Collaboration and Human Permaculture Workshop

Human Permaculture & Belonging

What does it actually mean to belong? In this workshop we'll deconstruct belonging at its root: our connection to the natural order, how permaculture recreates alignment within it, and how those same principles apply directly to our human domains, not just the land.

Drawing on years of first-hand experience across ecological projects, activist networks, spiritual and social hubs, and temporary autonomous zones, we'll look honestly at why so many communities and collaborations quietly leak energy and fall apart, and what it actually takes to build ones that don't.

In spiritual life, Sangha is essential, yet most of us in the West were never taught what real community requires: how to conserve resources, collaborate without losing ourselves, or read the signs of a group heading toward self-cherishing dysfunction before it breaks apart.

This session moves beyond self-centred, faux-spiritual approaches and into something more robust: empathy, observation, and skilled collaboration — the human permaculture principles that let us thrive together, not just alone. With rising costs making collaboration more essential than ever, this is timely, practical work as much as it is spiritual.

The Looping Problem:
Why So Many "Awake" People Have No Resourcing

There is a particular kind of looping happening right now, and it's not confined to beginners. We're watching senior practitioners – people with years, sometimes decades, of spiritual practice behind them – go into total meltdown over what are, in the scheme of things, first-world problems. More than crisis-level events, it's ordinary friction, and the meltdown is often karmic in nature, such as an old pattern surfacing, a relational rupture or a mirror they weren't ready for. What's missing isn't insight but resourcing, both in terms of ‘trauma tools’ but also in terms of understanding key natural and cosmic law concepts such as karma, decolonisation and natural law style collaboration.

This matters more than it might seem, because a lot of people who consider themselves "awake" or "conscious" have spent significant money and energy building a spiritual identity without building the underlying capacity to actually hold it. And with what may be unfolding in the world in the coming period, that gap is going to show. Insight without resourcing doesn't hold under pressure, it cracks.

Four Places the Looping Comes From

In the lead-up to some book club sessions Padma will be running in the autumn linked to her book, we want to name four areas where we keep seeing people stuck in loops rather than moving through them:

KARMA

Most people have a vague, popular notion of karma – good deeds in, good luck out – rather than an understanding of it as a lawful, energetic process of cause, pattern, and consequence playing out across time. Without that understanding, karma just looks like random bad luck or persecution, and the person stays reactive to it rather than working consciously with it.

DECOLONISATION

Spiritual communities routinely extract from indigenous and traditional knowledge systems while leaving the actual politics, history, and power structures those systems emerged from unexamined. Skipping this work doesn't just create ethical blind spots but it keeps people's understanding of "spirituality" shallow and disconnected from land, lineage, and consequence.

COLLABORATION AND GROUP ENERGETIC

Very few people are taught how to conserve energy in group settings, read collective field dynamics, or apply even the most basic principles of human permaculture – how people, roles, and resources can be arranged so a group sustains itself rather than burning through everyone in it. Most groups leak energy constantly and nobody notices why.

RESOURCING

The one underneath all the others. Without it, karma feels unbearable instead of workable, decolonial work feels like an attack instead of an invitation, and group settings drain rather than nourish.

These four themes – karma, decolonisation, collaboration and human permaculture, and resourcing – are exactly what we'll be exploring in the book club sessions this autumn alongside Padma Khandro's book. Our sense is that the coming period will ask more of people's capacity to stay resourced than it will ask for more spiritual knowledge, and we'd rather see people build that capacity now than discover the gap under pressure.

If you recognise yourself in any of this: the looping, the meltdown that seems disproportionate to the trigger, the sense of having done a lot of spiritual work without quite landing anywhere solid; this is exactly the territory the mentoring, readings, and Quantum Transfiguration work are built to address.

THIS IS FOR YOU IF....

– You have been on a spiritual or personal-development path for some time
– You have accumulated significant knowledge but still find yourself repeating certain patterns
– You experience disproportionate reactions to relational or interpersonal friction
– You want to develop greater capacity rather than simply acquire more information
– You are interested in karma beyond its popularised interpretations
– You want to engage more honestly with decolonisation and spiritual practice
– You work within groups, communities or collaborative spiritual spaces
– You are interested in collective energetics and human permaculture
– You have experienced spiritual or multidimensional expansion without always having the resources to integrate it
– You want to explore what it actually means to become more resourced

Breaking Through the Loops

Selected co-inquiry sessions and Book Club on Dakini Weaving – Keys to the Golden Age

These four sessions will explore the themes above alongside relevant chapters from Dakini Weaving – Keys to the Golden Age. Each session will give you an opportunity to engage with the material before coming together for deeper inquiry.

You’ll be invited to:
– Read the relevant chapter of Dakini Weaving Reflect on the questions and themes before the session
– Ask Me Anything session and commentary on sections of the book where relevant
– Explore the material through guided discussion
– Take part in small breakaway rooms for co-inquiry
– Reflect on how these themes may be operating in your own life, practice and relationships

You will be discussing the relevant book chapter in the break away groups, so it is recommended that you have read it if you wish to gain deeper knowledge however it is NOT mandatory. If you are feeling curious about this topic and just want to listen and reflect. Current students with Dharma STARS are expected to have read the chapter, and to be informal facilitators of their break away group.

The aim of these sessions it to more than just understanding the concepts is to create a space where you can examine the places you may still be looping and begin to understand what might allow you to move through them.

If you’re reading this and our real time sessions have past or you can’t make it live then you are welcome to purchase the recording of the session. We remind you that the deeper transmissions and opportunity to get your direct questions answered is prioritised to those attending the real-time call.