This is the decade in which we decide whether to collectively evolve into humanity’s higher dream or devolve into a path toward extinction. The stakes couldn’t be higher, which is why the current planetary curriculum we’re undergoing is so intense. It ricochets into personal and collective fault lines as our collective unconscious becomes conscious.

Navigating these times requires agility, open-mindedness, resilience, lightness of being, and a willingness to negotiate the shadow worlds, which in their distorted ways also seek freedom, but through destructive and dangerous means. In short, we are on notice to grow up by quickening into shared Planetary Eldership in readiness for the tasks ahead.

At Sacred Mountain Sangha, we are committed to supporting our collective evolutionary journey, which requires inner awakening alongside systemic transformation. As a newly founded US-based public charity with Church status, SMS has built on our 30 years of work in the UK, South Africa, and the US.

During that time, we cultivated a spiritual, integrative approach founded in Buddhist Dharma that we feel confident, particularly with the growing strength of our SMS Sangha, will make a vital and unique contribution in these times.

Alongside dedicated training, SMS is also committed to continuing depth meditation, synthesizing key aspects of Theravada and Mahayana while developing a comprehensive approach to Engaged Dharma, including a range of healing modalities. We invite you to be part of our community as we expand into our core vision and the organizational structures needed to support its outreach.

SMS Mission Statement

Sacred Mountain Sangha is a Buddhist-based community devoted to the path of awakening, collective well-being, and compassionate action in this time of profound global transformation. As a monastery without walls, we are a living mandala rooted in presence, relationship, and the vow to serve. Drawing from the meditative depth of Theravāda and Mahāyāna, devotional practice, and sacred activism, we bridge inner realization and outer engagement. Through classes, retreats, and training, we nurture ethical living and spiritual kinship, cultivating a diverse, multi-lineage field of awakening that honors our inter-being within nature’s sacred web of life. Our mission is to embody the Dharma as both refuge and response: rooted in wisdom, expressed through love, and alive in action.

SMS Vision

Sacred Mountain Sangha is a monastery without walls—a sacred mandala forged in vow, presence, and collective care. We are a spiritually rooted, radically inclusive community grounded in the bodhisattva path and a shared commitment to awakening in service to all beings. Guided by Six Baskets of Transmission, we offer a holistic Dharma that weaves inner transformation with sacred relationship and engaged action. In an era of unraveling and spiritual commodification, we call for a profound reorientation of consciousness and community. Our sangha lives not in walls or hierarchies of worth, but in the vow we hold, the collective healing we work toward, and the new story we help seed, one of reverence, belonging, and sacred responsibility.

SMS Six Baskets of Transmission

At the heart of Sacred Mountain Sangha’s path is a living transmission—a mandala of practice woven through six sacred domains. Together, these baskets form an integrated journey of awakening that unifies inner transformation, devotional depth, and engaged response.

Samādhi – Embodied Unification & Healing
Cultivating energetic balance, integration, and gathered-ness in support of embodied presence through the foundational practices of mindfulness of breathing and the jhāna factors.

Vipassanā – Insight into the Deathless
Grounded in classical Theravāda teachings, this basket invites deep realization of impermanence, non-self, and liberation from suffering through direct insight.

Chan/Zen – Kuan Yin Dharmas: Listening into the Mind Ground
Rooted in Mahāyāna wisdom, these practices turn the hearing inward to realize our essential nature, guided by Kuan Yin’s subtle meditation practice, supported by the practice of “Hua Tou” (Koan), the Heart Sutra and Shurangama Sutra.

Sacred Sound: Mantra/Dhārani, Holding the Sacred Name, Protection Chants
Devotional technologies that purify, protect, and awaken—honoring sacred names and sounds as gateways to non-duality, clarity, and compassionate presence.

Ceremony & Blessing – Kuan Yin Dharmas: Merciful Response
Rituals of refuge, forgiveness, renewal, and collective intention that restore connection with self, sangha, ancestors within a Gaian cosmology of inter-being, informed by the Lotus Sutra, Dharani Sutra, and the Bodhisattva Vows.

Sacred Activism
A Dharma of response—where inner freedom supports the dismantling of outer systems of harm, informed by justice, interconnection, and what it means to nurture a regenerative, sustainable world. This intention is reflected in our Liberation Spirituality project focused on co-emerging a network of spiritually engaged practitioners pro-actively going beyond “business as usual.”

SMS Values

Stewardship: Inspired by the lineages of the Forest School of Ajahn Chah and the Kuan Yin Dharmas of Mahayana Buddhism, we cherish and preserve the Dharma through embodying practice and teachings.

Justice: We respect the sacred web of life and are committed to social justice, inclusion, equity, accessibility, protection of nature, and systemic transformation.

Sacredness: We reclaim the sacred through integrating heart, mind and body, and respectfully learning from mystical wisdom traditions, including honoring, healing, and re-integrating the sacred within all identities, and within the feminine, gender queer and non-binary, and masculine.

Community: We honor the interconnectedness of all beings through caring for the Sangha and nurturing sacred kinship.

Integrity: We uphold the Triple Jewel–Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha–by orienting our lives to generosity, ethics, courage, compassion, service and devotion.

Collaboration: We lead collaboratively and center a diversity of voices and practices.