Common Ground is committed to being a welcoming, accessible, and safe practice home for all.
Over the past several years the community and leadership at Common Ground have become increasingly aware of the important intersection between our Buddhist practice of opening to the moment just as it is and the necessity of engaging the often messy and difficult work of acknowledging how cultural conditioning unconsciously keeps us bound up in cycles of suffering. As leaders of this community, we are committed to finding ways to keep this conversation alive and creating enough safety so that all people feel welcome to practice at the center and so that we can deeply see and hear each other . We aspire to develop compassion, and to practice non-harming so we may skillfully address the roots of suffering embedded in our views. The freedom that the Buddha points to involves acknowledging and responding to the suffering we see around us. As an organization we are committed to better understanding the injustices arising because of our ignorance in areas of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, and all the other ways that we perpetuate ideas and feelings of separation.
Registration Priority Policy
Common Ground gives priority registration to program participants of the following groups: Black, Indigenous, and people of color, as well as non-binary and transgender people. Two main values informing this policy are justice and safety. Regarding justice, we see this policy as an imperfect and insufficient attempt to remediate current and historical disadvantages faced by these groups by offering an advantage in our registration process. Regarding safety, we see this policy as an imperfect attempt to create a safer space for participants of these groups by making it more likely to not ever be “the only one” at a given program. There are other advantages to this policy, for example, the benefit to all participants of being in a more diverse group. To learn more, contact the center at info@commongroundmeditation.org or 612-722-8260. We welcome feedback on any aspect of this policy.
Other Written Statements from Our Leadership
- Read the letter from our leaders responding to the killing of George Floyd.
- Guiding Teacher, Mark Nunberg addresses the community in a letter titled “Why Open to Experiences of Difference, Privilege, and Oppression?”
- A statement from 2017: A reminder about our community’s guiding principles and practices in light of these turbulent times
