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
Join Kaye-Lee in a contemplative journey into the elements of mindful creativity, in the many forms that might take. Everyone is welcome.
...the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others.
– Brenda Ueland
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
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 continue reading and discussing Chapter 9, "The RAIN of Compassion: an Applied Meditation for Healing and Freedom".
When our attention is freed from reactive stories of a separate self and reconnected to presence, our hearts open to embrace the life that is here before us.
– Tara Brach
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Come join Gloria, KayLee and Marian as we continue to read and discuss Norman Fischer's The World Could be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path. This week, we will focus on Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253), noted for his imaginative approach to Buddhist practice.
When I practice, others practice; when others practice, I practice...In the big bodhisattva picture, we're all always advancing on the path together.
– Dogen
Click here to join on Zoom @ 10:45 AM ET
NEW DAYTIME SESSION! ONLINE
Please join Sandi and Darina's daytime session, in which we're currently exploring Pema Chodron's book, Another Kind of Freedom. Chodron covers the realm of paranoia, which can manifest as jealousy: comparing ourselves to other people and competing for power.
When you have the jealous...mentality, you have wealth, success, and so forth, and other people think you have it made, but you’re paranoid that someone else has it better. Your way of scrambling for ground and security—rather than staying with the fluid, unpredictable quality of open space—is trying to win, to engage in one-upmanship.
– Pema Chodron
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Join Sandi, Lauren, and Adam as we listen to Jeffrey Rutstein's "Wired for well-being" talk. Rutstein has spent many years exploring how we can become constantly dysregulated, meaning we're stuck in "fight or flight/freeze/collapse or shutdown". Over time, this can become a way of life–but another state of being is available.
The more our nervous system is in this activated, defensive state, it can easily become a way of life. So we start to perceive life through a very limited and small lens.
– Jeffrey Rutstein
OWEN SOUND, IN PERSON
This week, we carry on with our journey through "Life is Tough. Here Are Six Ways to Deal With It", an article by Zen teacher Norman Fischer. Specifically, we'll look at the second of six slogans: drive all blames into one. If that sounds radical, it is 🙂
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.
Everything that happens, disastrous as it may be and no matter whose fault it is, has a potential benefit, and it’s your job to find it.
― Norman Fischer
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ONLINE
Please join Debbie as we are introduced to the work of Lama Surya Das. In a reading from his book Buddha Standard Time, we will take a look at the section called "Creating Space in the Pace".
If we want to make peace with time so that our days feel neither overwhelmingly rushed nor glacially slow, we need to "change the space of the pace" – wake ourselves up by doing something different that shifts us to another way of being.
– Lama Surya Das
Click here to join on Zoom @ 7 PM ET
ECODHARMA
Join Debbie as we read from Lama Surya Das's book Buddha Standard Time. In a section called "Rediscovering Nature's Rhythm", we learn how to cultivate a more grounded and peaceful relationship with time by connecting with nature.
👉 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.
In my lectures, I always advise people to spend some time outdoors every day, even if only taking one deep breath out of the window or stargazing on their way to the front door. Do the same, and you will find that nature's rhythm will begin to tug on you.
– Lama Surya Das
Click here to join on Zoom @ 10:15 AM ET
ONLINE
Please join Debbie and Darina to continue reading Ethan Nichtern's book Confidence. As part of a series about the "Eight Worldly Winds" (praise/blame, success/failure, pain/pleasure, and fame/insignificance), we'll continue into the section called "The Four Powers of Confidence", starting with the power of compassion.
As a result of practicing these teachings on compassion, as well as learning from modern Western psychology, I've come to see compassion as having three basic elements: empathy, care (sympathy), and agency (taking action).
– Ethan Nichtern
Have you come across the word "ill-being"? I hadn't, and I don't love it, but it is the obvious opposite of well-being, so I should probably get used to it. The term popped up in a "noticing nature" replication study (one that repeated an earlier study under similar conditions) in the Journal of Happiness Studies.
The study confirmed that just two weeks of paying attention to everyday nature encounters, with zero increase in the time spent in nature, significantly raised well-being and lowered ill-being. Paying attention is something we take seriously here at Community Meditation; it's not a stretch to say it's the foundation of what we do. So, when we come across a study like this, we...pay attention 😉
The takeaway here is that you can cultivate happiness and positive feelings with no special training, meditation cushions, books, podcasts, apps, or seminars. All you have to do is remember and choose to pay attention to the natural world as you go about your normal routine. That's it. That's the whole practice.
Here are some tips for putting this very modest practice into action:
As the poet David Whyte put it:
All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
What are you waiting for? 🤔
--
🙏
Ken, Sandi, and the Community Meditation Team
Photo by Alaric Duan 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
