Join us for a Summer Solstice Healing Circle led by Sufi Dance Instructor Lale Sayoko and CRS co-founders Yasuko Kasaki & Christopher Pelham with crystal singing bowl meditation by Miyoko Satoh. We gather to let go of our small selves and remember our divinity within. Through meditation, prayer, drumming, singing, and the whirling dance of the sufis, we join together in unity and experience our limitlessness. Our circles are held on the third Thursday of the month at CRS.

We also support the family of Sayoko’s five-year-old daughter, Amara, who is growing up with a brain tumor and all the challenges that presents. Each Thursday 9pm we join minds 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, play together, and express ourselves and find Oneness of intention.

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

About Sufi Dance Instructor 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 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