How Are We Going to Do This?
On building conscious community that doesn’t collapse...
This article is edited by Tucker Walsh and adapted from a live recording by Dr. John Churchill with Integral Life. You can see the full episode here or listen to a free audio preview below:
If you’d like to come into the mandala with us, join us for our next three-day online retreat (yes, the field still transmits) called Awakening the Heartmind on April 24-26, 2026. Read to the bottom for a token of our appreciation.
Asking the hard question
We all feel a deep need for spiritual community. Traditionally it was the third place — we have work, we have home, and we had the third place: church, temple, sangha. If we don’t have that third place, our lives can often feel smaller because of it.
But look at what’s happened to spiritual communities in the West. Most of the ones I can name from the last fifty years have collapsed, often spectacularly. The guru-at-the-top model — the Rajneesh phenomenon — is just too prone to abuse. The communities that form around a single personality without peers tend to end the same way. Tremendous gifts get transmitted, and alongside those gifts, a tremendous amount of shadow runs. And once you know how these stories tend to end, you start to ask the harder question:
How are we going to do this?
This is a question that has taken up a lot of my thought and study over thirty years. And I want to start by saying something that might sound strange: it’s not the psycho-technology that’s missing. We have the psycho-technology. My apprenticeship with Dr. Dan Brown, my years studying with the Tibetans — we have these practices. Hundreds of thousands of volumes in the Tibetan libraries. The Vajrayana, at its best, is industrial-level depth processing of the shadow, built into ritualized structures that might appear like something else if you only read them theologically. The deity practices, the father tantra practices, the mother tantra practices — these are designed to do really deep work. They’re not missing.
So the problem is somewhere else.
What we’re actually missing
The problem is architecture.
When we think of spiritual teachers, we tend to picture one kind of person — the teacher, or maybe the prophet, the seer, the shaman, the priest. But there is another function that almost no one talks about, and it’s the one we most desperately need: the architect.
If we were going on a forty-year or more journey — and that’s really what this is — we would want to have the architecture of that. Of course there is individuality within the journey, but if there’s no outer structure, and no institutions that understand we are going on a multi-decade journey, then what you have is the postmodern predicament: spiritual teachers essentially making it up as they go along.
The lineages had architecture. But the architecture is a thousand years old, and it was built for elites. In Tibet and in Japan, these systems were wildly elitist — a vanishingly small percentage of the population ever went through the training, had access to the esoteric resources, or found a community of peers who could test and push and challenge them. Now the teachings have come to the West and been democratized, which is a good thing in many ways — but we don’t yet have a Western version of Vajrayana, and we haven’t yet built the architecture we need.
And the challenge for a creative Western teacher who sees our unique psychology, our unique traumas — the moment you understand that, it’s going to be difficult to be solely part of a traditional lineage. So now you’re by yourself. And because of that, you run into the shadow of what happens when you are a teacher without peers. One teacher, not a circle of teachers. That’s where things tend to break.
A multi-generational project
If we’re thinking intelligently, we need to be thinking about how we build an integral lineage. And that means more than adding psychology to Buddhism or making Christianity integral. It means actually designing the subtle architecture of a lineage — its transmission structures, its feedback loops, its research and development, its mechanisms for updating itself. If you just put one person at the very top, you are not building an intelligent organization. You have to use the best of Western developmental and organizational understanding to build something that can actually hold the depth.
The first thing this requires is seeing further than our own practice this year, or ten years from now. This is a multi-generational project. Once you start thinking that way, you begin to see potential solutions — what we need to build, and how.
Teaching is one function, but it’s not the only function. Education is a sacred dimension. Business and finance are sacred dimensions. Land is a sacred dimension. All of these pieces belong in the mandala. It is tetra-rising — an integral lineage has to consider all quadrants, all eight zones. You’re not going to wing that. You have to design it.
The guild model
One comparable system we can look at is the Freemasons — a deliberately developmental, initiatory system with a pedagogy that leads somewhere. Once you are trained, once you are initiated, you become a member of a guild. And at the level of the guild, you are a worker, a co-worker with other people who have received that degree of training.
What that means, practically, is that you have to build an education system. We already understand this from K–12 schooling. We understand pedagogy. You lay out a pedagogical map, with phases, and it leads from the outside world to the outer court, and on to further initiatory levels from there.
And in building that organizational structure, you also come to understand a crucial distinction: the governance system necessary for a training body is not the same as the governance system necessary for a community.
You want a more egalitarian, democratic culture at the level of the village — that’s the community. But when you go to school, you want to have someone in charge. Sacred culture involves both of those. You need a mandala large enough to have different governance systems for different dimensions of the culture.
Some dimensions of this need to be meritocratic. That’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s important, because we are trying to train people well. But that isn’t the only dimension of sacred culture. I also want to be able to go down and join the drum circle, and be part of something more village-like. Both have to be there.
When these things get mixed, everything risks collapsing. Either into a flat no-hierarchy community where no one can make a decision and the whole thing atrophies — or the single-personality-at-the-top model where it’s the same old story all over again. The differentiation is crucial.
Starting with safety
There’s another piece we need to name and where we actually have to begin.
The first thing in the mandala is safety.
We should begin by staying on the attachment security system. This is what gets internalized in early childhood as our innate sense of trust and faith — in ourselves, in life, in other people. It gets internalized as our capacity to attune and self-regulate our own nervous system. In the psychology of religion, attachment is what becomes faith.
If we don’t address this, our contemplative practice actually reinforces the split. You end up with very awake people who still have a raging volcano underneath, because the valve is too narrow — you’re transmuting a little drip that’s coming through when underneath there’s Kundalini, the suppression of the evolutionary force itself. And when you gather those people into community without attending to this first, you get the same old shadow patterns — just with more insight layered on top.
So when I think about how we build a community that can actually hold the depth Vajrayana wants to go, I come back to this: we build safety first. We track the ground. We track the Mother. We track the degree to which we are safe in every moment. We build the floor of the mandala before we build the rooms.
Once that floor is there, we can do the kind of work the tantras point to. If we don’t, we can’t.
Building the cathedral
I think of this, in the Planetary Dharma cohorts I’m working with now, as training masons.
We’re not just training individual practitioners. We’re training the people who are going to help build the cathedral. You have a senior architect who holds the plan, but you need a whole guild of peers who are capable and ready to build. And the building includes the organizational pieces — holacracy, civic technology, land-based practice communities, all of it. We all hold a dimension of the mandala. It isn’t just the teaching, or the teachers.
This also involves helping people recognize their own unique self — their unique genius — and how that fits into building Sacred World. I do believe everybody has a particular offering in that process.
And the training is designed to engage you in the world, not remove you from it. The path of the Bodhisattva is literally nondual, not metaphorically. Nondual means our development arises as we meet the world. Inner and outer are not two. The demands of the world are what ask us to bring out our unique genius.
That might look humble — I’m going to make the best bakery in town with the best bread. It might be parenting. It might be building a movement. The whole ecosystem of sacred culture has to be engaged.
Otherwise, what’s the point? This is not about going to the monastery and staying in the monastery. That’s overtly not the point. This is Bodhisattva training. We need to train people to use their practice out in the world. To change the world.
Slow by slow
I’ll end with something one of my Tibetan friends used to say: slow by slow.
These are difficult times. Maybe more than ever, we need to see some successes. We need to see that this can actually be built — not as another round of talking about the fourth turning of the wheel of dharma, but actually building it. Testing it. Refining it. Letting it be dynamic enough to respond to what’s happening as real people come through and share what’s working and what isn’t.
That, in the end, is the Bodhisattva’s question. Is this actually helping? Or is it another grand project of ego that’s not going anywhere?
The only way to answer that honestly is slow by slow.
Come sit with us
From April 24 to 26, Dr. John Churchill is teaching a three-day online retreat all about this: Awakening the Heartmind: Introduction to Bodhisattva Training.
Over three days, we’ll move through a full arc of practice. You’ll be guided into the release in the stable ground, into the feeling of being held and attuned to, into the meeting of humility and sovereignty at the heart, and the fundamental openness of experience beyond all constructs.
John will give you live pointing-out instruction on what’s actually arising in your direct experience, session by session. You’ll ask questions, and you’ll receive precise, real-time feedback. And you’ll be held in a sangha field built deliberately for this kind of work.
Three days to move the heartmind from intellectual understanding to direct experience. In the body, with others, in real time.
If you want more of what you experienced reading this, come sit with us!
Learn more and register at: heartmind.planetarydharma.com. The first 10 people to use the code OPEN-MIND get $100 off.
If you can’t join for the retreat, check out our monthly membership, The Gateway, for monthly calls with John and access to our Wisdom Library of dharma teaching and meditation recordings.
Dr. John Churchill is the founder of Planetary Dharma, a contemporary Bodhisattva training school integrating perennial wisdom, contemplative practice, attachment healing, and adult development.
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