counselor, healer, lecturer and translator from Tokyo, Japan. The founder of CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing), the first and only spiritual center devoted to the teaching and practice of A Course in Miracles (ACIM) in New York City, she is widely recognized as the person most responsible for the spread of ACIM throughout Japan. She has taught and worked with thousands of people from around the world to help resolve their mental and physical issues and witness miracles. She is the author of 16 books in Japanese about ACIM, as well as numerous novels, short stories, essays and collections of photographs. Her translations of the ACIM Workbook and books by ACIM writers Jon Mundy, Gabrielle Bernstein and David Hoffmeister and others have also been published in Japan. Meditation and communication with Holy Spirit form the foundation of her classes.
http://www.yasukokasaki.com

Christopher Pelham is a spiritual healer/counselor/teacher/artist who draws on practices from ACIM, Non-Violent Communication, improvisational theater, Sufism, and contemporary shamanism to help people remember who they really are. He is the Director and co-founder of CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing). He has also taught and/or offered healing in London, in Japan, at the 2018 Awakening to the One Mind Retreat, and at the 2017 Enlight Festival of A Course in Miracles in Ibiza, Spain.