The Sri Chinmoy Centre in New York was founded in 1966, and since then tens of thousands of New Yorkers have taken part in at least one of our events. All our meditations and concerts are free of charge, at the request of our spiritual Teacher, Sri Chinmoy, who felt that meditation and spirituality are something that should be shared with everyone. More about Sri Chinmoy….

Our main meditation Centre is in Jamaica Hills, Queens (near where Sri Chinmoy to lived for nearly 40 years) but we organize events all over New York, including Manhattan

Get details of upcoming events

What we offer

Meditation classes and workshops

• Meditation classes and workshops in: Manhattan and Queens

Concerts

• Our Songs of the Soul concerts: experience Sri Chinmoy’s meditation music performed in a variety of styles – Eastern and Western, soothing and powerful. In New York, these usually take place twice a year in mid-April and late August – check out the schedule….
• Peace Concerts, an unique audiovisual experience that usually takes place in the second week in October, based on the hundreds of Peace Concerts Sri Chinmoy gave worldwide in his lifetime.

Audio and picture: Our Songs of the Soul concerts often conclude with a powerful ensemble performance like this one from our New York meditation centre – soulful, powerful and cheerful at the same time.

Places to find yourself in the middle of the day…

• Some of our members have established cafes and restaurants – Annam Brahma, The Smile of the Beyond, The Panorama of My Silence-Heart Café in Jamaica Hills, Queens. The restaurants are independently owned by our members, but many students of Sri Chinmoy work there so feel free to ask them anything about meditation or our spiritual path!
  Sri Chinmoy called them ‘divine enterprises’, because we really do try to see and serve the divine inside each customer! These enterprises are probably the best way to check us out if we don’t have any upcoming events planned.

Meditation and physical fitness

• We strongly feel that sports and physical fitness can have a powerful effect on your inner life, and so we also put on races for the general public. Currently we organise races ranging from 5k to marathon distance in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and upstate NY, as well as a 2-mile race every Saturday morning in Queens. Check out our NY race schedule!
• This focus on sports led to Sri Chinmoy taking a keen interest in ultrarunning, and he pioneered some of the most unique ultradistance events out there. Currently members of our group organise the 6 and 10 day race in Flushing Meadows Corona Park as well as the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, the world’s longest certified road race. These races are a powerful demonstration that the soul is truly unlimited!
  When the races are on, it is well worth paying them a visit, but if not, you can always check out 3100: Run and Become, a recent documentary about the spiritual dimension of running that heavily features the 3100 Mile Race (available on  iTunes • Amazon • Google Play – see trailer below)

…and more!

• Sri Chinmoy believed that meditation and spirituality could be brought into pretty much any field, and so we organise events ranging from displays of meditative artworks to poetry festivals to peace torch relays across the USA; the spiritual life is never boring!

Get details of upcoming events

About Sri Chinmoy

Sri Chinmoy encouraged us to offer as many events for the public as possible, and he devoted his own life to making the spiritual life as widely known and practiced as possible.

“Meditation is everybody’s birthright. In meditation we establish our oneness with the entire world and our whole being is inundated with peace.”

Sri Chinmoy

He was born in 1931 in the village of Shakpura, Chittagong, in the easternmost part of India (now Bangladesh). All seven brothers and sisters in the family chose a spiritual life and lived in South India; after the death of both his parents, the young Chinmoy joined this spiritual community at the age of twelve.

During the next twenty years he spent many hours of each day and night in meditation and had the highest inner experiences, which deepened and widened as he continued his inner journey. He combined this with writing poetry, essays and music, studying, working and excelling in sports. In 1964 he came to New York to begin his service of teaching and inspiring spiritual seekers worldwide, and in 1970 he began a twice-weekly program of meditation for the staff and delegates at the UN in New York with the encouragement of the then Secretary-General U Thant.

“Each spiritual seeker has an inner hunger. This hunger is for the Unlimited,  for Infinity itself.”

Sri Chinmoy

The spiritual hunger Sri Chinmoy refers to within us is our aspiration – the inner cry or longing for a higher reality, mounting up like a flame in our hearts. The spiritual disciplines we do, such as meditation and service to the world, are the expression of this aspiration. Sri Chinmoy encouraged us to live in the heart, where we can find our own true satisfaction and our oneness with others.

With aspiration we continually transcend ourselves “from light, to more light, abundant light, to infinite light.” It is the aspiration within each person that creates progress in all areas of human life – religion, science, the arts, culture, public life and sports.

For more information on Sri Chinmoy, please visit:

• Sri Chinmoy’s official site
• Sri Chinmoy Library – read over 1,600 of Sri Chinmoy’s published books 
• Article about Sri Chinmoy in the New York Times

Find out more about our upcoming events:

Sri Chinmoy’s biography by Kusumita Pederson