November 2019
Stephan Bodian ~ Just Be Who You Are!
“Just be who you are.” This simple injunction from Ramana Maharshi has the potential to cut through all our conditioning and invite us to return directly to our very own true self. The first step involves penetrating through to our deepest, groundless ground and abiding in unconditional, nondual presence. No self, no other, just This, the one without a second! This is what I AM.
But the next step is often the more challenging: Clearly expressing the light and the love that we’ve realized ourselves to be through this tender, imperfect human form. Remembering and abiding as who we are amid the many challenges of intimate relationships and work in the world. Knowing who we are, how do we keep getting hooked in and forgetting—and how can we snap out of the trance of separation and return home?
Let’s meet together in satsang to explore this dance of embodying the light. Includes teachings, guided meditation, and ample time for dialogue and discussion.
Stephan Bodian has been sharing the direct approach to spiritual awakening for more than 40 years. A former Buddhist monk and a longtime student of Advaita master Jean Klein, Stephan received Dharma transmission from Adyashanti in 2001. Since 2007 he has taught the annual months-long School for Awakening, which will begin again, in online form, in January 2020. His books include Wake Up Now and Beyond Mindfulness.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
Find out more »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 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
Find out more »Pamela Wilson ~ The Love That Does Not Come or Go ~ 4-day Online Retreat
Let’s all gather with curiosity and innocent noticing within to become aware of the constancy of Love. Love is everywhere present, yet overlooked as it does not move! It adores being seen and unseen. Invoked by friendship, devotion and gratitude, it blooms revealing itself as that which holds everything and animates. So many names it has, including ours, it is tender and strong, fierce and subtle. Wise and still curious. Intimate and reserved, all-knowing and empty of the past, though it has seen it all.
To live as this is relaxing. Life, serene, strong and satisfied!
Nothing is required to return to this our naturalness, but it likes when Awareness notices and feeds it! Shall we?
This Retreat consists of 4 live and interactive 2-hour Satsangs with Pamela in Zoom (a total of 8 hours).
Pamela 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
Sliding scale: $70 to $110
Find out more »John Prendergast ~ An Introduction to the Deep Heart
10 am to 12 noon (Pacific Time - San Francisco, CA, USA) Time Zone Converter
The great human quest is to discover who we really are—a discovery that changes our lives and the lives of those around us. With The Deep Heart, John Prendergast invites you on a pilgrimage within, using the heart as a portal to your deepest psychological and spiritual nature. The Deep Heart is John’s term for the subtle center of emotional and energetic sensitivity, relational intimacy, profound inner knowing, and wholeness found within our hearts.
In this experiential guide, John offers precise and potent meditative inquiries to help you open your heart, see through your core limiting beliefs, and discover the true nature of your being. He brings a depth of experience, insight, warmth, and compassion to his teaching work, and is especially skillful in guided meditative inquiries and one-on-one dialogues.
John J. Prendergast is a spiritual teacher, psychotherapist and retired adjunct professor of psychology at CIIS, known for his pioneering work in integrating nondual wisdom and psychotherapy. A long-time student of both Jean Klein and Adyashanti, he was asked to share the dharma by Dorothy Hunt. He is the author of the forthcoming The Deep Heart: Our Portal Presence, as well as In Touch: How to Tune in to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
PLEASE REGISTER EARLY if you can. Review in advance info for joining event.
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All event are shown in PACIFIC TIME, as in San Francisco, CA, USA:
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December 2019
Jeannie Zandi ~ Listening from Presence
Join Jeannie and friends to learn the art of listening from presence, a useful relational skill as well as a form of meditation. Learn how grounding in one’s sovereignty and felt sense of being serves the warm and clear lending of one’s heart to another.
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 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. Residing in Colorado, she travels widely in the US, bringing a down-to-earth embodied teaching of living as love.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
Find out more »Tilicho ~ On Spiritual Concepts and Paradoxes
Tilicho offers a series of four satsangs "Seeing Through the Mist of Spiritual Concepts and Paradoxes" to help having a clear vision of the ocean of Consciousness.
Spiritual teachings generally focus on Self-knowledge (finding who we really are) or on the mind (self-integration). Yet, is the ocean of consciousness separate from the waves (the movements of the mind as thoughts and emotions)?
Depending on angles of perception, spiritual vocabulary and concepts vary. This often creates confusion in the mind of spiritual seekers. This serie of satsangs is an invitation to inquire and gain clarity. When the veils of illusion are removed, the ever present jewel of the Heart is revealed
Tilicho satsangs start with 15mns of silence, followed by Q&A. Her teaching unfolds according to your questions.
Satsang 1: On Spiritual Concepts and Paradoxes - December 7th
What is really meant by non-doing, surrender, silence, stillness? Is the path efforless or does it require vigilance? What is Reality? What is time? Can worldly life and sexuality co-exist with spirituality? You are invited to explore and clarify all sorts of concepts and ideas.
Satsang 2: On Truth (date coming soon)
Satsang 3: On Non-duality (date coming soon)
Satsang 4: On Sat-Chit-Ananda: the Trinity (date coming soon)
Who are you? What is wholeness? What is the Real meaning of the Trinity? What are the obstacles to realise it? What is the source of harmony, within and without? You are invited to have clarity on the most ancient and unconscious knot of human mind and history.
Tilicho will also offer a comprehensive teaching "From Self-knowledge to self-integration: Initiation into Love and Freedom". In order to register to this serie of "Initiation Retreats", previous participation in all four satsangs as well as in the workshop "Setting the Fondation" is requested.
About Tilicho
Tilicho spontaneously realized the Self in 1998 without following any teaching or practice. The absence of spiritual conditioning allowed her to see through the veils of spiritual idealism and illusions. She ended up spending thirteen years in Tiruvannamalai in south India, the seat of Ramana Maharshi and the sacred mountain, Arunachala. While recognizing the beauty of the Advaita teachings, she also observed that they can easily be misunderstood and distorted. Although the Self is eternally free from the world, it is not separate from it. Clarity does not exclude openness. Her teaching stresses the need to combine Masculine and Feminine qualities and approaches. It is an invitation to find unity within and without.
“May all beings realize who they truly are! Om Sat Chit Ananda.”
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
Find out more »Amoda Maa ~ Standing as Openness in the Face of Brokenness and Loss
Join Amoda in an intimate dialogue that invites you to reject nothing, welcome everything, and surrender into the deepest falling of the open heart. Includes a silent and/or guided meditation, discourse, and ample time for questions and answers.
“Listen to the visitors who knock on your heart … knocking from the inside. Shame, pain, loneliness, grief and more … all these are your allies not your foes. They yearn to come in, to be acknowledged, accepted, loved. For what is broken is the doorway to gold, what is shattered is the entrance to inconceivable love, what brings you to your knees is not a punishment but God’s invitation. Your brokenness is holy.”
Amoda is a contemporary spiritual teacher, offering meetings and retreats to support and deepen the living of an awakened life. She has been sharing her teachings since 2012, initially at small gatherings in the UK. Today, she lives in the US and her teachings are followed by a growing number of seekers world-wide. She is the author of Embodied Enlightenment, as well as Radical Awakening and Change Your Life, Change Your World. While often referred to as a ‘nondual teacher,’ she prefers to emphasize the full embracement of the human experience as a path to liberation. She brings to her teachings a depth and breadth of understanding of the human journey, born out her own immersion in the furnace of personal transformation.
Suggested donation: $15 to $25
Find out more »Isaac Shapiro ~ Authentic Autonomy: Maturing of the Heart ~ Online Retreat
3-day Online Retreat with Isaac Shapiro:
Authentic Autonomy: Maturing of the Heart
December 13, 14, 15, 2019
11:00 am - 1:00 pm Pacific Time
Time Zone Converter
As life lives us, a recognition of our true nature makes it possible for the automatic unconscious patterns that produce a sense of disease and separateness, to come home. This allows living as love - the nectar which benefits all beings.
Join Isaac Shapiro for a three-day immersion into simplicity of being with what is. From the comfort of your home, you will have the opportunity to explore yourself with like-minded community from around the world. Through direct yet playful inquiry into what is, we will be unraveling conditioning of the mind and the nervous system. The format of the meetings is interactive and spontaneous, deeply in tune with what wants to emerge in the moment.
Isaac Shapiro is an internationally known facilitator and non-dual teacher, fascinated with life lived in alignment with the world’s wisdom traditions. A former student of H.W.L. Poonja (Papaji), Isaac draws on a broad spectrum of understanding, from Advaita to neurophysiology to some of the latest discoveries in quantum physics, which he applies in a light-hearted but direct way.
Through years of working with people, Isaac has cultivated and refined an ability to track what is happening in the nervous system of participants. Bringing this awareness to people’s attention, allows our natural, innate self-regulating mechanism to be re-established.
More about Isaac Shapiro: www.isaacshapiro.org
This Three-Day Online Retreat will consist of:
- Three 2-hour Meetings in Truth with Isaac Shapiro (total of 6 hours)
- Video and Audio Recordings of Meetings with Isaac
We meet via Zoom, an online platform allowing for live video conversations. You will have the opportunity to see/hear and be seen/heard by Isaac and other participants. You will also have the option to switch your camera off and remain invisible. You may also join by phone.
To proceed to Registration, please affirm that you have read and agree to these terms:
click here to READ TERMS.
Registration: $60 - $100
Please register early if you can.
For practical questions please contact Sara at sara@opencirclecenter.org.
January 2020
Neelam ~ The Power of Self Inquiry, and the Role of Nervous Systems in Awakening, Embodiment and Freedom ~ 3-hour TeleSatsang
This call is an invitation to Presence and to Neelam’s teaching, and a practical exploration of the role of the nervous system in Awakening and Freedom. The nervous system and its capacity to Be Here are essential elements for Awakening, Embodiment and for Freedom.
When unmet, un-experienced tendencies from the past arise, and we so often believe them and identify ourselves with them, so that they affect and manifest in our physiology and show up as thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations.
When Ramana Maharshi was first asked by a devotee, deeply attracted by His Presence, to impart some direction on how to reach that state, he has written the simple instructions of who am I? Inquiry. This very direct approach - when done in the right way 🙂- immediately appraises us of the fact that Who we really are is Emptiness or Presence.
My personal path to Awakening was more through Devotion, Silence and "meeting of what is" rather than formal Inquiry; however, since I started teaching in 1996, I realized the value of Inquiry in my own Embodiment process, and for Awakening, Embodiment and Freedom. And in addition to Ramana’s Inquiry, I have developed several Inquiry processes with very practical and effective steps.
Inquiry, especially when combined with a practical knowledge of the Nervous System and the Brain, and of the role of the Nervous System's capacity to Be Here, in Awakening Embodiment and Freedom, is a very powerful way to identify, address, and end suffering in the moment.
I want to invite you all to join me in this very direct and practical exploration.
Topics that may be covered during this program:
- Elements necessary for Awakening Embodiment and Freedom
- Everything arises in Presence And Everything is Ok just the way it is
- Embodied Okayness and what does it mean to Be Here
- The Cause of Suffering
- Introducing the Inquiry process and the Role of the Nervous Systems capacity in Being Here
Neelam is a direct disciple of HWL Poonja (affectionately known as Papaji), whose own teacher was Ramana Maharshi. Neelam’s unequivocal commitment to Truth helps us turn inward and release underlying patterns of conditioning which block the recognition of our True Nature. With the utmost tenderness, she invites us into the same recognition of Truth that her teacher, Papaji, transmitted to her, while helping us to address all aspects of daily living, including past conditioning and trauma.
“Awakening is a shift from identifying yourself as this body to knowing yourself as Presence. Freedom means a true independence from the past, where our ability to Be Here and the action in the moment are not guided by our attachment to the arising past. To truly be Free we need to embody our recognition of Presence, and that requires growing of the capacity of our nervous system to Be Here. It is in the meeting of what arises that we find true and lasting freedom.”
3-Hour Experiential Intensive
Sliding Scale: $20 to $45
Tilicho ~ Setting the Foundations: Weekend Online Retreat
2-day Online Retreat with Tilicho:
Setting the Foundations
January 11th & 12th, 2020
10:00 am - 1:00 pm Pacific Time
To be yourself is both very simple and complicated. Simple, as you already are what you're looking for: CONSCIOUSNESS (the light at the core of all beings and all things). Complicated, because to REALIZE who you are, you need to BE CONSCIOUS not only of your inner light, but also of your ego, as it often prevents us from putting the light on here and now, and embracing the present moment as it is.
This workshop sets the foundation for deeper exploration of consciousness and meeting with 'here and now'.
Saturday:
10.00 -11.30: Self-inquiry
11.30-11.45 tea-break
11.45-13.00: “Leaving the past behind” - session on forgiveness.
Sunday:
10.00 -11.30: ”Living in Trust" - session on fears
11.30-11.45 tea-break
11.45-13.00: "How to BE in daily life?"
About Tilicho
Tilicho spontaneously realized the Self in 1998 without following any teaching or practice. The absence of spiritual conditioning allowed her to see through the veils of spiritual idealism and illusions. She ended up spending thirteen years in Tiruvannamalai in south India, the seat of Ramana Maharshi and the sacred mountain, Arunachala. While recognizing the beauty of the Advaita teachings, she also observed that they can easily be misunderstood and distorted. Although the Self is eternally free from the world, it is not separate from it. Clarity does not exclude openness. Her teaching stresses the need to combine Masculine and Feminine qualities and approaches. It is an invitation to find unity within and without.
“May all beings realize who they truly are! Om Sat Chit Ananda.”
This Two-Day Online Retreat will consist of:
- Two 3-hour Meetings with Tilicho (total of 6 hours)
- Video and Audio Recordings of the Meetings
We meet via Zoom, an online platform allowing for live video conversations. You will have the opportunity to see/hear and be seen/heard by Tilicho and other participants. You will also have the option to switch your camera off and remain invisible. You may also join by phone.
To proceed to Registration, please affirm that you have read and agree to these terms:
click here to READ TERMS.
Registration: $40 - $80
Please register early if you can.
For practical questions please contact Sara at sara@opencirclecenter.org.