dharma house: from monastery to co-housing

"There’s an invisible architecture to our house. It's hard to put in words but everyone feels it."

I was leaving behind everything. Again. My home. My work. My community. My identity. I felt so utterly broken and confused yet I knew I had to move on.

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.