January 2025
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.
Silent Group Meditation (Free, No Guidance)
Mondays: 8:00am – 8:30am Pacific Time
Wednesdays : 9:00am – 9:30am Pacific Time
Ongoing every week, with rare exceptions. Check Full Calendar to verify dates.
Join for a group meditation – just us, without a teacher. Do your own practice silently in the company of others. There will be no talk or guidance – only a bell to start and finish. Let’s be present, together.
After half an hour of silent sitting, there will be space for a brief hello in the end, if we like.
Please be seated by the time meditation starts, so that we can begin together. You are welcome to have your camera and microphone on (unless you have a lot of background noise), so that we can feel as if we were in one space.
The zoom link remains the same for all the sessions, so you are welcome to register only once and save the link for future reference.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
February 2025
Stephan Bodian ~ Waking Up Through the Metacrisis: Finding Deeper Ground in Challenging Times
The Buddha said it succinctly 2500 years ago: human existence is, and always has been, marked by constant change and uncertainty. Yet we find ourselves in uniquely challenging and uncertain times: overpopulation, mass extinctions, extreme weather, environmental tipping points, political upheaval, nuclear proliferation, demographic instability and widespread migrations, and the advent of technologies that challenge and distort our understanding of what’s real and true.
Perhaps our civilization is just on the verge of collapse, like so many before it. But since it covers the globe, this raises the unprecedented prospect that the future of human life on Earth may be threatened as well.
Of course, we can always seek refuge in the simplicity and innate perfection of right now and in the knowing that our true nature--awakened awareness, consciousness, the absolute--is undisturbed and never dies, and life is always unfolding in its own sacred and mysterious way.
But, as one of my Zen teachers used to say, what about the blood? That is, what about all the painful consequences at a very human level of all this difficult and precipitous change? How do we find peace in a deeper ground while acknowledging and welcoming our understandable feelings of fear, outrage, or grief and doing what we can to make a difference if we choose?.
Please join me for one or more satsangs in this monthly series (Jan-May) that include meditations for returning to and resting in our deeper ground while welcoming and working with the feelings that these challenging times evoke. There will also be a brief talk and plenty of time for sharing and discussion. This will not be a space for intellectual analysis or political discussion.
Stephan Bodian is a teacher in the nondual wisdom tradition of Zen, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta. He's been offering the School for Awakening, an annual multi-month intensive program in spiritual unfolding and awakened living, since 2007. As a licensed psychotherapist, he brings a deep understanding of the impact of trauma and early conditioning on the process of spiritual realization and offers individual counseling and mentoring in psychospiritual integration. Stephan studied for many years with Advaita master Jean Klein and received Dharma transmission from Adyashanti in 2001. His books include Wake Up Now and Beyond Mindfulness. For more information, visit : www.stephanbodian.org
Suggested donation: $15 to $40
No one turned away for lack of funds. Any amount welcome.
Stephan Bodian has offered that all donations for this event will go
to support Open Circle in continuing this work of offering teachings.
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
Lisa Schumacher ~ Choose Love: Self-Inquiry Meeting
A meeting with Lisa is an encounter in openness and silence, where you are invited just as you are and where you will find clear and loving support for your awakening.
You are invited into a community space that values the transmission of peace and love that is present here. In your search for freedom, you can rest in stopping. You can find stillness in Satsang.
“Satsang” means “in the company of Truth” – it describes a meeting where we gather together to uncover our True Nature.
Lisa offers guidance for your awakening, and would love to hear what you are discovering in yourself. All of your spiritual questions and reports are welcome as we discover together how to meet the intensity of the world with an open and loving heart.
This is an embrace of inclusion and an inquiry into the heart of the truth, as it transmits through your life.
All are welcome.
During our meeting together, Lisa will support you with deep stillness and skillful self-inquiry to open to your true nature, leaving behind the illusion of a separate self. During the webinar, you may rest in silence. This is deeply nourishing. We will begin each meeting sitting in silence.
About Lisa Schumacher
Lisa grew up in Colusa, CA, and attended college at San Luis Obispo in the 1980’s. After she moved to Southern Oregon in the early 90s, a friend invited her to a video satsang with Gangaji. Upon hearing Gangaji say “Be your Natural Self”, Lisa’s heart caught on fire and she fell into a deep bow of surrender. That meeting revealed to her the absolute simplicity of the natural, living truth of Love, inseparable from who one is. Lisa moved to Bolinas in 1999 to be closer to Gangaji and the vibrant community around her.
In 2006, Lisa was asked by Gangaji to meet with people and share her discovery of the Love that is alive in the core of one’s being . She holds meetings in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and North America. She’s also a long-time student of Eli Jaxon-Bear, Gangaji’s husband, and a founding teacher of the “Leela School of Awakening”. Lisa is the author of “The Stone I Love”, a book of poetry inspired by her meeting with Gangaji, available on her website.
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.
Lisa's website: satsangwithlisa.org
Suggested donation: $15 to $40
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
John J. Prendergast, Ph.D. and Lisa Ferguson, Ph.D. ~ Engaged Nonduality
Engaged Nonduality
Re-Sourcing Ourself in a World in Crisis
with John J. Prendergast, Ph.D. and Lisa Ferguson, Ph.D.
Recording will be emailed to participants within a week.
You’re welcome to join even if you can’t attend the live session.
As an informal community of nondual contemplatives who feel deeply moved by the historically-unique existential crises that we now face, how do we respond in a truly creative way? And how do we not succumb to the burnout that political activists so frequently experience?
The answer lies in our capacity to repeatedly re-source ourself in the ultimate source – the heart and ground of being. As we consciously discover the Great Heart behind the human heart and the Groundless Ground beneath our self-constructed ground, we experience a sense of well-being independent of outer circumstances. This discovery is profoundly nourishing to our conditioned body-mind, allowing us to replenish from the deepest source of life. This brings an openness, freshness, spontaneity, and love for life that inspires our creative action in the world.
This meeting will include silent and guided meditations, self-inquiry, a talk, and experiential conversations.
The Engaged Nonduality series
This Engaged Nonduality series, hosted by Lisa Ferguson, explores how nondual wisdom may respond to our world in crisis. We live in a time of multiple intersecting crises that threaten the wellbeing of all life, including climate breakdown, unaligned tech and AI, injustice, war and authoritarianism. The recognition of nonduality has much to offer in these times, including a deep knowing of our wholeness and shared Being, as well as opening to the wellspring of our wise and creative response. This series invites guest presenters to explore how nondual teaching may respond to planetary crises through talks, practices and group participation.
John J. Prendergast, Ph.D. is the author of The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence (2019 ) and In Touch: How to Tune In to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself (2015) and is working on a new book entitled Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality (March 2025). He is a retired Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies as well as a retired psychotherapist. He studied with the European sage Jean Klein for many years as well as with Adyashanti who gave dharma transmission to John in August, 2023. John and his wife Christiane offer residential retreats in the United States and Europe.
www.listeningfromsilence.com
YouTube channel
Lisa Ferguson, Ph.D.is the founder of www.climatecompassion.org, and has focused on supporting planetary wellbeing as a healing arts practitioner, climate justice activist, organizer and contemplative. She offers psychospiritual support to activists through one-one sessions and small groups, weaving together a focus on awakening, healing and wise action.
Suggested Donation: $15 to $40
(any amount acceptable, no one turned away for lack of funds)
Please register early if you can.
The events will be recorded and emailed to participants within a week.
To check your local time, use a tool such as: Time Zone Converter
Georgia Simone ~ Awakened Healing: Become The Space Where Healing Takes Place
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, anxious, 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 disidentify 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.
During this period, Georgia was influenced by Inner Relationship Focusing, a presence based approach that works with the Felt Sense and the split-off parts of self. She also trained as a NARM informed practitioner, which addresses developmental trauma from a psychotherapeutic perspective. Her approach is now a seamless blend of mystical insight and psychological understanding.
After many years of wading through this marshland of conditioning, she 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 $40
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
Unmani ~ How Can We Embrace the Whole of Life?
Beyond the play of separation there is only wholeness. We all know this, despite mostly living as if we have forgotten. Experiencing separation can feel incredibly painful when we reject parts of ourselves or Life, because we think those parts are not good enough, or shouldn't be here for some reason. This rejection goes against our deeper sense of the wholeness beyond it all, and our natural longing to merge with and embrace Life as ourselves.
But how can we stop this painful game, and start embracing the whole of Life as ourselves? Let's explore this together.
About Unmani
Meeting with Unmani is meeting with yourself in the most real and alive way. Unmani is originally from the UK, but has lived in many countries around the world. Since she was a child, Unmani didn't identify with being a separate individual, but assumed there was something wrong with her, until she came across the expression of Satsang and nonduality. Truth has always been her passion. Unmani had teachers including Osho, Dolano, Nathan Gill, Tony Parsons, Gangaji and several other amazing people who are not considered 'teachers'.
In 2013 she met her husband, the wonderful musician, and courageous lover of life, Robert Hanuman. In 2015 their son, Sky, was born. On 3rd January 2018, Robert Hanuman died suddenly from a heart attack while they were in India. Robert Hanuman's presence deeply influenced Unmani's teaching, and in the time they were together it evolved into a more human expression of the courage to live the paradox of the Absolute, living as this human. Robert put Unmani's words to his beautiful classical guitar music and Unmani still plays his songs at her meetings.
Unmani has been holding meetings and retreats all over the world for since 2003, and in this time people have been deeply touched by her work: She meets each person exactly where they are at, and in whatever they need at the time, while at the same time holding them in the truth of who they really are beyond it all. This combination, and paradox, of the personal and impersonal, brings so much depth, openness and healing to people's lives. They wake up to who they really are, and discover how this is lived and integrated into their daily lives.
Unmani has written 3 books 'I am Life itself', 'Die to Love' and 'The Courage to Come Alive'. Unmani holds regular meetings and retreats several times a year as well as monthly webinars on different themes.
For more information about Unmani's work go to: www.die-to-love.com
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Unmani
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unmani
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unmani_hyde/
Robert Hanuman's music can be downloaded on iTunes here: https://music.apple.com/nl/artist/robert-hanuman/1329878840?l=en
Suggested donation: $15 to $40
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
Ishita Sharma ~ Embodiment Lab – Experiments in Embodying Presence
We are not thinking beings who sense; we are sensing beings who think. And re-setting that balance is key to joy, to vibrance, and true liberation!
Join us for Embodiment Lab, an experiential exploration of the body as a doorway to presence and aliveness, returning to the ground of being through our own direct experience.
We will use the fullness of our experience to tune and attune to our bodies, illuminating our deepest healing and freedom. Engaging and transcending our senses, awareness, breath, movement and sound and more, we will use our body's signals to return to sensate presence.
TOGETHER ON OUR CALL WE WILL:
- Explore states of inner coherence in our own experience.
- Engage simple yet profound somatic and energetic practices.
- Experience the healing power of inner and group coherence.
- Have space to share, ask questions and learn from within and together.
- Learn about ways to deepen our access to embodied presence.
All levels of experience are welcom.
BIO
Ishita Sharma serves as a spiritual teacher, healing mirror, embodiment guide, and Core Energetics Practitioner of body-based psychotherapy. Teaching Universal principles of healing and mysticism, she is devoted to supporting healing and awakening in all those committed to living a bright and connected life, sharing their gifts for the good of the Whole.
Growing up in India, asking big questions, Ishita's curiosities about the nature of All Things fueled a series of profound openings. Having her relationship to Self, Life and others re-calibrated, while learning to honor her own body's signals as the ultimate path to God, led her to study various spiritual, neurological, relational, somatic and shamanic modalities, through the Grace of her teachers and the Book of her Life.
Ishita has coached visionaries and leaders from Google, Harvard, MIT, Silicon Valley, Broadway artists, and renowned scientists, coaches, teachers, artists and activists. Clients come to her to grow through their deepest longings and challenges, held and mirrored in their perfect wholeness. She points every one of them back to center.
Ishita’s teachings, like her learnings, support self-study through direct realization. They marry western mind and eastern spirit through the human body and heart to facilitate embodied awakening and authentic connection, the balm for our tumultuous times.
Care for our sacred shared world informs all her endeavors. Ishita now uses her skills to help clients connect with their inner signals so they can find rest in minds, ease in their bodies, joy in their hearts, and embody their True Nature in right relation with Life. She brings 15 years of advanced facilitation, a refined meditation practice, and a fierce devotion to her own healing to serve. She looks forward to meeting and supporting you!
Suggested donation: $15 to $40
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
Amoda Maa ~ An Inquiry into the Living Truth of Freedom (In-Person & Livestream)
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. 26 (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.
PARKING: There is some street parking in the neighborhood, free and without time limit.
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.
yle="text-align: center;">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.
Amoda Maa ~ An Inquiry into the Living Truth of Freedom (In-Person & Livestream)
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.