Bridging Family and Community Practice

My Buddhist practice has taken many forms—from initial academic study to lived experience as a practitioner. I’ve sat with university groups and practiced in traditional Theravada and Tibetan monasteries, both in Asia and in the United States. I’ve lived in mountain retreat centers, been active in urban dharma communities, sat through extended retreats, and even spent time as a monastic. For the past six years, though, my practice has been shaped by family life. 

I have a 6-year-old son and a 2-year-old daughter who have been immersed in Buddhist practice and culture since birth. At home, they love spending time in what they call “The Buddha Room,” watching my husband and me as we practice. They delight in making offerings at our shrine, helping to set up water bowls, lighting incense, and repeating mantras. Recently, my older one asked for his own Buddha statue and water-offering bowls, which he now uses for the small altar he’s created in his bedroom.

We’re fortunate to belong to a center that offers diverse programming and genuinely welcomes families—the resident lama has always made a point to integrate children into community practice, rather than segregating them into separate activities. A few weeks after my children were born, we held their refuge blessing ceremonies at the center, formally introducing them to our sangha. Over the years, they’ve developed their own rhythm at events: sitting with us for a while, then wandering off to the community area to color, play, or grab a snack whenever they need a break.

Like many Western dharma centers, ours has a core group of steady members alongside others who come and go, some staying months, others years. At any given event, there are usually people present who aren’t familiar with my children—a dynamic that is generally fine but can also create uncertainty about how people will respond to their presence at the dharma center.

One particular incident brought this tension into sharp focus. It had been a challenging week for my family. Rain kept us indoors, leaving the kids restless and me feeling frayed around the edges. Still, we were looking forward to participating in the final session of a weekend event at the dharma center. While a formal dharma teaching or meditation retreat would, of course, be inappropriate for children to attend, participants in this event would be chanting, circumambulating the main shrine, and playing traditional Tibetan instruments. I was hoping that this would work well for my energetic children—lots of sound, movement, and the rhythm of instruments—minimizing any potential disruption. 

We arrived with the children, excited but still carrying that cooped-up energy from days of rain. Despite my attempts to keep them settled, there came a moment during one of the impromptu teaching segments when my children, who had joined my husband and me on our meditation cushions, began whispering to each other. Someone in front of us turned around and delivered a sharp “shush!”

Suddenly, I found myself managing multiple layers of difficulty: my husband’s discomfort with this negative attention, my own uneasiness about disturbing others, and the ongoing challenge of keeping the kids settled. On top of that, I now had to absorb the reactions of those who seemed annoyed or disrupted by my children’s behavior. It was simply too much to carry all at once. We decided to leave.

Whenever I can, I seize the opportunity to practice as a family.

I could have let this experience end there, feeling frustrated and excluded. However, our community circled back to this incident later in the week. What followed were some truly meaningful conversations with dharma friends—including the person who had been triggered by my children’s noise, as well as the center’s lama—about inclusion within the sangha. By exploring broader questions about holding space for kids in Western Buddhist communities,  these conversations made me realize why it’s so crucial to practice both as a family and in community life.  

To Practice as a Family

As a full-time working mother, finding time to practice is incredibly difficult. It requires juggling priorities and making use of stolen moments. So, whenever I can, I seize the opportunity to practice as a family. 

At home, our shrine room has an “open door policy.” I don’t keep my children out. While it’s set up as a traditional Tibetan shrine room filled with delicate items that small hands could easily break, I’ve made deliberate choices to welcome them in. Both kids have their own meditation cushions where they can sit with us if they choose. When we make daily offerings, I include them—letting them help set water bowls or offer incense. We often bring special rocks or feathers from our family walks to place on the shrine, turning our time in nature into part of our spiritual practice. On special occasions, I encourage them to make their own offerings through dancing or singing to the buddhas, watching their natural joy become part of our practice.

Having my children not only observe my husband and me practicing, but actually participate in the practice itself, feels essential. I want them to grow up seeing dharma as part of their lives rather than as something that happens around them but doesn’t include them. I want our practice to be a shared family experience, not something we disappear to do behind closed doors.

This integration at home makes it all the more important to me that we’re able to practice together as a family in community settings as well.

To Practice in Community

I want my children to experience practice in community—not just as something we do at home in isolation. I want them to practice alongside others, and to witness and be part of a sangha.

The goal isn’t that my kids become Buddhist per se but that they learn about kindness, compassion, generosity, and helping others—the things we cultivate as Buddhists. They need to see that these qualities are not just abstract concepts we talk about at home but ways of being in relationship with others, and that these values extend beyond our Buddhist community to all people.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ I want my kids to know that wherever they go, whoever they encounter, they can always build community. They have the capacity to find and create connections with others, to recognize shared values and humanity, and to cultivate belonging no matter where life takes them.

Practicing in a community also provides opportunities for them to learn how to behave in a dharma center. This learning process isn’t possible if we don’t allow them to attend, and it’s equally important that they see how people react when they make mistakes and how we can support one another through those moments.

I believe a dharma center should be a constructive place. I don’t want my children to develop negative associations with dharma centers—places where they’re constantly being told “no” or getting in trouble for simply being children. This isn’t the association I want them to grow up with. Instead, I want them to see dharma centers as welcoming spaces. 

Shifting the Western Buddhist Model

Dharma centers in the West often create quiet, sanitized environments where everything feels controlled—you sit down, you’re silent, and you practice within carefully maintained boundaries. While some centers do wonderful work offering children’s programming and family-friendly approaches, there’s often still an underlying divide between “real” practice—the quiet, adult-centered kind—and the “children’s activities” that happen elsewhere.

This sterile approach can create a significant gap in our practice. When our practice consists only of sitting on the cushion in controlled environments, we struggle to carry it into the real world. Our practice can become disconnected from actual life, existing only in highly curated settings rather than informing how we interact with people and navigate daily challenges.  

This doesn’t align with my experience in traditional Buddhist communities. In the gatherings I’ve attended in Asia and within diasporic communities, children aren’t an exception requiring special accommodation—they’re simply part of the fabric of community practice. I’ve found myself holding babies I’d never met, helping toddlers who wandered over during teachings, playing quietly with children while their parents practiced. Kids come and go, move around, and exist naturally within the space without anyone feeling disrupted or uncomfortable. It’s just a different set of expectations about the nature of practice. 

I think something essential gets lost when we compartmentalize practice this way. When we create these separate spaces—adults here, children there—we miss opportunities to learn how to carry our practice into the messiness of actual life. If dharma centers were more integrated—truly welcoming to families and all generations—we’d have training grounds for living the practice. Instead of practicing how to maintain equanimity only on a quiet cushion, we could learn to find it amid the beautiful chaos of real human interaction.

Simple Steps Toward Inclusion

The changes don’t have to be dramatic. In dharma centers and gatherings, even simple acts of acknowledgment can go a long way toward making children feel included. Our resident lama will sometimes invite my son to recite the refuge prayer for everyone, or to light and offer an incense stick—and I watch him light up with pride and a sense of belonging. These small moments of participation help children develop a sense of ownership and responsibility within the community.

But it can be even more basic than that—just acknowledging children’s presence at the beginning of an event can shift the entire dynamic. When a teacher takes a moment to say something like, “We have some young practitioners with us today, and they might move around or make some sounds as we practice together, and that’s perfectly fine,” it changes everything. It gives parents permission to relax, and it helps other practitioners adjust their expectations before anything even happens.

I’ve noticed that much of people’s discomfort around children isn’t really about the noise itself—it’s about worrying what others might think about the noise. Once we communally acknowledge the situation and agree that some sound and movement is part of our practice together, it takes the edge off. People become more comfortable when a toddler wanders over during meditation or when they whisper (or even scream!) during a teaching. The children stop being a distraction and become simply part of a living, breathing practice community.

The sangha is one of Buddhism’s three jewels for a reason. I love practicing with my family at home, but it’s only through community that we can actually bring that practice into the larger world. In community, we become part of each other’s practice—learning how to both offer and receive support. Community also serves as a necessary mirror, reflecting the sticky points we still need to work on, those blind spots we can’t see on our own. It gives us real opportunities to practice patience, generosity, and compassion. When we build welcoming spaces that include messy family life, we do more than just strengthen our own practice. We strengthen the future of Buddhism.