President & Founder — Yasuko Kasaki
Director & Co-Founder — Chris Pelham
Front Desk Manager — Aya Shibahara
Gallery Director — Rie Nishimura
Healing Clinic Manager — Makiko Mizuta
Mission
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) is a community center opened in 2004 by writer/lecturer/healer Yasuko Kasaki, her students, and artist/producer Christopher Pelham in order to provide artists and individuals from all walks of life with opportunities to remember and share their limitless creative energies. Through our programs in the healing and creative arts, including meditation and A Course in Miracles, you can train your mind to act in accordance with your true self with consistency and to take active steps to follow your internal creative direction.
About Yasuko Kasaki
President and founder of CRS
Spiritual counselor/healer, teacher, writer, translator
Member of International PEN Club
Member of Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy (A.S.P.) Board member of and columnist for IBF (International Beauty Fdn.)
Yasuko Kasaki is the author of 15 books in Japanese about A Course in Miracles (ACIM), as well as numerous novels and collections of photographs, short stories and essays. Her translations of the ACIM Workbook as well as books by ACIM writers Jon Mundy, Gabrielle Bernstein and David Hoffmeister and works by poet Maya Angelou and others have also been published in Japan. She is currently translating Mari Perron’s A Course of Love and the ACIM Original Edition into Japanese for publisher Natural Spirit. She has been offering spiritual counseling, reading, instruction and healing to individuals and groups since 1999. In 2004 she and partner Christopher Pelham founded CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing), the first and only spiritual center devoted to the teaching and practice of ACIM in New York City. In addition to teaching weekly classes at CRS, Yasuko travels several times a year to Japan where she teaches seminars organized by the vibrant community of study groups established by her students, by International Beauty Foundation for which she is a board member and columnist, and with other leading lecturers and healers.
In her classes, Ms. Kasaki sequentially teaches the text of ACIM, and through abundant use of guided meditation and creative visualization, facilitates experiential learning and practice of the concepts of ACIM, and by extension, of channeling, clairvoyance, reading and understanding the dynamics of universal energy, and the essence of spiritual healing. She has now taught and worked with more than 1,000 people in New York and Japan to help resolve their mental and physical issues. Several of Ms. Kasaki’s long-time students have also begun to offer psychospiritual healing and instruction at CRS and elsewhere. Through CRS outreach programs, her students now offer ACIM classes in Westchester, NY and Edgewater, NJ.
Ms. Kasaki was born in Tokyo, Japan. She attended Gakushuin University, Tokyo, from which she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Japanese language and Japanese literature and a Teacher’s Certificate in junior high and high school education. Befrore graduating, her photo essay of street kids, Harajuku Takenoko-zoku, was published by Daisan Shokan Ltd. Shortly thereafter, she began working as an editor for the women’s monthly magazine Free. This opportunity in turn opened the door to a series of freelance jobs as writer, translator, and photographer for numerous magazines and companies. Two years later in 1987 Ms. Kasaki completed and published her first novel, Owaranai natsu. The following year she moved to New York City, where she has since written numerous other books, novels, short stories, and essays, published in Japan. Ms. Kasaki has also translated several American books into Japanese, most notably Maya Angelou’s lyrical collection of essays, Even the Stars Look Lonesome.
While still a young girl, Yasuko Kasaki became aware that she was to devote her life to the exploration of the human heart and soul. Initially, her passion flowered in the fields of photography, journalism, and literature. Many fruitful years as a writer and searcher carried her into contact with various spiritual teachers, several of whom brought her quest for psychospiritual understanding into sharper focus and uncovered her own abilities as a healer. She has attended workshops and studied meditation, spiritual reading, quantum healing and clairvoyance with many teachers, including Sanaya Roman & Duane Packer. She has also studied holistic health, attending Gary Null’s holistic health class. With Bruce Davis Ph.D, Matthew Hanson, and several others she studied and completed A Course in Miracles, which she now considers to be the surest path to peace, joy and healing.
About Christopher Pelham
To extend is a fundamental aspect of God which He gave to His Son. In the creation, God extended Himself to His creations and imbued them with the same loving Will to create. You have not only been fully created, but have also been created perfect. Because of your likeness to your Creator you are creative. No child of God can lose this ability because it is inherent in what he is.
— A Course in Miracles
Christopher Pelham is Director and co-founder of CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing). He assists his fellow CRS co-founder Yasuko Kasaki in teaching A Course in Miracles on Monday nights. He also regularly leads Inner Vision Workouts. He studied 20th century and post-colonial literature & theatre in college and is an avid amateur activist (women’s empowerment, environmentalism, human/animal rights, economic justice) & artist (variously actor, writer, director, graphic designer and filmmaker). Since 1995 he has lived and worked in NYC where he has studied The Spiritual Psychology of Acting with John Osborne Hughes and improvisation with the late Gloria Maddox, who first introduced Christopher to the idea of undertaking a spiritual path.
His responsibilities at CRS include oversight of the front desk staff, classes and special events, and much of the web and graphic design, marketing, and accounting. Since he began producing live performance events in 1997, he has had the privilege of presenting dozens and dozens of wonderful artists from all over the world, including luminaries such as Alexandra Beller, Big Apple Playback Theatre, Lake Simons, and Yoshiko Chuma and the School of Hard Knocks, among many others.
From a young age, Christopher immersed himself in the study of various Utopian and Marxist texts and philosophies. While attending Harvard Summer School in 1986, he took a class in “Revolution & Society” and participated in various public participatory art projects in Harvard Square led by artist/writer/computer scientist Richard Gardner, who had lived for a time at the FH art commune outside Vienna founded by Actionist artist Otto Muehl. These two experiences and his later residency during his undergraduate years at Duke University in Epworth/SHARE (Student Housing for Academic and Residential Experimentation), fostered his commitment to the exploration and development of creative communities.
Christopher studied theatre, 20th century/post-colonial literature and literary theory at Duke University, most notably with Frank Lentricchia, Michael Moses, Thomas Ferraro, Jody McAuliffe and Doris Duke Impact Award Winner Johnny Simons. After a semester studying American Lit in the graduate English program at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, he returned to the theatre to play the role of the Policeman in Rodrigo Dorfman‘s production of Fassbinder’s Blood on the Cat’s Neck. He then appeared for four seasons with Johnny Simons’ Hip Pocket Theatre in productions at Duke University and at the Hip Pocket’s idyllic Oak Acres Amphitheatre in Fort Worth, Texas, appearing in a number of world premieres including Dabloids by Leonid Tishkov and dogman by Lake Simons. His personal career highlight as an actor was creating the role of the Snoid in Robert Crumb’s R. Crumb Comix III.
As a member of MadWomanoftheWoods Productions, he co-produced five Off Off Broadway productions and performed in and helped to create Antigone Through Time and An Absolute Mystery. Antigone Through Timewas the first production of the New York International Fringe Festival to be reviewed by the New York Times. The show was created from the poems and stories of the many Greek women who were imprisoned, some for decades, and executed on secret island concentration camps by the Greek fascist government following WWII. MadWoman also presented a staged reading of Christopher’s play American Spirits at the Miranda Theatre in 2000. With Lake Simons and Herald Lehmann, Christopher performed in and helped to create The Nose, Two and Two, and Imagining Cain in the American Living Room Series at HERE.
He studied dance for nine years at Dance Space Center with teachers such as Guido Tuveri, Jana Hicks, Diane McCarthy, Beth Goheen, and Sara Neece, and performed in several dance theatre works by Guido Tuveri, Mark Drahozal, and others. He completed an intensive course in video filmmaking at New York Film Academy and worked at times as an event videographer, proofreader, and online producer.