December 2024
John Prendergast ~ Being No One; Being Your Self ~ Bay Area Daylong Retreat
The freer we are of our self-image and story and all of the emotional reactions and somatic contractions that go with this limited identity, the freer we are to simply be ourself – a living mystery not separate from the whole of life. Self-inquiry facilitates an unveiling, unlearning, spontaneous letting go, and discovery of our true nature. This meeting will include silent and guided meditations, a talk, dyadic self-inquiry, and intimate, powerful, experiential conversations.
John Prendergast, Ph.D is a spiritual teacher, retired psychotherapist, and retired Adjunct Professor of Psychology at CIIS, well known for his pioneering work in integrating non-dual wisdom and psychotherapy. He studied with the European sage Jean Klein for many years, as well as with Adyashanti, who gave him dharma transmission in 2023. He is the author of The Deep Heart (2019), In Touch (2015), and a new book, Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality (March, 2025) from Sounds True.
www.listeningfromsilence.com
YouTube channel
The meeting will be from 10:00am to Noon and 2:00pm to 4:30pm, with a break for lunch.
Please bring your own lunch, or feel free to go into town to one of the restaurants or to Good Earth Natural Foods.
Pre-registration required, as space is limited.
Registration closes at 5 pm on Dec. 6th
Suggested donation: $75
(Any amount acceptable. No one turned away for lack of funds.)
PRE-REGISTER HERE & PAY AT DOOR WHEN YOU ARRIVE.
(Cash or Check only)
This event is Co-sponsored by Open Circle & the Schwartz Family Trust.
All proceeds, above covering event costs, will go to the
Schwartz Family Trust to support Rob Schwartz’s vision of
his property being available for Open Circle retreats and events.
Event donations will go directly to the Schwartz Family Trust, rather than to Open Circle.
If you want to contribute more for this project, you can do so at the event,
or contact us for more information (contributuons, loan, volunteer).
For inquiries contact LocalEvents@opencirclecenter.org
Location:
The meeting will be held at a private home in the Fairfax hills, with views of Mount Tam and hiking trails.
Address and directions will be provided upon registration.
If you have symptoms of a respiritory infection, or have had a recent
Covid exposure or positive test, please stay home out of consideration for others.
January 2025
Pamela Wilson ~ Love Wisdom and Strength ~ Bay Area Daylong Retreat
Gathering together to nourish each other in rooting and spreading our transmission branches wide to benefit all Beings. Please join Pamela and your fellow sages to celebrate the New Year together, hosted by Open Circle Center.
Pamela Wilson evokes through dialogue, inquiry and her very presence the qualities of unconditional love and radical acceptance. She is celebrated for her ability to open the heart and create a space in which long-cherished struggles and notions about one’s identity relax. Featured in the book Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom, Pamela is at her best in heart-felt dialogue, so please bring your questions!
More about Pamela: www.pamelasatsang.com
The meeting will be from 10:30am to 4:30pm, with a break for lunch.
Bring your own lunch, or drive 5 minutes into town where there are restaurants, as well as the Good Earth Natural Foods Store that has a full hot and salad bar, plus deli.
Pre-registration required, as space is limited.
Registration closes at midnight on Dec. 31st
Sliding Scale: $60 to $120
No one turned away for lack of funds.
For inquiries contact LocalEvents@opencirclecenter.org
Location:
The meeting will be held at a private home in the Fairfax hills, with views of Mount Tam and hiking trails.
Address and directions will be provided upon registration.
If you have symptoms of a viral infection, or have had a recent
Covid exposure or positive test, please stay home out of consideration for others.
Jeannie Zandi ~ Love’s Wild Heart: When Human Meets Divine (In-Person & Livestream)
A Year to Love: Claiming What You're Really Here For and Living It
January 2025 Bay Area Events with Jeannie Zandi
Join spiritual teacher Jeannie Zandi for a series of Bay Area gatherings (in-person and livestream) exploring how to unite our humanity and divinity, becoming love's instrument in an aching world. This is an invitation to make 2025 the year you live what you're here for.
Attend any or all in this series of In-Person events.
Each session is complete and meaningful on its own.
Livestream also available for Jan. 13th to 16th events.
January 12: Sebastopol, CA ~ Awakening Your Heart's Essential Power
The Heart's Revolution: Three Nights of Radical Presence, in Berkeley, CA
January 13: Berkeley, CA ~ Melting the Walls Around the Heart
January 14: Berkeley, CA ~ Standing in Love's Fire
January 16: Berkeley, CA ~ Being Love's Instrument in the World
January 15: San Rafael, CA ~ Love's Wild Heart: When Human Meets Divine
Jan 18th & 19th: In-Person RETREAT in Sausalito, CA ~ Earth and Sky: The Dance of Being Human
Click here to access details & registration for ALL events in series.
"Love's Wild Heart: When Human Meets Divine"
January 15th, 7-9pm
First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael, CA (Chapel)
In this evening of meditation, teaching and exchange, Jeannie invites us to discover what becomes possible when we fully embrace both our humanity and our divinity. What if 2025 was the year you stopped running from your humanness and discovered it as the very gateway to your essence? As the familiar structures of our world shake and shift, we're called to embody a love that can hold it all–our messiness and our majesty, our limitations and our limitlessness. We'll explore practical ways to heal the ancient split between humanness and divinity, discovering how our very humanity, fully embraced, reveals itself as love's perfect instrument. This is the time we've been preparing for–to live as the marriage of heaven and earth, right here, right now.
The world doesn't need more spiritual bypassing or human perfection - it needs your whole heart, where human and divine unite in love's endless dance. Let 2025 be the year you come all the way home to who you really are.
Jeannie Zandi is a spiritual teacher who supports people to integrate awakening into every aspect of human experience and to bring their heart's offering to life. Known for her potent blend of spiritual mastery and grounded humanness, she creates transformational spaces with fierce tenderness, irreverent wisdom, and unwavering presence, inspiring students to embody their deepest truth in everyday life.
Her gift for inviting people into resting, rooted presence evokes a deep meeting with oneself and reality. Her disarming humor and directness invite us beyond mere intellectual understanding into direct experience. Through silent and guided meditation, spontaneous talks, and authentic dialogue, Jeannie hosts a space of clarity and warmth where the richness of experience can be explored safely and innermost questions met fully.
At the heart of her teaching is the recognition that life itself is the ground through which we are purified as vessels for divine expression. She guides students to embrace every moment—from mundane to challenging—as fuel for awakening, transforming daily life into a practice of embodied truth. Her work bridges the mystical with the practical, moving beyond abstract concepts into fully embodied awakening. Jeannie calls students to mature into capable, authentic expressions of love and truth, serving the whole with wisdom and courage. This devotional path invites alignment with the divine, where life's challenges become opportunities to manifest love in action
For January 15th
Suggested donation: $15 to $30
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Pre-registration for In-Person attandance closes at Midnight on Jan. 14 (the night before event)
Pre-registration is encouraged, but you can also just show up & pay at door. Come & join us!
OR
If you register for Recording access by event date, link to access it will be sent to you within a week.
If you register for Recording access AFTER event date, please forward your confirmation email to web@opencirclecenter.org to notify us that you registered after event date.
For inquiries contact LocalEvents@opencirclecenter.org
If you have symptoms of a respiratory infection, or have had a recent
Covid exposure or positive test, please stay home out of consideration for others.
February 2025
Dorothy Hunt ~ Flowing with Love’s River ~ Bay Area Daylong Retreat
A road might end at a single house,
but it’s not love’s road.
Love is a river. . . .
--Rumi
Known or unknown, there is a river of Love flowing in the heart. It may appear as longing, seeking, laughing, weeping, birth, life, and death. Its current can turn our attention inward, burn our illusions, and return us Home. Sometimes it overflows the banks of pain and pleasure and delivers gratitude for even the most challenging moments. Its movement can be felt when we are touched by some small act of kindness. At times, we might run away, hiding from love, fearful of our vulnerability in the face of its power. Or we might try to demand love, or argue with love, not knowing we will lose. This river flows to the ocean of our essence, where our separation dissolves in its silent depths.
Please join Dorothy Hunt for an exploration of Love’s presence and spontaneous movement in our lives. This daylong will include guided meditation, silent sitting, satsang, poetry and discussion. Perhaps we may discover, in the words of Nisargadatta, that “Awareness is love in action” here and now--the awake Mystery that knows no “other,” and loves us unconditionally. To discover this love is to BE love.
Dorothy Hunt currently serves as Spiritual Director of Moon Mountain Sangha, teaching at the request and in the spiritual lineage of Adyashanti. The flavor of her teaching blends Advaita and Zen with a deep welcoming of the human expressions of the Mystery. Dorothy is the founder of the San Francisco Center for Meditation and Psychotherapy, and practiced psychotherapy from 1967 until her retirement in 2020. She is the author of Only This!, Leaves from Moon Mountain, and Ending the Search: From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness. In addition, she is a contributing author to two books on Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, and the editor of Love: A Fruit Always in Season.
Presently, Dorothy offers satsang and retreats via Zoom, and dokusan by phone. For more information, please visit www.dorothyhunt.org
The meeting will be from 10:30am to 4:30pm, with a break for lunch.
Bring your own lunch, or drive 5 minutes into town where there are restaurants, as well as the Good Earth Natural Foods Store that has a full hot and salad bar, plus deli.
Pre-registration required, as space is limited.
Registration closes at midnight on Feb. 8
Sliding Scale: $60 to $120
No one turned away for lack of funds.
For inquiries contact LocalEvents@opencirclecenter.org
Location:
The meeting will be held at a private home in the Fairfax hills, with views of Mount Tam and hiking trails. Address and directions will be provided upon registration.
If you have symptoms of a viral infection, or have had a recent
Covid exposure or positive test, please stay home out of consideration for others.
Community Work Party, Fairfax, CA
Come enjoy community and help work on the beautiful land in Fairfax that was purchased by Open Circle co-founder Rob Schwartz a few years before his death. Help Rosie, the caretaker of the land, and Open Circle in continuing to realize Rob's dream of using this special property as a place to gather together in satsang.
The emphasis of the day will be on clearing trails and creating space around the outdoor meeting sites on the property. This will include raking, pulling Scotch broom, using a small hand or circular saw to trim small branches off fallen trees, repairing fencing, and some watering. And preparing a community salad!
We will start at 10:00am with a brief meditation. We will then work until noon, enjoy a potluck lunch until 1:30, then go back to work, ending around 4:00 pm with another brief meditation. You are free to come and go as your schedule allows.
Please bring work gloves and any tools you may have for clearing trails. Dress in layers and bring a hat. Long sleeves and long pants are recommended as we will be working around poison oak.
Also, please bring a dish to share, and water to stay well hydrated. And feel free to bring your friends!
Heavy rain will cancel.
RSVP/Registration is requested (though not required) to give us a sense of how many people are coming.
We will also then provide the address and directions.
Click here to access link to RSVP
Find out more »Amoda Maa ~ An Inquiry into the Living Truth of Freedom (In-Person & Livestream)
Open Circle is hosting a series of SATSANGS & a DAYLONG with Amoda Maa in California, USA.
February 27th (7-9 pm, PT) ~ Berkeley, CA
February 28th (7-9 pm, PT) ~ Mill Valley, CA
March 1st Daylong (11:00am - 5:00pm, PT) ~ Fairfax, CA
March 2nd (2-4 pm, PT) ~ Sebastopol, CA
All events are In-Person ~
Livestream is also available for Feb. 27th to March 1st
Click here to access details & registration for ALL events in series.
Amoda Maa invites an open-hearted honesty to the exploration of what it means to live as freedom in all circumstances. She offers profound pointers to how this freedom reveals itself if we are willing to surrender all resistance to “what is” and how the light of our essential nature shines through all experience when the “veil of self" comes undone. Through dialogue, inquiry, and guided meditation she supports the recognition of that which is beyond the duality of perception, thought and feeling, and takes us to the experience of the ever-present and unchanging reality of awareness. This unbounded awareness is the eternal ground of Being … and this is the source of true peace and freedom.
This is a two-hour meeting, including guided meditation/silence, discourse and Q&As.
Amoda Maa offers a profound invitation to all those who wish to embody the truth of awakened consciousness in the midst of everyday life. Amoda’s teachings are free from any ideology and are not affiliated with any lineage or tradition, and yet the luminous truth is the same nondual understanding at the core of many spiritual traditions.
She offers meetings and retreats in the USA and Europe, is the author of several books, and is founder and spiritual director of the Amoda Maa Foundation.
www.amodamaa.com
Suggested donation: $15 to $30
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Pre-registration for In-Person attandance closes at Midnight on Feb. 27 (the night before event)
Pre-registration is encouraged, but you can also just show up & pay at door. Come & join us!
OR
If you register for Recording access by event date, link to access it will be sent to you within a week.
If you register for Recording access AFTER event date, please forward your confirmation email to web@opencirclecenter.org to notify us that you registered after event date.
For inquiries contact LocalEvents@opencirclecenter.org
If you have symptoms of a respiratory infection, or have had a recent
Covid exposure or positive test, please stay home out of consideration for others.
March 2025
Amoda Maa ~ Discovering Freedom as the Natural State of Open Awareness ~ Daylong (In-Person & Livestream)
An opportunity to meet and dialogue with Amoda Maa in an intimate setting. In this sacred meeting space, there is an amplification of the field of presence and the possibility to open to the innermost discovery of what is already here as the natural state of open awareness.
Amoda Maa offers profound pointers to how this freedom reveals itself if we are willing to surrender all resistance to “what is” and how the light of our essential nature shines through all experience when the “veil of self" comes undone. Through dialogue, inquiry, and guided meditation she supports the recognition of that which is beyond the duality of perception, thought and feeling, and takes us to the experience of the ever-present and unchanging reality of awareness. This unbounded awareness is the eternal ground of Being … and this is the source of true peace and freedom.
Find out more »John Prendergast ~ Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality ~ Bay Area Daylong Retreat
Join us for a daylong introduction to John’s new book from Sounds True - Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality. In this meeting we will explore different dimensions of the ground - individual, archetypal, and universal - and experience how to recognize and effectively welcome resistance to opening to our deepest ground. There will be silent and guided meditations, a talk, a group or dyadic inquiry, and experiential conversations.
Copies of the new book will be available for purchase.
John Prendergast, Ph.D is a spiritual teacher, retired psychotherapist, and retired Adjunct Professor of Psychology at CIIS, well known for his pioneering work in integrating non-dual wisdom and psychotherapy. He studied with the European sage Jean Klein for many years, as well as with Adyashanti, who gave him dharma transmission in 2023. He is the author of The Deep Heart (2019), In Touch (2015), and a new book, Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality (March, 2025) from Sounds True.
www.listeningfromsilence.com
YouTube channel
The meeting will be from 10:00am to Noon and 2:00pm to 4:30pm, with a break for lunch.
Please bring your own lunch, or feel free to go into town to one of the restaurants or to Good Earth Natural Foods.
Pre-registration required, as space is limited.
Registration closes at Midnight on March 7th
Suggested donation: $75
(Any amount acceptable. No one turned away for lack of funds.)
PRE-REGISTER HERE & PAY AT DOOR WHEN YOU ARRIVE.
(Cash or Check only)
This event is Co-sponsored by Open Circle & the Schwartz Family Trust.
All proceeds, above covering event costs, will go to the
Schwartz Family Trust to support Rob Schwartz’s vision of
his property being available for Open Circle retreats and events.
Event donations will go directly to the Schwartz Family Trust, rather than to Open Circle.
If you want to contribute more for this project, you can do so at the event,
or contact us for more information (contributuons, loan, volunteer).
For inquiries contact LocalEvents@opencirclecenter.org
Location: The meeting will be held at a private home in the Fairfax hills, with views of Mount Tam and hiking trails. Address and directions will be provided upon registration.
If you have symptoms of a respiritory infection, or have had a recent
Covid exposure or positive test, please stay home out of consideration for others.
Lisa Schumacher ~ Your True Nature (In-Person & Livestream)
A meeting with Lisa is an opportunity to step away from your day to day life and devote time for inquiry into the source of who you are. There will be a few moments of silence to start the meeting and then Lisa will speak and invite you to share about your realizations and ask questions about awakening.
In Lisa’s meetings, she invites you to rest in stillness. Your discoveries and questions about awakening, deepening, and the unfolding truth are welcome. The teaching is in the tradition of Gangaji, who is a student of Papaji, who had his awakening at the feet of Ramana Maharshi.....
LEARN MORE HERE
Lisa Schumacher ~ Let Love Lead You: Return to what is Sacred ~ Daylong (In-Person & Livestream)
A meeting with Lisa is an opportunity to step away from your day to day life and devote time for inquiry into the source of who you are. There will be a few moments of silence to start the meeting and then Lisa will speak and invite you to share about your realizations and ask questions about awakening.
In Lisa’s meetings, she invites you to rest in stillness. Your discoveries and questions about awakening, deepening, and the unfolding truth are welcome. The teaching is in the tradition of Gangaji, who is a student of Papaji, who had his awakening at the feet of Ramana Maharshi.....
LEARN MORE HERE