I’ve been organising community and Sangha events for decades and one thing that increasingly dismays me is the lack of ability that people have to drop into collaborative approaches. I see this time and again – in retreats, during workshops, and in many ways this is a critical shortcoming that we need to overcome, and soon, if we wish to become more empathic, robust, and connected to cosmic and natural law.
Today, therefore, i want to discuss Human Permaculture.
Many people hear the term permaculture, and immediately think of ecovillages and hippydom. At its root, though, it’s a natural law design science – the study of how living systems arrange themselves so energy is conserved, roles are distributed, and the whole stays resilient. What it teaches, once you look closely, applies just as directly to human community as it does to soil, water, and plants. And it’s here, in our human ecosystems, that I think we’re currently the most disconnected and the least skilled.
This is the territory of a workshop that we are now offering on this important subject, alongside the ones on karma, decolonisation, and resourcing. Recordings are available if you miss the real time sessions.
In it, we’ll deconstruct what it actually means to belong: our connection to the natural order, how permaculture recreates alignment within it, and most importantly how those same principles translate directly into our human domains, not just our vegetable patches.
What Biomimicry Adds
Biomimicry sits alongside permaculture as a related field of enquiry: rather than designing from ego or abstraction, it asks us to emulate strategies that already work in nature, and to remember that we are nature, not separate observers of it. Ecosystems don’t waste energy competing for the sake of it. Every species has a role, such as anchor, pollinator, decomposer or connector and the system only thrives when those roles are allowed to function together rather than in isolation or opposition. Human communities are no different, except that we’ve largely forgotten how to read our own ecosystem, or find our place within it.
What I’ve Observed in the Field
Over years of working across ecological projects, activist networks, spiritual and social hubs, and temporary autonomous zones, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat: groups of well-intentioned people come together, energy is high, and within a relatively short time the system starts leaking. Resources aren’t conserved. Roles aren’t respected. People burn out, factions form, and what could have been a resilient, self-sustaining “guild” collapses back into a handful of exhausted individuals doing everything.
This isn’t a failure of intention. It’s a failure of skill. Almost nobody has been taught how to read a group’s energetic field, how to conserve collective resources, or how to recognise the signs that a system is thriving versus quietly draining itself.
Sangha Is Not a Vibe
In spiritual life, Sangha – community, held in right relationship – is considered essential, not optional. It’s one of the three refuges for a reason: realisation doesn’t happen in isolation. But in the West, “community” has become a loosely used word, more often describing a shared aesthetic or a mailing list than a functioning, mutually resourcing ecosystem. Most people simply haven’t learned what real community requires: how to collaborate without losing themselves, how to conserve energy in group settings, or how to spot the early signs that a group is heading toward the kind of self-cherishing dysfunction that eventually breaks it apart.
This is where permaculture principles become genuinely practical. Observation before action. Using edges and valuing the marginal. Integrating rather than segregating. Applying self-regulation and accepting feedback. These aren’t garden techniques, they’re a functioning template for how humans can actually live and work together without depleting each other.
The Self-Centred Trap
There is a version of “spirituality”, and I’ve written about this before, that stays entirely self-referential: ‘my’ healing, ‘my’ activation, ‘my’ platform, ‘my’ path. It can look sincere and still never move beyond self-cherishing ego. In the timelines I surveyed while researching my book, one pattern was unmistakable: collaboration, and a decisive move beyond self-centred, ego-based spirituality, is a precondition for a Golden Age, not an optional extra. A future built by individuals each optimising for themselves, however “conscious” the language, doesn’t converge into anything resembling collective flourishing. It converges into more fragmentation.
The alternative isn’t self-erasure. It’s approaching our human ecosystems the way skilled permaculture designers approach land: with sustained observation, empathy, and genuine attention to the other beings – human and otherwise – who share the system with us.
Why This Matters Right Now
With so many people rightly worried about rising costs, learning to collaborate well isn’t an idealistic add-on but a practical necessity. Shared resources stretch further, shared skills reduce individual burden. Communities that function as real guilds, rather than loose collections of individuals, are simply more resilient under pressure. Human permaculture gives us the map for doing this with more skill than trial and error alone ever will: how to observe a system before intervening in it, how to find our role within it, and how to conserve energy for what actually sustains the whole rather than what merely serves the ego.
Belonging, it turns out, isn’t a feeling we either have or don’t. It’s a set of skills which are observable, learnable, and urgently needed.
If you would like to come into real-time containers and explore the intersection of spirituality, community, introspection AND interaction then please get in touch. It is time-consuming but more and more people are realising this IS a vital missing link in their holistic development and well-being.
At Dharma STARS we don’t seek to become an eco-community or a reality tv type drama experience, but we do seek to help all of our students and peers to become more cognizant and applied in maintaining their collaborations, their hubs and their interactions through adherence to distributed networks and natural and cosmic law and time principles.
Interested? Please check out more of our offering or get in touch!
https://learn.dharmastars.org/courses/book-club-human-permaculture
Empowerment to the Golden Age 