Dharmadatta Community is a spiritual community grounded in friendship. As four Spanish-speaking women walking the Buddhist path together, we founded this community in 2009 as a place to cultivate our hearts and minds together. At first, Dharmadatta Community consisted in a residential monastic community training in India and traveling to Latin America to serve a growing lay community. Over the years, we have evolved into a community where nuns and laywomen live together and walk the path side-by-side.

After several years in Mexico moving from place to place, offering spiritual instruction and leading retreats, the residential community shifted to a base in the United States, first in rural Virginia and now in the New York’s Hudson Valley. We remain committed to serving our Spanish-language community, with nearly all our activities—from weekly Dharma talks to sutra recitation to meditation courses—now taking place online, completely free of charge.

All the women in our residential community had professional and personal lives before dedicating our lives to a spiritual path. We were journalists, college lecturers, accountants, lawyers and schoolteachers. We led lives that met most worldly definitions of success, and had an ample share of life’s enjoyments. Yet in our own way we each experienced a lingering sense of dissatisfaction, an unspoken longing for a life of greater substance and more lasting value.

To face our century’s unprecedented ecological and social crises, we believe it is necessary to learn to live rich and joyful lives with far less than our society would insist is indispensable for a happy life. Solving our ecological and social ills will also require that we restructure our relationships with each other and with the planet, so that we can live together in ways that honor our interdependence and allow for mutual flourishing. In this area, too, we have found that Buddhist teaching and practice have much to offer to inspire rethinking and new ways of relating.