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.
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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
This Monday, we'll explore collage as a mindful experience. Not thinking of the outcome, but rather, allowing an intuitive choosing to emerge. Bring glue and anything that can be glued: paper, twigs, fabric, plastic, buttons, string–there are no rules. We will do this together as we continue to delve into dharma art as a way of approaching creativity from a place of deeper awareness.
Mindfulness practices improve skills or habits of mind that can support creativity.
– Henriksen, Richardson, & Shack
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Please join Brenda, Gordon, and Jim for 20 minutes of silent meditation followed by a reading and discussion of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach. This week, we will be continuing with Chapter 7, "Opening our Heart in the Face of Fear."
We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.
– Tara Brach
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Please join Gloria, Kaye Lee, and Marian as we continue reading 'Buddhism and Imagination' in Norman Fischer's The World Could be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path. We will consider the Mahayana path, whose purpose for every human being is compassion and endless caring that will relieve suffering throughout time and space.
Experiencing suffering like this, suffering ends. It transforms into love. Loving without limit. I dedicate myself to others and the world.
– Norman Fischer
Click here to join on Zoom @ 10:45 AM ET
NEW DAYTIME SESSION! ONLINE
Please join Sandi and Darina as we launch a new daytime session. We're excited to bring you readings from Pema Chodron's brand new book, Another Kind of Freedom. Pema emphasizes the importance of letting our neuroses come to the surface and making friends with all parts of ourselves. Only then, when we accept ourselves, can we not act from our neuroses.
We must begin by facing the reality of our living situations. We cannot begin by dreaming. That would only be a temporary escape; real escape is impossible.
– Pema Chodron
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Please join Lauren, Adam, and Sandi in reading a Pema Chödrön article: A Buddhist Teaching on Loneliness, Rejection & A Broken Heart. In it, she reminds us that loneliness, rejection, and heartbreak aren’t problems to escape but experiences to meet with openness, compassion, and mindfulness.
Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don’t close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings
– Pema Chodron
OWEN SOUND, IN PERSON
This week, we'll continue exploring "insight", which is the ability to see how our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs shape our experience. Our source is the third pillar of Davidson and Dahl's book "Born to Flourish", which lays out what it means to flourish in this lifetime, and the skills we can develop to that end.
Flourishing: marked by vigorous and healthy growth.
– Merriam-Webster
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Please join Daniel as we continue exploring the work of new teachers. This week, we'll watch a David Hawkins video that looks at a willingness to surrender thought and see what emerges.
...the letting go technique is not a form of repression or suppression but rather a way to allow emotions to pass through without creating unnecessary suffering.
– Louise DeCelis
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ECODHARMA
Join us as we watch and discuss a video by Lama Rod Owens titled "Embracing Earth, Embracing Self." In this keynote, he explores the essential connection between our well-being and the health of our planet. As we confront the challenges of climate change, he addresses how systems of violence, such as capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, intersect with environmental crises and impede sustainability efforts.
👉 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.
...the issue is never in the thing itself, but rather the issue lies in one’s relationship with that thing.
– Lama Rod Owens
Click here to join on Zoom @ 10:15 AM ET
ONLINE
Please join Debbie and Lauren as we continue reading Pema Chodron's book, Living Beautifully. The "Beyond Our Comfort Zone" section is about exploring the idea of committing to benefit others.
This is why [this] commitment [to take care of others] requires bravery–the bravery to do whatever we think will bring the greatest benefit, the bravery to face the fact that we never know for sure what will really benefit.
– Pema Chodron
In "Art Does Not Ask For Proof", Nora Bateson challenges us to work with complexity by transcending and including the world of data and evidence to inhabit the wider world of art and pattern:
Strung between the chords of a flamenco song is the empathy of a thousand years of love and pain. In the gestures of a contemporary dancer we can remember all that we have never imagined, and follow the form of the body into an unknown dictionary of emotions. In the strokes of color on a London wall, we find the humor and irony of our own mistakes. On a canvas, in a photo, on the screen, we see ourselves seeing the world. We see it, we see us, we take in the cock-eyed framing that tilts our heads and rests our status quo on its ear. The poetry is there, un-killable. Each of us is an artist, dabbing rhythms, colors, metaphors, and harmonies into our moments.
Where might you be looking for proof when integration is called for?
Photo by lauren lulu taylor on Unsplash
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Ken, Sandi, and the Community Meditation Team
Photo by Nicolas Messifet on Unsplash
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
