Sangha for Parents was an online sangha, or spiritual community in the Buddhist tradition, created and led by Joanna from 2023-2025. The purpose of Sangha for Parents was to provide an accessible spiritual community for parents. It was born from the following thoughts:

Many spiritual spaces are unknowingly dominated by patriarchal systems. At most places of worship, parents are expected to drop off children in Sunday school or nurseries in order to participate in their own study and worship. We are given the message that we must separate from those we love and who need us in order to awaken. We must attend distant or intensive retreats away from our families to find liberation. Many of us unknowingly go along with this patriarchal practice of not centering parents and children in places of worship. We hide nursing our babies as some act of perversion. We quiet our toddler’s squeals and sweat bullets until the service, Zoom call, or group is over. Or we just don’t attend. At all.

The Buddha left his wife and children for 7 years to become enlightened. Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days and then had a nomadic ministry largely away from home. Others went to the Himalayas to meet their gurus.

But what happens when our child (or our heart) say “no” to these practices? Surely liberation is available for us, too.

What can we learn from Mother Mary, from Dipa Ma, from the early Buddhist nuns, and from those quiet parents in our humble communities we do not know yet?

What if enlightenment comes from life with our family, not despite it. What if nursing a baby and co-regulating with our child are as central to a spiritual practice as any other conditioned “spiritual behavior”?

What would happen if we began centering parents and their children in these spaces?