The Shared Body

Not long ago, I was teaching a weekend seminar at Crestone Mountain Zen Center with my friend Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi. We were trading teaching sessions, building a shared thread of dharma between us. At one point, Tatsudo Roshi spoke about the power of sangha—the energy that arises when we practice together—and how the forms of Zen life help us access what she called “the shared body, the Buddha’s Mind.”

Then, a woman in the audience, maybe in her mid-50s, raised her hand. Her voice carried a note of concern.

“What about the dangers of groupthink?”

English is Tatsudo Roshi’s second language, so she didn’t catch the Orwellian overtone—the shadow of 1984 that the word carries in American culture. Without that baggage, she offered a spontaneous, luminous teaching about the beauty of thinking and moving as one body.

“When we practice together,” she said, “we are not trying to make everyone the same. We are learning to feel from one body. Like fingers on one hand. Each one moves differently, but they do not forget they belong to the same hand. When one finger is hurt, the whole hand knows. When one wakes up, the whole hand wakes up.” “This is not losing yourself,” she added. “This is finding the larger body you were always part of.” 

Her words stopped me. Here was an invitation to reimagine something we modern Westerners usually resist: the power of communal mind. What if, in our eagerness to stay independent and autonomous, we’ve misunderstood what the Buddha meant by sangha?

Our American Suspicion of Groups

We are so thoroughly conditioned to prize individuality that even in spiritual community we stay on alert. We guard our independence, watch for conformity, worry about losing our unique perspective. We approach sangha as though it might swallow us whole.

And, yes, there are real dangers when collectivity turns unconscious—when it demands obedience, silences dissent, or mistakes submission for surrender. The shadow side of any community is real. We’ve seen it in cults, in authoritarian systems, even in Buddhist communities where questioning is equated with betrayal.

But what Tatsudo Roshi revealed to me that day is that awake groupthink—the kind rooted in mindfulness and intention—might actually be the heart of our practice. You can feel this shared intelligence pulsing through the whole of the Buddha’s path—most clearly in the three trainings of ethics (Pali: sila); concentration (Pali: samadhi); and wisdom (Pali: panna).

Sila: Ethics as Shared Practice

We don’t learn to live ethically in isolation. We learn goodness from one another. When we’re around people who lie or harm, we start to bend in that direction; when we’re surrounded by honesty and care, something in us straightens and responds in kind. The Buddha called this kalyanamitta—admirable friendship—because our ethical lives are always shaped by the company we keep.

Sila isn’t an individual accomplishment; it’s a shared field. We act with others and out of the influence of others. The precepts come alive not as private rules but as a collective atmosphere of integrity, a current of mutual respect that carries each of us beyond what we could sustain alone.

To practice sila is to participate in that current—to let the goodness of others call forth our own. Ethics itself is a kind of awake groupthink: a shared commitment to bring forth the best in one another.

Samadhi: The Field of Collective Presence

Anyone who has sat in a hall of forty practitioners knows the unique stillness that gathers when we meditate together. Something larger holds the room. Our minds, like tuning forks, begin to resonate with one another.

This isn’t about losing ourselves in the crowd. It’s about discovering that our individual stability is strengthened by shared intention. When I drift, the presence of others draws me back. When my neighbor breathes steadily, I feel it in my own body.

The collective field has a texture. It can feel like the whole room is a glass slowly filling with warm water. Attention steadies. Embodied awareness spreads through the chest, belly, and limbs. The head, heart, and gut begin to cohere. Fragmentation loosens. A grounded, unified presence gathers—not my concentration and yours but a steadying that happens between us.

That, too, is groupthink in its awakened form.

Panna: Wisdom Beyond the Separate Self

And then there’s wisdom—the insight that perceives emptiness, that sees through the illusion of separateness. How could we imagine learning that on our own? Our view is always partial, shaped by conditioning and blind spots we cannot see from the inside. Wisdom requires mirrors—others who reflect our stuck places, expand our perspective, and help us recognize the body we all share.

Even the most solitary awakenings are shaped by relational conditions: teachers, teachings, language, lineage, a body born of countless others. No one wakes up from scratch.

Awakening is not a private event. It’s a relational unfolding. We learn wisdom as awake groupthink—not as conformity but as interconnection.

The Third Jewel

The Buddha placed the sangha alongside himself and the dharma as one of the three jewels. Not two jewels—three. The community of practitioners isn’t an optional support group; it’s essential to realization itself.

Yet in the modern West, we often treat sangha as an accessory to “my” meditation practice—a place for people who need connection. But the truth may be the opposite: None of us awakens apart from others. The very forms that look restrictive—bowing, chanting, walking, eating in silence—are actually technologies for dissolving the small self.

When we move together in those forms, we aren’t giving up our intelligence or autonomy. We’re practicing something far more radical: harmonizing with a field larger than our preferences. We’re letting go of the endless commentary that insists on being special, different, or right. We’re loosening the tight fist of self-protection.

Trusting the Collective Field

These rituals and rhythms, handed down for 2,500 years, aren’t meant to turn us into automatons. They free us from the exhausting project of maintaining separateness. When we bow as the bell rings or walk slowly in kinhin, we join a stream that’s been flowing since the Buddha’s time.

Something happens in that stream. The question of my practice and your practice becomes less important than our practice. The boundary between self and other softens. We begin to sense what Tatsudo Roshi called “the shared body, the Buddha’s Mind.”

Awareness is what gives these forms life. Without it, they can harden into rote performance; with it, they become expressions of trust. To follow the forms is to let practice shape us—to move through doubt with humility, surrendering not our discernment but our self-centeredness.

And crucially: Awake groupthink never asks us to override our inner moral compass. When a boundary is crossed or something feels harmful, that discomfort is information—not ego. Discernment stays awake.

Awakening Together

Tatsudo Roshi’s teaching that day felt quietly revolutionary. She wasn’t denying the danger of collective delusion; history as well as modern times have given us more than enough examples of what happens when minds move together in ignorance. She was pointing to something else entirely—the possibility that when awareness is shared, when practice itself becomes mutual, the same forces that lead to confusion can open into awakening.

Maybe what we fear as groupthink is really a mirror showing us both extremes: the peril of unconscious belonging and the promise of awakened interconnection. When the mind we share is deluded, it can cause great harm. But when the mind we share is awake, it can become the very path to freedom.

We cannot walk this path alone. We were never meant to. The Buddha’s groupthink—the shared mind that arises when we practice with sincerity and commitment—may be precisely what our fragmented world needs most.

Not as an escape from individuality but as a doorway into something vastly more spacious: the recognition that we have never been separate at all.