Join us for our monthly Healing Circle & Whirling practice. We gather to let go of our small selves and remember our divinity within. This month we welcome back CRS Founder Yasuko Kasaki to lead our prayer. And we’ll be welcoming the Winter Solstice with live music by Tomchess of the American Sufi Project! It’s such a joy to whirl with live music so we’ll be devoting extra time to that.

The participation fee is $20 with advanced registration and $25 on the day of the class.

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

Tomchess (oud, ney, morsing) is a New York City–based multi-instrumentalist, improviser, and composer who has played and recorded with some of the most esteemed players in the improvisational scene (Dewey Redman, Butch Morris, Pharoah Sanders, Drew Gress, Ronald Shannon Jackson) as well as Moroccan sintarist Hassan Hakmoun. He has performed around the world and at New York City venues like Lincoln Center, the Turkish and Pakistani embassies, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the United Nations He has played on Grammy-nominated recordings and was awarded grants from the Turkish American Society and the Maryland Council for the Arts. In 2012 he was nominated for an Independent Music Award.
https://tomchess.bandcamp.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