About Aloha Sangha
Meditation, spiritual friendship, and the practice of awakening in ordinary life.
Aloha Sangha is a small Buddhist meditation community in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, meeting weekly in our home on the island of O‘ahu since 1998.
If you live on O‘ahu, you are welcome to join us on a Thursday evening. The details are on our group meditation page.
Over the years, people from many different backgrounds have joined us to explore meditation, mindfulness, compassion, and the deeper possibilities of spiritual practice.
This website brings together three aspects of that practice.
Our local meditation community
Our gatherings are informal and welcoming, grounded in mindfulness, insight meditation, loving-kindness, and the cultivation of wisdom in daily life. Aloha Sangha offers a quiet place for practice, reflection, and spiritual friendship.
The early Buddhist path
This site reflects an ongoing effort to reconnect contemporary spiritual practice with the depth and clarity of the early Buddhist teachings.
Much modern spirituality emphasizes inspiration, wellness, or self-improvement. The early Buddhist path certainly supports healing and compassion, but it also points toward something more radical: liberation from suffering through ethical living, meditation, insight, and transformation of the heart.
The teachings shared here are especially influenced by Theravada Buddhism and the insight meditation traditions of Burma and Sri Lanka, with an emphasis on direct meditative experience rooted in the earliest Buddhist texts.
Personal reflections
I write about meditation practice, spiritual life, aging, compassion, psychological transformation, and the challenges of living the Dharma in the modern world. Over the years, I have also collected and shared readings, poetry, and other resources that may nourish reflection, insight, and contemplative depth.
My Path in Buddhism
My name is Tom Davidson-Marx, and I have been teaching Buddhist meditation in Honolulu since 1998.
My own path began in 1979 when, at the age of 24, I attended a ten-day silent meditation retreat taught in the tradition of S. N. Goenka . That experience became a major turning point in my life and awakened a deep interest in Buddhist practice and meditation.
In the early 1980s I lived at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles, where I studied with the American meditation teacher Shinzen Young. His ability to illuminate the early Buddhist teachings through direct experience deeply influenced me.
After many intensive retreats in the United States, including long retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, I traveled to Sri Lanka in 1984 to deepen my practice and study.
While in Sri Lanka I studied the early Buddhist discourses with Bhikkhu Bodhi and ordained as a Theravada Buddhist monk later that same year. I spent three years in monastic life devoted primarily to meditation, study, and contemplative practice before returning to lay life in 1987.
It was during these years that I first encountered the teaching of the late Venerable Amatha Gavesi (1918–2003), a former police officer who became a monk and founded Devanapathis Meditation Center near Kandy.
I continue my practice and study under Venerable Kapilani Manio, the center’s principal meditation teacher. Before his death, Venerable Gavesi entrusted his teaching to a senior nun at the centre. Venerable Kapilani, who also studied with him, continues this lineage today.
Venerable Kapilani has authorized me to share teachings from this lineage with our sangha. I continue to learn how these teachings speak to my own life and how they might best be shared within our community.
Alongside my meditation practice and teaching, I studied nursing at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and spent 30 years working as a Registered Nurse in an inpatient psychiatric facility. I retired in 2025.
Aloha Sangha Today
My partner Katina and I founded Aloha Sangha in February 1998. What began as a small home meditation group has continued as a place for meditation, inquiry, kindness, and spiritual friendship.
Today, we meet weekly in Pālolo Valley to practice together and explore how the Buddha’s teachings can be lived in ordinary life.
If you live on O‘ahu, you are welcome to join us. And wherever you live, I hope you will find something here that supports your own practice and understanding of the Dharma.