A Path for Parents: What Buddhism Can Offer, by Sara Burns

(161 pp., Windhorse Publications, 2007)

“How do we lead rich and meaningful spiritual lives in the context of parenting?” asks Sara Burns, mother of two and an ordained member of the Western Buddhist Order (WBO). While delousing her children’s hair, Burns complains that this task “is grindingly repetitive, continuous, never-ending.” She then realizes that nothing is “never-ending.” On a retreat, she envisioned that her children might be hurt or die: “I felt something twist round in my body, and I had a strong sense that although I still didn’t know how I would ever recover from the grief and loss I feared, I would physically continue to live and have an existence if my children were to die before me. I had a visual image of myself as being beyond and without them.” A Path for Parents includes Burns’s “parenting” versions of traditional guided meditations, including a “three-minute playground meditation.” Parenting stories and wisdom from over two dozen other parents, mostly WBO practitioners, are also included.

∞

From the Fall 2007 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 24, No. 1)

© 2007 Patricia Mushim Ikeda

Parenting, Children, Practice, Women in Buddhism

Patricia Mushim Ikeda is a Buddhist teacher, writer, mother and diversity consultant living in Oakland, California. She authored a quarterly column on Buddhist practice and family life for ten years for Turning Wheel: The Journal of Socially Engaged Buddhism. She also served on the board of directors, known as the Leadership Sangha,for seven years at the East Bay Meditation Center in downtown Oakland.