Building community is hard, keeping it is harder

Infighting on the Left, the desire for community, and third spaces

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The late Grace Lee Boggs, philosopher and radical social activist, argued that the greatest thing capitalism has stripped from us isn't wealth or security, but community. Capitalism thrives on our disconnection, making it harder to build networks of mutual support—whether it's helping someone with rent or picking up medication for a sick neighbor. The fragmentation and isolation many people face are not personal shortcomings, but consequences of the system.

In leftist spaces, we often critique capitalism and individualism while recognizing that we need community. But when we finally find ourselves in one, do we have the skills—and a more flexible, dissolved ego—necessary to maintain healthy spaces in the first place?

Here’s the rub: as much as I romanticize the idea of living on a politicized-Buddhist commune with friends, growing organic food, and cultivating collective harmony, I know communal life is far more complex than idealized images suggest. While community living can indeed be nourishing, it is often difficult, fraught with irritation, and requires a heightened sense of emotional awareness and maturity.

In my early twenties, I spent three months living at a meditation retreat center. By the end, I practically ran out, desperate to return to the comforts of autonomy my normal life gave me. At the center, every meal was shared, there was no privacy, and I slept in a room with four other people. Although I was at a meditation center, I longed for solitude, often escaping on hikes or hiding in bathroom stalls just to find a moment of peace. At times, the other residents felt less like a source of connection and more like an overwhelming irritation.

This wasn’t a bad experience in itself; rather, it revealed the challenge of living in community. Our cultural conditioning toward individualism makes being with others a skill we must actively practice. It requires us to cultivate the qualities that transform a community into something enjoyable.

We crave connection, warmth, and mutual support, but when the realities of group relationships—disappointment and annoyance—inevitably arise, do we have the ability to navigate these challenges? Can we sit with discomfort without withdrawing or escalating the conflict?

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Anna Pompilio

writes about Gen Z and millennials' penchant for third spaces—places where we can exist in community without the expectation of consumerism. She points out the seemingly contradictory ways our generations act both in-person and online—in one word: anti-social. Pompilio argues that to create and truly inhabit third spaces, we must cultivate a tolerance for being in groups that aren’t curated for us. She writes:

“A third space won’t always exist the exact way we want it. That’s the beauty of it. Our penchant for black-and-white thinking—often alienating us from one another over things both big and small—causes us to be averse to spaces like this.”

Pompilio clarifies that we shouldn’t explore spaces that are so far outside our core values and lived experiences that we fear harm or abuse. She is asking us to reconsider how we perceive conflict. Are disagreement and disharmony truly harmful? Can we tolerate discomfort in our spaces without immediately retreating? As she writes: “Community more often than not will not court us. We initially engage with it, and then it begins to engage with us. It’s something built, not ‘followed.’”

My experience living at a retreat center revealed that, although I wanted community, I wanted it on my own terms—limited doses, with the option to opt out when things felt uncomfortable. I wanted the benefits of community but with the option to escape. 

This irritation I felt in sangha is, in fact, purposeful. In Buddhist monastic communities, living in accordance with a strict schedule and in close quarters with other practitioners is a form of spiritual training. Sangha practice recognizes that it is in our relationship with others that our practice reveals its benefits and growing edge. Other practitioners are mirrors for our limitations; to both our delight and frustration, we are given constant opportunities to cultivate generosity and patience.

Much like Buddhist sanghas, social justice movements demand that we engage with difficult people, conflicts, and discomfort. The challenge is how to address these difficulties—both spiritual and organizational—when our societal conditioning pushes us toward individualism, ego-driven behavior, and emotional reactivity.

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Ayesha Khan, Ph.D.

and

Aisha Abu-Asaba

recently wrote about infighting on the Left and how it undermines radical political organizing. They argue that the primary driver of the Left's carceral cancel culture is a “mutual hatred of capitalism rather than love for people and the land.” To me, this reflects a form of misdirected rage and a sense of helplessness, one that gets channeled toward comrades rather than what we are striving to protect and transform.

Khan and Abu-Asaba say, “We have to rise above the BS and put the people, the struggle itself first. We have to learn to set our egos aside, which can be difficult in an individualistic Western society designed to keep us separated.”

They offer transformative-justice tips for organizers when people inevitably disagree or clash in leftist spaces. These strategies include self-reflective questions for those who have experienced harm, as well as for bystanders and mediators, all aimed at fostering genuine resolution.

Here’s the thing: I often find that transformative justice practices are only helpful when the participants are emotionally regulated and self-aware enough to engage. How do we put these practices into action when our personal emotional and interpersonal skills are underdeveloped?

How can we expect mediation to work when participants are so dysregulated, their nervous systems so heightened, no one is able to feel safe enough to move through the process?

This is why I’ve always found the tactic of shame on the Left—pressuring each other to repeatedly bear witness to traumatic violence that our bodies are not meant to absorb (under the threat of being labeled privileged)—to be a self-defeating strategy. We cannot expect our movements to grow resiliently if we are distracted with forcing one another into a moral litmus test of who is the most righteously destabilized and rageful.

Khan and Abu-Asaba identify the ego as the root cause of the Left’s interpersonal struggles and fragmentation. This insight underscores the need for more than conflict mediation—we need spiritual and embodiment practices that soften our sense of self and nurture a culture of care.

Buddhism offers a clear path to dissolving a rigid ego, but how can we integrate the dharma into our organizing groups, so that when conflict inevitably arises, we have a shared foundation to work from?

Community agreements might seem simple, but their value lies in the power of fostering a shared worldview from which we can all engage. For instance, whenever I facilitate a group, I start by grounding the agreements in the Buddhist teaching of basic goodness—the belief that we are all inherently whole, worthy, and awake. This perspective helps to ease fear and encourages participants to engage with one another from a place of trust and good faith.

Groups can also dedicate the first section of a meeting for check-ins, where each person shares one sentence about how they’re feeling or what they’re bringing into the meeting. For instance, someone might mention having a difficult morning getting their kids to school, or that they feel overwhelmed by a recent move. This practice acknowledges that we come into meetings as whole humans.

After check-ins, the group can do a short meditation so everyone can settle into their bodies and enter the conversation from a more embodied and regulated place.

These practices aren’t arbitrary—they build intimacy, belonging, and a sense of safety for more honest and transformative work.

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Elise Granata

writes about the power of “groupfeel”: when we articulate emotions in spaces, they “architect a shared reality for a group of people to now operate in together.” The ability to articulate emotions in community—especially when things feel difficult—can be cathartic. It can also create a more aligned space for addressing concerns. 

Granata adds that some organizers fear that making space to process emotions will dominate the conversation and derail the work. I resonate with this hesitation; I’ve witnessed moments where a harm is named and, due to a lack of trust, poor facilitation, or a focus on one individual’s needs over others’, the entire group’s agenda gets derailed. This isn’t always inherently bad, but it becomes problematic when it’s a reoccurring habit that disrupts the original intention of the gathering.

In a world where cancel culture often reigns, facilitators can sometimes become so afraid of not offending someone or being seen as insensitive that they allow one person or a group to dominate, even when it’s clear their grievances simply cannot be resolved exclusively within the limits of the group. The point here is not that we shouldn’t collectively hold space for people’s hurts, but that we need to learn how to do so without letting one person take over and divert the work that everyone has come together to do.

Granata argues that this dynamic can be transformed when we create “more space, and more types of space, held by more of us, more often.” This is about fostering a space that isn’t just black-and-white—agenda or emotions—but flexible, generous, and ready to hold both. Skillful facilitation means being able to discern when it’s time to process a grievance as a group and when it’s time to focus back on the shared goals and collective intentions.

To make our organizing spaces stronger, we need to stop viewing emotions, and the spiritual and embodiment practices that support them, as separate from the larger work we’re doing. Our organizing is inherently emotional because of the stakes involved—it involves risks and vulnerabilities that affect our lives and communities—but we can create a culture in which these emotions are honored and held in productive ways.

We must commit to the challenging, ongoing work of cultivating emotional humility and compassion for each other. By integrating spiritual practices and worldviews into our activism, we can build movements that are not just about dismantling systems of oppression, but also about fostering the kinds of deeply connected communities that are capable of sustaining radical change.