I’m bringing Diamond Mountain Sanctuary into the inaugural cohort of Dharma Alive Incubator, boldly offering affordability in downtown Palo Alto, CA (one of the most expensive zip codes in the U.S.).
This decision didn’t emerge from strategic planning. It emerged from contemplating the current affairs and responding from the depths of the wisdom traditions. A friend asked recently: What’s the role of joy and love in the face of oppression?
I’ve been sitting with this while watching what’s unfolding—the fires, the deportations, the ways material security continues eroding for young people who were promised something different. The baseline anxiety that’s becoming normalized. My answer shaped what Diamond Mountain needs to become.
Let me illustrate with a childhood experience. I came from a developing country. When I was very young, most dwellings had no private showers. Tropical flies everywhere. Food was rationed.
Yet I distinctly remember moments of immense joy. Sitting still. Breathing. Noticing the breath and being with the present moment.
That unadorned presence—that capacity for joy without prerequisites—became my survival. Not metaphorically. Literally. It guided me out of the pangs of multiple times being an immigrant and the due cultural shock. It helped me survive experiences that would be criminal offenses in this country—the kind of adversities children shouldn’t have to survive.
What strikes me now is how consumerism and meritocracy have eroded our collective imagination of wellbeing so thoroughly that many people can’t even conceive of resilience emerging from something as affordable as the joy of just being. Simple joy from the depths of our beings can be a profound source of resilience. Not despite material scarcity, but alongside it. Sometimes through it.
The material foundation on which previous generations built their identities is collapsing. The promises are broken. Young people especially feel this. And in this deterioration, the capacity to connect with the love and joy of unadorned presence—and express it through grounded human connection—becomes more than spiritual practice.
It is resilience.
That is what Diamond Mountain Sanctuary needs to offer. And this is why joining Dharma Alive Incubator matters—not as an organizational expansion, but as a commitment to making this kind of practice accessible. Not because we’ve made it cheap, but because we’ve remembered it was never supposed to be commodified in the first place.
The Incubator’s model allows us to experiment with sustainability structures that don’t require high tuition barriers. To create spaces where contemplative teachers can support each other’s growth while serving communities that need this work most. Joy doesn’t cost anything because it emerges from what our bodies and deep minds already know.
What does love look like when mainstream culture becomes increasingly oppressive? It looks like building infrastructure for the kind of resilience I knew as a child in poverty.
That joy is still here. Still available. Still revolutionary.
And now, through this partnership, we’re creating the conditions for others to find it too.