The following reflection originally appeared in the newsletter I sent out on July 2, 2026.
Feel free to read just the bold words and skip the rest.
Introduction
In a society where so many people long for deep, meaningful connection, my observation as a dharma teacher is that while many people are highly motivated to meditate or study contemplative teachings, far fewer take the steps needed to actually cultivate spiritual community.
As an introvert who has spent most of my life moving through and helping build spiritual communities — from a robust Christian upbringing, to several years embedded in Buddhist sanghas in Southeast Asia, to nearly a decade leading local & virtual practice communities — I find myself increasingly fascinated by what makes this kind of connection actually happen, particularly given how fragmented, busy, and individualistic our culture has become.
My core conviction, developed over time, is simple: sangha isn’t something that happens to us. It’s a practice that we bring into being with the same patient continuity we’d bring to meditation itself.
What Is Sangha
One way to think of the starting point of Buddhism is that it involves three refuges — things that support and nourish us along the path. These are Buddha, the possibility of awakening, Dhamma, the practices & teachings, and Sangha, the community of fellow practitioners.
Used conventionally, the refuge of “sangha” refers to something like “spiritual community,” and is often spoken loosely to refer to particular gatherings, like, “I’m going to Monday night Sangha this week.”
However, to plunge a bit deeper, what it’s really pointing to is a community bound by a shared intention to live beyond the surface — to live compassionately, mindfully, with integrity, and ultimately, to awaken.
The basic function of sangha is to provide a relational ecosystem where people can learn about, try on, and deepen that core intention, thus collectively being supported and nourished.
The key distinction between this type of community and a club, class, or group of people who are bound by interest or demographic is what’s actually held in common: not keeping the neighborhood safe or improving our chess skills, but again, the shared aspiration to cultivate wholesome qualities of being.
Characteristics of a Healthy Sangha
To use the Buddha’s own words:
“These are the four grounds for the bonds of community. Which four? Generosity, kind words, beneficial help, and consistency.”
Just focusing on these four as core aspirations is sure to fuse a sangha with healthfulness. However, in reflecting on sanghas I’ve been a part of or have led, four qualities come to mind that characterize a healthy sangha: wisely-held authenticity, inclusivity, depth of practice, and intimacy.
Wisely-Held Authenticity
A healthy sangha isn’t full of people acting enlightened all the time. Because they’re not. Rather, it’s a place where people can be authentic with what’s alive for them — joy, anger, despair, or resistance — and have it relationally held in a different way than mainstream society. Instead of community members egging them on or fueling their stories, when there is some baseline of depth of practice in the sangha, other members hold their authenticity with the fruits of practice, like presence, wisdom, and compassion.
It’s not a place we need to hide parts of ourselves, but where we learn how to be with those parts that feel less spiritual with deeper awareness, wisdom and compassion.
It’s also a place to experiment with what it even means to be “authentic,” as awareness & wisdom show us that, fundamentally, we are not our urges, emotions, beliefs, or preferences. In this way, we can begin to experiment with ways of being. Sangha is a place where this exploration can be held with care.
As one example, as someone historically inclined to being quiet, I once experimented with initiating more dialogues with other sangha members, saying more hellos, and speaking up more in group spaces. It was uncomfortable and revealed facets of myself that weren’t showing up on the meditation cushion.
Inclusivity
A good starting point for any healthy community is to ask: who doesn’t feel welcome here?
This goes well beyond a DEI statement. All of us filter and interpret the world through our own conditioning and circumstances — our identities, histories, and ways of being seen or unseen. A healthy sangha builds collective awareness around this, imperfectly but intentionally nurturing conditions where more people feel genuinely welcomed.
Sometimes our unique backgrounds and wounding clashes with one another, and I’m not sure it’s even possible for 100% of people to feel perfectly included in a given community, but the more a community sees inclusion as a priority, the awareness builds and the layers of actual welcoming follow.
Importantly, moving towards inclusivity will inevitably make people uncomfortable — from folks who resist sharing pronouns to the community member who once wanted me to kick someone out of the sangha who was making the space feel uncomfortable due to repeated insensitive comments. Of course, in the latter case, the double bind is that kicking someone out without first making sincere attempts at dialogue and reconciliation actually makes the space less safe and inclusive.
A general principle is that no one is going to get kicked out of a healthy sangha, unless the harm is grave or many attempts at reconciliation have been first made.
To put it another way, a healthy sangha isn’t absent of conflict, but is a place where conflict is held with mindfulness, care and wisdom. It invites dialogue, a little bit of messiness, and the willingness to see other points of view and make efforts at change.
Over the years, I’ve had a number of students point out to me ways I was falling short of inclusivity, some private, some public. All of these have been great learning experiences for myself and the community.
It’s hard to create a community where the container is loose enough to feel natural, but firm enough to create safety and inclusion — and yet, a healthy sangha actively aspires to this.
Intimacy
I was part of a sangha for over a year, where apart from the teacher, I only learned one person’s name.
In contrast, as a participant, the most alive and beneficial sangha I was a part of had a strong relational component, where we actually developed friendships with one another that spilled outside of the formal gatherings.
In other words, having genuine interactions with one another is part of what keeps it feeling alive and keeps us coming back.
I often think of sangha as the fertile soil from which spiritual friendship grows. It’s not that sangha necessitates individual friendships, but when there is a strong community container, friendship tends to sprout.
Curiously, when the Buddha’s attendant Ānanda suggested that spiritual friendship was “half the holy life,” the Buddha corrected him, saying it was in fact “the whole of it.”
Depth of Practice
Depth has two dimensions.
The first is the people: when enough experienced practitioners are in the room, like those who’ve been meditating for years or even decades, they naturally hold the culture and model what long-term practice actually looks like. Beginners feel the current and get pulled along by it.
The second is what the community does together: retreats, long-term explorations, or shared practice that goes beyond a weekly sit. There’s something about going deep alongside others that builds bonds ordinary socializing can’t.
Of the qualities I’ve mentioned here, depth is perhaps the most important. It creates the conditions for intimacy, the spiritual maturity to wisely hold authenticity, and the clarity of awareness to explore inclusivity in earnest.
How to Cultivate Sangha
Sangha isn’t something that happens to us — it’s a practice. In other words, it’s something that takes effort. Here are two specific ways we take on the practice of sangha:
Continuity
I once worked at the Portland Saturday market, roughly 10 hours on Saturday, and 8 hours on Sunday. At 6pm on Sunday, I finished dropping off the inventory, and I was at sangha by 7pm.
I almost never felt like eating a quick dinner and driving a half hour to go to the sangha I liked, but basically every week, I did it anyway. Some evenings were special. Some were forgettable. Some topics I was excited about. Some I wasn’t. None of it mattered.
Over the course of about two years, showing up over and over, at some point, I stopped feeling like an outsider. I actually got to know other people — not through dramatic reveals, but through repeat, ordinary contact. Slowly, sneakily, bit by bit, I felt a sense of genuine belonging. I realized then just how essential continuity was for building real community.
Contribution
To feel part of something, we have to feel like our presence matters — as in, people will feel it if we’re not there.
Typically, this happens through more than just showing up physically, but could be as simple as speaking up, contributing our voice, whether in the big group or in casual conversations with other members. In community gatherings, I often frame speaking up as a “gift to the community.”
However, helping out and contributing can happen in many ways beyond our voice, such as helping clean up, being the person who goes out of their way to greet new people, taking on organizer roles, sitting on a committee, filling out community surveys, or generally being a person who sits with the question, “how can I contribute to this community?”
We start to notice a shift from being a consumer of a community to a steward, and along the way, we feel more connection to the community, and more inspired to show up.
What Gets in The Way
If sangha is not a side-dish to meditation, but a deeply nourishing practice in itself, it raises the question, when we want community but don’t seem to make the effort to actualize it, what’s getting in the way?
Here are four blocks I’ve noticed: consumer mindset, wanting effortlessness, non-prioritization, and busyness.
Consumer Mindset
We live in a culture that orients to spiritual practice as a commodity like anything else. We pay our fee to the retreat center or the facilitator and expect to get a good experience in return. We are customers consuming a product, whether that’s meditation itself, a meditative community, or something similar.
When we have this consumer mindset, what tends to happen is that as soon as some friction arises, it seems like it’s not working as intended, or maybe we just get bored, we move on to the next practice or community. Or, when we had a long day, we think, “I feel tired; I don’t want to deal with going to a place and seeing a bunch of people. I’d rather stay at home.”
The alternative is to orient to community as a practice, as something that takes patient continuity and contribution, as something that isn’t quite so much about getting something, but plugging in over and over, and seeing what arises over the long haul.
Wanting It To Be Effortless
In early education, friends were just there — at the next desk, on the same bus, in the same lunch period. Community happened to us.
In adulthood, that conditioning follows us, and when connection doesn’t arrive automatically, we tend to assume something is wrong, perhaps with the community, the teacher, or ourselves. In turn, we move on, seeking an effortless community-building experience.
However, the simple reality is that building community and also friendships takes some effort. It usually requires more ordinary repetition than feels meaningful in the moment. The good news is that once we stop waiting for it to feel effortless, we can actually get on with building it.
Non-Prioritization
As our spiritual practice deepens, something gradually shifts in what we find ourselves prioritizing. Early on, it’s completely understandable to treat sangha as optional — one more thing competing for limited time.
But at some point, the question stops being “do I have room for this?” and becomes “can I afford not to have this?”
Even then, one particularly tricky reason we don’t prioritize sangha is that it can be hard to find a community we actually resonate with. There is some mysterious alchemy of connection with the format, the teacher, the lineage, the distance from our house, the day and/or time they meet, the particular methods or style of instruction being offered, the identities, experience level, makeup of the other community members, and so on.
When you’re struggling to find a community that checks enough boxes, I understand — it’s hard to motivate yourself toward something when your heart isn’t fully on board.
In these cases, it’s helpful to explore around, both locally and virtually, and to make peace with the fact that no community will be a perfect fit.
It’s also worth remembering that sangha doesn’t require a formal community — even one or two consistent spiritual friendships, prioritized and tended, can go a long, long way.
Too Busy
On one level, I completely understand the “too busy” objection. I myself often feel too busy. However, it’s also code language for saying “I’m not prioritizing this, as I’m prioritizing other things.”
For example, I’m basically never too busy to spend some time with my wife, meditate each day, take a daily walk, touch in periodically with my dearest friends and family, maintain my personal hygiene and health, and steep in the dhamma.
Sure, on any given day, I may not have time for some of these things, or only a little. However, over the course of a week, I make happen what I care about most. In other words, I am not too busy for the things I prioritize. A number of the other things that I enjoy, like pickleball, board games, bike rides, going to various events, and so on — well, sometimes I’m just too busy!
I often reflect on how the Buddha praised people who were “contented and easily satisfied, unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways.” The more we can embrace this simple teaching, the closer we get to aligning our life with our priorities.
An Unfolding Experiment
While the core of my teaching is sharing the Buddha’s liberating practices — meditation, wisdom, love, integrity — I’ve increasingly come to see sangha-building as a fundamental part of the job. This includes many things that are tiresome for the introvert in me. But I’ve come to see it as part of my own practice.
In practical terms, this has meant building multiple entry points at different levels of commitment, from a daily morning sit and a weekly in-person drop-in that ask only that you show up, to multi-week courses, retreats, and year-long programs.
One thing that’s brought me great joy is watching community members increasingly step up their contribution, organizing their own offshoots, leading sessions, sitting on committees, or simply showing up regularly and sharing their experience, in spite of whatever is going on in their day-to-day life. The shift from passive audience to co-creator is slow, but I can feel it happening, little-by-little.
It has also been deeply moving to watch friendships develop independently of me — people who met here and have remained close even after drifting from the community itself. These are not “customers lost,” but the fertile soil doing its work.
I talk about “the gift economy” often, partly because all these offerings run on generosity rather than fixed fees, and manage to keep going only because the community supports them. But more deeply, it points to the culture shift at the heart of all of this: from consumer to steward, from “what can I get?” to “how can I be of support?”
Of course, I’m still learning. I’m essentially the sole teacher, which has real benefits but real drawbacks too. I continue experimenting, pulling people in, trying things, making mistakes, taking feedback, and trying again.
Sangha, for me, is not a problem I’ve solved. It’s a practice I’m in.
Conclusion
I’ll close with an invitation: consider the role of spiritual friendship and community in your own life. Have you tasted this at some point? Do you have it now? If not, what’s genuinely getting in the way?
More than anything, I hope this lands not as an abstract teaching but as an encouragement — that sangha is available to you, that it’s worth the effort, and that the effort itself is part of the practice.
I’ll let a community member have the last word. They wrote this recently on the community Discord page:
“I started attending the sangha at the start of what turned out to be the most difficult year of my life, and the sangha was a genuine refuge in every sense of the word. It’s a sacred, protected, peaceful space with people in all their vulnerability and imperfection, holding each other with compassion and love. Even outside the sangha, throughout the day, the reminder to keep calmly knowing change has helped me through many difficult points.”
—————
If you would like to get a monthly’ish email with reflections like this one, along with some event updates, sign up here for the newsletter.