Spirituality
Contemplative Care Matters: The Power of Spiritual Community
Sangha, compassion, and waking up.
Posted October 9, 2025 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- The barometer of your spiritual practice is how you cultivate and nurture relationships.
- Openness, honesty, and a lack of hierarchy are key in a healthy sangha.
- There are many valued friendships, but spiritual friends are those who will be there at your deathbed.
This post is Part 1 of a two-part series.
Author, Zen teacher, and Jungian psychotherapist Koshin Paley Ellison is a leader in the contemplative medicine movement. With his husband, Robert Chodo Campbell, he co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care in 2007. He is the author of Untangled: Walking the Eightfold Path to Clarity, Courage, and Compassion, among other books.
Robert Chodo Campbell is a teacher in the Soto Zen tradition who specializes in helping those suffering with the complexities of death and dying, aging, and sobriety. He is on the faculty of the University of Arizona Medical School’s Center for Integrative Medicine.
Mark Matousek: In the Upaddha Sutra, the Buddha tells Ananda that having good friends is "the whole of the holy life." Let's talk about the importance of friendship and spiritual community on a wisdom path.
Robert Chodo Campbell: Koshin is the most awakened one. I’ll leave it to him.
[Laughter]
Koshin Paley Ellison: It’s a beautiful teaching, to do with how the spiritual path is integral to relationships. Very often, our students here at the Zen Center ask me, “How is my spiritual practice going?” I say, “Tell me about your relationships with the people at the grocery store, and tell me what you know about them and what their names are.” How are we engaged in our life?
I think that while formal spiritual community is super helpful, in terms of chosen family, the barometer is how we are cultivating and nourishing relationships. That was a very difficult thing for me early on. It has become the most important goal, to have a community where I’m known and I can know so that I can receive spiritual care and offer spiritual care equally.
RCC: Well done.
MM: Why is 'belonging' such a challenge for so many people? Did that impact your choice to practice Buddhism?
KPE: Well, I come from a background of a lot of difficulty, different forms of abuse and challenge. Belonging never felt safe to me. I was carrying a story of childhood suffering, as I think most of us do, almost like wearing a Halloween costume, but you're doing it all the time. We’re interacting with our adult environment as if we’re in that back-then story. I was in a back-then story, wearing it around saying, “Oh, belonging means I could be in danger.” I really wanted to belong, but I was afraid to belong. I think that is a very important thing to learn how to set down. Often, there is a fear of commitment to belonging, to getting out of our small little self and actually allowing ourselves to be alive. It's the choice of moving from a necrotic, death-like pull, to choosing life, actually.
RCC: Similarly, with regard to childhood upbringing. My mother was 17 when she had me, and unmarried, so a single parent who chose crazy guys. We never really belonged anywhere, the both of us, because she would go, leave one man for the next, basically. I would be at some point living with my mother’s sister or my mother’s aunt or another aunt. Back and forth, never really knowing when mom would return from one of her jaunts. Having no spiritual background, no knowledge of spirituality or spiritual life, it was all about the only spirit I had, the alcohol. A sense of belonging didn’t really appear in my life until I got sober, which was 35 years ago now. That was when I first stepped onto the path of belonging to something or someone, but very, very mistrusting of it.
MM: In AA, they say, do it alone, you do it again.
RCC: Again, and again, and again. AA brought me to my Buddhist path.
MM: Was sangha a challenge for you, Koshin, in terms of your own early bad experiences with belonging?
KPE: Yes. I was in many different sanghas for a while. In my late teenage years, I was on a Greyhound bus, and I was sitting next to this woman. She said, “Oh, are you a Buddhist?” I had some beads on. I was like, “Oh, yes, I’m Buddhist.” She’s like, “So you’re spiritual.” I felt really egocentric about it. I thought it was cool that someone saw that I was a spiritual person. She said, “Oh, so who is your teacher?” I said, “Oh, I study with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield and Ganor Rinpoche and John Dideler.” She’s like, “Well, it sounds like you don’t really belong anywhere.” I said, “What do you mean?” She’s like, “It sounds like you’re a lone wolf.” I said, “I am a lone wolf.” She said, “Well, the thing about lone wolves is that they’re sick.”
I remember thinking, “Oh, my goodness, oh, sh*t.” It was so amazing. This woman on this trip, on this Greyhound bus going somewhere in Colorado, because she was willing just to say what she thought. Also, that is a spiritual friend. It really was the beginning of realizing I have work to do.
MM: Would you classify sangha as chosen family?
RCC: Initially, yes, I think the sangha chooses us, and then it’s how we relate to the sangha as family. For our sangha, anyway, it’s like any other family. It has its dysfunctions. It has its beautiful moments, its tricky moments.
KPE: Actually, I was talking with one of our sangha members this morning, and he said, “I want to tell you something that you’re not going to like.” I was like, wow, that is a wonderful barometer for the health of our community that people know they don’t have to be pleasing, because many of us come from backgrounds where we had to be pleasing for different reasons. Not that we ever do it right, but for Chodo and me, there’s a willingness to not be perfect, to not be right, and our willingness to be in the discomfort and the weirdness of it.
MM: Not to pretend to some kind of omniscience as teachers?
RCC: The good parent empowers the child, right? The good parent empowers the child to ask the questions, to be curious, to be disappointed. We talk about that.
MM: How do you think about spiritual friendship? What distinguishes it, the bond between seekers?
RCC: Spiritual friends are the friends I know will be there at my deathbed if I want them there, which I probably won’t. We’ll see.
