The Dharmahouse Eco community project

Hi there, we are the dharmahouse community project in the south of france, we are looking for others interested in our vision to help us set up an eco community based around the Buddha's teachings. please see www.thedharmahouse.com

The Dharmahouse community project

In May 2006 the community moved in and started to live together in an 8 acre property in southern France. The property was previously a farm, and gave us a great opportunity to start to explore our desire for community living in the context of natural surroundings. We started to experiment with growing our own food using ideas based in natural and synergistic agricultural systems. We have also started to explore ecological and sustainable building techniques as a basis for future community building. The present property is serving as a springboard and small-scale temporary model for community living. Our main goal is to establish a co-housing community based around the teachings of the Buddha and environmental concern. Why did we choose Cohousing? And what is it? To start with a dictionary definition Cohousing is:

“a type of collaborative housing that attempts to overcome the alienation of modern subdivisions in which no-one knows their neighbours, and there is no sense of community. It is characterized by private dwellings with their own kitchen, living-dining room etc, but also extensive common facilities. The common building may include a large dining room, kitchen, lounges, meeting rooms, recreation facilities, library, workshops, childcare.”

The concept of Cohousing was first established in Denmark in the 1970s; catalysed by frustration at the isolation and impracticality of modern day housing designs, cohousing became an attempt to redefine how our living arrangements can support and develop our human relationships. Taking inspiration from different cultures and traditional village settings, the concept of cohousing is now being developed across Europe, north America, Australasia, and eastern Asia.

Expanding on this definition of cohousing within the context of the Dharma, we are seeking a ‘practicing neighbourhood', a sangha to provide nurturing and supportive conditions for our spiritual lives. Our common building could perhaps be a Dharma hall, to again support our practice, where we could come together to share, discuss, meditate and support each other. This could also be a place where Dharma teachers could come and lead retreats from time to time.

In the on-going development of this project we are keen to discuss the social, economic and environmental aspects of cohousing. What follows are some of the benefits of cohousing and also some of the issues that we will be looking at in our discussions when we come together in August of this year (1st-5th). I am sure many more questions and discussions will be raised when we meet, this will give us a chance to inquire into what best direction we can take this project in the years to come. A chance to dip in to the sea of possibility! Maybe a few different visions of community will emerge from these discussions, maybe a few different communities could start - the beginnings of small network?

Let's see……

Personal space / freedom within a community setting

Cohousing is unlike the ‘commune model' of community in that it gives you your own personal boundried space in the form of a seperarately owned dwelling. This of course gives you the choice of when you wish to be among others or just with your immediate family / alone. Two of the traditional key conflicts occurring in intentional communal settings have been around a lack of personal space and the sharing of finances. Cohousing communities address these potential banana skins by giving the individual autonomy over both of them. Community does however include many people, making it hard to satisfy everyone's needs all the time. Plato spoke about the conflict between ‘the one and the many'. e.g. One person's freedom to dance all night negates their neighbours' freedom of peaceful sleep! How is this held within the confines of a intentional community?

What is your notion of community? How are you at making compromise?

Democratic self-determination

The ability to have some control over decision making. Entering into a collective decision making process where people feel they are being heard and have some influence over the way they live. I'm sure we have all had the experience of poor communication with a landlord / freeholder / organisation that does not share our value base. Feelings of disempowerment and separation from what matters to us can soon arise. A lot of cohousing communities use a consensus model of decision making (see this article on the Consensus Decision Process in Cohousing for more info). What are our experiences of decision making processes?

See also 'On Conflict and Consensus: a handbook on Formal Consensus decision making'.

This book is free to download from www.ic.org/pnp/ocac/

A shared vision

Implicit in the early stages of forming a cohousing project is a clear understanding of our aims, values and expectations, and their formalisation in writing. It would seem this has to be established prior to any commitment into a project. It has been a common problem in many communities that don't establish these ground rules to begin with. They are indirectly setting up a potential timebomb for dispute later on down the road. Gary Moffatt highlights this point in his essay ‘Why Do Communities Fail?':

“Part of the problem doubtless lies in an over-optimism which causes those taking part to waive some of the fundamental prerequisites for selecting companions in the venture, i.e.:

• A shared analysis of what social change is needed and how the members of the group will work and live together to bring it about.
• Common agreement to a written set of principles outlining what the group expects from each member and what each member expects from the group.
• A mutual understanding of the conditions of living together; what standard of cleanliness will be maintained, how work will be divided, extent to which individual privacy will be maintained, degree of communalization of property and so forth.
• A commonly accepted strategy for furthering the group's ends.

Without these prior agreements, a group's chances of working together over a long period of time for common goals are most remote. The difficulties of finding enough people to rent a house or work a piece of land often tempt those starting such a project to waive some or all of these requirements. The easier it is to get a group of people together, the more easily it will fall apart in midstream when it fails to meet all the members' diversified expectations.”

One person's vision of community maybe wanting to be away from all technology in a rural setting, completely off grid only wanting to be with those that spend most of the day in silent meditation. While another person has an internet business and 3 children needing to be close to a town school. We need to know from the outset what it is we are looking for. What differences are we not prepared to accept?

Personal / spiritual growth

“The ego does not go with laughter and caresses. It must be chased with sorrow and drowned in tears.” (a Sufi saying)

There are of course many challenges in living with just one person. How are we going to be with 10 or 20? What is the essence of what pulls us towards community? To many community is the holy grail of the spiritual life. It is a chance to break down the narrow confines of our self-interested ego. A chance to work towards a deeper feeling of interconnectedness with others, a sharing and belonging to a group or sangha on the spiritual path. This of course is a beautiful vision of how we could lead our lives, and the way many people do, but how idealistic are our notions of what this will really be like?

Diana Leafe Christian, the respected community author who wrote 'Creating a life together' gives us a clear sense of this when she states:

“My observation of “the successful 10 percent” (of communities) taught me that it's all in the willingness of the potential new member or cofounder. If he or she has what I call “high woundedness” (hey, don't we all?), it seems to only work if the person simultaneously has “high willingness” - to grow and learn and change. I have seen several forming communities in recent years - even those with powerful vision statements, fine communication skills, and good consensus training - break apart in conflict and sometimes lawsuits because even just one member didn't have enough self-esteem to function well in a group. The person's “stuff came up” - as everyone's does in community - but theirs was too destructive for the community to absorb. When a person is wounded and having a difficult time in life, he or she can certainly benefit from living in community, and, ideally, can heal and grow because of the support and feedback offered by others. But a certain level of woundedness - without “high willingness” - appears to be too deep for many new communities to handle. I believe one deeply wounded person can affect a group far more than 10 healthy people, because of that person's potential destructiveness to the group. Such a person can repeatedly derail the community's agenda and drain its energy.”

Quite a sobering paragraph! What are we to make of this? How high is our willingness? How do we deal with those whose 'stuff is too destructive for the community to absorb'? What will our policy be?

Security, safety and support

There is a security, safety and support to be found for both oneself and ones family in the community setting. As relationships within the community grow, networks of support can be put into place. Maybe someone has some form of disability / illness that requires the support of others from time to time? Maybe a more elderly resident is not able to go shopping on a particular day? Maybe families can take it in turns to take children to school or form some kind of crèche to support working parents? Of course the benefit of positive people looking out for eachother's welfare makes for a very safe secure environment. As Corporal Dan Kelly states “Safety is in knowing your neighbours - not in walls and barriers.”

Environmental economics

One of the key financial aspects of an intentional community that assumes the cohousing model is that owning your home keeps you in touch with the economic world, providing you with the ability to sell up and move on should you choose or need to at any point in the future. Depending on the dwelling you would choose to live in you could also save money i.e. living in a cob house that has built-in passive solar designs alongside solar hot water and wind energy systems could save you a lot of money in build and electricity costs.

(see www.simondale.net/house/family.htm)

Even renovating a ruin or another form of self-build? Could we access the shared skills and resources of the community to cut down expenses? What skills do we share between us? Having lower overheads also means having to earn less, being able to spend more time with friends and family and on retreat.

The environmental impact of this form of community has many implications. Shared community spaces can cancel the need to live in overly big homes. Transport can be shared and pooled, again cutting down on expenses and carbon emissions. Creating a community design around permacultural and natural farming models creates a positive environment to maximise resources, grow food and develop a closer bond to the land. Growing our own organic food has tremendous health benefits and again brings financial savings.

Incorporating this way of living can produce positive working environmental models for the wider communities in which we live. Liz Walker invites this challenge for cohousing communities in her essay 'Stepping stones to sustainability, What cohousing communities can learn from ecovillages':

“In my experience, ecovillages are distinguished from typical cohousing communities by emphasizing a holistic approach to ecological, social, economic and spiritual design. Ecovillages typically incorporate green building, organic food production and on-site businesses. They are oriented toward learning from experimental systems and teaching the lessons learned.

Some cohousing communities integrate many but not all of these features. I offer a challenge to other cohousing communities to consider not only adding on some of these eco-features, but also serving as a catalyst to learning, teaching and organizing local sustainability initiatives. The world needs your inspiration.”

Some possibilities

We have started looking around at potentially suitable properties and found some exciting prospects in two departments that near to us at present; the Gard and Ardèche. There are some very interesting old-style hamlets that can have up to 10 properties of various sizes within them as well as land attached. An example of one place we went to visit in the Ardèche mountain ranges had 7 properties and 75 adjoining acres. A rough estimation of 7 households purchasing this property would have worked out at €50,000 Euros per household (that's about £33,600 British Pounds and $62,000 U.S. Dollars). This is an average price of course, as some houses / flats were smaller than others so would have had a lower market value. However the gist is that property here is still very reasonably priced at present! We are mindful of rising property prices and would like to aim to try and buy somewhere in the next 12 - 24 months, hopefully before property prices rise too much. There would be some legality to work through with this option as we would need to get official agreement to divide up such a property, and work out how to perform such a task in an agreeable way to all.

Another idea to look at would be a ‘Retrofit cohousing neighbourhood'. This differs from a purpose-built neighbourhood in that residents start with a few existing homes on some land, and then find innovative ways to adapt the houses, alleys, backyards and courtyards to make them more pedestrian-friendly and community-oriented. By nature, retrofit neighbourhoods are unique, and each community would control its own timetable of work and developments, depending upon financial resources and availability of adjacent properties / building permissions. There have been some interesting projects in the USA of Cohousing groups converting farms and even old factory buildings to great effect.

It could also be possible to buy some land with existing planning permission and build from stratch using permacultural models as a design basis. This would obviously be a longer-term project as the whole community infrastructure would have to be laid down. Lots of planning involved!

These are some possible avenues we could follow, and there are many variations of properties we could eventually buy. These final decisions will be formed by the others getting involved with this project.

We have had a lot of emails from you regarding this over the last couple of years and I'm happy to say that next summer we will be holding a community retreat for those of you serious about getting involved (see our cohousing retreat in August  www.thedharmahouse.com ). The retreat will give you the chance to meet the existing community and get involved in discussion about what our ideas are regarding the project, as well as to spend some time together working on the land, sharing formal meditation sessions and listening to Dharma teachings.

The ‘Dharmahouse community project' is differentiated from the ‘Dharmahouse / Maison du Dharma' retreat organisation. The ‘Dharmahouse community project' will be a privately funded housing scheme whereas the ‘Dharmahouse / Maison du Dharma' retreat organisation is registered as a non-profit organisation under French law to run Dharma retreats and courses in Permaculture.

Please join our Yahoo group (see website for details) for ongoing updates and information on both the community project and our retreats and courses.

Further reading…

An inspiring piece on community by Zen philosopher David Loy:

“But here is the interesting question, I think. If as I now think we have a pretty good sense of how the intellectual process of meditation works to help develop prajna, nondual wisdom, what's comparable for working on the heart level? What I would now say, what seems to be the case, is that you don't work in this heart level so much in meditation, although there are meditations that help it, but I think the heart level has to do with developing love, with purifying and extending our love, and the most important way that we work on this is not by sitting, facing the wall, but in community with our friends and families, with our wider circle of community that we help to develop, which provides the opportunity, which provides the place, for this love to be worked out. In the situations that arise in dealing with other people, it allows us to see how the way of love can help us to let go of the kinds of resistances and selfishnesses that normally tend to limit our way of relating to other people. It seems to me that when we really do this sincerely and over a period of time, then what we get is a sense of a community of love. Love is not simply something that is an attribute of me that I am expressing and bouncing back and forth with other people. It is not just a subjective process, but that we start to realize that out of this community of love we are participating in something deeper than us, and then we begin to see that love isn't something that belongs to me, it is not something that I have or show, but that it is something that I participate in.”

Re: The Dharmahouse Eco community project

That sounds cool. What type of group do you have going, and how is it organized?

I've read plenty of mission statements in my time, but what really makes something like that come together is the group of people working on it, and how they organize to get the jobs done.

And, do you have any pictures of the site?

Re: The Dharmahouse Eco community project

Hi Bill,

Sorry for the delay in responding!  You can learn more about our project at our website, http://www.thedharmahouse.com, where we have posted a lot of pictures and some write-ups about our current and future organizational ideas thus far.

Any more questions or comments, we'd love to hear them!

Re: The Dharmahouse Eco community project

Hi Bill,

Sorry for the delay in responding!  You can learn more about our project at our website, http://www.thedharmahouse.com, where we have posted a lot of pictures and some write-ups about our current and future organizational ideas thus far.

Any more questions or comments, we'd love to hear them!