The Christchurch Sri Chinmoy Centre offers free meditation courses and workshops throughout the year. Our structured workshops introduce a broad range of techniques to familiarise participants with the various types of meditation that will help to develop a successful home practice. Following our introductory classes of four evenings or two days over a weekend, we offer ongoing continuation programs, which are also free of charge, to further deepen and encourage meditation experience.

Our meditation classes are free and offered as a community service at the request of Sri Chinmoy who felt that meditation and spirituality should be freely available to all.

What do our courses involve?

• Breathing Techniques – how to use calming breath to put out the fire of emotions and thoughts.
• Mantra – how to properly use the repetition of spiritually resonant phrases to calm the mind.
• Heart Meditation – focusing on the spiritual heart center, the safest and most effective energy center (chakra).
• Visualisation Techniques – guided meditations to invoke a peaceful and expanding inner landscape.
• Illumining Life Habits – we are often painfully unaware of our own destructive habits and tendencies that continually bring unrest into our lives. Methods for awareness and transformation of bad habits are shared, as well as secrets for maneuvering through a challenging contemporary lifestyle. Tips are shared for more spiritually grounded and productive living.

What type of meditation is it?

• The workshops are based on the teachings of Sri Chinmoy who requested that his students offer meditation classes free of charge.
• We encourage meditation techniques that focus on the spiritual heart, which is where our innate spiritual energies are most powerfully focused.
• Introductory courses focus on silencing the mind and offer course participants a real experience of meditation.
• The courses are not based on any particular religion but simply encourage people to explore their own deeper nature in order to discover happiness, fulfilment and satisfaction.

Benefits of Meditation

If properly practised meditation can offer the following benefits.

• Greater relaxation
• Improved peace of mind
• Improved health and better sleep
• Increased concentration

However, as well as relaxation, meditation is also an invaluable part of any spiritual life. Through meditation we can become aware of our inner self because meditation awakens and brings to the fore our dormant spiritual consciousness.

In meditation we dive into the vast sea of Consciousness. We do not have to ask God for Peace or Light because we are swimming in the sea of divine qualities. At that time God gives us more than we can ever imagine. The deeper we go in meditation, the more we expand our own consciousness, the more abundantly the qualities of Light, Peace and Bliss grow inside us. Meditation itself is the fertile soil where the bumper crop of Light, Peace, Bliss and Power can grow.

In meditation there is a flame of constant aspiration. Our journey is eternal; our progress and our realisation are also constant and unending because we are dealing with Infinity, Eternity and Immortality.

– Sri Chinmoy.