Awaken your Mind
Open your Heart
Nourish your Life
Beautify the World
Rooted in Mindfulness is a Buddhist meditation community in Brookfield, Wisconsin. We sit together, learn together, and help one another live with more clarity, kindness, and steadiness. Everything here is freely offered and community-supported, and open to everyone. Come as you are.
Learn, Practice, and Grow Together.
Most of us are carrying more than we let on. Full days that somehow do not nourish. News that arrives faster than a heart can hold it. Plenty of connection on a screen, and more loneliness than anyone says out loud. Nobody needs to be told the times are hard. What we need is a place to put some of it down.
And what helps is old, and it still works: a practice that settles the mind, teachings that give a life meaning and direction, and people who take both seriously, sitting beside you. That is what we are making here, together.
What We Learn and Practice.
At RIM, meditation is part of a larger way of learning and living. We explore Buddhist wisdom across the traditions—not as a belief system, but as practical ways to steady the mind, understand experience, meet difficulty, and bring more wisdom and compassion into everyday life. You do not need to be Buddhist to practice here, and nobody will try to make you one.
Everything we keep passes one old test: does it help a person suffer less, see more clearly, and love more capably? We call this ordered path A Handful of Leaves, after a story the Buddha told in a forest.
Join a Mindfulness-Based Community
This path is difficult to walk alone, and no one here has to. Anyone who has sat in a room of settled people knows that steadiness is contagious, and in community we learn as much from one another’s honest difficulties as from one another’s calm.
Members gather for meditation, dharma talks, classes, community groups, and retreats, and friendships form around what matters. Membership, like everything else here, is freely offered.
Community programs
Learn and practice with the support of others.
We gather through the week, mornings and evenings, in person at the center and online. Every session is complete in itself. No background is needed and no one will ask you to explain yourself, so you can come this week, just as you are.
RIM asks no fees or tuition; the center is held by the people who practice here, each giving as they are able.
Dana
A Generosity-Based Approach
We follow an old practice here: the teachings are given as a gift, never sold. There is no fee or tuition for anything. The community sustains the teachers and the center, each person as they are able.
The tradition calls this dana, generosity of heart: a gift economy rather than a fee for service. What you receive here was given by someone, and what you give keeps the door open for the next person. A teaching given freely can be trusted freely.
RIM is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.