Community Meditation is non-profit network of meditation groups. We bring mindfulness and wellness into people’s lives through courses, meditation sittings and group discussions, both in-person and online. By sharing the benefits of meditation and mindfulness, we support the evolution of a wise, caring, and healthy world.
Our network has existed for over a decade and although our roots are Buddhist, we draw on many wisdom traditions as well as contemporary wellness, psychology, and neuroscience. Community Meditation is completely volunteer-based and guided by a council of experienced teachers.
Community Meditation is a Canada Revenue Agency Registered Charity No. 73107 5719 RR0001.
Your donations, either one-time or with a monthly subscription, help us to pay rent, insurance and other basic expenses. We are a volunteer organization and all of our costs are covered by donations and course fees. Online Canadian donors will receive an annual tax receipt for the full amount of their donations in each calendar year.
One-Time Donation Monthly Donation
NOTE: For monthly donations, use the Qty button to adjust the amount in units of $5. For example, a Qty of "3" is 3 x 5 = $15.
All online sessions, except our short morning sessions, include a 20-minute silent meditation. New to meditation? Instruction is available.
🧘
Click here to join on Zoom @ 8:45 AM ET
Looking for a mindful start to your day? We're launching silent group meditations from 8:45 to 9 AM ET, Monday to Friday. There is no meditation instruction available in these sessions–if you'd like instruction, email hello@communitymeditation.net.
NOTE
For all the sessions listed below:
Click here to join on Zoom @ 5 PM ET
ONLINE
Join Kaye-Lee on Monday for a contemplative journey into the elements of mindful creativity, with its limitless forms of expression. Bring a pen and some paper, and we'll explore through play. Everyone is welcome.
Just like in playfulness...in art, I can both find and lose myself at the same time.
- sandi
Please join Brenda, Jim, and Gordon for 20 minutes of silent meditation followed by a reading and discussion of Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha. This week, we begin Chapter 12, "Awakening Together: Practicing Radical Acceptance in Relationship". There's no need to be familiar with the book, and everyone is welcome.
While some relationships will be mutually more healing and fulfilling than others, all can reveal our interconnectedness.
– Tara Brach
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Join Gloria, Kaye-Lee, and Marian for 20 minutes of meditation followed by a reading and reflection on Chapter 3, "The Perfection of Ethical Conduct" in Norman Fischer's The World Could Be Otherwise. Everyone is welcome
Speaking kindly is typical of Boddhisattva practice.
– Norman Fischer
Click here to join on Zoom @ 10:45 AM ET
ONLINE
Please join Sandi, Darina, and Anita for our daytime session. How about an exploration of forgiveness? What might the steps be that lead up to it, and how do we actually do this?
Forgiveness clears the heart of resentment and blame. Resentment literally means to "re-feel", to replay the hurt over and over again. Blame makes it nearly impossible to hear the clearer and gentler tones that inspire us to practice kindness.
- Norman Fischer
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Join Lauren, Sandi, and Adam to continue exploring the five gates of grief from Francis Weller's beautiful book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. We'll contemplate the second gate: places untouched by love. If grief occurs in these unloved places, is that one of the origins of shame? We continue to create a tender, open-hearted place to explore this often painful feeling. Please join us.
We can digest a certain volume of disappointments and criticism, but at some point, with enough repetition, the internal stories associated with these events reach their saturation point. The fictions crystallize into something that feels like the truth.
– Francis Weller
OWEN SOUND, IN PERSON
Join Ken this week for a deep dive into the nature of a thought and the role that mindfulness can play in how we handle thinking. Everyone is welcome.
NOTE: Harmony Centre has a new door lock, and we can't make sure it stays open, so please use the doorbell to the right of the door.
...thought, in itself, is no more powerful than a shadow flickering on a wall. What gives the thought power is you.
― Rob Nairn
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Please join Hazel as we watch a video titled "Giving that Centres on Dignity, not Data", by Jill Van Gyn-Carr. We'll be exploring generosity and the strings attached.
This talk reveals why oversight isn't generosity, how stigma blocks impact, and why unconditional trust may be the most radical form of compassion.
– Jill Van Gyn-Carr
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ECODHARMA
Join Debbie to read and discuss "Outgrowing Modernity" by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. In a section titled "Learning to be Together", we'll explore the complexity of responding to the climate crisis.
👉 Friday EcoDharma sessions are designed for those experiencing anxiety or grief relating to environmental issues. The aim is to bring mindfulness and Buddhist practices to our distress, and to build community.
Instead of listening merely to confirm pre-existing biases or to defend established positions, this approach encourages us to listen for moments of insight...that challenge our understanding and potentially transform our perspectives.
- Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
Click here to join on Zoom @ 10:15 AM ET
ONLINE
Please join Debbie and Darina as we continue reading "Confidence" by Ethan Nichtern. In the chapter titled "The Power of Windhorse", we will explore a practice for generating energy.
Windhorse is a quick practice for...riding whatever emotional "wind" we're experiencing, showing up to whatever comes next with balance and vision.
- Ethan Nichtern
There's a line that goes something like this: We're human beings, not human doings!" At Community Meditation, we're certainly trying to help people (including ourselves) cultivate a state of being. But as Randall Amster points out, there's a way in which doing and being can merge. Here's an excerpt:
For what it’s worth, in my world the only thing that truly helps to assimilate all of this into something that moves beyond mere coping to a place of connection is the simple act of getting back to work.
By this, I don’t mean “work” as the strategic acquisition of wealth, productivity for its own sake, or simply doing more. I’m nodding to something more transcendent than all of that, more intentional and impactful.
This kind of work is about manifesting our purpose, making a contribution, supporting those we care about, creatively turning woe into wonder, adding our voice to the discourse, making beauty and meaning, offering random acts of kindness, making uncredited interventions and notable accomplishments alike, pushing through inertia and barriers, speaking our mind with conviction, going the extra mile, doing what once seemed impossible.
None of this implies that work of this sort needs to happen at a monumental scale to matter.
It can be as simple as cleaning the kitchen before anyone else wakes up, or sprucing up the kids’ rooms while they’re at school — acts that may bring no overt recognition whatsoever. It can be finally cleaning out the garage, painting the fence, planting the garden.
You can read or listen to Amster's entire article on the wonderful Awakin.org website.
May your doing awaken being. Meanwhile, I have a smoke detector to replace and some steps to adjust 🙂
--
🙏
Ken, Sandi, and the Community Meditation Team
Photo by Speak Media Uganda
We started this meditation network to help you bring more clarity, balance, caring and joy to your life and your community.
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.
― Thomas Merton
