Saturday, November 19, 2011: Thanksgiving FireCeremony & Kirtan

Thanksgiving FireCeremony & Kirtan

Suzin Green

w/ Dan Johnson, tabla

Saturday, November 19, 2011, 4-9 pm

FireCeremony is elemental yogic theater with fire in the central role. We sit around an outdoor fire, chanting rounds of mantra and tossing symbolic offerings into the flames. FireCeremony elicits a state of clarity and inner stillness. It’s also an opportunity to contemplate the ties that bind us, offering these “thieves of the heart” to the fire. Finally, FireCeremony is a way to give and receive blessings and to offer a prayer for peace and sanity to the world.

FireCeremony is a simple, profound, transforming, powerful, astounding yogic process.

Kirtan is a bliss-inducing, joy-infusing, mind-stilling, delightful, glorious yogic process.

FireCeremony+Kirtan will knock your socks off.

Peace of India Yoga Sanctuary, 

On the Park in Highland Park, NJ

To register, please use this link to email Gopali

732-214-YOGA (9642) 

www.peaceofindia.com

Ceremony & Kirtan: $45 – members by Nov. 12 / $48 others & after Nov. 12
Fire Ceremony: (4-6pm) $35 – members by Nov. 12 / $38 others & after Nov. 12
Kirtan: (7-9pm) $25 – members by Nov. 12 / $28 others & after Nov. 12

Potluck Supper from 6-7pm.

Please use above link to email Gopali if you plan to attend.

Private Sessions w/SG: Personal & Professional Life Coaching, Meditation-Based Therapies, Transformational Healing

Private sessions offer personal and professional coaching that empowers the way you express yourself in all aspects of life. The process enables you to be seen and heard on your own terms and deepens your empathic abilities. Sessions also include Eyes-Closed Work. This meditation-based therapy fosters an inner sense of spaciousness while cultivating your ability to remain clear and calm regardless of circumstances or events.   

Private sessions can help you:

• master listening and communication skills 
• re-invent yourself in a rapidly changing world  
• decipher the riddles of relationships, career, or calling 
• ease the experience of living with illness or pain
• neutralize harmful effects of stress
• unravel emotional knots and harmful patterns 
• open creative blocks
• cultivate emotional intelligence
• experience deep relaxation 
• live with a stronger sense of grounding and stillness in daily life

Office hours in NYC and Princeton, NJ. 

Skype and Phone Sessions are also available.

If you have questions or would like to schedule a session, 

please email: suzingreen@gmail.com 

or call:

NYC: 212.724.0265

NJ: 609.915.1392 

FAQs about Eyes-Closed Work w/SG

What is Eyes-Closed Work?  

As you rest in a comfortable position, I guide you into a relaxed state, conducive to self-discovery and inner vision. As memories, images, or physical sensations arise, a rich inner journey unfolds. You may “travel” to metaphorical places, re-enter a dream, meet previously unknown aspects of yourself, dialogue with totemic beings, explore roots of chronic illness or pain, re-frame memories, or rest in a state of stillness. The varieties of experience are endless. In my role as traveling companion, witness, and guide, I offer careful nurture, insightful counsel, and unconditional safety and support.

How will Eyes-Closed Work help me with

issues or concerns in my daily life?

Eyes-Closed Work develops greater clarity and presence, increasing your effectiveness in the world. Family relationships, workplace performance, community service, creativity — all benefit from this work. There is a paring down to your essential self, a simplifying that allows you to see life as it actually is. You become rooted in your personal power and live with more equanimity and joy.

How long is each session?

The ideal session runs approximately two hours. If you require a shorter time frame, 60- or 90-minute formats are available.

Monday Night Chanting & Meditation

Monday Night Class w/Suzin Green

7:30 - 9:30 pm
Cost $20/door
Changing the inner world, one mantra at a time...

Monday Night Class is the place for great chanting, sublime teachings, healing meditation, and good company. Please use this link to visit the Monday Night Blog where along with logistical information about Monday Night Class, you can listen to excerpts from Suzin's weekly dharma talks and group chanting and peruse the archive for sacred poetry and text from the world's wisdom traditions. 

Monday Night Class @

Princeton Center for Yoga & Health, 

just north of Princeton in central New Jersey.  

Please use this link for directions to the center

The Autumn Garden

I was recently walking in a perfectly manicured September garden. Summer blooms had been replaced by the more humble offerings of fall and the garden had a sparseness and simplicity that took my breath away. I've always loved the magnificent abundance of the Fall: the harvest, the foliage, the moon. This year though, I'm experiencing Fall through different eyes: autumn eyes. Eyes that seek out spaciousness and simplicity; eyes that find comfort in brown grass dying back down into the earth. There is a softness to the autumn garden I've not seen before. And a silence that roars in my heart.

The silence speaks its own special language, pulling me deep inside myself. Absorbing me in that inner sense of knowing. This listening to silence has a fierceness to it. It moves me into unexpected places, pushing me up against notions of who I am and why I'm here. It laughs at me too, testing my trust in myself. Am I willing to rest in the air of my being. Am I really okay with how fluid the ground I want so solid beneath me truly is. Can I sit still, can I wait, can I look and see what is, rather than what I want it to be.

Sitting in the Great Bowl of Silence

Many years ago, one of my spiritual mentors gave a beautiful teaching on the syllable "om." He said that if we really listened, we could hear "om" vibrating inside every sound. I performed this practice diligently and while I can't say I began to hear that subtle om within the cacophony of daily life, something else happened: my capacity to listen went deeper.

I began to sense a great bowl of silence inside me, and worked to root my listening as far down into it as I could manage. This allowed me to listen with very clean ears and opened me into hearing what I think of as the deep song. Which is not a song at all. It's a presence. The more I learned to listen to my own deep song, the more I began to recognize it in others. And that was when I realized my calling as a transformational healer and teacher.

Several years later, when I began to study Sanskrit, I was astounded by the way the sound of "om" moves through us. Try it and you'll see. It begins deep in the belly with the mouth wide open and ends on the lips with the mouth fully closed. It was then that I finally got it. In the way that making the sound of "om" mimics the opening and closing of any process, metaphorically at least, "om" does contain everything.

And the thing of it is, one can ride "om" into the very depths of our being. Which is where we find the great bowl of silence. Try it. Sit in a meditative stance and bring your focus to breathing. Just listen. Listen to the in-breath. Listen to the out-breath. Listen to the space between them. Listen for that subtle vibration of "om." Listen for the silence underneath it all. And when you stand up, moving into daily life action, try to move from that silence. Practice this for awhile and see how you feel.

We live in a time when marketing is everything, when the pitch has to tell us what we get before we're willing to buy. So I'll tell you a secret: the great bowl of silence contains everything. Once we begin to touch it in a regular kind of way, life takes on a whole different feel. The poet-saint Kabir expressed this so beautifully when he sang: Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains! All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars. The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels. And the music from strings no one touches, and the source of all water.

Kabir finishes his song proclaiming, If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God I love is inside of me. He might as well have named it Silence.