For Mystic Heart in Week Nine, Khalsa to teach meditation as healing

fredo villaseñor

In the months following 9/11, Subagh Singh Khalsa entered an intense period of meditation. During that time, he used the healing meditations he had long practiced not with the intention of healing one individual, but with a new impulse to bring healing to the many in the world that were suffering.

“The real reason we meditate is so that we can fix our fractured world ” he said.

Khalsa is co-director of the Mystic Heart Program and will lead Week Nine’s meditation sessions and seminars. He is a practitioner of Sikh Dharma and Kundalini yoga. His most recent book is titled Healing Ourselves, Healing the World.

The Mystic Heart Program, which is completing its 13th season on the grounds, is an initiative of Chautauqua Institution’s Department of Religion that shares meditation techniques from many of the world’s different traditions. Morning meditation sessions are held from 7:15 to 8 a.m. weekdays at the Main Gate Welcome Center. Seminars are held from 12:30 to 1:55 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday in the Hall of Missions.

There are many ways to think of meditation as healing, Khalsa said. Healing makes one whole. It also reduces tendencies to be self-centered and greedy. Khalsa feels that healing is especially needed today.

“Billions of individuals, acting as they do in their own self-interest, tens of thousands of communities, ethnic groups, corporations and governments, each hoping for their own success or profit or supremacy, have led us to a set of conditions that are clearly not sustainable,” he wrote in the newest preface to his book Anatomy of Miracles.

However, Khalsa also sees that there is a growing countertrend to the greed and self-centeredness he feels has so long dominated the human race.

“Growing environmental awareness, new international communities of spirituality and compassion, exciting technical breakthroughs that hold the promise of real solutions to our pressing problems — there is genuine reason for hope,” he wrote.

Despite the insecurity that grips the world today, people have all the knowledge and wisdom they need to save themselves, he said; it is up to individuals, corporations, governments and communities to apply that knowledge and wisdom.

“My prayer is that enough of us shall free ourselves from those inner tendencies that cause personal disease and societal ills that we may see the dawning of a new, healed world,” he wrote. “This is, I have come to believe, the true mission of our meditative practice.”

Tagged: Fredo Villaseñor kundalini yoga meditation Mystic Heart sikh dharma Subagh Singh Khalsa