CRS invites you to join us for our monthly healing circle (see Japanese announcement below). We gather to meditate, drum, sing, dance, pray and remember the divine strength within ourselves. This month we welcome Sufi dance artist Rana Gorgani, founder of “l’Oeil Persan” – The Persian Eye – the first company in Europe devoted to Persian dance, into our circle to lead us further.
http://www.ranagorgani.com/

Rana will lead a Sufi community event at CRS on Tuesday, April 17 at 8 pm. The event is free and donations are welcome at the door.

We also 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.

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 and express ourselves and find Oneness of intention. We will begin promptly at 7:30 pm so please arrive by 7:15 pm if you can.

The participation fee is $20 with advanced registration and $25 on April 19.

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.

At 4:33am EST this morning of 4/19 our friend the artist Kimi-Tea TsukaDa, who painted the dervishes shown here, passed at her home in Los Angeles. In a telephone conversation with Yasuko Kasaki several days ago, Kimi said that the many people who had to live with pain in the past had come into her awareness and she had told them that she was now living, accepting, enduring for them. Her beautiful, loving mind has uplifted her many friends around the world, and we will include her in our prayer tonight at 9:30 pm EST during our Healing Circle. Please join us with your mind wherever you are if you are unable to attend in person. The prayer will be led by Yasuko with crystal singing bowl performance by Miyoko Satoh.

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

About Rana Gorgani

‘Neither from the East nor from the West’, Rana Gorgani was born in Germany to an Iranian mother and a Kurdish father. She subsequently grew up in France, where she still lives today.

Fascinated from an early age by the Persian culture, Rana was fortunate to grow up in a family very present in the Arts where music and poetry were a constant fixture in her household.

While traveling in Iran, she was introduced to the Daf instrument, a large Persian frame drum, and pursued learning this sacred percussion for the Kurdish Sufi rituals.

Instinctively, she became familiar with this spirituality that sounded like an inspiration and reflection of her artistic work. Finally, at the age of 24, Rana dedicated herself entirely to dance.

After several years of learning and travelling in and around Iran, Rana mastered the Iranian dances and the dances of its neighbours.

In 2009, she founded the company “l’Oeil Persan” – The Persian Eye – the first company lead by traditional dances of the Persian world in Europe.

Furthering her knowledge of dance, she obtained a Master degree in Anthropology of Dance at the University of Clermont-Ferrand (France), and is pursuing research within the Qashqa’i people, one of the many nomadic tribes of Iran.

http://www.ranagorgani.com/