Practise in a peer-led community without religious affiliation
Find or start a small group where practitioners study and sit together as equals, without vows, lineage or a teacher at the top.
Why it works
The Secular Buddhist Network says secular Buddhists advocate “fully egalitarian, inclusive, and democratic sanghas, where there is little or no distinction between teachers and other practitioners,” and its own groups — monthly discussion, weekly meditation, reading, ageing, political activism — are autonomous and peer-led. Batchelor points back to the Buddha’s “fourfold assembly,” in which monastics and lay people had equivalent roles. A community makes practice something done with others rather than alone, which the fourth task — cultivating a path — explicitly includes.
How to do it
- Look for an existing group first: the Secular Buddhist Network lists online groups; local insight or meditation groups may also welcome secular practitioners.
- If you start one, keep it simple — a set time, a period of sitting, a short reading from the early discourses, open discussion.
- Rotate who facilitates, so no one becomes the authority by default.
- Agree on a few ground rules for discussion: speak from your own experience, disagree without contempt.
- Review every few months whether the group is still serving practice, or has drifted into something else.
Evidence
The Secular Buddhist Network’s about page describes its peer-led groups and its 2025 merger with the Secular Buddhist Association, founded in 2011; its history page sets out the egalitarian sangha ideal and contrasts it with the Insight Meditation movement, which it says kept a teacher’s charismatic authority and lineage. The Insight Meditation Society, founded by Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield and opened in 1976, describes its context as the Buddha’s teachings and its practices as universal. Gleig describes two currents within the American Insight network. (anecdotal)
There is no research on how peer-led secular sanghas compare with teacher-led ones. The characterisation of insight meditation communities is the Secular Buddhist Network’s, and insight teachers would describe their communities in their own terms; traditional Buddhists would add that refuge, precepts and teachers are part of what makes a sangha a sangha.
Sources
- Secular Buddhist Network. About us: our history, vision and mission.
- Secular Buddhist Network (SBN Editor). The origin of secular Buddhism.
- Secular Buddhist Network (2022). An interview with Stephen Batchelor on secular dharma (interview by Mike Slott, 21 June 2022).
- Insight Meditation Society. IMS History (from co-founders Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein).
- Insight Meditation Society. About Us.
- Gleig, A. (2019). Meditation and Awakening in the American Vipassana Network. In American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (pp. 111–138). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Common mistake
Assuming no teacher means no need for experience in the room. Peer-led groups still benefit from people who have practised for a long time — the difference is that their experience is shared, not ranked — and anyone meeting difficult meditation experiences still needs someone qualified to talk to.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Secular Buddhism: Stephen Batchelor’s Four Tasks, and the Debate Around Them
- Work with the four tasks: embrace, let be, see it stop, act
Treat the Four Noble Truths as four things to do with a real situation — embrace life, let reactivity be, see reactivity stop, actualise a path — rather than four propositions to believe.
- Let reactivity be, and notice the moment it stops
Catch one reactive surge, leave it alone, and deliberately notice the gap when it fades — the secular Buddhist reading of what the tradition calls cessation.
- Ground your ethics in this life, not in karma across lifetimes
Decide how to act by reflecting on how your actions land on others and on you now, as several early discourses already do, without making rebirth the reason.
- Hold rebirth as an open question, and know the case against doing so
Neither assert nor deny rebirth — Batchelor’s agnostic “middle way” — while taking seriously the traditional argument that rebirth is integral to the path.
- Sit in a secular frame: mindful awareness without a cosmology
Practise ordinary mindfulness and insight meditation as a way of meeting this life more clearly, using methods taught elsewhere on this site.
- Read the early discourses critically — including your own reading
Go back to the Pāli discourses as a primary source, ask what in them speaks to this life, and stay alert to the charge that secular readings pick what they like.
- Test your practice against the McMindfulness critique
Ask honestly whether your practice has become private stress management that leaves the causes of suffering — including social ones — untouched.
Related concepts
- The Four Noble Truths as a Practical Framework
Diagnosis → cause → cessation → path: using the Buddha's framework for any episode of suffering
- Vipassana Meditation, Made Practical
Insight, equanimity, and the body-scan approach to liberation from reactivity
- Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
The core MBSR practices, the mechanisms, and where the evidence is genuinely strong
- The Noble Eightfold Path as a Practical Life Framework
Eight mutually reinforcing practices for reducing suffering and living with greater clarity
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