July 27 + 28

Ripples of Light is YSI's yearly celebration of Touching the Diamond World. This year, we are hosting a 24-hour relay of half-hour long classes with a  philosophy, meditation, and asana teachers from YSI and Worldview Organizations.

Join the international YSI community in dedicated practice and honor the moment our Teacher saw emptiness directly, and continue the wave through meditation, movement, and shared intention.

What you get:

• Zoom access to 24 hours of practices focused on Touching the Diamond World through the 8 limbs of yoga
• Attend all 48+ classes or any of the 30 minute classes. Classes begin at 8:00am NY on July 27 and end at 9:00am NY on July 28
• Schedule of classes on July 27 + 28 will be available in your student dashboard + Telegram Group Chat
• Community chat with the YSI global community and easy access to links + schedule 

Course Description:

This offering is inspired by the third Quiet Retreat Teaching from Geshe Michael:

"You drop the good karma in a quiet pond and then the ripples start to go out... They touch your teachers in the heart... and the teachers will keep coming to you, higher and higher."

Imagine a wave of intentional practice rippling across the globe—hour by hour, hand to hand, heart to heart.

What do people want?  Change.  Not necessarily a new car or a new job.  But some deep fundamental change that allows them to see the world from a profoundly different perspective.  One that leaves them empowered, connected, and with an optimistic outlook and vision for the future.  To facilitate this change, there is no experience as transformative as directly perceiving truth.  We call this experience Touching the Diamond World.

On July 28th, 1975, Geshe Michael had a transformative experience and began what has now been a 50+ year teaching career, during which he has taught hundreds of thousands of students worldwide, thousands of classes, and translated more pages of texts than perhaps anyone since Je Tsongkhapa, 500 years ago.

To honour this day and this experience, we offer classes that will guide students through the 8-limb path outlined in the Yoga Sutra, the essential text on yoga philosophy. This framework is fundamental to YSI’s teachings on yoga as it was designed to bring practitioners to this transformative experience.  

Over a 24-hour period, YSI teachers will join leaders from around the world in facilitating a day to see emptiness directly.  To start the relay, we will begin with the first two of the 8 limbs: a celebration of our good actions, and practices to help us deal with our missteps along the way.  YSI Instructors will continue with asana (physical postures), pranayama (breathing practices), pratyahara (preparing for meditation), and then the meditation itself.  

Connie O’Brien will then give us the instructions on Touching the Diamond World and lead us into a meditation with that goal in mind.

Throughout the rest of the 24 hours, teachers from around the world will host yoga, meditation, and philosophy sessions, providing us with a community of friends to sit with in silence, to attempt to touch the profound, and to honour those who have done so before us, like Geshe Michael.

There is one last crucial point.  For any of this to work, we must plant the seeds for success by helping others.  This is the price of admission.  To join this class, we ask all participants to do 5 specific acts of kindness to others.  We will dedicate these acts so that everyone can have their highest dreams fulfilled, and we are all able to Touch the Diamond World.