In case you are wondering who are the Founders, or Owners, of Metta Circles...
How can there be founders for a practice that was sacred to the Native Americans (and possibly other civilizations as well), to which a name from a different civilization (Buddhism) has been attached? How can it be owned by anyone?
However, it does take effort to maintain the website and curate the information on it, and for that, as well as hosting the first Metta Circle, your hosts are Dileepa Manawadu (she/her) and Sifaan Zavahir (he/him); we live in Sri Lanka, have been married since 2009, parents since 2015, and are founders of Sri Lanka's first (and still only) democratic school, Kinder Republic, since 2021.
When trying to make sense of some of our struggles, we eventually realized that the trauma of our inner-child was holding us back from becoming the people we wished to be. We recognized that in healing some aspects of that trauma, we had been supported by people who held space for us - not by trying to "fix us" or "repair us", but just creating the safety for us to express ourselves and find our own way. And we thought it would be useful to convene intentionally to heal, initially for ourselves and the people with us, but then we also wondered "why should we keep this idea to ourself?" and we decided to share it, so that anyone who wises to make use of it, can do so.