
December 2022
Gail Brenner, Ph.D ~ Fully Alive in the Timeless Now ~ 2-Part Online Retreat
2-Part Online Retreat
Dec. 30 & 31, 2022
9:00 am – 11:30 am, Pacific Time, each day
Time Zone Converter
Event will be recorded and
emailed to participants after each meeting.
You're welcome to join even if you can't attend all the live sessions.
The calendar might tell us that a new year is approaching, but in truth, there is only this moment, now, free and uncaused, completely fresh and new, emerging from and infused with love. In any moment, we can turn away from our minds to recognize wonder, delight, mystery, and inspiration.
Come and join this two-day retreat as we explore the potential of living the freedom that we are in our everyday lives.
• How do you discover this freedom?
• What about the fear-based mind that wants to control life?
• How can you show up as love in your relationships?
• What about challenging emotions and the frustrations of daily life?
You are wholeheartedly welcome just as you are as we share intimate, loving space in community. Together we’ll explore the practical reality of awakened living in your own direct experience. Our time together will include guided meditation, words of ancient masters, self-reflective exercises, small group conversation, and plenty of time for Q&A.
We will investigate the myth of the separate self, the power of the thinking mind to divert us, and the possibility of living the moments of your human life with awareness, freedom, acceptance, and love.
Please feel free to contact Gail with any questions about the program at gail@gailbrenner.com.
For technical questions please reach out to web@opencirclecenter.org.
“Thank you so much for your teachings and for all the compassion and love you transmit to me, and so many others. Your teachings are a gift of grace and love.” ~Pat Brown
“What you’re pointing to is so difficult to talk about in words, but you describe it so brilliantly and give such practical, actionable steps to follow that I truly, deeply get it. I just cannot express to you how transformative your approach has been for me.” ~Sandra Joseph, Broadway star and author of Unmasking What Matters
Gail Brenner, Ph.D. is your guide on this journey. She is a clinical psychologist and lover of truth with a fire that burns brightly. She brings to this work years of experience with individuals and groups and is known for creating the sense of safety and trust needed for this deeper exploration.
Sliding Scale: $50 to $80
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please Register Early if you can.
January 2023
Silent Group Meditation (Free, No Guidance)
Join us for a silent group meditation. Do your own practice quietly in the company of others. Let’s be present, together. .... more details
Mon.: 8:00am – 8:30am (PT) and Wed.: 9:00am – 9:30am (PT)
Ongoing drop-in group – attend as often as you like.
Weekly, with rare exceptions. Verify dates on Full Calendar.
Lynn Marie Lumiere, MFT ~ New Year Healing Retreat ~~~~ 3-Part Retreat
A 3-Part Retreat
Jan. 13, 14 & 15, 2023
9:00 am – 12:00 pm Pacific Time, each day
Time Zone Converter
Event will be recorded and emailed
to participants after each meeting.
You're welcome to join even if you can't attend all the live sessions.
This retreat offers an opportunity to begin the New Year by focusing on your deepest intentions and receiving therapeutic support for resolving the blocks to manifesting those intentions and being the fullest expression of who we are.
We will bring together spiritual wisdom and somatic psychology to focus on both waking up to your deepest Nature and resolving the human issues we struggle with such as depression, anxiety, low self-worth, and illness. These issues, along with the life problems they create, can interfere with our ability to recognize and rest in our Being.
The retreat will offer:
- Deepened recognition of our essential Nature through guided meditations and sharing truth
- Somatic practices to help regulate the nervous system and build resilience
- Psychotherapeutic processes for resolving negative beliefs and traumatic memories
- Sharing and dialogue in the group
- Individual spiritual and therapeutic support from Lynn Marie
You are invited to join the retreat sessions live to benefit from group interaction and processing with Lynn Marie. You are also welcomed to register and attend the retreat by recording on your own time.
Lynn Marie Lumiere, MFT is a psychotherapist and author with a focus on bringing awakened consciousness to the healing of our human body-mind issues. Her work is grounded in decades of deep spiritual work and psychotherapeutic and somatic training. Lynn Marie is a contributing author for the Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy, co-author of The Awakening West, and is the author of Awakened Relating: A Guide to Embodying Undivided Love in Intimate Relationships.
For more information se: www.lynnmarielumiere.com
Sliding Scale: $80 to $120
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please Register Early if you can.
Adam Chacksfield ~ Living In Your Desire
How do you act and make choices when you realize there’s nothing you need to be or become? How do you claim the gift of your unique embodied life when you see that all stories of life purpose are fictions?
When we are spacious enough we can zoom out and realize the absolute freedom of nonduality, and the open space of vast possibility in which our particular lives are unfolding.
From here, we can also zoom in and explore the inspiration of our deepest desires. Let’s tune in to what lights us up and what shuts us down. Let’s embrace the sensual juiciness of our journey, and honor the movement our hearts and the truth of our experience. Inspiration effortlessly brings us all the way here, move us, and creates our lives.
You don’t need to believe the fear and shame conditioning that has you ignore your desire and instead do what you’ve been taught is “normal” or what “you should do.” You get to live inside your desire, enjoy it’s erotic vitality, and unfold freely without believing in any destination.
Adam’s teaching is an expression of nondual wisdom that also passionately embraces the whole of our embodied aliveness. Adam’s reliable open-hearted presence makes him adept at supporting people in moving through the fear and shame conditioning that so often shuts us down.
Adam facilitates retreats and workshops in North America and Europe. He coaches individuals and couples. Adam also created and teaches a four-month online course called “Erotic Embodiment & Intimacy.”
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Marlies Myoku Cocheret ~ Women Only: The Free Woman!
During this Way of Woman – ‘WOW’ – gathering, the whole of you is welcome! All desire and passion is welcomed as well as all feeling, sensation, body and emotion. Nothing is excluded.
Silence is the mystery of Her from which we spring, and is sensual in nature. When the female body arrives in awareness and silence, I call that the awakening sensual body.
Our female body is designed for pleasure and goodness. When women realise how free and luscious they are, the world would be changed. Nothing, including our own imprisoned self, is able to withstand the power of embodied love in female form. She is our Innermost, our beloved Self.
In the WOW journey you will connect with your innermost and melt that into the sensuality of your beautiful female body. When you experience this, naturally you shine as who you are – the Free Woman.
Let's come together to journey and taste the finest of our nature and feminine expression - Woman! We will join in silence, movement, sensuality, questions and conversation.
I am so looking forward to joining together as One Woman Flowing.
Special Note from Marlies:
'For my women events, I work best with cisgender women. Working with transgender women is outside my area of expertise. I have a colleague who is well experienced in this field that I am happy to refer transgender women to.' - Marlies
To read more about Marlies' 'Way of Woman' events, please click HERE.
Marlies Myoku Cocheret de la Morinière has devoted her life to the Beloved. She brings a potent invitation into the deep Silence that we are. The kindness of her gentle and direct teaching guides us home like a lighthouse. Marlies has been offering satsang and retreat since 2000 when Adyashanti asked her to teach. She lives in Santa Cruz, California and works internationally as a psychologist, Hakomi therapist and Tantric Educator.
Marlies is interviewed in the book Awakened Relating. A Guide To Embodying Undivided Love in Intimate Relationships by Lynn Marie Lumiere, and in the book Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom by R.M. Robinson.
“With Adya, the bottom fell out. I deeply knew I am not this body, mind, thought, psyche, and I am also all these things as well. There was no in and/or out. All is One.”
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Mukti ~ Liberation & Incarnation: Embracing the Human Experience
Often people are drawn to spirituality to be free from a sense of division and separation and to realize deeper knowledge of the undivided state. The movement of consciousness from separation toward wholeness is one in which the individual’s identity can be liberated from the egoic state and be recognized as awareness, which can realize itself as oneness.
Identity shifts can occur in varying sequence, yet often following a short or prolonged shift into the liberated state, consciousness moves to individuate once again—not to be rooted in ego but to be rooted in one’s authentic incarnation. Through returning focus from the transcendent to the imminent, the individual can continue to see parts of the ego become uprooted and move toward their own liberation. As human consciousness shifts from egoic states, it becomes more free to express and reflect the presence and undivided consciousness of spirit.
Mukti’s presentation will be devoted to investigating how spirit enfolds what is separate and informs what is uniquely distinct. She’ll continue the investigation with audience members during a Q&A session following her talk.
Mukti, whose name is translated as “liberation,” has been a teacher at Open Gate Sangha in the lineage of Adyashanti since 2004. Her teaching methods are founded in meditation, self-inquiry, and body awareness, and bring flavors of healing, nurturing, quietude, and a refreshing down-to-earth humanity. For teaching excerpts, audio downloads, qi gong videos, and a calendar of Mukti’s current programs, visit Mukti’s website: mukti.opengatesangha.org
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Jeannie Zandi ~ Presence
Join Jeannie and friends to explore presence and discover that that’s most primarily what you are.
Jeannie’s gift for inviting people to join her in resting and rooted presence evokes a deep meeting with oneself and reality. Within that, Jeannie’s humor and iconoclasm serve to bring people into an understanding that is beyond the intellectual. Through silent and guided meditation, spontaneous talks and exchange with participants, Jeannie will host a space of clarity and warmth where the richness of relating can be explored safely and your innermost questions met fully.
Jeannie Zandi is the director of Living as Love, a nonprofit organization dedicated to seeding a culture of the Heart on the planet, inspiring, teaching and supporting people to live from their essence as Love. A year before the birth of her daughter, Jeannie was plunged into a dark night of the soul that culminated in a radical shift of consciousness. She is known for her fearless clarity, tender mercy toward humanness, and a juicy, poetic and often humorous style that draws from Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, Christian mysticism and the ongoing revelation of fully engaged living.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
February 2023
Chesaray ~ Awakening to Ground
Grounding is the most important foundation for blossoming on the spiritual path. Without grounding one can feel overwhelmed, exhausted, scattered and unable to enjoy the fruits of spiritual realization. In this class, we will bring ground to the various awakenings and energetic openings that can happen on the path through guided meditation, somatic inquiry, and exchanges.
Chesaray offers retreats, courses, and classes focused on grounding the magic of spiritual realization into daily life. Chesaray is a gifted healer that is filled with down-to-earth wisdom and loving presence. She invites us to slow down and turn towards our direct experience to discover what we are. For over 15 years she has studied and practiced ancient spiritual traditions, somatic psychology, conscious movement, holistic health, and bodywork. Because she faced tremendous difficulties that eventually opened her into the experience of Divine love, she has a gift for meeting people where they're at and supporting their awakening.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Ellen Emmet ~ The Shrine of Not Knowing: 2-part Online Mini Retreat
Feb. 24 & 25
We start at 9:00 am Pacific Time / 5:00 pm UK time /
6:00 pm Central European Time.
Time Zone Converter
Event will be recorded and emailed
to participants after each meeting.
You're welcome to join even if you can't attend all the live sessions.
We gather, invited to leave our convictions and spiritual beliefs at the door of our shared space.
Together we welcome our direct experience and let it gradually reveal its palpable yet un-nameable, source and reality.
We will not engage with the singularity of our psychology and history. However, in the immediacy of our inquiry, layers of resistance that keep us trapped in the cage of thinking will surface in the form of raw feelings, sensations, and emotions.
Each one of us is invited to fully allow, taste and face these landscapes of exile and separation, which in daily life come in the form of anxiety, addiction, hopelessness, boredom, emptiness, resistance and even despair.
Nothing needs to change and the agendas for change are surrendered as they surface.
In this sacred process something is touched and shared, the openness is made palpable, the One source of all experience begins to flow through, and we partake in the mystery of our humanity and divinity.
There will be guided meditation and conversation.
About Ellen:
Ellen’s deepest intuition was confirmed when she met her teacher in the non-dual tradition, Francis Lucille. Hearing his words, she recognised the eternal, limitless and universal nature of our shared reality. Over the years, this understanding has continued to unfold and to touch all levels of experience.
At the very same time, Ellen has never ceased to delve into the depths of her human experience, seen and unseen, thirsting for a wholeness and connectedness which appeared to be lost or obscured. This unstoppable quest brought her to therapy, Jungian workshops (and later Jungian analysis), Dream Work, Authentic Movement and creative writing.
More and more, she senses that each of our lives is a journey of revelation and integration, including its darker crossings, through which the face of truth can shine uniquely and anew, wedding us to our direct experience and connecting us to the great family of creation.
To find out more about Ellen and her offering, visit www.ellenemmet.com
Sliding Scale: $60 to $90
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please register early if you can.
Jeannie Zandi ~ Love
Join Jeannie and friends to explore presence and discover that that’s most primarily what you are.
Jeannie’s gift for inviting people to join her in resting and rooted presence evokes a deep meeting with oneself and reality. Within that, Jeannie’s humor and iconoclasm serve to bring people into an understanding that is beyond the intellectual. Through silent and guided meditation, spontaneous talks and exchange with participants, Jeannie will host a space of clarity and warmth where the richness of relating can be explored safely and your innermost questions met fully.
Jeannie Zandi is the director of Living as Love, a nonprofit organization dedicated to seeding a culture of the Heart on the planet, inspiring, teaching and supporting people to live from their essence as Love. A year before the birth of her daughter, Jeannie was plunged into a dark night of the soul that culminated in a radical shift of consciousness. She is known for her fearless clarity, tender mercy toward humanness, and a juicy, poetic and often humorous style that draws from Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, Christian mysticism and the ongoing revelation of fully engaged living.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
No one turned away for lack of funds.
Please register early if you can.
The event will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter









