April 2021
Shakti Caterina Maggi ~ Being Truth: A Practical Guide to Embodying Non-Duality in Everyday Life ~ A 5-Part Course
A 5-Part Online Course
Tuesdays, April 27, May 4, 11, 18 & 25th, 2021
10:00 am – 12:00 noon, Pacific 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.
Knowing truth is not enough to embody it. This webinar will guide the participants to actualize the recognition of our true nature as One Consciousness in the everyday life experience, and to overcome its challenges as reflections of the sense of separation. The weekly meetings will be both theoretical and experiential, with meditation or practices to follow every day, and to accompany the process.
1st Meeting: Recognizing Truth
The realization of Awareness as the fundamental cause of life is the starting point of any real spiritual process. Perception exercises and meditation will guide participants to glimpse their own true nature.
2nd Meeting: Fear or Joy?
The ego is the recurring contraction appearing in awareness. The participant will be guided to discover the constant trade we make between fear and joy, and how this can become the determinant factor of a deep alchemical transformation of our life.
3rd Meeting: The other is the You that You Haven’t Met Yet
The world will reflect the parts of the ego we are not yet conscious of. Theoretical discussion and experiential meditation will guide the participant to use the reflection of the world as an opportunity for clarity and openness to love.
4th Meeting: Being YourSelf
The individual expression blossoms once Awareness can express itself free from the hindrance of the false personality. Unclothing the ego allows a new energy to embody in life.
5th Meeting: An Imperfect Journey towards Perfection
Our spiritual journey is a never-ending process of love and devotion towards truth. As we become more conscious of the beauty of living, we discover that our apparent imperfections are the precious jewels through which we can recognize deeper and deeper who we are.
Shakti Caterina Maggi has been sharing a message of awakening to our true nature as One Consciousness since 2003. Her approach to Self-Realization is very contemporary and accessible, while profoundly in tune with Advaita and the non-dual Tantric traditions. She reveals the real possibility of seeing what we truly are, and embodying it in our everyday lives with clarity, wisdom, and humor.
She was asked to contribute to the anthology On the Mystery of Being: Contemporary Insights into the Convergence of Science and Spirituality edited by Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo, the founders of the Science and Non-Duality (SAND) Conference. She teaches in Europe, Canada and the USA, offering satsang, seminars and retreats.
Sliding Scale: $80 to $130
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please Register Early if you can.
Lynn Marie Lumiere, MFT ~ FREE TO BE: Releasing the Blocks to True Freedom ~ 3 Day Retreat
3-Part Online Retreat
April 30, May 1 & 2, 2021
3 hours each day, 9:00 am – 12:00 noon, Pacific 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.
Reflect for a moment…
Do you feel overwhelmed by all stresses of life and end up forgetting to focus on what is already free and peaceful within?
How much does your wounding, trauma or conditioning interfere with being free to be your full self?
Are you ready to let go of the pain and self-negativity and stand in the truth of who you are?
If so, this retreat will offer you deep support for healing and awakening so you can rest more in the ocean of peace, love and unity that resides in all of us.
This is a psycho-spiritual retreat that balances both awakening to our pure-love essence and psycho-somatic exploration of the pain, trauma, negative beliefs, and so on, that obstruct our ability to rest as our essence.
Lynn Marie will offer guided meditation, somatic exercises to deepen resilience, and therapeutic methods that facilitate releasing traumas and conditioned patterns. The retreat will also include sharing and dialogue in the group and in dyads.
The invitation is to let go of your daily routine as much as possible for 3 days and retreat from distractions so you can take a deeper dive into awakening and embodiment. Please plan ahead to free as much time as you can to be on retreat.
Lynn Marie Lumiere, MFT is a nondual psychotherapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and author. She offers knowledge and wisdom gained from over 30 years of experience as a therapist as well as with nondual teachings. She is the author of Awakened Relating: A Guide to Embodying Undivided Love in Intimate Relationships and The Awakening West: Evidence of a Spreading Enlightenment.
Sliding Scale: $60 to $100
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please register early if you can.
May 2021
Adam Chacksfield ~ Falling Open Together
Join Adam for Falling Open Together and invite more intimacy with the deeper movement of life through us and between us.
“We are invited to receive the ultimate gift, for which there is no substitute , worth infinitely more than all our dreams and fantasies. We accept this gift by simply falling open. When the heart and mind fall open, we find ourselves intimately present and completely available to what is here. Our struggle with reality dissolves into harmony.”
Described by Pamela Wilson as “a great messenger of truth with a unique transmission that does wonderful things for my spirit,” Adam invites us to share the direct experience of the heart and mind falling open. In this effortless opening, the suffering involved in resisting feelings and believing our thoughts spontaneously releases. This allows our natural abundance of joy, peace, wisdom and love to become apparent and available. Heart-centered and direct, Adam offers a path straight into the truth of who you are. Adam Chacksfield offers retreats worldwide exploring the depths that reveal that reveal themselves as we become more intimate with our embodied experience and the vibrantly alive field of relating. He also offers private sessions online and in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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 ~ God the Mother
Join Jeannie to celebrate God the Mother for Mother’s Day! Explore the themes of God, gender, and the integration of yin and yang that is embodied human wholeness.
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. Come join us!
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
Dorothy Hunt ~ Opening The Door To Not Knowing
This is an introductory session for the upcoming daylong online retreat May 22nd.
You are welcome to attend either one, or both events.
Can we actually know who or what anything is by thinking about it, labeling it, having an opinion about it? Does the word rose deliver its fragrance, or the thought of water quench our thirst? Are we expecting Truth to deliver an intellectual answer to our seeking? What might we discover when we open the door to not knowing? Conception is not perception. We experience life more intimately, lovingly, and profoundly when we cease imagining our thoughts –even the most “spiritual” or “righteous” ones—are truth.
Conventional knowledge is needed to function, of course, but we can so easily be trapped by our conditioned thoughts, opinions, beliefs. We live in a virtual world of our own creation depending on our interpretations of reality. We do not need to be at war with thought to begin to see that thinking that we “know” continually shuts the door on open perception and deep listening. This is as true in relationships as in the spiritual search. What if we approached more moments with “don’t know” mind, “beginners mind,” realizing that thinking does not See?
In this Sunday satsang and daylong retreat the following Saturday, we will explore experientially and meditatively what it feels like to approach life, emotions, and particularly our deepest spiritual longings, from present moment awareness. This Presence moves as openness in the mind, heart, and body. The Truth we seek reveals Itself to itself and not to the idea of a separate “me.” A mind open to not knowing is an awakened mind, open to a spontaneous, authentic and compassionate response to the moment.
Dorothy Hunt serves as Spiritual Director of Moon Mountain Sangha, teaching at the request of Adyashanti. She is the founder of the San Francisco Center for Meditation and Psychotherapy and practiced psychotherapy from 1967 to 2020. She is the author of Leaves from Moon Mountain, Only This!, and Ending the Search: From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness.
Dorothy has a long and deep connection to the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and the path of Self-Inquiry, as well as the nondual teachings of Zen, Advaita and the Christian mystics. In meeting Adyashanti, she was invited beyond identification with either the absolute or relative, finding freedom in what is awake in each of us regardless of the changing faces of experience. Dorothy offers satsang, retreats, and private meetings in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere by invitation.
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 ~ Standing Your Ground in the Blizzard of the World
During this regular monthly satsang, Marlies gently guides us to rest in the silence of our being, our secret sacred sanctuary. The more we rest as the silence that we are, the more we can stand firmly as presence in the turbulence of these times.
In this process of falling into the arms of silence, we meet along the way our own inner turbulence.
We invite you to join us to be strongly rooted in your nature in the midst of the blizzard.
There will be an opportunity to share, so please bring your experience, presence and questions to share with the group.
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
Dorothy Hunt ~ Opening The Door To Not Knowing ~ Daylong
The event will run from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm, including a 2-hour lunch break.
Can we actually know who or what anything is by thinking about it, labeling it, having an opinion about it? Does the word rose deliver its fragrance, or the thought of water quench our thirst? Are we expecting Truth to deliver an intellectual answer to our seeking? What might we discover when we open the door to not knowing? Conception is not perception. We experience life more intimately, lovingly, and profoundly when we cease imagining our thoughts –even the most “spiritual” or “righteous” ones—are truth.
Conventional knowledge is needed to function, of course, but we can so easily be trapped by our conditioned thoughts, opinions, beliefs. We live in a virtual world of our own creation depending on our interpretations of reality. We do not need to be at war with thought to begin to see that thinking that we “know” continually shuts the door on open perception and deep listening. This is as true in relationships as in the spiritual search. What if we approached more moments with “don’t know” mind, “beginners mind,” realizing that thinking does not See?
In this Sunday satsang and daylong retreat the following Saturday, we will explore experientially and meditatively what it feels like to approach life, emotions, and particularly our deepest spiritual longings, from present moment awareness. This Presence moves as openness in the mind, heart, and body. The Truth we seek reveals Itself to itself and not to the idea of a separate “me.” A mind open to not knowing is an awakened mind, open to a spontaneous, authentic and compassionate response to the moment.
Dorothy Hunt serves as Spiritual Director of Moon Mountain Sangha, teaching at the request of Adyashanti. She is the founder of the San Francisco Center for Meditation and Psychotherapy and practiced psychotherapy from 1967 to 2020. She is the author of Leaves from Moon Mountain, Only This!, and Ending the Search: From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness.
Dorothy has a long and deep connection to the teachings of Ramana Maharshi and the path of Self-Inquiry, as well as the nondual teachings of Zen, Advaita and the Christian mystics. In meeting Adyashanti, she was invited beyond identification with either the absolute or relative, finding freedom in what is awake in each of us regardless of the changing faces of experience. Dorothy offers satsang, retreats, and private meetings in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere by invitation.
Sliding Scale: $40 to $80
Some Partial Scholarships Available
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
Bruce Pardoe ~ Heart Fluency® – Directly Feel & Embody Your Awakened Nature
Do you long to continuously experience the freedom and happiness of pure awareness clearly and obviously? Are you frustrated that old patterns, emotional wounds, trauma or anxiety run your life and cloud over a fundamental well-being you know is possible? As it turns out, ordinary physical space is already free and at peace with all of the qualities of pure awareness. Using Heart Fluency's uncomplicated map we can directly sense and explore space in and around our bodies providing an accessible and comprehensive portal to awakening, non-dual truth and emotional healing.
Heart Fluency® founder Bruce Pardoe will lead this 3 hour experiential journey with group exercises, Q&A and guided meditations to directly feel your awakened nature. With Heart Flueny's 3 step practice you will also learn to utilize an embodied balance that harnesses the ever present, unlimited capacities of space to allow emotional wounds, traumas and afflictive patterns to transform into your deepest gifts.
Bio:
For more than 40 years Bruce Pardoe has been navigating and facilitating the path of inner healing and non-dual wisdom. Bruce's journey through the fires of his own complex trauma led him to develop the radically accessible and gentle Heart Fluency® method for healing emotional wounds and opening to non-dual well-being and happiness. Heart Fluency combines neuroscience and the unconditional nourishment of pure awareness in a highly accessible, heart-centered approach.
After spending over two years on silent retreat Bruce became a meditation teacher in the Vipassana tradition of Buddhism. He has completed Spirit Rock Meditation Center's 2 year Dharma Leader training and has studied extensively in Asia in the traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Advaita. Bruce has also trained in Polyvagal Theory, Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement and Hakomi's body-centered psychotherapy. Since 2007 Bruce has shared Heart Fluency trainings and workshops with hundreds of conscious individuals, therapists and healers on 4 continents.
Suggested donation: $15 to $35
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
Isira ~ Why Enlightenment is not enough: 3 Part Retreat
Three-Part Retreat
May 28, 29 & 30
7:30 – 9:30 pm, Pacific 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.
The true quest of enlightenment is to expand beyond the self, and the transcendent experience, to live an awakened life by fully integrating the spiritual and the physical worlds for the next level of human evolution and environmental wellbeing.
And in fact, our awakening is not complete without this integration.
Awakening the “self” is not enough
What truly matters is how we integrate the awakening in our daily lives ~ what we do with the awakening; where and how we live with the awakening.
Our awakening must be fully integrated and sustainable in all aspects of our lives.
It’s about living our awakening globally, not just personally.
There are two traps committed spiritual seekers can fall into
The first is to focus only on the transcendent experience; believing that this will take you all the way. And that sitting in pure being is the end game. There is a sense of removal; of not being fully immersed in the world; not facing and moving through and with the shadow; the grit and the ordinariness of life. Isira calls this “spiritual escapism.”
The second is “spiritual self centredness” to focus only on ‘self’ and forgetting that your awakening is intrinsically connected to everything around you - your environment, your relationships, and the cosmos. We do not awaken in isolation.
In this 3 day retreat
In this 3 day retreat Isira will share what it takes to not just be spiritual but to live spiritual ~ to integrate and fully live a sustainable and an awakened life.
You will:
- Discover how to integrate the spiritual and physical worlds with “The Four Pillars.” These are the foundations of holistic enlightenment, an awakened society and an awakened world.
- Understand how to move with, and through, the personal and collective (global) shadow, rather than bypass it.
- Be guided into transformative meditations that you can use again and again.
- Have your deepest questions answered.
This will support you to expand and embrace holistic enlightenment ~ to live awakening - emotionally and psychologically - in your relationships, our community and our environment.
About Isira
Isira (pronounced "I-sai-ra") is a wisdom keeper and spiritual leader of Australian Indigenous heritage who has been ordained by His Holiness Dalai Lama. Embodying wisdom from the teachings from her ancestors, eastern initiations, and the many challenges of her life experience; Isira brings rare clarity and unconditional love, to the challenges we face.
Isira is an author, teacher and speaker bringing the power of consciousness to people around the world. She offers a way to respond, realign ourselves and move forward to a new more empowered life. In the words of many - she is a truly transformative presence.
“I am Universal. I am not of one religion, one lineage, one race or one country. My lineage is consciousness. My religion is love. And the world is my sacred home.” ~ Isira
Watch an hour-long conversation between Isira and Open Circle's Sara.
Sliding Scale: $50 to $80
Some Partial Scholarships Available
Please Register Early if you can.
Georgia Simone ~ Welcome to The Holding Space
A space where we can gather together and BE exactly as we are
A space where the full spectrum of your human experience is invited
Calm, nervous, open, closed,
ALL is welcome here.
It's in this gentle embrace that everything can start to unravel. It's in this open space that we can begin to unwind the strategies that no longer serve us. This is the space that early mis-attunement failed to foster, the space where love blooms and new life can emerge. This is the space where all that quivers and shakes can come to rest, and where all that contorts can untwist into greater alignment.
Through gentle exploration and somatic awareness you can cultivate a new way of being with your most challenging patterns. No longer a victim of the push and pull of inner disturbance, you can step forward with greater confidence, knowing that whatever comes your way, you embody the resilience and the capacity to meet and integrate it.
You can expect a deeply held space where you’ll be invited to slow down, tune in, and track your present-moment experience. As you awaken and refine a more subtle way of Being and Being With, you can slowly but surely become the space – the container and the field – where healing takes place.
Bio:
The first leg of Georgia Simone’s path exposed her to the teachings of Advaita Vedanta, which provided her with the foundation she needed to dis-identify from pain and suffering. However, despite a growing freedom, a significant bypass took place, as her orientation towards transcendence reinforced her deep disconnection from Life. Upon seeing this, her focus became addressing the unresolved trauma that had woven its way into every fibre of her being.
After many years of wading through this marshland of conditioning, she now shares her discoveries with others. She believes that the spiritual path is as much about arriving here fully - as an embodied human being - as it is about dissolving into the infinite source that makes this life possible. How can we die to the absolute, while deeply embracing our relative human experience? This Living inquiry is her Life’s prayer.
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