What is Community?

For the past few months, Lama Rod & Team have been reflecting together about what we mean by “community”. In a video about politics and mutual aid on Lama Rod’s Learning & Practice Community, Lama Rod reflected on the kind of community needed on the road ahead. This salient wisdom from that video stands out to us: 

• “We’re always looking for other people to save us. But at what point do we choose freedom for ourselves? Because freedom, ultimate freedom, ultimate liberation, is actually extremely individual. It’s very personal. When I say personal, I mean that you have to make the choice and choose the labor. And of course, this is in collaboration with community, absolutely, which is really wonderful. But you have to choose that for yourself.” 

• “We have to stop looking up to people who are going to save us and start looking around us to people we can start collaborating with. That’s community. That’s the community we should be creating, right? Looking around and actually engaging in mutual aid with one another.”  

• “Let’s start building relationships with people who reflect our ethics, knowing that relationships are not gonna be perfect. [...] I don’t have to 100% agree with everyone I collaborate with. But we have to be at least clear about the objectives; about freedom, liberation, agency; centering care, compassion, love [...] Those are key for me. And that’s what we have to start thinking more about: taking responsibility for the people around us.”

Alongside these offerings from Lama Rod, we as a Team would like to weave in some of our own reflections about what we mean by “community”. These contemplations emerge from our commitment to supporting the fullest expression of freedom for everyone engaging together in Lama Rod’s virtual/in-person spaces, as individuals and as a collective:

• The community we are choosing responsibility for includes each of us who gather around Lama Rod as a teacher/guide; anyone who feels encouraged by the precious lineages of embodied freedom; and all who tend a world burdened with profound suffering.
• Community is a forest: a dynamic spiritual ecology of unbounded wholeness where we are all constantly growing, decaying, and getting free together. 
• Community means claiming responsibility for the ways we enter into, practice within, and share our learnings throughout the wider ecosystems that sustain us. An ecosystem is a collection of intersecting ecologies.
• Community is the shared struggle to bear the fullness of spiritual and ecological maturity. 
• Community invites the unique contributions of all beings, all lineages of liberation, and all expressions of freedom. Accompanied by all beings we chose to honor as teachers, mentors, and guides, we touch the Earth to affirm the unconditional availability of liberation for all beings, no matter what. We will get free by empowering ourselves and each other. We commit to releasing all obstacles to our shared freedom.
• If learning and practice is what nourishes or feeds us, then community requires curiosity and clarity about our own tastes, our own preferences, our own hunger, our own metabolism, and our own goals. Getting curious and clear enables us to intentionally collaborate, mingling in mutual relationship to what others enjoy eating, preparing, and sharing. 
• Community supports the feeling of complete freedom and unconditional permission to get the resources we need to sustain us from anywhere in the vast forest of liberation.
• Community is where we are in direct relationship with the struggle to behold the truth of ourselves and the truth of others, simultaneously.
• Community isn’t just about me getting my own taste of freedom. It's about everyone who’s in this space struggling to get completely free, together.
• In the style of Andre Leon Tally, community means cultivating my own aesthetic universe and sharing that universe with the people I respect and love. One invocation is the creation of my own universe. Another is sharing that creative universe with those I love and respect. 

We affirm the profound blessing that there are so many different ways, spaces, and relations available to engage liberatory teachings throughout this vast forest of freedom. 

We encourage you to explore what is supportive for you, whether it be through Lama Rod’s Learning & Practice Community, attending an event or retreat, reading books, or staying in touch through Lama Rod’s newsletter or social media.

We devote all the labors of our collective struggle to the swift abolition of the carceral state and liberating the entire phenomenal world without a single exception. May it be so!

Sincerely, 

Lama Rod & Team