• As a full-time monk,

• As a hermit cabin builder,

• Starting several dharma community houses,

• Joining residencies at several pop-up centers.

I’m sharing my journey from monastery to dharma house to pop-up villages and centers to sharpen our villaging wisdom and better inform our spiritual community infrastructure.

The roads to the village are many and complex. And we need all of the forms.

Writing this piece helped me see how each community form solved something the previous one couldn’t but introduced its own tensions between individual autonomy, collective commitment, and alignment.

In the Beginning…

I wasn’t always into communal life. Most of my 20s were spent as a hyper, self-reliant individual. I started remote work in 2005. I lived in a tiny RV in 2012, before these became the norms in the COVID era. But, like many, I learned that an island of one is lonely.

The turning point came during a disastrous weekend in San Francisco. I had traveled cross country in an RV. Now, it was suddenly leaking wastewater onto the streets. All the dump stations and repair shops were closed.

I felt alone, helpless, and broke down crying.

In that despair, I yearned for a loving community. I felt the longing for the village, a place that would encapsulate my spirituality, vocation, friendship, and home. That wish led me to move in with close friends and start my first dharma house in Boston.

And eventually eight years in a modern monastery.

Modern Monastery

When I first entered the monastery, I felt a huge sense of relief and homecoming.

An immediate sense of rightness filled the air. People were present instead of absorbed in phones and screens. We cared about truth and spirituality and wanted full answers to “How are you doing right now?” Rather than being exhausted by shallow social interaction, individuals were energized by each other’s practice and sharing. Everyone cared for everyone else.

For someone from modern individual life, it felt like becoming sane again.

But every structure casts a shadow. The same conditions that created depth also created pressures of conformity: the weight of communal norms and the narrowing of possible freedom and futures. What had initially been the support of the schedule and container could start feeling like a prison constraining one’s freedom.

The people who benefited most easily were those who treated the monastery as a temporary training ground: international students staying for a few months, older practitioners with families and careers, returning alumni, skeptics with other spiritual homes, and those with a single purpose like deepening their meditation.

In contrast, the fully committed residents often struggled most. Many were younger searching for home, family, purpose, and vocation. For a while, the monastery could hold all of that. But over time, that total alignment became hard to sustain. People changed. Spiritual needs were fulfilled, while others like intimate relationships, creative expression, and livelihood became more important. The same structure that once felt like a home could begin to feel too small. Like a potted plant that had outgrown its container and needed a larger space.

Deep transformative work and long-term residency can make a community feel like one’s entire family system. This creates tremendous potential for transformation, but also for destabilization.

I experienced this tension. I believed the monastery might be my permanent home and vocation. During one retreat, I looked around with certainty that I wouldn’t trade my life for anyone else’s. I hoped a core group of us would recognize this monastic life as our shared vow.

That never happened while I was there. Finally, when I lost faith in long-term peers, I left.

Leaving felt like losing everything at once: my home, community, practice, and sense of purpose.

Asheville Dharma House

After leaving the monastery, I knew I still needed a community.

Not the totalizing, regimented structure, but the depth of shared communal life and interdependence. The sense of being oriented around something spiritual and sacred.

When I moved to Asheville and started the Dharma House, I carried a quiet hope:

That I could recreate that same depth of spiritual friendship, but without the brittleness of required total alignment.

We could build a grounded, sustainable life together. It would be less rigid than the monastery, more integrated with the world. Instead of dedicating ourselves to an organization’s mission, our intention was to support each other as we incubated our new phases in work, relationships, and life. We would create the fertile soil for each other so that our individual lives could flourish.

It worked.

We cooked meals, celebrated birthdays, and spent long evenings in conversation. We even led a weeklong public retreat together. There was a sense of intimacy, mutual care, and our lives being intertwined.

But then, things shifted.

As we succeeded in our lives, we unfolded in different directions. Our calendars became full. On Sunday mornings, I prefer to sit with a Zen center, others prefer Ecstatic Dance, and others go to Christian church. Many found their romantic partners (often amongst each other), and had less time and desire to socialize. Our careers flourished and the draw to collaborate diminished.

We succeeded. In our success, we needed each other less. Spending time together became something we had to consciously choose and schedule.

What remained was still meaningful: friendship, shared history, connection. Some members would say the intimacy is deeper now than ever.

But I felt the sense of a shared trajectory and alignment to a shared future fade.

What happened?

The Dharma House succeeded as a mutual incubation space, but it never developed into a larger shared purpose or durable collective project.

Friendship remained. What faded was the need for each other and collective moving together.

This was the inverse problem of the monastery. The container of the monastery was too tight: we relied on one another for nearly everything, and maintaining that life required an alignment that became constraining over time. The Dharma House’s container was loose: it gave our individual lives room to flourish, but little collective gravity to hold a shared future.

The question of an ongoing community is the right mix of individual freedom and collective constraint. How to weave our desires and needs towards a larger purpose without compromising ourselves?

The next step of a physically built village through shared investment didn’t work out. We hadn’t developed enough shared necessity, trust, or momentum to take on the commitment and coordination a physical village required.

So I began wondering: what lies between a dharma house and a village? A shared home and a monastery?

Berkeley Living Mandala - Pop-Up Center

In my last Substack piece, Missing Spiritual Practices, I wrote about the Berkeley Living Mandala house, where I was a resident for December 2025. It was a short-term three-month dharma house experiment organized by my friends, Milo North and Zev.

Living Mandala was partly inspired by my Asheville dharma house, but also departed in many radical ways.

Living Mandala was more like a pop-up urban meditation Zen center, while my Asheville home is more of a private house nest.

Neither is better or worse. There’s a lot of overlap, but they serve different purposes and thrive under different conditions.

Conflicting understandings of the community can cause a lot of trouble for residents.

There’s a difference between a co-housing center with a public-facing community space and one’s home.

Trying to make one structure do both can generate tension.

In the long run, everyone needs their own home nest that’s fully in their control and buffered from required interactions with others. The tensions I experienced at Living Mandala and in the monasteries and dharma houses were negotiating how much of this is my home nest versus how much I have to compromise for the public good.

Nectary: A Relational Monastery & Pop-Up School

In the spring, I spent a month at the Nectary, a relational monastery and pop-up school in Washington, DC, led by my dear dharma friend, Dechen Ellen McSweeney.

The Nectary combined the dharma house, a pop-up school, and the Hearth.

The Hearth was the relational home nest. It was built on deep spiritual friendship, like the dharma home. Our days were woven together through morning practice, shared breakfasts, check-ins, spacious dinners, spontaneous conversations, and regular “down-and-ins” devoted to one person’s healing and transformation.

The Pop-Up School was the outward-facing expression of that shared life. The Nectary gathered a community of fellows, rather than centering a single teacher. Each Teaching Fellow was invited to design and lead a public offering rooted in their own gifts and practice.

Our group had an unusual coherence, like a monastery. We shared a commitment to contemplative practice, personal transformation, and service to something larger than ourselves. We weren’t just co-living; we were engaged in a common project, and that sense of being in it together was palpable.

What struck me most wasn’t any individual practice, workshop, or teaching. It was the emergence of a temporary spiritual village.

For two months, the Nectary combined the intimacy of a Hearth, the coherence of a monastery, and the creativity of a Pop-Up School into a glimpse of a form many of us seek.

Its innovations include multi-headed teacher, peer-based leadership, and economying.

Multi-headed Teacher

One of my favorite activities at the monastery was developing new training programs. The flagship was the Anti-Fragile Heart retreat, a weeklong in-person immersion with multiple facilitators across modalities (mindfulness, embodiment, emotional processing, relational practice, etc.) to engage 20+ people in collective intelligence practice.

People quote, “The next Buddha will be the Sangha (community).” One way is generating a relational field of teachers in deep spiritual friendship who can support and balance each other. Typically, a teacher excellent in one field (non-dual awareness) casts a Halo Effect that leads people to believe they must be great in every dimension, which is rarely, if ever, the case.

By having multiple teachers in deep relationship teaching together, we prevent putting any single teacher on a pedestal. The relating field and friendship between them become the teacher, the transmission.

At the Nectary, I led the first public event, a meditation retreat titled Stillness Comes Easier Together. A simple question guided the event: What kind of retreat would I have wanted when I started practicing? Together with three facilitators, we combined nature practice, embodiment, relational exercises, and silent meditation into an experience grounded in safety, connection, and ease.

I’m often surprised by how petty spiritual leaders can be, and how difficult sustained cooperation between teachers can be. Sanghas fragment, authority becomes territorial, and teachers struggle to collaborate.

I’m confident that with the millennial and later generations, we’ll see more groups of spiritual friends from various backgrounds teaching together and building the spiritual infrastructure and lineages as a collective.

Sourcekeeping Leadership

The Nectary was different from both monasteries and dharma houses in its approach to leadership.

Although Dechen and the other primary leaders (Hosts) carried substantial responsibility, the Nectary’s source never felt located in one person. We were collectively listening to and from the shared middle. Leadership emerged less through a single authority than through attunement to what the Nectary itself seemed to be asking of us.

This differed from the monastery or a company, where the primary leader carries responsibility for holding the vision and inspiring the community. It also differed from the Asheville Dharma House, where we cultivated deep friendship but didn’t organize around shared projects.

The Nectary felt closer to the Sourcekeeping model. While certain individuals had greater responsibility, everyone was invited into stewardship of the larger field.

Economying

The economics of the Nectary were unlike any other project I’ve been part of.

Income came from three sources: contributions from resident fellows, paid events, and donations.

Before the residency, Fellows were invited to contribute from nothing to several thousand dollars. A few raised donations through friends and networks. Finally, we held public events and weekend retreats.

This pool of money covered the shared costs of housing, food, and event space over the two-month residency.

We generated a modest surplus.

All fellows were asked to fill out a survey giving feedback and requesting financial support.

Then, a nominated committee who read everyone’s responses distributed these surplus funds.

There was remarkable trust in collective discernment. The familiar fears of unfairness, exploitation, or imbalance could be included in the collective inquiry rather than avoided.

It was an experiment in a maternal gift economy: distribution based on need and collective discernment rather than hours worked or capital contributed.

Magically, everyone almost exactly got what they requested.

Conclusion

I’ve been seeing myself as a spiritual community researcher. From these experiments of a spiritual collective, my wisdom grew to see the differentiation of the layers and dimensions, the underlying architecture.

There may not be one final structure called “the village.” We may need an ecology of containers: private hermit homes, co-housing with friends, schools, monasteries, temples, and larger villages.

We need a lot of experimentation. This is the forefront of civilization, culture, and future village design. These are the lived laboratories developing a metamodern alternative to our metacrisis civilization.

I’ve graduated out of a dharma house, but the village is too soon. What’s next?

I’ve been reconsidering a church or temple of an urban center for human flourishing and integration rather than cloistered awakening. A year ago, I envisioned developing an urban center and school. In the interim, I’ve experimented and visited pop-up centers and schools.

This idea is not unique or mine. It’s in the zeitgeist. Previously, my dharma friends, Daniel Thorson and Cheryl Hsu, created the Church of the Intimate Web. VividVoid launched his Nameless Mountain, a center focused on the Grow Up quadrant. And, while editing this piece, I’m in San Francisco exploring the creation of a pluralistic temple integrating psycho-spiritual development, culture change, and collective intelligence.

These projects are grounded in spiritual friendship, a loving relationship based on commitment to truth over transactional gain or positive feelings. They rely on the non-dual, full affirmation of one’s unique soul and the emptiness of persistent change and interdependence. They rely on the courage to create the future, faith in larger guiding forces, and humility of not-knowing.

May we find the spiritual friendship, awakening realization, courage, faith, and humility to lead us towards flourishing life.

If this work resonates, there are several ways to participate:

• one-on-one emotional coaching (schedule a free intro session).

• Tuesday night circles through Relateful (zoom-based).

• Watch video interview with Cam Joyner and me on the journey from monk to successful coach.

These are some of the gradual, foundational skills for a spiritual community.

Globally, people are trying to build intentional communities, co-housing projects, retreat centers, and land-based collectives. Groups gather around a shared vision: buy land together, build homes, grow food, raise children, and live in alignment with their values.

But most village projects overlook the most challenging aspect.

They try to build the physical village before the community.

Last month, I toured Radish, a residential village for sale in Oakland. I was impressed by the multiple homes, families, kids, and community house. They did it!

A fellow community weaver friend said something that has stayed with me. She wouldn’t join another residential community unless it was a spiritual one. I realized that was true for me too.

What makes a community a spiritual community?

My adult life has been about spiritual community. I’ve practiced in various spiritual communities. I ran a monastery and its monastery village. Afterwards, I gathered the Asheville Hearth community.

At my invitation, several spiritual friends moved to Asheville, NC. Last year, I led the attempt for my Asheville spiritual friends to buy land together. We almost closed on a mortgage, but it fell apart.

I felt hopeless. A few months later, nearly half the community moved away. The dream was on ice.

I missed something.

Time to go back to the drawing board.

This essay is my reflection of the past months. It clarifies the precursors to a spiritual village. My envisioning of a metamodern village center. Finally, my focus is on researching deep spiritual village practices.

What If the Village Started Outdoors?

In September, I went on a retreat-party camping week with a dozen friends on rustic land in California.

Low frills, minimal infrastructure, and an emergent schedule. What made it extraordinary were the people. Addictive habits fell away, and truth-telling and heart shares came easily.

I felt an ease and presence I associate with retreat containers, a feeling of deep rightness, of being at home, being my best self connected with others.

I looked around the raw land: the outdoor showers, kitchen, and tent sites. I realized I could build all this myself.

I thought starting my own center would be expensive. But, what if we had an outdoor-based, seasonal, low-maintenance center instead? At least as a prototype.

Why not create this back home?

I’ve built my own cabin. I ran a monastery and developed its guest programming. I understand utilities.

This center would be dedicated to creating deep community before an actual village. It would be a home for village practice to develop a strong community.

While pitching my outdoor metamodern village center idea, one question kept coming up: “What village practices lead to a village?”

From my monastery experience, I knew that the essence of community isn’t taught in models, beliefs, and words. It’s transmitted through daily experience, absorbed like a child absorbs language, through immersion rather than instruction. We need to generate and deepen that community field into village-level bonds.

Living Mandala Dharma House in Berkeley

In December, I lived at Living Mandala, a short-term dharma house experiment in Berkeley, for its final month. About ten people lived together with a daily morning schedule, weekly meetings, and frequent evening events.

Two friends organized this experiment, partly inspired by conversations with me and my Asheville house. I handed over our values documents and shared what I could about starting a dharma house.

The two houses were at different points on the same arc. Most members in Asheville had years of experience living together in a monastery. We already had community transmission. Less experienced members could absorb it from us.

I’d seen this at the monastery: the modeling in relationships and groups was the teacher, not explicit agreements or protocols. In Asheville, we needed space to reclaim personal sovereignty after intensive monastic life with its rigid schedules and structures. Over time, our group has worked on that polarity toward greater differentiation, finding partners, and making more friends in town.

Berkeley was the opposite starting point. Most residents had little or no prior experience in residential community. They might have done silent meditation retreats before, but living together is different.

Living Mandala had more structure than Asheville. It had morning practice periods, house roles like kitchen manager, and frequent public events and workshops. It felt like a residential center.

My original plan was to buy land and start a metamodern center, a place for practicing villaging together before an actual village. That felt like a significant intermediate step.

Watching the Living Mandala folks work through deep community life opened my eyes another step. The bottleneck wasn’t land or location. It was that the practices, principles, and relational capacities for spiritual village life don’t exist yet.

We were importing our experiences from the monastery or relying on tools like Relateful circles, but these weren’t sufficient for developing deep community life.

Now, I updated the steps. First, develop the village principles and practices before buying land. Then create temporary containers for people to develop deeply trusting, deeply committed relational ties through direct, lived experience.

A dharma house, a residency, or an online group are all just the canvas. But the people practicing together and learning to commune are the painting.

Metamodern Church Principles

What makes a community spiritual? I keep testing this question against the most vibrant example I know.

Several close Asheville friends have joined a newer, non-denominational Christian church with a strong sense of community. The church has young families, deep passion, and strong supportive ties. I’ve sung with them, felt the heart opening, and appreciate the earnest wholesomeness.

I believe the radical centering of Christ makes the community feel so passionate and coherent. It has the similar flavor to what the monastery’s emphasis on awakened leadership felt like. A sense of mission and importance worthy of commitment and safe to surrender into.

In the church, everything orients around Christ as a singular, non-negotiable axis. The singularity and sense of this being the most important thing, the thing everything else depends on.

The community has the downsides of common Christian churches: emphasis on belief over personal lived experience. The subtle fear of worldly versus church life, bypassing personal trauma towards faith and Jesus, and a single-solution mentality, common of many systems and traditions.

My friends hope to bring in more practices and perspectives (embodiment, relational practices, secure attachment, etc.) to help balance and enrich the church.

But, that doesn’t seem like my work. I don’t feel drawn towards the Christian church.

The question then becomes: what would provide that same centering force in a metamodern spiritual community?

I have a starting framework with four dimensions.

1. Immanent Divinity
   Everyone carries truth and the sacred within them. Spiritual practice deepens our daily realization of this. The spiritual community’s work is to transmit this view as part of its culture.

2. Tradition as Resource

   Traditions are a sacred resource but not end points. The point is not to imitate Christ or the Buddha. Traditions provide a path and past learning to realize and apply those truths to our evolving reality.

3. Historical Urgency

   On a personal level, we are always in a period of change and unknown. On a historic, cultural level, we are living through a civilization transition that asks us to take seriously our participation in our lives and the world.

4. Truth, Love, and Responsibility are Real.
   We begin with the most basic premise of religion that truth, love, and responsibility are real and important. It’s the antidote to nihilism and relativism.

A more open framework like the one I’m describing might be too diffuse to generate the alignment that makes the community feel sacred and coherent.

But it’s something I’ll research next.

Teaching Residency at the Nectary

Tomorrow, I’m joining the Nectary in Washington, DC, a two-month residential experimental laboratory in its second year. About fifteen experienced practitioners are living together to explore the frontier of metamodern practice, soul work, relational depth, and sacred economy.

Think of it as a yin-based pop-up monastery: contemplative, experimental, and exploring the frontier of deep community.

My work will focus on the Hearth, the home-village dimension of communal life, internally. I’ll work with other residents to test a community archetypes hypothesis, explore Hearth village practices, and develop our collective trust and intimacy.

I look forward to publishing and sharing more on those results.

I’ll be leading Stillness Comes Easier Together, a public, day-long meditation retreat on Saturday, March 28, focused on deepening safety via relationship. The premise is simple: many modern people carry a background hum of anxiety, stress, loneliness, and self-doubt. Because of this unresolved material, the turn toward presence and direct experience can be challenging. Meditation is often taught through willpower, forcing, or dissociation, muscling our way into stillness.

This retreat takes a different approach. The first priority is creating genuine safety, trust, and attunement in the social field with skilled facilitators. From that deep relational safety, from a foundation of secure attachment rather than effortful striving, participants can settle into presence naturally. Melting rather than forcing.

If you’re interested, I’d love to have you there.

The hope is that containers like Asheville Hearth, Living Mandala, and Nectary can serve as laboratories for village life. There, precursor capacities get researched, practiced, and refined before buying land to build permanent ties.

My current steps:

1. Gather in spaces to tend to the communal hearth’s soul with other dedicated fellows.

2. Research the principles and practices that develop spiritual community and deep ties based on connection to the sacred and commitment to truth and one another.

3. Share those principles and practices with broader audiences.

4. From that larger dataset of people and relational bonds, allow the creation of dharma homes, metamodern centers, and a spiritual village.

Moving forward

I’m drawn back to the same question: what does a deep spiritual community require of us?

It takes a village to start a village.

Before the physical village, we need to plant the seeds of the village bonds within and between each other.

This includes the personal trauma healing work, the shadow pattern breaking, the alignment with vow, and more.

Over the next two months, I’m following that thread at the Nectary and look forward to sharing what emerges.

If this work resonates, there are several ways to participate:

• one-on-one emotional coaching (schedule a free intro session).

• Tuesday night circles through Relateful (zoom-based).

• Trustworthy Ground Together, a day-long meditation retreat in Washington DC on Saturday, March 28.

• Relational Mindfulness daylong at Greatwoods Zen, Charlotte, April 5th.

These are the patient efforts of building the capacities that a metamodern spiritual community will rest on.

If you’re in Washington DC between March 15 and May 15, join us at the Nectary!

In this post, I want to step back and examine the broader civilizational context. The desire for spiritual community and village is not an outlier, but a deep human need exacerbated by the the societal context we live in. In fact, I would go further to say the need for regrowing our collective spiritual and communal substrate is vital for humanity’s future existence. In a future post, I’ll be presenting my solution of Wise Villaging Centers.

Problem: Civilization is Accelerating Beyond its Wisdom Capacity

Technological progress is outpacing human maturity. As E.O. Wilson wrote, we have “paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” Artificial intelligence, climate disruption, and social atomization are converging faster than our hearts and institutions can adapt. The result is a technologically advanced civilization without the wise, loving collective bodies to responsibly hold such power.

We may disagree about our future—Star Trek–level abundance, Wall-E decadence, or species extinction but we sense massive change is inevitable.

The consequences of technological power without corresponding levels of wisdom and compassion is wrecking havoc today. These include the failure to adequately respond to climate change, AI disruptions, the on-going mental health epidemic, and collapse of real-life relationships.

Climate Change Failure & Return to Local

Many climate scientists now publicly acknowledge that global coordination through centralized national and global institutions has failed.

Despite evidence and warnings, our universities, governments and corporations remain incapable of meaningful action.

Climate experts such as David Suzuki have begun urging a turn toward local community resilience as the only viable path forward:

“We’re in deep trouble. It’s too late. But do we give up? No. Get together with your local block and start finding out who’s going to need help in an emergency.”
— David Suzuki, CBC Interview

Hurricane Helene in Asheville, a “once-in-a-century” flood, and the COVID pandemic revealed the fragility of the daily systems we rely upon.

In the aftermath of Helene, Asheville also demonstrated the beauty of local, empathic response. The devastation was met with an extraordinary surge of grassroots mutual aid, showing that community care can emerge powerfully in crisis.

Yet, we must learn how to proactively continue practicing villaging as an ongoing way of life rather than only in reaction to a temporary crisis.

AI threatening to take all jobs and relationships

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman back in 2015 said, “AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”

More recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said, “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment within the next five years.”

So, AI could kill us all. The work that took ten humans will soon take one human manager. Entry-level jobs in tech, legal, and information fields are already evaporating.

However, the less recognized threat is not AI terminators killing all of humanity or taking all our jobs.

The deep threat is that AI replaces our human relationships.

Corporations are already trying to position AI chatbots as replacement therapists, teachers, lovers, and friends. This is a serious risk to the human soul. AI chatbots are not real people. Therefore, to be in relationship with an algorithm is to risk training ourselves to become non-people by primarily relating to AI non-persons. We’re mistaking algorithmic responsiveness for intimacy. Unlike the sentient androids of Star Wars, today’s AIs are more like the Star Trek computer (knowledgeable but unconscious).

Our species risks becoming spiritually and emotionally atrophied, outsourcing connection to non-person machines and meaning to algorithms.

Loneliness and Attention Collapse

Even if we stopped all AI research today, we are still in the midst of a disconnection crisis: a mass epidemic of depression, anxiety, and attention collapse. Despite unprecedented material wealth, rates of antidepressant use, loneliness, and suicide continue to rise.

Johann Hari, in his book Lost Connections, argues this mental health epidemic is not a physical or biological glitch but a collective spiritual and social dislocation, a civilization-wide loss of connection. Through years of research, he identified a minimum of nine causes of depression and anxiety, all forms of disconnection from the fundamental conditions of human thriving:

1. Disconnection from Meaningful Work

2. Disconnection from Other People

3. Disconnection from Meaningful Values

4. Disconnection from Childhood Trauma

5. Disconnection from Status and Respect

6. Disconnection from the Natural World

7. Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future

8. Disconnection from Community and Tribal Belonging

9. Disconnection from a Sense of Biological Support

These reveal that the malaise of the modern mind is not a private disorder, it is a collective signal. Our society has lost the structures that made life coherent: shared meaning, connection, and interdependence.

The mental health crisis trends directly with our deteriorating social bonds. People have less friends, marry less, and have fewer kids.

Let’s look at some numbers and graphs illustrating some of these disconnection points.

• More than 20% of the US adult population is estimated to live with a mental illness. (NIMH).

• About 16% of US adults report taking at least one drug for a psychiatric issue. (CDC, 2020)

“Marriage rates in the U.S., on the decline for decades, hit an all-time low in 2020 of 5.1 per 1,000 people. That’s lower than the 7.9 reported in 1932, during the Great Depression”. From: Adrift: America in 100 Charts by Scott Galloway.

For those interested, CDC numbers for the recent years are:
2021 - 6.0%,
2022 - 6.2%,
2023 - 6.1%

“Global fertility rates have dropped sharply across all regions—falling by more than half from over 5 children per woman in 1950 to around 2.4 today. The world is on track to dip below the replacement rate by 2050, signaling eventual global depopulation.”

The percentage of married couples with kids has fallen 27% since 1960. The number of single folks without kids has doubled.

What does this all mean?

Everyone is spending less IRL time with their friends and peers.

Economic realities are rough with lack of affordable daycare, healthcare, and livable wages to raise a family.

Young adults are going on less dates, are more single, and have lower rates of marriage.

We are having less and less kids.

This is Not New

These problems are not new.

The first mental health crisis was when Adam took a bite from that fated apple. As long as human civilization has existed, the seeds of these societal ailments have existed.

As far back as ~300 BCE, we see the Daoist sage Zhuangzi warning of getting enveloped in urban, courtly life with the idea of changing the world for the better. (Zhuangzi Chapter 17 The Floods of Autumn)

Ecovillages, Utopian Cities, and Friend Villages

In recent decades, retreat centers, monasteries, ecovillages, and small friendship-based villages have emerged as partial responses to this crisis. They have heroically attempted to prototype what a civilization rooted in care, reverence, and responsibility might look like. Communities such as Earthaven and Tamera have pioneered regenerative forms of living through permaculture, ecological design, and off-grid infrastructure. In doing so, they have preserved vital knowledge about how humans might once again live lightly on the land.

These efforts matter and we stand on their shoulders.

But they are also structurally limited. Most are rural, difficult to enter, culturally narrow, and economically inaccessible. They tend to exist as enclaves apart from society rather than as living parts of the societies around them. They model an alternative way of life, but they do not integrate into the everyday worlds most people actually inhabit.

Nor do we need a new generation of spiritual megacenters, another Kripalu or Esalen, beautiful centers of teaching but not in service towards local village.

Digital networks attempted to solve the problem differently: scaling the possibility for global connections on narrow interests. But, at the same time, we saw a reduction in our local physical connections. Without a shared physical hearth, a part of our human being remains incomplete. As extended families fractured, traditional churches withered, and third places disappeared, society lost its everyday containers for belonging. Today, we can have thousands of online friends and followers but no one to babysit our child.

Meanwhile, well-funded technologists have tried to build utopian cities (2) from scratch. But, they fail in the same ways. Infrastructure has proven easier to engineer than intimacy. It turns out to be easier to engineer solar grids than to form emotionally stable groups of people. Community does not emerge from capital investment. Culture building is hard.

At the same time, another trend from the ground-up is emerging.

Small groups of friends are pooling resources to buy land together and attempt village life directly. Have your own house, a common garden, and raise children together. Most of these efforts are very new. I know at least three different friend groups who have started this in the past year. I attempted to do so with my friend cohort in Asheville too. (Sara Ness did a very public version demonstrating the steps and difficulty)

While this model is sincere and admirable, it has serious limitations.

Friend-villages quietly presuppose four limited resources:

1. a trustworthy, deep friend group.

2. the financial resources.

3. the time, energy, or skillset for land development.

4. And the planet itself does not contain unlimited “good land” for everyone’s mini-village.

Attempting to solve community breakdown one private mini village at a time is not feasible for everyone.

Wise Villaging as a Practice
& Wise Villaging Center as its Practice Space

We need a bridge from isolated studio apartment to living in a shared risk village together.

As my cohort of friends discovered last year and many failed housing communities have discovered, there is more to a successful village than just money and goodwill.

I would posit that there are community skills and specifically, villaging skills that we can practice together to prepare for a larger village. And we need a physical place to practice and serve each other.

We need villaging centers embedded inside existing cities, places where people can practice being a village together without renouncing modern life. Environments not designed as retreats, but as training grounds for relational adulthood. Spaces where kinship can be grown slowly, where social trust compounds over time, and where shared life and shared risk becomes a practice like yoga or meditation.

If this sounds like a church then you hit the nail. Traditional churches are a wonderful example of deep community hubs of mutual aid serving all age groups. But, modern life requires new churches capable of holding psychological complexity, diversity of worldview, and moral ambiguity without regressing to premodern forms. We need the deep community, we don’t need the tribal identities.

As institutional trust erodes, new centers of coherence must arise, physical places where humans can practice wisdom and village skills. Zoom meetings cannot pull us out of dark nights or cook us dinner. We must build local, embodied, relational infrastructure: schools of wisdom, churches of the compassion, and villages of deep community.

The Wise Villaging Center is a prototype for that future, a physical, local community hub to practice and build the roots for deep spiritual villages in urban environments.

In my next post, I pitch my villaging center. Stay tuned.

Look more about mitra at peterxpark.com. Get my messy tweets at x.com/peterxpark.

Receive support: I do 1-on-1 sessions to help people melt their protective boundaries and feel safe working with reality. These unfolding sessions usually last 60-90 minutes. If this sounds good, reach out to schedule a no-cost intro session.

“No, we don’t have enough money to build new meditation halls.”

“No, we can’t possibly start a new center when we just purchased this property with a million dollar loan.”

People joked my primary job as the Executive Director was to say, “No”. It was an uncomfortable yet necessary position.

Leadership begins at the edge of what is known and unknown. The leader in a group is the person everyone turns to in times of uncertainty and crisis. This person may or may not have the title of leader, but he/she is the person everyone trusts to lead them. Leadership is about directing a group of people when the way is unknown.

My time at the monastery was a long training around spiritual leadership. I grew in holding ever more complex and impactful leadership roles: operations, executive director, and teaching abbot.

In addition, I introduced relational practices, specifically Circling. It was my first time regularly leading a community in relational practice. It was a crazy unknown edge. At the time, we were the only residential community doing regular Circling practice.

As ED, I managed the physical, social, and financial aspects of the non-profit. I oversaw 129 acres, construction of several buildings, and fundraising millions.

As teaching abbot, I gave daily one-on-one interviews, oversaw all practice periods, and led several week-long retreats.

Soryu, the head teacher and founder, was away 4-6 months a year, making me the primary leader for half the year.

It was a pressure cooker that pushed me to my edge again and again. Every day, I faced a leadership challenge. Who needs to be involved in decisions? What do you do when stakeholders disagree on our COVID response? Is the organization's mission in the hands of the founder or the collective?

I want to share three frameworks that helped me understand the leadership koans I experienced during my eight years at the monastery. These are useful lenses for your groups and communities.

Framework 1: The Visionary & Integrator Dyad Roles

Soryu's role as Head Teacher was to hold the Vision—offering a 50-year North Star to guide the organization. The Executive Director's job was to realize that vision: handling financials, managing resources, ensuring daily functionality.

In Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, Gino Wickman identifies two core leadership roles in every successful organization:

• Visionary: Often the founder. Focused on ideas, culture, innovation, and significant relationships.

• Integrator: Responsible for operations, finance, and logistics. They integrate all parts to make the vision real.

We see this pairing in entertainment (TV series showrunner vs producers) and startups (charismatic leaders like Steve Jobs vs genius engineers like Steve Wozniak). The birth of something new into the world requires this union of both vision and execution.

The Visionary lives in the dynamic realm: the world of possibility, ideals, and future. Their vision arrives as an intuitive image. It’s unrealistic, poetic, and disruptive. The visionary is the creative genius, the Source: the one holding something no one else can fully see.

The Integrator lives in the concrete realm: the world of systems, constraints, and timelines. Their gift is making a path from the present to the vision’s future. They translate the unconditional into the conditional.

As Executive Director, I took on the Integrator function. I was in constant, living polarity with the vision. This translated both into how to steer the systems in the right direction, but it also meant making sure our plans were feasible and not too risky. I was the person who said “No” or “Not yet”.

Ironically, the person I said ‘no’ to most was the founder himself.

When we were trying to buy the monastery property, we had to get creative with funding: either through fundraising or securing a mortgage. One expert financier proposed a complex plan: friends would purchase the land and sell shares back to us at a premium interest. I argued with Soryu and others for an hour because something felt off in the numbers. Sure enough, when we finally crunched them, I was right.

I was the one protecting our financial and operational stability. He was the one protecting the spiritual core, ensuring we didn’t compromise our values for comfort or revenue.

These two roles depend on each other:

• A Visionary without an Integrator becomes unmoored: floating above reality, chasing inspiration, and exhausting collaborators.

• An Integrator without a Visionary becomes mechanistic: soulless, efficient, and uninspired, trapped in the safety of the known.

But when held consciously, the dyad becomes powerful: spark and structure, dream and manifestation, vow and form. When these roles are in the right relationship, the organization becomes a living institution capable of bringing real changes to a fixed world.

Framework 2: The Wisdom, Love, & Power Triad

Beyond the Dyad

The Visionary-Integrator model captures crucial organizational dynamics, but it is incomplete for spiritual leadership. At the monastery, we argued that trustworthy spiritual leadership requires integrating Wisdom, Love, and Power as cultivable skills.

This triad transforms the business-focused dyad into something spiritual:

• Wisdom is the capacity to go beyond our conditioned mind, loosen identity with patterns, and perceive from emptiness and clarity.

• Love is the capacity to enter another’s world, expand one’s identity to include all beings, and act from that care.

• Power is the capacity to shape the world (self, systems, and others) towards one’s intentions.

These qualities are interwoven. Each one modulates and grounds the others:

• Wisdom without Love becomes cold and detached.

• Love without Wisdom becomes misguided compassion.

• Power without Love becomes narcissistic or extractive.

When this triad is balanced, vision emerges from deep wisdom and compassion. In Zen, it’s said that each person is born with a Vow—a unique purpose aligned with, and in service to, the whole world.

Vow could be synonymous with the word, vision. But, the word vision has been overused, often reduced to mean “the future we want to create.” But this is different from a spiritual vision or vow. In a podcast interview, Darren Silver asks Soryu to define this deeper kind of vow:

With that came a shift from a sense of vision to a sense of vow. Now, vow, is connected to the word voice, which is connected to other words like vocation. And it means you're calling.

So there's the sense that you have been called by God to do something in the world. And this is a good way of looking at it as well. I should say, however, that in Buddhism, we have a different word and the word is pranidhana.

And that word means something more like you have put forth an intention, a determination, a commitment to be of service in some way. So it's something that you have put forth. You have stated, I will benefit the world in such and such a way. (transcribed with AI)

This vow differs from business visions like Elon Musk's "multiplanetary species" or Facebook's "connecting the world." While these have visionary and integrator leaders, they're not trustworthy spiritual visions due to lack of grounding in true wisdom and love. What makes it spiritual is this connection to this ground of being that’s not just my ideas and conditioning. It’s not operating from captured ideology. It is connected to the sacred towards being of service, of true benefit for the sake of all beings.

This triad—Wisdom, Love, and Power—provided crucial insight into what made leadership spiritual rather than merely effective. But it still left unresolved one of our most persistent challenges: when multiple people in a community each felt called to lead, whose vision should guide the whole?

Framework 3: Sourcekeeping

One paradigm that has influenced the dharma house and spiritual circles is Sourcekeeping, , a leadership model developed by Peter Koenig. It centers on the original initiator (“source”) of a project as the natural steward of its vision, coherence, and boundaries.

It addresses a subtle but foundational dynamic: in any human endeavor, there is one individual who carries the original impulse. They are the first one to take a vulnerable step toward starting the vision. This person is the Source.

As Tom Nixon puts it:

we can acknowledge a vital role that’s held by exactly one individual: the role of source.

It’s not a formal organisational role, like CEO; it’s a naturally emerging role to which a person cannot simply be appointed through a formal process. Instead, like the mother in a family, we simply acknowledge who is in the role.

The role emerges naturally when the first individual takes the first vulnerable step to invest herself in the realisation of an idea.

The source’s intimate, personal connection to the initiative means she can intuit what the initiative requires and has a natural authorship over it. (Work with Source by Tom Nixon)

Every endeavor begins with someone who receives the vision. That person carries the subtle blueprint in their bones. Because they alone have access to the originating impulse, they carry a certain authority—a responsibility—not over people, but over the integrity of the vision.

One of the most challenging leadership tensions at the monastery was confusion around Sourcekeeping. As an institution training spiritual leaders, we encouraged individuals to clarify and live out their personal vows. But how many distinct visions could truly coexist under one roof?

This tension showed up again and again. When we shifted from mindfulness-in-schools to monastic training, those aligned with the earlier mission felt displaced. The move from Johnson to rural Lowell, Vermont created a geographic rift that left many Burlington supporters feeling abandoned. Later, our pivot from leadership development to AI risk created yet another exodus.

Each of these transitions raised a deeper question:
Was the organization a shared vessel for many visions, or the unfolding of one central vision stewarded by Soryu?

One answer to these budding visions was to expand our offerings and roles. We created a Village with the aspiration that non-monastics could be born and die on the land. We hired staff to serve the mission without requiring monastic commitment. We encouraged side initiatives—like my circling program—that had their own bounded space. Some visions grew into independent centers and dharma houses with their own Sources.

But often, residents, donors, and community members wanted to steer the broader vision toward their own ends. Fights over social justice narratives and identity politics were very painful. Healing-based or eros-centric cultures—contact improv, circling—often clashed with the rigor and renunciation of the monastic core.

This diversity of visions could help clarify our program: What exactly is the true, the beautiful, the good at work here? At other times, it threatened to fragment the community.

In retrospect, Sourcekeeping would have offered a clarifying lens: the monastery had one Source: Soryu. He initiated the vision, made the largest sacrifices, and held the arc of the project’s evolution. Others, including me, held significant roles or led sub-projects, but the primary vision was his.

Tom writes:

A Source can share the authorship of the vision and get out of the way as others become specific Sources for parts of the whole, taking on the exact same role of Source within that specific domain. (Work with Source)

This was my experience. And as people’s visions grew beyond the container of the monastery, it was a difficult but necessary transition to become one’s own Source.

Many of us, like birds nudged out of the nest, eventually had to learn to fly on our own. Part of us wished to stay, but our visions needed space. While we lost the monastic infrastructure and resources, we gained something essential: direct contact with our Sourcekeeping and the full ownership it entails.

Integration and Application

How the Frameworks Work Together

These three frameworks aren't separate—they're complementary lenses that highlight different aspects of spiritual leadership:

1. Visionary-Integrator shows the essential teamwork between inspiration and execution that every organization needs.

2. Wisdom-Love-Power reveals what makes leadership truly spiritual and trustworthy rather than merely effective.

3. Sourcekeeping clarifies authority and responsibility, preventing confusion that destroys collaborative efforts.

They suggest that healthy spiritual leadership requires:

• Clear roles and authority (Sourcekeeping)

• Balance between vision and execution (Visionary-Integrator)

• Grounding in wisdom, love, and power (Spiritual Integration)

Final Reflections

One of the hardest lessons I learned was that trust is contextual, multidimensional. There's a naive belief that if someone is trustworthy in one dimension then they must be in all dimensions. In truth, someone could demonstrate profound Wisdom yet be clueless about relational dynamics. Someone could finely attune with great love yet be a mess at long-term commitments. A person could be a great visionary but lack all of the integrator capabilities and vice versa.

Trust demands triangulation across Wisdom, Love, and Power. This doesn't mean every leader must master all three equally, but a trustworthy container—whether teacher, team, or community—must recognize the necessity of all three and learn to balance its complex interdependence.

Finally, many of us want to share being the Source to avoid its deep responsibilities and costs. In many of my endeavors like past Anti-Fragile Heart retreats, I tried to have an equal leadership model of facilitators. It went terrible and we went back to me being the benevolent integrator.

At the monastery and the dharma house, many times I’ve taken my hands off the reins too much leaving a vacuum of uncertainty and ambiguity. It can be profoundly lonely and vulnerable to be the leader of an initiative. You bear the responsibility for others and this vision given to you by God. Yet, the cost of failing to lead ends up being worse than leading and failing.

In our dharma house community, we rely on the Sourcekeeping framework to give clear authority and leadership. Each dinner party has a clear Source. The garden project had a clear Source. Each meal has a head chef. And I've been the Source of this house with the most weight of who joins and who does not.

Conclusion

These mental models aren't absolute truths. They're useful paradigms for orienting to organizational and community dynamics, particularly in leadership. As Tom notes:

It’s not healthy, and not even practically possible, to get a group of people to adopt exactly the same mental model about how the world works. Such a model becomes a dogma rather than a working set of concepts and principles. As the saying goes, “All models are flawed, but some are useful.” So working with source is a personal choice. If your own reasoning, experience, and instincts tell you that looking at things through this particular lens makes sense, then use it.
….

In my experience, the people who click most easily with source share some characteristics. They have often been in the role of source for something significant previously and directly experienced some of the complex dynamics the principles help to explain. They have also often used a variety of other mental models and organisational paradigms - both top down and bottom up - to make sense of their situations and found something missing or not working. So when they learn about the Source Principles, they finally have a language and concepts which explain something they have felt yet not been able to articulate. (Work with Source)

I hope these musings are helpful for you to make sense of the “complex dynamics” of leadership and community. These grammars of leadership have been helpful in navigating the choppy waters of spiritual community.

The original vision for my dharma house was as an incubator. It was an in-between space for all of us in a transitional phase in our lives. Many of us were post-monastics, single, and starting new careers. I knew from the monastery experience how powerful and needed a strong community was to maintain sanity against the numbing and distracting forces of the world.

But, as people have entered partnerships, gained momentum in their careers, and looking towards the next stage of our lives, the vision for this community is now under question. What do I want my long term home to look like? How do I want to raise my kids?

Each adult person is the Source of their own future. As the Source of this interim half-way house, I intentionally took a more hands-off approach. Protecting the integrity of the home as an Integrator and tempering my Visionary based on the group field. After all, is it even possible for a Source to exist for someone else’s home? This question I believe underpins a central tension within residential community.

In the future, I’ll cover my visions for spiritual community to end this series.

To work with me, follow me at peterxpark.com or x.com/peterxpark.

To practice spiritual leadership skills, signup for our Anti-Fragile Heart retreat Sept 3 - 10, 2025 outside NYC.

At that moment, a seed germinated. After so many years, what am I still doing here?

It took me another year of painful doubts and hurt feelings to finally leave.

In the last two posts (dharma house: from monastery to co-housing, Post-Tragic Community: Not Everyone Belongs), I explored what a spiritual community feels like and how I formed them. I’ll be borrowing from models in those posts so I recommend checking them out if you haven’t already.

Previously, I talked about filtering well, attracting the right people, and building shared coherence are essential for a good foundation.

Nonetheless, even with these, ruptures still occur.

This post explores a lesser discussed but essential part of community life: Knowing it’s time to leave yet why is it so hard to leave? Not in the obvious cases where agreements are violated but because the container no longer feels nourishing or our visions have moved in different directions.

Designing exits from the community are often more difficult than filtering or admission. They can feel like death, both for the person leaving and for those still behind. Unlike filtering, which can be framed as “this just isn’t the right fit,” an off-ramp means something once good is no longer.

In an ideal world, every exit would be graceful. People would sense their time’s end, thank the group, and walk away with mutual love and blessing. Most times that is exactly what happens.

But, not always.

Why leaving hurts

To understand the off-ramps challenge, we need to examine:

• the systemic level issue of collapsing spirituality into wellness culture,

• the attachment system bonding of community,

• the spiritual grounding in the unconditional

Spirituality as a collective, scarce resource

Exiting spiritual communities is painful because modern culture lacks clear pathways for "graduates" of deep inner work. This most valued aspect, our relationship to the Sacred, was once clearly recognized but is now muddled and indistinguishable from wellness, self-improvement, and therapy culture. So many people seek wisdom from influencer bros who have read many books. Or turn towards a twenty something therapist who has no life experience.

In traditional societies, initiates had clear roles. You left the monastery and became a temple priest or an elder-in-training. In Japan, many of the monks are there training so they can take over their family’s local temple. The culture valued and had roles for those who underwent extensive training.

Why don’t we recognize this value? Modern humans are so unhealthy: physically, emotionally, mentally, relationally, spiritually. In this dysregulated state, how can anyone recognize a healthy person when their own system is so loudly in pain or numbness.

I think of friends who sacrificed financial security to help build meditation centers or intentional communities. They worked as underpaid kitchen staff, construction crews, or administrators—gladly contributing their labor to something meaningful. But when they left, they often had no savings, no traditional career path, and skills that mainstream culture doesn't value.

Whereas, consider other intensive training programs. Military service leads to veterans' benefits and career pathways. Medical residency leads to practice opportunities. Startups factor in sweat equity with vested stocks.

The comparison to military service is instructive. We ask soldiers to dedicate years to serving something larger than themselves. In return, we provide structure, resources, and pathways back to civilian life. We recognize that this transition is challenging and requires support.

On the other hand, spiritual communities often assume people will either stay forever or figure out reintegration on their own.

When there's nowhere obvious to go, leaving doesn't feel like graduation. It feels like exile from Eden.

How can we view these departures as off-ramps and graduations rather than exiles and exits?

Community as my everything home

There’s also the personal layer of our nervous system attachment.

In our fragmented world, a spiritual community often becomes a person's primary source of belonging. Unlike traditional societies with extended family, lifelong friends, and established belonging, many of us arrive at spiritual communities hoping to fill the needs of home, friendship, and meaning.

The nervous system makes no distinction between temporary and permanent belonging. It bonds and attaches. Even when it’s time to go, your body’s attachment system screams to stay. Leaving feels like exile or death. It pings the memory of the first separation from the mother’s womb and the first break of human consciousness from Source.

I often saw that even when it became clear I was meant to leave, parts of my psyche screamed to stay. How many times have I been in the same situation around leaving a relationship or an incompatible career?

After leaving the monastery, I developed this metaphor:

• Visiting the monastery as a guest felt like going on a date in a foreign country: exciting, idealized, uncertain.

• Becoming a resident was like entering a committed relationship. The honeymoon fades, and real challenges emerge.

• Becoming a senior student or teacher was similar to marriage and having kids. You had to sacrifice your needs to raise “children” together, rely on each other, and share deep responsibilities.

And leaving:

• As a guest? A bittersweet travel romance and leave wondering, what if?

• As a resident? Like ending a serious relationship you thought might last forever.

• As a teacher or director? Losing a child together. There’s still love yet it’s so painful that moving forward feels impossible.

The deeper someone's role in the community, the more difficult it is to leave. Leaving means losing the version of yourself that existed in that context.

Retreat highs & nervous system bonding

I’ve seen smaller examples: a weekend retreat, a psychedelic journey, or a venture into the woods. The nervous system relaxes into empowerment, belonging, and truth. Suddenly it feels like, “Oh, this is my true family. This is the real me.” People scramble to maintain that feeling.

A year ago, I attended Relateful Camp, a weekend immersion of connection and relational practices. On the last day, several people mourned its ending, desperate to preserve its magic. One person made passionate pleas to rally and continue the momentum.

But I felt clearly: this isn’t our home. It’s not meant to be continued in that way. It was a beautiful container, showing us what’s possible. But the real integration, the hard work, is learning to establish this magic in yourself and in your own homes with your real family and friends.

I was grateful I had done that work and was returning to a community I deeply missed.

The post-tragic view: cultivating unconditional belonging

It was a painful process when I started shedding my roles at the monastery and sensed my involvement was changing.

I couldn’t imagine life outside the monastery, yet I knew I couldn’t participate in the same way anymore. I spent a year building my own cabin on adjacent land, hoping to maintain the connection but allow for my growing difference. Initially, I couldn’t imagine a life outside of the community.

These days around here with the dharma house, I have felt the fear of being abandoned and that the housing structure is losing coherence. In those dark moments, I ask, “why even try? Others aren’t committed and it’s bound to fail. Everyone’s first priority will always be their partner and kids. How can a community form in such a sick society?”

The post-tragic perspective is crucial.

If we stay stuck in a pre-tragic mindset—believing communities, relationships, or homes must last forever—we will suffer. We’ll cling, idealize, and resist change.

The post-tragic doesn’t reject the need for belonging. It widens the sense of belonging. It accepts the tragedy as not just inescapable but an essential nutrient that heightens appreciation, beauty, and love. It recognizes that everything is impermanent. Things form and dissolve. Relationships end. Our lives have an endpoint. The flower falls.

But this doesn’t mean we’re destined for hopelessness. It doesn’t make the beauty and meaning and love untrue.

The post-tragic asks a deeper question: Where does true belonging start?

It begins in direct relationship to the Source—whether God, Dao, Mystery, or Reality. Without this, as Ernest Becker wrote, we deny death and build civilizations to shield us from facing tragedy, discomfort, and the mystery of not knowing.

In Buddhism, we point to the same truth by reciting the 5 Remembrances:

• I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

• I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

• I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

• All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

• My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

From a tragic point of view, this could feel hopeless and defeating. The tragic person still is resisting these truths as if they are not suppose to happen. But, from a post-tragic stance, if we accept these as true then how would I live differently? How would life be like instead? How would I relate to my work, community, and relationships?

Second, once we are grounded in a connection to Source, we console the scared parts of ourselves that fear abandonment and struggle with tragedy. We could call this secure attachment or basic goodness. Whereas the Transcendent aspect is connection to universal, unconditional Source, there is still our Ensoulment: how can this soul live in this body, in this world with all its humanness?

The ability to sit with our nervous system through grief, joy, loneliness, and change, without abandoning or numbing ourselves. How can I be empowered yet receptive to this life?

Only then does the third layer (home, family, community) fall into its place. It does not serve as the permanent ground for my life, but as an extension of a deeper belonging. As portals and expressions of Source enacting and expressing in this life.

This isn’t about bypassing the need for outer connection. It’s about building inner belonging in parallel to our soul’s journey through this life and impermanent, ever rich conditions.

Tea ceremony & fleeting beauty

A few days ago, a landmate performed a tea ceremony for us in the forest. As the tea opened my heart and I admired the scene with the sun cascading down and the lush green forest, I felt heartbreak of beauty and tragedy.

I don’t know how long this will last. A tragic part of me still has so much past grief and fear that limits the beauty and magic of this life and community. How much have I held myself back in my relationships, work, and art because I couldn’t bear to feel the same wounded rupture of leaving the monastery again or losing my sense of home? The earliest rupture of leaving Source to enter this world of chaos and magic.

Yet, this post-tragic view, along with healing work, helped me embrace the beauty and love alongside the pain and grief. To be able to see how the pain and impermanence makes the beauty even sweeter. I could feel the great tenderness, beauty, and sweet breaking in my heart.

How can I be a vessel that surrenders to life and enacts these beautiful spaces knowing their fragile, temporary nature?

Looking forward

In my final posts, I’ll discuss leadership, community design practical solutions, and the past, current, and future visions I have for spiritual community.

Thanks for the journey.

If you want to learn more please visit peterxpark.com or DM me on Twitter.

Also, we still have spots for our week-long Anti-Fragile Heart retreat September 4 - 10, 2025 where we’ll be exploring many of these themes in deep relational practices.

I believe the real question is, "What are the actual requirements for who fits and who doesn't?"

This post explores the messier answers. If the last post showed you the magic then this one is revealing how it came to be.

It explores the developmental architecture of spiritual community—why filtering matters, what discernment requires, and how post-tragic design principles can hold it all together.

Filtering: Who Is Admitted?

If our house’s current coherence seems rare, it didn’t happen by accident. It was filtered for—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes explicitly. In the last post, I described the invisible alignment we share. What I didn’t say clearly enough: those traits weren’t cultivated within the house. They were selected for, often by me. Filtering, deciding who belongs, is the most important decision of a community. Like a building’s foundation, everything else is supported or limited by that structure.

Most of us haven’t ever lived in a healthy community. We only feel its absence and don’t know what its presence looks like. In that void, we can project all kinds of idealizations. We live in a state of community neglect.

I learned this the hard way.

Case Study 1: The Boston House and the Painful Lessons in Misalignment

Many years ago, I launched my first dharma house, gathering meditators from the Boston Buddhist scene. Interest was high, but when it came time to commit, few remained. Despite misgivings, I went ahead with availability over alignment. I was excited, naive, and a bit desperate to start.

The house of five was full of well-meaning people in their 20s, many new to practice, and emotionally immature. Five of us met through the same meditation center but beyond that there wasn’t much connective tissue.

One housemate (A) struggled with anxiety and leaned heavily on another (B) for support. B, lacking boundaries, tolerated it until a breaking point. During B's own family crisis, she snapped. All her unspoken resentment poured out in an explosive exchange. Lacking the coherence or skills, that rupture was irreparable.

The lesson: Emotional regulation, clear boundaries, and the ability to metabolize distress aren't nice-to-haves. They're foundational requirements. Without them, the whole container destabilizes.

That failure was pivotal. It showed me that values and visions are what we aspire to on good days, but crisis days reveal who can actually make it through relationship. It humbled me out of the fantasy of bootstrapping my own community. I finally joined a monastery.

Case Study 2: MAPLE and the Cost of Idealism at Scale

At the Monastic Academy (MAPLE), I was involved in major personnel decisions for eight years as resident, teacher, and executive director. Unlike Boston, the stakes were higher. People were leaving careers, relationships, entire lives. All the pivotal moments from admissions, extensions, staff hires, and terminations came on my desk. I saw how contentious “who’s in, who’s out?” could become.

Unlike Boston, the MAPLE context required deeper discernment—balancing individual strengths and weaknesses with systemic capacity. Some applicants were great people but not aligned with our monastic values. Others had unresolved emotional issues that the container couldn’t handle.

In the earlier years, we rotated organizational roles around the residents to build institutional knowledge and provide cross-training. This meant different people held the Admissions role who would interview applicants and recommend who to accept. I often clashed with admissions heads who had fixed beliefs about who should join.

The leads who operated from fixed idealism were the most challenging and least wise. They wanted to prioritize diversity or inclusion but without the necessary cultural or structural support.

One admissions lead advocated for applicants through a social justice lens, many lacking contemplative grounding and monastic values. Most struggled and left quickly. Another fought for trauma-background applicants. While admirable, the austere lifestyle proved unbearable for most.

Developmental Framework: Pre-Tragic to Post-Tragic

A developmental lens helps explain these failures:

• Pre-tragic: “defined by a superficial sense of clarity and certainty.”

  • ex. idealistic inclusion aka everyone should belong.

• Tragic: “certainty and clarity are exploded, and all that seems to remain is a debilitating and even degrading uncertainty.”

  • ex. painful disillusionment aka community and relationships are impossible.

• Post-tragic: “move beyond the certainty of the superficial and the dogmatic and begin to directly access the deeper certainties of… [reality]… And yet, at the same time, we paradoxically hold the mystery. We enter a cloud of unknowing—the spiritual and even religious dignity of our uncertainty—but do not allow ourselves to be inappropriately seduced by facile certainties.”

  • ex. integrated wisdom aka love includes boundaries. Inclusion requires capacity.

*These quotes are from the book First Principles & First Values. I am drawing this model mostly from Dr. Zak Stein. (Wonderful interview here on post-tragic).

I wish I had this pre-/post-tragedy perspective as I look back at those ten years of community building.

My early Boston dharma house was stuck in the pre-tragic lens. We believed a shared vision could carry us—that we could bypass suffering, conflict, and tragedy in real community.

Many conflicts at MAPLE arose from fixed pre-tragic assumptions. These included seeing all gatekeeping as oppressive and assuming trauma-responsiveness equaled acceptance to residency.

From a tragic POV, we can give up saying, “well, this is impossible.” The tragic characters are broken and can’t move on anymore. The challenges seem impossible to move beyond.

The post-tragic holds both the openness and the limits. They can be with the tragedy as a painful invitation into deeper love and discernment. A post-tragic leader understands a group can only metabolize so much difference. When developmental ranges or worldviews stretch too far, collective sense-making breaks down. That always dynamic, contextual discernment marks the post-tragic.

The pre-tragic uses their ideology and mental models to believe they could design a perfect community without mistakes. They instinctively fear and resist tragedy. The tragic desperately want out of their suffering but also believe it’s impossible. They will lash out at others who say otherwise. They don’t want to be alone in their pain but also don’t see a solution. The post-tragic doesn’t have all the answers. They aren’t always correct. But they understand that there’s a wholeness and love that cannot break. And they see that facing the tragedy with joy and love and grief are the only way forward.

Mind you, the opposite failure case exists too—too little diversity can create echo chambers. But, you know what the least diverse group is? An individual or two people in a partnership. A group already has exponentially more complexity.

The answer isn't either extreme. It is fit. Filtering is less about "yes/no" and more about timing, resonance, and capacity—individual and collective.

One Solution: Multiple Gates

Discernment isn’t a questionnaire. It’s lived time in shared conditions.

To avoid catastrophic misfits in a community, it’s better to give it time than to get it right at the start.

Time-tested organizations and communities implement phased paths. These allow individuals and the group to gradually test fit, build trust, and surface misalignments.

In Catholic monasteries, it’s literally named “discernment process.” In Theravāda Buddhism, you start as a white-robed postulant (anagārika) before novice and then full ordination. Academia has grad students, postdocs, assistant, associate, and tenured full professors. Medicine has interns, residents, and attendings.

These phases matter. The initial phase allows the honeymoon period of idealism to wear off and reality to emerge. The next phases demonstrate greater commitment, authority, and integration.

When I joined MAPLE, the discernment process was minimal. I did an initial weekend visit. Later, I signed up for six months residency. There was a one-month trial, but by then, I had already paid the training fee, broken my lease, and left my job. The exit wouldn’t be easy, even if the alignment was off. The assumption was: most people would make it.

Later, we changed this. We introduced a required 2–3 month apprenticeship phase. It was completely free. Apprentices trained, worked, and lived in rhythm with the community. Most completed the program and returned to their lives. A select few were invited to stay. This created a healthier field: mutual, organic, paced.

Discernment can hurt. Some apprentices were disappointed when not invited into residency. As Executive Director, I had a significant role in admissions and delivered the decision face-to-face.

One case stands out. Two apprentices were edge cases who deeply wanted to become residents. One clashed with other residents. The other was drawn more to the community vibes over serious training.

I waffled back and forth, uncertain. As I leaned toward saying yes, our admissions lead pulled me aside and voiced serious concerns. Once again cast into doubt, I called an all-hands resident meeting for collective sense-making.

It quickly became clear that the issue wasn’t just about them. It was a deeper tension between two values. Belonging vs. coherence, or collective kindness/care versus self-excellence.

At the start, I was stuck in the tragic trap that all options seemed painful. Accepting them could disrupt the community cohesion. But, rejecting them I knew would also be painful to them and other residents. The pre-tragic wants to believe everything will always work out. The post-tragic sits in the discomfort and waits for discerning grace to arise.

In the end, we said no. I believe it was the right move.

What’s beautiful is what happened afterward. One returned for another apprenticeship, took feedback seriously, matured, and became an excellent resident. The other became a frequent guest visitor and married someone in the community—something that may not have happened had she been a resident.

Phased discernment comes with trade-offs: more people to manage, more decisions, more complexity. The result was fewer mismatches, fewer early flame outs, and more aligned long-term fits.

Many co-housing communities I know follow similar principles. New guests join meals, events, and sometimes cook for everyone. In our house, guests help clean the kitchen. You can learn a lot in ten minutes just watching someone clean.

What We Need: Transmission, Training Grounds, and Trust

I had an unusual advantage in this community: eight years of monastic training with hundreds of people. When it came time to build this house, I drew from a deep well of people. My sense of a person’s fit was not abstract or intellectual. It was embodied memory, unspoken intuition, and relational trust built through shared hardship and transformation.

If more contemplative housing communities are to emerge, we need more training grounds. Places where people can gain the transmission of healthy community that my group inherited from shared monastic life.

Weekend intensives can echo the function: ritualized challenges, shared connection to truth, post-tragic understanding of development. Not just dreams about what community can do for me, but felt experience of the ups and downs of a real community life is like.

Trust lives in the relationship between two people, not the mind. It’s the intimacy earned through doing hard things together.

Looking Ahead

The next piece will explore what filtering alone can't solve—when shared background and skill still fall short. We will cover the need for exit offramps, owning leadership authority, and the uncertain future of long-term communal life including land ownership and children.

Shoutouts

If you want to work with me or learn more about me, please visit peterxpark.com.

If you want to train the relational capabilities, join this year’s Anti-Fragile Heart retreat in September 2025.

I was leaving eight years as a monastic in the mountains of Vermont.

I knew I could go insane in the world. The only solution? Live with good people.

In December 2023, I invited five dharma friends to create my third dharma house. A year and a half later, we’re still going strong. We often remind ourselves about how special the house feels. Guests mention the good vibes. One person described it as a shared field of loving-kindness.

What unites a community?

We don’t have much formal structure. The biggest community driver is cooking dinner for each other nearly every night. This simple act means we spend an hour or two together daily—celebrating wins, sharing struggles, making jokes, and being present together. It’s ordinary and sacred.

These days, we live on nine acres across four structures. Initially, we moved into the main house with seven bedrooms, a fortunate find at an affordable price. Over the past six months, friends joined us to take over the remaining three cabins. It’s been going remarkably great.

There are nearly invisible, hard to name bonds holding the house together. I often question what makes good collaboration, friendship, and community. What makes it work? There aren’t many good resources. After all, we live in an age of isolation. The autodidact, the individualist, the lone genius. There are countless books on starting a business, using AI to vibecode, or build a cabin. There are fewer resources on establishing a co-housing group, raising families together, or creating a spiritual family of friends.

In my group of nine, there are common themes.

Six of us trained and lived together at the Monastic Academy in Vermont as leaders, residents, and apprentices. One came for month-long stays and trained at a Zen monastery. The remaining two visited the monastery for short stints but never participated in the austere training.

We’d all label ourselves very spiritual. We’d diverge in our form of spirituality whether Christianity, Buddhism, Daoist, Wiccan, or others. Our diets are diverse from vegan to only carnivore. We don’t regularly practice meditation or prayer together.

Yet, we’re conflict-free, navigated three house moves together, and survived Hurricane Helene.

What’s the invisible glue between us? How much is my leadership role in it?

One of my housemates said, “The equation to start a group like this is go train at a monastery for almost a decade, be its Executive Director, and then start a house like you did.”

This post is my attempt to clarify the elements of all those years of training and experience.

To tease out the nuances between the differences between those who’ve done intensive monastic training and those who haven’t. To name the implicit glue that holds us without rules, systems, or rituals. In another post, I will focus on our hidden shared worldviews and my Daoist leadership of leading without leading.

Explicit Structure vs. Shared Inner Coherence

In broader culture, explicit structure, doctrine, and words compensate for the absence of deeper coherence and relationships. After all, families do not draft values documents or conflict resolution protocols. A tribe relies on trial and error to develop a rich shared context operating on the body, spirit, and mind. In our hyper rational age lacking coherence around ethics, metaphysics, or values, we lean on checklists, policies, and enforcement. In our house, something else holds the field.

The Invisible Architecture of Trust

A shared substrate of relational, somatic, and spiritual coherence makes this house feel alive without needing strict rules or systems. It’s not enforced. It’s in the space between us.

Many of us have undergone multiple transformational rites of passage together, such as vision quests, meditation retreats, circling relational training, and months or years of monastic life. Many of us have done years of Aletheia Unfolding training. We’ve sat in silence together. Broken down together. Facilitated each other’s unfolding.

I’ve come to believe that deep adult friendship is forged through repeated experiences of vulnerable transformation with others. When someone’s ego structure is dissolving to be reconstructed anew, they touch the sacred. In that moment, all the beings in the shared, sacred space form a strong bond of kinship.

Because it is so vulnerable to drop one’s faces and patterns and trust others to hold me in that process. All of us carry the wounding of being judged, abandoned, and ostracized for being different, for becoming a different person than what was wanted.

If you enter that vulnerable state and get hurt, dismissed, or unseen, the result is often fragmentation and fear. More armor. More distance.

The foxhole metaphor is apt. We joked that it was like we survived a war together. These people were my foxhole buddies. Even if I didn’t like many of them, I still loved and deeply trusted them. Like Navy SEALs after Hell Week, or SNL cast members pulling off a live show weekly, the bond formed through intensity runs deep like nothing else can.

The Path of Ego Death (Again and Again)

What we share in this house is not just history. It’s an ongoing willingness to die and be reborn. To lose old identities. To descend into the pit. And to trust that something deeper will emerge on the other side.

In most of society, people pathologize breakdown. Here, it’s respected. Suicidal thoughts, disorientation, confusion; they’re not failures. They’re part of the transformation process. Because we’ve been through this terrain before, we don’t panic. We don’t collapse into addiction. We don’t project onto others. We don’t need to solve or fix each other or cover up discomfort when it arises.

This shared appetite for dissolution actually stabilizes our house.

Nourishment vs. Stimulation

Contacting the sacred requires internal quietness, finely tuned awareness, a healthy body-mind, and a culture that doesn’t depend on external aliveness.

There’s a real difference between stimulation-based pleasure and nourishing presence. One spikes the nervous system—like a sugar rush. Loud music, bright lights, dopamine hits. It feels good for a moment but leaves you depleted afterwards. The other kind is subtle, sustaining. Eudaimonic rather than hedonic. It’s the pleasure of coherence, rightness, and deep rest.

Most of us in the house are pretty sensitive types. We enjoy the quiet times and less stimulation. Violent and horror films are downvoted. There’s a lot of walking in nature. Most of the time, we’re heading home early from events to get a good night’s sleep.

Transcendence, Ensoulment, and Development

Zak Stein offers a helpful triad as a lens for metapsychology: Transcendence, Ensoulment, and Development. My monastic teacher Soryu named a similar one: Wisdom, Love, and Power. Most of us in this house have cycled through all three and seek in some way towards mastery of all of them.

Transcendence was often the starting point for many of us. It could be meditation, awakening experiences, psychedelics, meeting God, or contact with the Absolute. Transcendence is timeless and universe. The experience of the Buddha 2,500 years ago is the awakening of today. The complete emptying out and surrender of the personal self allows the transcendent to come through.

But as many find out, transcendence doesn’t solve everything. It doesn’t heal attachment wounds, make you a great communicator, or teach you to hold a job. It doesn’t help you express your creativity or maintain a romantic relationship. In the end, we still have this self, this ego that is the interface, the vessel between the timeless and the conditional.

Ensoulment is the process of entering into one’s unique self. There is the recognition that I have a purpose for being here that is completely my own. Whereas transcendence is timeless and universal, ensoulment is very conditional and specific. This soul is meant to do a specific vision. A lot of healing work might be needed to heal the soul.

Development is the most worldly layer and what we typically think of in terms of self-improvement and development. It is all the skill building and becoming useful. How to interface with the worldly systems to have power and impact. Everything they try to teach in college fits here. Tracking logistics, showing up on time, running a business, facilitating a retreat. This part is often overlooked in spiritual communities, but it is essential.

Some spiritual spaces get stuck in transcendence. They generate high states but avoid trauma work or adulting. Other spaces—like the bro-podcast, self-optimization scene—hyper-focus on development while missing connection to soul or transcendence.

With the integration of these three spheres, one can be a true bodhisattva capable of living one’s calling in connection to Source and having a positive impact in the world. It doesn’t make us perfect. But it does finally feel like we’re truly alive, fully embodied right here and now and doing what we are meant to do.

A Culture Without (Many) Rules

My teacher said that rules exist where the challenge is too high and mindfulness is lacking. The more attuned and present a group is, the less structure is needed. Rules are a crude attempt to freeze reality’s dynamic intelligence into something static, regulated, and enforceable.

In our house, we don’t need a chore chart or too many prescriptive rule sets. The implicit coherence does the work. Each moment, if we are attuned to the house, each other, and ourselves then the next right action can make itself known. That right action could never have been in a book beforehand. It’s emergent from the complex situation of self, other, and world/house.

Acknowledging the Grief of Difference

Most importantly, we allow difference. We don't assume a shared reality. Each of us lives in a rich inner world, shaped by different wounds, values, visions. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they don't. But there's a faith that all of our worlds are connected by something deeper, something sacred we can't fully grasp alone.

A young part of us feels grief in that difference, and a wiser part understands: I don’t need you to mirror my worldview to live mine. That’s my vow. That’s my piece to play.

Construct-Aware Relating

To be construct-aware means holding multiple paradigms lightly, with the knowledge that no model is ultimate. We stand less on ideology and more on presence, on the living, unique wisdom present in every moment.

Sometimes, this feels disorienting to others. Once, a young visitor to our house asked pointed questions, seeking advice from us. It was clear that they were deferring their own judgment towards us. Initially, I gave flippant replies, not to dismiss them, but to return the questions to them. To build dissonance so they would have to question and find the true answer for themselves.

The Gift of Being Robbed

My teacher had a metaphor for the dissonance a good teacher generates:

A student asks a teacher for direction. "Tell me who I am. What should I do?"

A bad teacher gives answers. Adds burdens. More chains. Rules. The student is overjoyed to receive the answer and says, "Thank you! Now I know!"

A good teacher robs the student of answers. Unburdens them from their performative, self-doubting self. Breaks the chains without replacing them. And the disturbed student cries out: "What are you doing? How dare you take away my things from me”.

It’s rare to receive and follow the gift of being robbed of our falsity.

Our pattern seeking rational mind attempts to create a map of reality and then impose that map onto the mystery. It does not work. It is a move of Development trying to take over Transcendence and Ensoulment.

The Invisible Web

What makes this house work?

It’s not rules or ideology. It’s the invisible web of shared surrender to truth and goodness. The depth forged through fires of struggling to work our unique path. The humility of seeing how much we can get wrong yet our being is never wrong.

- Develop a Supportive Network of Next Generation of Spiritual/Developmental Teachers and Leaders

A lot of my ideas are evolution of prior ideas.

When I took over as MAPLE Exec Director, I expanded our guest offering and invited outside, expert facilitators and teachers.

My idea was that MAPLE training would be like the Navy SEALs training of spirituality and human development. Doing a 2-4 year stint would make residents in the top 5% in several modalities.

In a given year, a person would get world class training in awakening meditation, community development, how to run world class events, emotional healing modalities, relational practice mastery, wilderness and Vision Quest, excellent work productivity, and more.

Another example:

Back in college, I was part of a McNair program that also had 20-30 students each specializing in very different backgrounds (Computer Science, humanities, hard sciences, etc). We spent the summer living together in the same campus housing and did research mentored by professors. We also challenged and supported each other. Cooking meals, giving research presentations, doing debates, etc.

I'm still interested in this idea. How to support facilitators and leaders of the emerging what's next. Create a kind of secret society where there’s a type of mutual aid and peer development support.

Secret societies like Freemasons were interesting because they invited any man from any social class to join. Equals inside. Radical for the 1600s. And there was a secrecy clause not for nefarious purposes of manipulating society. But rather so people could engage in open conversations. Talking about democracy or freedom of religion in the 1600s also very dangerous and radical.

Arguably these secret societies were one of the main seeds for the Scientific Revolution, Western Enlightenment, and start of capitalism/democracy/United States.

Today, having a cohort of peers where we could engage in topics that are typically taboo/cancellable. When is physical violence, if ever, appropriate? Is shame always bad? How do you navigate power dynamics? How do you balance needing money/resources versus keeping things pure? What do you do when XYZ Teacher is condemned online with the worse allegations yet their close friends and colloborators vouch for each other? What do you do with the fact that a bunch of experts and mentors in a field are in a feud with each other? etc etc etc.

(PS Don’t send me answers to any of these questions. That’s not the point…)

Point is I want to be a part of such a group.

- Business Models

I have one friend who offers a coaching package. You have to signup for like 3 months for several thousand dollars. He is promising a result — cure to ED for men. He does a lot of work in between sessions thinking what’s best for each guy. He got most of his clients via Youtube.

I have another who does mostly emotional therapeutic work. She charges hundreds of dollars per session. She just shows up and does the thing and doesn’t think about them again after the session is over. She also has a bunch of courses.

I have another who is starting a global, digital Church. He built a platform via podcast for many years and also with his adult life demonstrating his trustworthiness. He’s the type of guy you want to donate to. And he got patronage to start and do this church experiment for a few years from just a few key donors. Church will be entirely free.

Another prefers doing group practice, thinks it’s more rich and more possibilities and integrations that way. She’s experimenting with charging per month for membership to this weekly group and also per session.

One more example. She is similar to ED coach except she helps people with their money issues. Their stuck attitudes and beliefs around money. She once worked for an org as a teacher/facilitator that got her a large, online following and gets most of her clients that way. Also just friends in general (lot of people have issues with money it turns out).

On and on and on.

It’s interesting that the Church is a noun. It’s a vision. There’s a global intimacy disorder that is causing massive damage and pain in the world from rampant loneliness,, polarization, and more.

Clear nouns are easier to raise donations for.

Whatever the offering is, how do you package it as a vision, a noun, a end point that is good for not just me but the world?

Common knowledge in startups and business but the problem of distribution (aka marketing/advertising/getting attention) is half the business. Church friend built a platform of aligned fans over many years. Emotional therapeutic coach also did the same. Money coach too. ED coach relied on YT.

Getting good at a skill is one thing.

Getting in front of the right and enough eyeballs is another.

Most of the time being an employee means offloading the second job to the company.

This is why the company investors get the outsized returns and why good sales people make so much money.

I have a loose network of probably dozens, maybe hundreds of people who tangentially know me. Hopefully as the thoughtful, skilled, ultra competent person who ran a non-profit for years, taught week-long deep retreats, and facilitated transformative, life changing workshops. But I don’t really have distribution platforms like a podcast (yet). Maybe my loose network is enough. Not sure.

- Run Many Experiments, Iterate

Nuff said.

- Interoperability of Networks, Network of Networks, Protocals Between

This is probably my biggest takeaway from tonight’s talks.

I know some people are working on this but I’m not sure if any of them are truly live and working yet.

Many people are dreaming the same things and envisioning the same ideas. But we’re all siloed away.

We’re not going to give away our power and agency and life to someone else. So we build it on our own or with a small group of others. But this is so wasteful.

Consolidation and mergers though kills the richness.

Yet, interoperability would be clutch.

Examples would be Gympass — one membership access to multiple gyms
Another would be the EU —the euro and EU passport gives access to different countries
Another would be tech standardized things like USB, TCP/IP, etc.

Each of us build our own little network/kingdom. But build easy roads between us.

A participant may initially join the ED Coach and solves his ED problems. Gets into a good relationship. But now doesn’t know how to deal with his relationship problems. Gets referral/access to the group relational coach. Nails that down and later wants to start his own business but has money issues. Access to the money coach. Etc etc.

Another example would be intentional orgs and communities. If there was a shared protocal that if you trained at MAPLE then you can get fast tracked to work at IMS or be an apprentice at Earthdance. Your high standing in one community ought to translate across orgs. Sort of like having a FAANG on your LinkedIn opens many doors.

Teach the Newbies or Teach the Teachers?

Most of the offerings I’ve done are more in line with teaching new people.

We haven’t yet done much of teaching people to become teachers. I’ve at best TAed in such positions. And I suppose a lot of MAPLE training inside was this but that wasn’t a guest offering.

Ultimately, I want a physical neighborhood of dozens of cool people

One of the best things at MAPLE was the ready community just down the stairs. It’s the #1 thing I think most people miss after leaving. It’s what I recreated in Austin this past winter.

And it’s what I am dreaming to create again.

To me the fundamentals are (A) Livelihood and (B) Shared-Enough World Vision

Without adequate resources, people will default to what will support them over taking risks of doing something new or unproven. (Let’s all move to the same area and create stuff……too risky). So, creating a type of Recurse Center or talent agency to handle the resource issue is a fundamental corner stone. Or you just filter those who already figured it out.

Then B. Shared Vision of trying to help the world. What coheres us.

Meditation is great

Going down the stack to just turning off the constant mind anxiety and mental strategies to deal with (imagined) problems. It’s a huge relief and as my teacher once said, once you fall off, there’s no guarantee you will remember and find your way back. So take it seriously.

i’ve fallen off for weeks and months at a time. I still haven’t really gotten to as present a place as I know i can get to but i’m finding my way back to integrating it back into my life.

Self-esteem is a function of doing things you’re great at

If you aren’t doing those things then self-esteem will plummet

Record all conversations, figure out AI to get the gems out of it….or just take better notes during

-

For the past eight years, I was residing at MAPLE, a Buddhist neo-monastic community dedicated towards awakening and addressing global risks. “Residing”. I guess co-founding might be closer. For seven of those years, I was a full-time resident. But, I quickly became its Assistant Director in year 2, became the first Assistant Teacher (year 3), and soon thereafter, I became its Executive Director too (year 4) (held both roles of Director and Teacher somehow).

They actually asked me initially to be Exec Director but I refused and then later said yes after the last guy bounced out. Ironic since I was planning on leaving that year but he got out first.

About a year and half ago though, something in me broke and I couldn't do it anymore. I had this inkling I could go into a deep meditation retreat again and find my faith and energy again. But, I felt like it'd be just spinning my wheels again. I was heart broken. I was overwhelmed. I was confused.

The full story is for another time. But, for now, I'd just say I stepped down at my 7-year mark. I intended to take some time off and explore with the intention of returning and finding a new role at MAPLE. I thought I would tour great teachers and centers and pickup a lot of new practices and skills.

But, in the past year, instead, I started building a cabin nearby. I spent a lot of time with close friends. I did a dharma house experiment with several friends in Austin. And I returned, as I promised, this past summer to help out again and see what's happening. And I found myself feeling even more distant than before.

So, I'm leaving in a month or two. I'll have my cabin nearby, perhaps completed, perhaps not. I have a few great friends I'm confident can house me short-term while I figure out next steps.

New home. New work. New communities.

I guess I'm taking it as a good sign that all these years of training helped because I'm not freaking out. (much).

In the interim, I've been working on teaching relational practices, doing a coaching program, helping out as a strategic advisor for a meditation non-profit, finishing up my cabin build, and finishing up my work with MAPLE.

The project I began at MAPLE still feels very meaningful to me → Training trustworthy leaders through cross-training various methods within a deep community of peers and mentors.

I stilll have a deep love for meditation, relational practices (circling & co), Buddhism, and such. I also feel a great affinity for a global dharma project that addresses existential risks through creating communities of practice to help people heal their hearts and develop spiritually.

My ideal is to create a secret society or guild of peer teachers dedicated towards serving the planet. We would share a common ethos around seeing the crux of the global problems rooted in the lack of human spiritual / emotional / relatonal intimacy or wisdom.

Ultimately, I wish for a lot of mini-MAPLEs not so oriented towards Awakening but rather sila (Character, Ethics, Becoming a Good Friend).

I think there’s this huge gap between local gym/yoga studio/ecstatic dance and monastery. There ought to be common spaces and residential trainings where people can dive deeply into becoming a mature human being capable of wisdom, love, and power. Who have experienced a great intimacy and love for all beings. Who can see beyond the dualistic traps of society and be courageous enough to take a stand for the sake of the planet and all its inhabitants.

That was I think one of the greatest gifts MAPLE gave. It took my mild techno-capitalist-materialist-post-modern-existential identity and had the embodied experiences of fully letting go and seeing the only sane response from a place of surrender and love is to help others. That I gained a more broader worldview and identity. And the tools and empowerment to actually do good with my actions and responsibilities rather than just think and say nice things.

And that’s what is sorely lacking in the world today.

Oh. I started writing this substack. I realized I need to publish more. I want my next project to be a work-in-public. I’m working it out. I have a lot of potential angles. I still have a lot of inner demons and insecurities. I’m going to need help to remember to keep moving forward and not settle for mild pleasures.

Aho. May we hear our calling and respond with love and courage.

-Mitra

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