Thriving Together: Nine Principles for Cocreating True Community

by David Viafora, Sister True Dedication (Foreword by)

Overview

Seasoned community builder David Viafora pinpoints the nine principles that create conditions for joy and solidity in any community

Research over the last few decades reveals that our social fabric is unraveling as rates of isolation and loneliness continue to rise, climate crises intensify, and an individualistic worldview prevails. Is there another way to live? Where can we turn for guidance and hope in the face of such challenges?

In this astute and empowering guide, David Viafora, a former Buddhist monk, points to community building as a fresh yet ancient and powerful way to face our most pressing individual, social, and ecological challenges. With precision, enthusiasm, and deep humility, Viafora draws from his own vast experience of mindfulness communities to offer inspiration and concrete guidance in growing thriving communities from the inside out. The nine principles Viafora uncovers for successful community—including Visioning, Service, Joy, and Reconciliation—are broad and easily applicable to our existing groups and relationships. Yet their potential to reshape the most basic elements of our life and friendships is revolutionary. With these nine principles in hand, we can cocreate another way of being—beyond isolation, individualism, and despair.

In true community, we don’t have to face the difficulties of the world on our own. What we can embrace and heal as a community is far greater and more fulfilling than what we could ever achieve alone. Whether your aim is to start a new group, strengthen the community you already belong to, or explore what mindful community living has to offer, Thriving Together teaches us how to:

• Collectively create a vision to guide your community’s unique growth and purpose
• Strengthen the culture of joy, appreciation, and peace in your family or community
• Nurture vibrant, compassionate friendships as the foundation of community life
• Strengthen the muscles of reconciliation through simple yet powerful communication practices
• Embark upon meaningful service projects that nourish and heal both your community and others
• Protect your community by creating healthy boundaries in relationship to power dynamics
• Embrace racial healing as a path of compassionate and inclusive community building

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946764966
Publisher:	Parallax Press
Publication date:	02/25/2025
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	257,588
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.76(d)

About the Author

David Viafora, LICSW, leads mindfulness retreats for educators, families, teens, young adults, and other groups in North America and Europe. He first ordained as a monk with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in 2005 and spent several years living in the Plum Village tradition monasteries before finding his niche in lay community life. David has founded several mindfulness communities across the US, including Greatwoods Zen in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he currently resides. David is a lay ordained member of the Order of Interbeing, the core community of the Plum Village tradition, and works as a licensed therapist for children, adults, and families. David identifies as a white-presenting Chinese-American cis man. Some of David’s favorite activities are drinking tea in the woods with friends, Sangha game nights, sober dance parties, and sunset meditations.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.
Healing is an act of communion.
—bell hooks

Happiness is not an individual matter.
—Thich Nhat Hanh

There is hardly anything more appealing,
yet apparently more elusive, for humans at the end of the twentieth century than the prospect of living in harmony with nature and with each other.
—Robert and Diane Gilman

Nestled between lakes abundant with star lilies and within a rich forest of pine, beech, maple, poplar, oak, and birch trees, Morning Sun Mindfulness Community was built on the land of an abandoned quarry mine. In more recent decades, this land had been a hangout spot for target practice and beer drinking. Scars of the past remain: dilapidated machinery, a hollowed-out silo of crumbling concrete walls, rusty metal cables weaving in and out of the earth’s surface like a Chinese dragon statue, swaths of previously cleared forest steadily reclaiming their home, and the colored glass shards of thousands of broken bottles. Yet the mining also left something that the current inhabitants of this land enjoy. Huge sand deposits formed lakeside beaches and dune hilltops overlooking Blueberry Pond, where kids and families play, adults gather for retreats and days of mindfulness, and the entire community barbecues over campfires throughout the summer. Morning Sun has also become a refuge for humans to enjoy natural beauty as a nurturing background for mindfulness and meditation retreats. Every year, several hundred visitors from across the United States come to unwind, rest their eyes on the infinite shades of green, blue, and brown in the lakes and forests, and discover new ways of connecting to themselves and the world around them.

Over the last several years, the land has been steadily transitioning back to its essence—a quiet forest refuge where deer and moose roam. Beavers thrive in this habitat, and wild blueberry bushes encircling the lakes offer dessert to shy black bears on quiet summer afternoons. For over five years, Morning Sun Mindfulness Community was my home, wilderness refuge, a source of inspiration and support in my mindfulness practice and life learning, and an avenue of service.
Together, the resident members guide programs and retreats year-round with the aim of creating a more mindful and compassionate society for ourselves and future generations. I’ve learned that building a residential retreat center in a pristine forest that both protects and nourished by the wilderness cannot be accomplished by one person or even a few individuals. Ecological sustainability needs a healthy and thriving community of people who work harmoniously together so that the land and her guests can flourish as one.

Building the Dream

Morning Sun began in 2009, when Fern Dorresteyn and Michael Ciborski, both meditation teachers who had lived and studied extensively as monastics with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, planted the seeds of mindfulness and community living on the rolling forest hills of the Catawba or People of the Dawn Land, commonly known as New Hampshire. Over time, as Morning Sun residents, we dedicated ourselves to realizing this shared vision of building a retreat center where hundreds and eventually thousands of people would come each year to train in the art of mindful living and receive the blessings of its gorgeous forest and wetland habitats. Through a hodgepodge of fundraising, one resident with construction genius, an enthusiastic crowdfunding video, a small village of wholehearted volunteers, and boundless inspiration, we scraped together enough funds to buy most of our materials. And then, with limitless gratitude for our mindfulness practice, we subsidized construction labor with our own hands.

Aside from building sheet and pillow forts in my childhood living room or working on sketchy tree houses as a kid, I had never done any construction. What made it possible for a scholarly social worker and meditator (that’s me) to get out on the construction site every day? We’ve heard the old adage, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Where there’s a collective will, the way is even stronger! Each day, a community force energized me through the challenges of construction like a river carrying me through a canyon. I found myself climbing up ladders (big ones!) with a nail gun in one hand and plywood in the other, hauling forty-pound bundles of tile to the roof, cutting out sheetrock, screwing in ceilings, nailing in bamboo flooring—basically becoming a full-on construction worker. We tiled the roof from dawn to dusk under blazing summer rays and nailed in wooden siding around the building amidst the snow and frosty winds of late winter and early spring. No matter the season, the work was dirty, sweaty, and exhausting. Just as importantly, it was invigorating, challenging, and fun to be out there working together as a tribe. We were building the temple of our beloved community with our own hands and it bore our signatures.

At times, our physical and emotional energy felt sapped by the intensity of doing construction in between offering multiple five-day summer retreats. The more challenging it was, the more we leaned into our community practice. We encouraged each other to attend morning meditation sessions before construction, often took moments to pause, breathe, smile, or laugh between tasks, and rested while eating lunch in mindful silence together every day. We encouraged anyone who was feeling overly tired to care for their body and mind by lying down for a nap outside or taking five for a tea and dark chocolate break. When our spirits were low, even when things seemed beyond busy, we still made time to gather in a circle and share appreciations for one another’s brightest gifts of time, presence, and generosity. This simple act repowered our spirits almost beyond belief. On days off, we practiced being as lazy as possible. We frequented a hidden river spot to lounge on sun-heated rocks, swam with our kids in the small rapids, picnicked from noon to sunset, and completely forgot about lifting anything.

Building our retreat center taught me a lot about construction, but most of all I learned about building community. There’s an often-quoted African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I would like to add to that wisdom: “If you want to go joyfully, go in friendship.” There are some things, and some distances, that we can’t or wouldn’t want to cover alone. We need the power and momentum of trustworthy friends and a loving community to accomplish our most important, far-reaching dreams.

The Great Need for Community

When practiced in community, mindfulness strengthens bonds of acceptance, appreciation, empathy, and joy between close friends and loved ones. Mindfulness is the living awareness of what is happening within and around us at each moment, in a spirit of curiosity and compassion. Everyone has this innate capacity, and we can strengthen it both within ourselves and within relationships through sustained practice. Mindfulness helps us access the living intelligence of our own body and mind, grow our capacity to face suffering with both gentleness and fierce compassion, understand and transform the roots of our difficulties, open our eyes to the many wonders of life, and dwell more happily in each moment. Voyaging even farther on the path of mindfulness, we discover a profound interdependence with other people, all life on earth, and even the outermost reaches of the universe—and we realize we are less separate and more connected than we ever imagined.

Practicing mindfulness depends on the guidance, motivation, and relational support that arise in a community like Morning Sun. Daily practice thrives in environments where slowing down and cultivating moment-to-moment awareness is collectively encouraged, compared to the extreme busyness of mainstream society. Trying to practice mindfulness without collective support, we are like birds separated from the flock, struggling alone against the wind. In community life, we naturally learn from others how to uniquely adapt mindfulness to our lives where we need it the most.

In the Buddhist world, we call a community that practices mindfulness in a spirit of harmony and compassion a Sangha. A Sangha, though, does not need to be Buddhist—it can be our family, congregation, workplace, or any community where people try to listen with an open heart and support each other’s deepest aspirations. Time and time again, my teacher, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, spoke about the necessity of building Sangha wherever we are. Thich Nhat Hanh, more affectionately known as Thay, which means “teacher” in Vietnamese, famously said, “It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living.”

A Buddha is someone who embodies unconditional love and compassion for oneself and all beings and manifests liberating insights into the nature of suffering and happiness. Perhaps our future hinges not just on one individual person or Buddha attaining these peaks of spiritual awakening, but rather, on a community whose collective compassion and wisdom can support and guide our individual paths. Thay often told us, “My friends, you are my Sangha body. I take refuge in you. I also need you.” If having a Sangha is this important even for such an accomplished Zen teacher, then how much more so for the rest of us? No matter what tradition, belief system, or congregation we adhere to, our spiritual and emotional wellness depends on the nourishment and love of a true practice community.

Many people wish to live in or be surrounded by supportive, wholesome, communal environments where mindfulness is the norm and compassionate ideals are shared by everyone. Yet where can we find these places, or how can we create them? Typically, only Buddhist monasteries offer an all-inclusive environment of mindfulness practice where people can visit or live. For those of us not destined for monastic living, lay mindfulness residential communities and practice centers are sprinkled around the world. There are few guides for helping people create flourishing Sanghas, residential or not, that can support our practice and help transform our ailing society.

The need for oases of mindful living and compassionate human connection is as great as at any time in history. Our society has reached a critical juncture, as people are more disconnected from each other than ever before. Research over the last few decades, both in the US and abroad, shows us that the fabric of community life is unraveling as our social resources deteriorate. Even before the global COVID-19 pandemic, more than one in five Americans reported feeling lonely,
having not a single close connection with others, and the average person’s social network had shrunk in size by over one-third.

A 2018 study discovered that at least a quarter of our population feels we don’t have anyone in our lives who understands us. Nearly three-quarters of our nation, 74 percent of us, don’t know most of our neighbors, and a full one-third of us have never had an interaction with a neighbor. It turns out that we are not alone in feeling lonely at all.

The longest research project on happiness is an eighty-year study by Harvard University, which highlights two critical findings. The first is that strong social connections support and enhance people’s well-being. The second finding is that loneliness kills. Hundreds of studies similarly reveal that when people experience significant loneliness, live alone, or are more socially isolated than they wish to be, they are less happy, likely to die much earlier, their health deteriorates faster, they sleep worse, and their brain function heads downhill more quickly.

A 2015 review of over seventy international studies and more than three million global participants concluded that social isolation, loneliness, and living alone were all associated with increased risk of death in that year. Interestingly, it wasn’t just older adults who were most at risk; middle-aged folk living alone suffered more of these consequences than older adults. It turns out that poor relationships have a greater influence on health than even physical inactivity and obesity. Vivek Murthy, former surgeon general of the United States, wrote about “the loneliness epidemic” in the Harvard Business Review: “Loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.” Loneliness, it turns out, is killing people. Perhaps one of the few things worse for one’s health than loneliness is being a lonely smoker. It seems our society has largely forgotten about the ancient,
innate power of community. […]

Research shows those with stronger and more intimate relationships with family, friends, and community are happier and healthier, and they live longer. The happiest and most resilient people are not without conflict, but they lean into their closest relationships, especially when facing tough life challenges. Once we wake up to community’s pivotal influence on the health of our bodies, minds, and world, we can begin to build more trustworthy, supportive connections and meaningful lives.

Even in the shadow of our societal loneliness and separation, the wisdom of community lies dormant within us like ancient seed buried deep in the earth, waiting for a strong rain to burst them open again. Community is in our bones and our blood; it is our survival and our birthright as a species. Every one of our cells contains the wisdom, whether known or forgotten, of the strength, love, challenge, and happiness of living harmoniously and interdependently as one communal organism. Community-building skills are not merely for us to learn anew; they are a forgotten art for us to rediscover, renew, and strengthen. […]

What are your ancestral sources of communal wisdom, joy, and tradition, and how will you manifest them in our world today?

Researching Communities from the Inside Out

This dilemma of loneliness, individualism, and separation in the world and my personal quest to find a community home restlessly churned within my heart and mind for years when I was young. In my early twenties, I had fallen in love with the practice of mindfulness and Sangha building, and I dreamed of living in a community where mindfulness, harmony, and service were at the core of our lives. I explored Buddhist monastic life for several years, lived in a lay urban Zen center in Southern California, and worked as the temple keeper for a meditation center in rural Washington for eighteen months. I grew and learned tremendously from each of these communities, yet
I didn’t find an enduring fit for my life. Finally, at the age of thirty- four, I resolved to visit and research lay residential mindfulness communities and retreat centers around the world to thoroughly study their shared practice and then pass their inspiration, knowledge, and lessons on to others. I knew mindful communities offered a rare medicine to help heal our society’s estranged hearts, and I was ready for the adventure.

I felt inspired to study communities that practiced mindfulness as taught in the Plum Village tradition founded by the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh and nun Sister Chan Khong. This tradition had been my path for over a dozen years by then, and I was passionately driven to learn how to build community according to its teachings. Visitng communities that shared a common culture of practice together would also streamline my research, learning, and insights. I was primarily interested in exploring lay practice communities, which are inspired by and rooted in Buddhist monastic communities but not immersed in them. These lay communities are founded and led by practitioners who often have loving partnerships, families with children, and diverse jobs in the world alongside a sincere dedication to deepening mindfulness practice and sharing it with others.

In the spring of 2017, my then-partner and fellow Sangha enthusiast, Vanessa Ixil Chavez, and I set out on our global quest. We journeyed across the English-speaking world and several countries in Europe, staying for weeks and even months at various residential communities and young adult mindfulness houses, as well as briefly visiting dozens of local weekly mindfulness groups in thirteen countries. We focused primarily on residential communities, but also visited and learned from many non-residential Sanghas. Knowing that 50 percent of communities fail within the first two years, we asked questions about what made each community sink or swim in the deep pond of relational dynamics. Our understanding of creating community grew rapidly with every encounter.

Editorial Reviews

"A pragmatic and inspiring guide for cocreating communities of depth, connection, and resilience."
—David Treleaven, PhD, author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness

"A heartfelt and deeply practical guide for anyone seeking to build genuine, inclusive, and resilient communities."
—Kaira Jewel Lingo, author of We Were Made for These Times

"In Thriving Together, through engaging interviews and deep looking into his own experiences, David Viafora lays out what it means to create Beloved Community. This book is fresh and engaging, and anyone wanting to live in community is sure to be inspired by David’s active research.”
—Dr. Larry Ward and Dr. Peggy Rowe Ward, authors of Love’s Garden

“For those of us who are interested in nurturing and sustaining intentional and lasting communities, Thriving Together is an indispensable book."
—John Bell, author of Unbroken Wholeness

"Sharing stories of his visiting, joining, and forming intentional communities and reflecting on them through the lens of his Buddhist practice, David Viafora invites us to join him on his own voyage of discovery. In the process we will all find there is more to discover than we supposed.”
—Richard Brady, author of Short Journey Home

"David Viafora has dug deep into the reality of community life.… This book, the fruit of his exploration, draws on the collective wisdom of over a hundred community-builders who have shared their lives and insights with courage and vulnerability.… What shines through in Thriving Together is the need to be bold, loving, and authentic. David’s research is a precious resource to encourage us to step into this practice ourselves—whether we are founding a community, joining one, or simply seeking to bring a more meaningful communal spirit to our neighborhood, workplace, or network of friends and family."
—from the foreword by Sister True Dedication, editor of Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Nhat Hanh

From the Publisher