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.
Click here to join on Zoom @ 5 PM ET
This Monday, join Kaye-Lee as we carry on exploring our creative awareness through discussion, readings, and shares. We'll be reading and exploring Chogyam Trungpa's book True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art, which considers dharma art as a way of approaching creativity from a place of deeper awareness. Everyone is welcome!
I had been a bell my whole life but didn't know it until I was lifted and struck.
– Annie Dillard
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
Please join Brenda, Gordon, and Jim for 20 minutes of silent meditation followed by a reading from Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach. This week, we'll continue reading Chapter 5 and discussing how returning to our bodies may contribute to healing old traumatic and emotional wounds. Everyone is welcome, and there's no need to have or be familiar with the book.
Emotions, a combination of physical sensations and the stories we tell ourselves, continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our bodies.
– Tara Brach
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
Join Kaye-Lee, Marian, and Gloria as we begin our gathering with 20 minutes of silent meditation. We will follow with readings from Presence: the Art of Being at Home in Yourself by Tracy Cochran: "Seeking Verity" and a new chapter, "Finding the Path."
All are welcome. There is no need to be familiar with the book. Bring your curiosity.
Notice how it feels to be willing to be fully human–and held by a spacious awareness that is compassionate and wise beyond words.
– Tracy Cochran
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Please join Lauren, Adam, and Sandi to follow up on Lama Tasha Schumann's article titled "The Clarity Inside Your Anger." Our curiosity about Schumann's writing inspired us to explore a practice this week, one that brings us deeper into the felt sense of Anger. Can we bring spaciousness to this practice? Our session will begin with 20 minutes of silent meditation.
On a personal level, clarified anger can show us where we’ve been silencing ourselves, where resentment has been quietly accumulating, where we’ve been saying ‘it’s fine’ when it isn’t.
– Lama Tasha Schumann
OWEN SOUND, IN PERSON
What does it mean to flourish in our lifetime, to discover that we carry within us the possibility to realize a genuine well-being? Join Ken to explore how to cultivate awareness, connection, insight, and purpose–and why it matters. Our session will begin with sitting and walking meditation, and everyone is welcome.
We can train ourselves to navigate life's ups and downs with far more resilience, calmness, and even a hopeful outlook.
– Richard Davidson, PhD, Cortland, Dahl, PhD
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Please join Debbie and Daniel to watch an Eckhart Tolle video. In it, he looks at how identifying with things outside of ourselves, such as our roles, possessions, and the approval of others, leaves us constantly wanting more to feel secure. Our session will begin with 20 minutes of silent meditation.
To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.
– Eckhardt Tolle
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ECODHARMA
Join Debbie to explore the role Indigenous peoples have to play in addressing climate change. Yuria Celedwin discusses how Indigenous cultures have shown extraordinary resilience against genocide and cultural and environmental destruction, as they have continued to transmit traditional wisdom, ancestral lineages, institutions, ways of knowing, beliefs, history, and spirituality through generations. Our session will begin with 20 minutes of silent meditation. There's no need to have the book.
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.
For Indigenous Peoples, who widely live in environments harshly threatened by the climate crisis and biocultural loss, learning to understand Nature is a matter of survival.
– Yuria Celedwin
Click here to join on Zoom @ 10:15 AM ET
ONLINE
Please join Debbie and Lauren to continue reading Pema Chodron's book, Living Beautifully. In the "Staying in the Middle" chapter, we look at the uneasiness and lack of awareness underneath our habits and patterns. Our session will begin with 20 minutes of silent meditation, and there's no need to be familiar with the book.
We allow ourselves to wait, to sit patiently with the urge to act or speak in our usual ways and feel the full force of that urge without turning away or giving in.
– Pema Chodron
The allure of sudden transformations and dramatic leaps is hard to resist. David Lloyd George captured the spirit of this attraction when he wrote: "You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.” He's not wrong! But not everything is a chasm. You can't climb Everest in a single step.
People turn to mindfulness practices for many reasons. Anxiety. Difficulty sleeping. Stress. Spiritual longing. The list goes on, but no matter the motive, mindfulness is not a chasm. Exactly no one has ever received meditation instruction, practiced for the first time, and banished their anxiety for good.
Which brings us to small steps. One of the most common questions about a mindfulness practice, like meditation, is: how much? According to Dr. Richard Davidson, PhD, at the Center for Healthy Minds, the empirical evidence is clear:
If you do it for 30 days and you do it just five minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety, and symptoms of stress. We’ve shown that repeatedly in randomized control trials.
Five minutes is about the time it takes to steep a cup of peppermint tea, or brush and floss your teeth, or French press your morning coffee. You've likely been doing one or more of those activities every day for years. Now, imagine significantly lowering your stress level in five minutes a day.
Baby steps. Baby steps through the office. Baby steps out the door...It works! All I have to do...is take one little step at a time..and I can do anything!
– Bill Murray, in What About Bob?
Another benefit of the small steps approach is that it short-circuits the overwhelm that can arise when starting something new. Five minutes of mindfulness still feel like too much? Make it one minute. No kidding, do it for one minute a day and see what happens. You just might forget to stop.
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Ken, Sandi, and the Community Meditation Team
Photo by Trần Long
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
