I remember first hearing these words from Thich Nhat Hanh — words that coursed through me like prophecy, making the hairs on my arms stand on end:
“The future Buddha may not come as an individual, but as a community — a community practicing loving kindness and mindful living. And this may be the most important thing for the future of our planet.”
Every fiber of my being resonated. It was a resounding yes — a cosmic affirmation of not just to my own values and aspirations, but to what felt like the evolutionary trajectory of our time in history.
What struck me most was that this future would revolve around a field of collective awareness: a shared mythos and lived experience of wakefulness. A community that meets not only our biological need for belonging — rooted in survival — but also our deeper yearning to thrive, to expand, to participate in the unfolding of life itself
Community is what we do
The idea of humans gathering in community is not new. In fact, it may be the oldest thing we do. From the San Bushmen of the Kalahari to the longhouse cultures of the Pacific Northwest, to the simple village life of most of our great grandparents — human flourishing has always been bound to shared life. For hundreds of thousands of years, small bands of foragers lived in webs of reciprocity, storytelling, ritual, and mutual care. As storytelling creatures, when humans came together we created culture to sense-make our place in nature, society and the cosmos so we knew to whom and to what we belonged. To be human was to belong — to be connected.
The challenge is that our modern context is profoundly fragmented. Capitalism has required the commodification of everything that gave us roots — land, work, community. Unlike our ancestors, we no longer inherit a coherent cultural container. Instead, globalization has left many of us uprooted, diffuse, and unsure where we belong. As a third-culture kid myself, not particularly religious or patriotic, I grew up without a strong sense of rootedness.
Yet the yearning to belong is one of the deepest human needs. Neuroscience shows that our nervous systems are wired for co-regulation; we literally need others to feel safe. Anthropologists remind us that kinship systems — extended families, clans, and tribes — once gave us roles, meaning, and continuity. In their absence, we scramble for substitutes: clubs, brands, online forums. But beneath it all is the same hunger: Where do I belong? Who are my people?
Cultural Poverty and the Hunger for Renewal
In my own experience with intentional communities, I saw even the best-laid plans and noblest intentions unravel. In 2014, a group of us came together to purchase a 100-acre property on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia — a resort, arts centre, and nature reserve at the time. While raising funds and negotiating the deal, we created an MOU to operate the property for a year.
At first, our group was small, close, and deeply aligned. But as more people joined — investors, contributors, dreamers — the diversity of values, histories, and incentives grew. People had different visions for the land, conflicting ideas about governance, finance, and operations. What looked like harmony on paper quickly revealed its fragility in practice.
We weren’t prepared for the invisible handicaps handed to us by living in a ready-made society. It wasn’t until we tried to form a community with shared values, vision, and processes — governance, economic, environmental, spiritual — that we understood how much work it truly takes. We were like wealthy children without an inheritance — surrounded by tools, books, and resources, yet missing the ancestral scaffolding that teaches people how to live and labor together across generations.
As Stephen Jenkinson puts it:
“Cultural poverty is an indictment as long as it’s unchallenged and unrealized; the moment you glimpse it in its three dimensions, it becomes something closer to an obligation than to an indictment.”
This hidden deficit — the absence of inherited cultural scaffolding — combined with leadership dysfunction, undermined the whole project. Logistical factors certainly played a role, but at the heart of our unraveling was cultural poverty, a lesson in both humility and the profound complexity of building life together.
Our ancestors carried intact containers: kinship systems, rituals of belonging, initiation into adulthood, guidance for aging and dying. We, by contrast, inherit fragments. The new age borrows practices from here and there, piecing together yoga, therapy, permaculture, or festival culture into a patchwork that rarely has the durability of a true lineage.
This is a major predicament of our time as we try to envision and implement new systems. The 1960s and 70s were full of idealistic experiments — communes, intentional communities, back-to-the-land movements. Most collapsed within a generation. But perhaps collapse was part of the curriculum. Each failure leaves seeds of insight. Each attempt, however incomplete, teaches us how to prototype again with more honesty, humility, and skill.
We are not starting from scratch, but we are also not heirs to intact traditions. We are in the awkward but vital work of cultural regeneration — improvising new forms while listening deeply to the old ones that still whisper through the cracks.
Living Laboratories of Belonging
If cultural poverty is our diagnosis, then the antidote is not nostalgia or escape, but practice. We need places where we can rehearse new ways of being human together — what I think of as living laboratories of belonging.
Civilizations are built on shared fictions: myths, religions, nations, money — stories powerful enough to align millions of strangers. Our predicament is that the dominant myths of our age — endless growth, consumer freedom, national identity — no longer sustain us. They hollow us out, divide us, and pit us against the living Earth.
The left and right succumb to this cultural void by falling into the traps of demagoguery and identity politics. While the old polarities fracture into tribal identities, the center risks dissolving into despair. In the wake of it all, many of us are searching for a cultural container that is non-dogmatic yet psycho-spiritually rich enough to support the full arc of human maturation — from birth through initiation, from love through loss, into the deepening of wisdom.
Regenerative communities are an attempt to craft new living myths, not just in theory but in daily practice. They ask: what stories can align us with life itself? What rituals and rhythms can root us in place, in soil, in kinship? How can our shared fictions become shared realities — water systems, gardens, conflict circles, schools?
The Usual Suspects: Food & Culture
Two areas where regenerative practices are taking root are community farming and cultural healing.
A vivid example close to home is Abundance Community Farm in Agassiz, BC. What began as a dream to transform a cattle farm into a thriving community-supported agriculture project now nourishes over 100 families across the Lower Mainland of Vancouver. The farm provides not just organic food, but also a space for human connection, shared labor, and local culture. This summer, I witnessed a group of middle-schoolers participating in a re-villaging program led by Jacky Yenga, who brings the village-building wisdom of her home in Cameroon. Her work weaves cultural knowledge, practical skills, and communal care, offering participants a tangible experience of what an intact village culture can look like.
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What’s remarkable is that these outcomes weren’t fully planned — they emerged from meeting fundamental human needs: for nourishment, for connection, and for belonging. In doing so, these centers act like white blood cells in the immune system of society, generating local resilience and broader social health. These are not utopias, but they are signals. They show us that beneath the fractures of modernity, there is a movement toward reconnection — a search for ways of living that restore meaning, reciprocity, and joy.
The Presence of Connection
One of my teachers, Dr. Gabor Maté, offers what I consider one of the most profound insights into the human condition:
“Safety is not the absence of threat. It’s the presence of connection.”
At first glance, it’s a simple reframe. But when you sit with it, the implications are enormous. Safety is not just the locked door, the gated community, the absence of violence. True safety arises in the felt knowing that you belong, that others will show up for you, that your nervous system is met and mirrored by theirs. A crying baby doesn’t calm when the noise stops — it calms when it is held.
This is what belonging really means. It is not just membership in a group or participation in rituals; it is the felt experience of connection. And the more we expand into this, the more belonging matures into inclusivity — not only with our immediate circle, but with the earth beneath us, the ancestors behind us, the generations ahead of us, and the other-than-human kin who share this planet.
Anthropologists remind us that wisdom cultures always extended belonging beyond the human. Among the San Bushmen, kinship was not limited to people but included the animals and landscapes woven into their stories. In the Pacific Northwest, salmon were greeted as relatives returning home. In these ways of life, the deepest connection was to the whole circle of life. And this, I believe, is the aspiration of all true wisdom traditions: to expand the boundaries of belonging until nothing is outside the circle.
Our great mystics envisioned the destiny of humanity as the evolution of consciousness itself — a movement from isolated mind to collective, integrated awareness. Regenerative communities can be seen as embryos of this future: spaces where inner and outer worlds, spirit and matter, ecology and economy, begin to harmonize. They are laboratories not only of culture, but of human potential.
From Sustainability to Regeneration
This is where the language of sustainability has given way to the language of regeneration. Sustainability was about reducing harm and buying time; regeneration is about healing the root causes and creating conditions where life can thrive. In this shift, we are not just preserving what exists but re-imagining what is possible.
For thousands of years, Indigenous people practiced regenerative lifeways: using fire to renew landscapes, maintaining reciprocal relationships with plants and animals, embedding ecological wisdom in story and ritual. Belonging was never separate from stewardship; to be part of the circle of life was to tend it.
Modern regenerative culture is not about copying these lifeways wholesale, but about weaving their spirit into contemporary forms. Across the world, we now see hybrid experiments taking root.
What unites these prototypes is not perfection, but emergence. Emergence is the process by which simple interactions give rise to complex patterns and new forms of order. Life itself evolves this way: through cooperation and feedback, not top-down design. Slime molds find food by self-organizing; birds flock without a commander; single cells became multicellular organisms through collaboration.
What must distinguish these communities is not only their ability to root in place but also in their responsiveness to the wider world. Unlike many isolated communes of the 60s and 70s, these labs must be porous: connected through communication, collaboration, and observation. They cannot be escapes from society; but rather experimental nodes, testing social, ecological, and cultural innovations that can be replicated, adapted, and scaled. Small is beautiful here because it allows for careful iteration, attentive feedback, and a tight integration between vision and practice.
Collapse is not the end — It’s the curriculum
To call this work urgent is not an exaggeration. The meta-crisis of our age — ecological collapse, social fragmentation, runaway technology — signals a civilization that can no longer sustain itself. Regenerative communities are not quaint alternatives; they are the immune response of humanity. They represent the prototypes of a new cultural DNA.
Every garden planted, every workshop run, every governance experiment carried out is both a localized solution and a blueprint for broader application. These communities serve as education centers for the future, places where skills, ethics, and regenerative models are learned, refined, and shared.
They are simultaneously rooted and networked, a bridge between the immediate challenges of their place and the global imperatives of our time. In this way, they demonstrate that regeneration is not a retreat — it is an active, participatory response to the world around us.
But to succeed, we must be honest. Romantic notions of community will not suffice. We need structures of governance that prevent abuse of power, economic models that ensure resilience, and trauma-informed practices that heal the wounds people bring with them. Otherwise, we risk repeating the failures of past experiments.
And perhaps most importantly, we must share what we learn. Knowledge is the lifeblood of evolution — passing insights, failures, and breakthroughs from one generation to the next. By documenting and exchanging what works, regenerative communities become living textbooks for the future.
The next generation doesn’t need to start from scratch. They can take these experiments, adapt them, and scale them, building stronger, more resilient communities. What we plant today — our ideas, our practices, our prototypes — can become the foundation for a culture that truly thrives, rooted in connection, care, and life itself.
“Perhaps the future Buddha is already here — not as an individual savior, but as communities practicing belonging, regeneration, and love. The question is whether we will join them.”
Takeaways: Toward a Regenerative Future
- Belonging is the foundation. Humans evolved in community. Regeneration begins by reweaving the social fabric of belonging.
- The future is communal. The “future Buddha” is not a heroic individual but a field of collective awakening. Leadership is distributed, not centralized.
- Regeneration is more than sustainability. It is not about maintaining systems that harm life, but creating conditions for life to thrive.
- Communities are living laboratories. They test new forms of culture, ecology, and economics. Their value lies in innovation, not perfection.
- Emergence is the design principle. Just as life evolves through emergence, regenerative futures arise from interaction and participation — not top-down engineering.
- Learn from the shadows. Acknowledge the pitfalls of past communities — conflict, power abuse, collapse — and integrate safeguards into new designs.
- Share the learnings. Document, collaborate, cross-pollinate. Knowledge is the mycelium that connects and strengthens the movement.
👉 If you love the ideas in this article, and want to go deeper or join a circle of others who are working on these communities, check out our Regenerative Stewardship Lab at the Gift Academy : www.thegift.is/regenlab
