Ecodharma

Spring. I cycled south-east through France - eight days of old railway lines carving through pine forests, villages with perfect gardens and no one to be seen, Le Pen posters, sand dunes, a long sunday morning in the shade with a gang of Peruvian asparagus pickers - over the Pyrenees, eating nothing but chewy baguettes, butter, cheese and oranges, escorted through the 5km Lleida tunnel by a works van (I pretended it was my tour de france support vehicle), and suddenly I was in Catalunya - the grass yellower, the sausages denser, the people seven degrees more tranquillo. Destination: Ecodharma - a small collection of stone houses, yurts, gardens and grey-white boulders nestled high in a remote valley in the foothills of the Pyrenees, populated by a small sangha of activists, Buddhists, climbers, cooks and cats. An intentional community, with a collective shoulder pushing towards a world in which we fuck up ourselves, each other and the natural world less, and glimpse at the fundamental connectedness of all things more.

The place had been recommended by several friends, and in a flurry of winter planning I had booked myself onto a course entitled 'Transformative Collaboration', which sounded very good but pretty vague. People who have known me for a long time will know I used to do shitloads of work with groups – revolutionary, musical, sporty, squatty – but people who have known me for less may know me as solitary – the caravan, the boat, the disappearing from groups of wonderful people for no good reason... but it turns out there is a reason. On the second day we created a visual representation of our 'history in groups' in the form a river. Mine went backwards – starting at the sea – as children we don't even think about group dynamics – Scarborough Football Club, the DIY Collective, Rhythms of Resistance, SOAS – and then narrowed as time after time, through no one's fault, groups fragmented or imploded or got evicted or did what they needed to do and were no longer needed. At a certain unidentifiable point I realised I had decided that I functioned better alone, and was perfectly happy alone (with occasional jams, fires and big dances).

They call the course 'immersive learning', and everything we learnt was applicable to our temporary community of fourteen Belgians, Germans, Scots and Luxembourgers – decision-making, leadership, giving and receiving feedback, power dynamics, feelings... feelings? Mari reminded me that I once got very annoyed at reports of a 'men's group' made up of middle-class hipsters that existed to talk about their feelings. My attitude has always been 'you can talk about your feelings if you want, I don't need to' (in fact music has always been the way I speak about my feelings, but that is not the point). The debunking of this myth was one of several revelations of the week - The task, and the processes of completing the task, affect how we all feel. How we all feel affects how we behave, and therefore the process and task. We obviously talk about the task and the process (oh, how we talk about process) so why not talk about the feelings?

'I feel like you aren't listening to me'

'I feel bored and frustrated because I feel like people are talking for the benefit of their ego not the good of the group'

'I feel totally excited to be working with you'

'I feel angry because I am doing all the work'

'I feel like everyone thinks I am a shit facilitator'

'I think I might be in love with you, but it is probably just your fiery rhetoric'

How these discussions, had early on, would have prevented feelings damaging the processes and tasks of groups! So we need to leave space for this stuff.

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture" goes the quote, and the music that I tend to make – improvised, collaborative, putting feeling before perfection – is all about experience over analysis; music that would squirm if one tried to write it down. At ecodharma I learnt that the dharma – the way of being – that is followed by many philosophical/spiritual frameworks cannot be really understood through reading, or even trying alone – it too has to be experienced in the context of a community. Because as well as the people on the course being a 'live lab' of transformative collaboration, the wider ecodharma project is a 10 year old experiment in collaborative living, working and journeying. Part of a self-definition on the website:                                                                                                                                           [Ecodharma is] ...'a spiritual exploration which eschews the life denying traps so many religious traditions are liable to fall into, fetishizing the spiritual above the socio-political, remaining confused by residual beliefs in an otherworldly salvation, a somewhere else heaven or nirvana, a split between the spiritual and the everyday, between mind and matter. [Ecodharma is]... a socio-political exploration that affirms that the transformation of the world and the transformation of the self are not separable, and that the transformation of consciousness is integral to subverting the conditions which give rise to systems of oppression and domination

BOOM. So when issues inevitably come up – personality clashes, different visions, high-pressure situations – there is a framework within which things can be solved and re-solved. As it says, societal transformation is fundamentally intertwined with us as individuals and our individual relationships, and that transformation is tied up with an 'exploration' that involves principles that align with Buddhism, or its slightly sexier cousin, Daoism. To be in the space, with the people, and see what that journey means in the everyday, was very powerful. One of the facilitators talked about how he had spent many years travelling, journeying, but described his exploration of Buddhism as an equally valid, much more interesting journey, in the literal sense of the word: New things to see, new experiences, new people, and the reflection of all those things back on who we are (and what we are not).

No statues, incense, bells, robes to speak of. Nothing wrong with them, but this is my kind of non-religion. Instead: a conch, a vulture's wing hanging from the workshop space, and mountains rising all around.

 

 

photos: Frederik Sadones. Reproduced here with big thanks.