Founders
The vision of MorningSun is carried by Fern Dorresteyn and Michael Ciborski.
It has grown out of their collective training in mindfulness practice and experience in intentional communities. This experience includes living and studying in several healing arts and yoga communities in the US. They also lived for a short time as co-workers in two Camphill Communities where they were deeply inspired by a simple life of service, hand crafts, and caring for the Earth alongside developmentally disabled people.

Their most significant community experience comes from the nine years they lived in Plum Village, France, the monastery and practice center of Vietnamese Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh. They trained in the meditative arts as monk and nun for seven of those years and were fortunate to live and work intimately with Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastic community to organize, support, and offer meditation retreats around the world. While living in Plum Village they became Dharma teachers in Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition.
In 2003, they departed Plum Village and returned to lay life. Now they are married and have a son.

"We are so excited to be realizing the vision of MorningSun. Over the years many practitioners have shared with us their aspirations to live and work together in order to transform our social and cultural norms through mindfulness practice. Through MorningSun it is our intent to help these aspirations be realized. So many experiences are gathered together in this vision.

We envision an educational community that:

• Provides a service and benefit to all life, cultivating a reverential, healthy and sustainable relationship to the natural world (people, animals, plants, and minerals);

• Creates a space wherein people (both residents and visitors) can experience peace, slowing down, relaxation, resting, touching life's beauty and wonder deeply;

• Provides conditions for life-long education that fosters personal growth and transformation at the base of consciousness, thus supporting people to develop mature human capacities: mindful presence in every situation, the capability to truly listen and understand, the experience of a genuine sense of kinship with all beings, the ability to manifest compassion as creative, healing action in the world;

• Provides conditions for social relationships and shared spiritual practice that support wholesome transformation of cultural norms, values, ethics, and morality;

• Thus offers a model of an alternative way of living that manifests sustainable solutions to the sufferings and difficulties present in society and the world."

Inspiration
There are great crises and sufferings within and all around us in modern society. There is violence and hatred manifest in many places. As a culture we are lost in busyness and distraction, unable to summon the understanding and compassion necessary to address the rights and basic needs of others, even our own countrymen, women, and children. Even within the sustainability movement, within the liberal and activist movements, there is unrest and the inability to live peacefully and harmoniously together.
The practice of mindful living, with its effects on how we relate, communicate, move, and grow in the world, has so much to offer to this situation.
Fundamental to the vision of MorningSun is a shared practice of peace and understanding that can address the difficulties present in society in many ways. MorningSun will be a healing presence and example through its educational programs and other service initiatives, through community processes and social structures, through the development of the built environment, and through the personal health, well being, and transformation of resident staff.