Welcome to our community of Compassionate Meditating Families
We are an online community for families of mindfulness and awareness meditators grounded in compassion, helping children and their special adults directly experience their own natural worthiness, wisdom, kindness, and strength together.
A place to connect with other meditating parents and children
Having children changes your meditation practice radically. If you don’t have many parent friends who are meditators, you may not have anyone to discuss meditating with small children around with. What do you do when you have a baby and can barely shower, let alone sit? When your child is climbing all over you to get your attention back when you sit, do you ignore them or end the session?
What if you’ve never meditated before, and you want to start now? In the middle of dinner, drop-off, and due date chaos? Is it even possible? YES!
Join us for meditation instruction (for both children and adults!), resources for family meditation, and to ask other meditating parents what they do!
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Mission
Vision
Values
To support the always-existing enlightened society based on primordial human basic goodness by helping children and their special adults directly experience their own natural worthiness, wisdom, kindness, and strength together.
An active online community of younger and older human beings who are affirming and experiencing the power of families based on mutual love, respect, kindness, and gentleness to create enlightened society.
In this community, parents will support one another in exploring and using gentle, loving parenting styles in order to nurture their children’s basic goodness, wisdom, kindness, and strength so that their children can find true happiness.
Children will get the opportunity and prompt to explore and their own experience in order to use it to recognize their basic goodness and cultivate further wisdom, kindness, and a strong mind.
Basic goodness – all human beings are basically good. Not good as opposed to bad, but as appreciation for our existence as human beings with a fundamental nature as clear and brilliant as a crystal, or as wide and open as the sky.
Respect for children – children are human beings with full human rights, no exceptions. We adults have a special and powerful role in nurturing and supporting children in our care, but we grow bodies and minds with genuine compassion and respect even as we use our power to avoid idiot compassion (ice cream for dinner). This allows our children to grow strong, brave, and bloom where they’re planted.
Meditation as a key tool for gentle parenting and nurturing both ourselves and our children. We meditate ourselves (once we are no longer trading meditation time for sleep or food in the baby years), because not only does it help us stay sane enough to continue to be patient and gentle when the going gets tough, doing it teaches our children that it is worth doing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Absolutely! We all start somewhere. We welcome all levels of practice so you’ll feel right at home in our community.
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Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we practice mindfulness meditation. No, in the sense that this is not part of the so-called mindfulness movement.
The chief difference between our approach here and the so-called  mindfulness movement is twofold:
- We see grounding mindfulness in a system of ethics based on compassion as very important. Mindfulness only leads to peace and wisdom when coupled with compassion. This is why we are Compassionate Meditating Families, and not just Meditating Families.
- While we are a secular community, we explicitly acknowledge our roots in Buddhist practice. Even the Shambhala teachings also discussed here are like a flower growing in the soil of Buddhism. This community is another flower growing in that soil.
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Not at all!
While mindfulness meditation is known for being practiced by Buddhists, it isn’t what makes you a Buddhist. (Taking refuge is.) Before the Buddhists, mindfulness meditation was used by Vedic and Jain ascetics, and is practiced today by people of all and no religions.
Like in the mythical Kingdom of Shambhala, in which the inhabitants combined all their spiritual practices and religions into a single wisdom tradition that lead them all to enlightenment, we acknowledge that wisdom is everywhere and everywhen. No tradition or culture has a lock on wisdom. Meditation is a tool to separate your innate wisdom from ignorance that everyone can use.
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Of course! Everyone can learn how to meditate. It may not feel like it, but it’s true. If you have a mind, you can meditate!
Now, it’s not always easy in the beginning. Just like starting an exercise routine isn’t so easy, it takes some effort to get going. The good news is, after a certain point, you miss it if you don’t do it! We can help you get to that point where it helps to sustain itself.
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For family life, the most obvious benefit is a larger reservoir of patience.
We all get on each other’s nerves sometimes, both children and adults. We don’t always understand each other and we sometimes lose our tempers and throw a tantrum. (Yes, us adults too.)
With time, mindfulness meditation creates more space in our minds. It’s like a maturity accelerator. Things don’t feel so in our face, even if someone literally is. (Possibly hanging on your shoulder or upside down.) This makes it naturally easier to connect with family members with compassion instead of anger, which in turn leads to better family harmony.
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