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.
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 serves several purposes.
First, it is the online home for our weekly meditation evenings and local sangha activities. Our gatherings are informal, welcoming, and grounded in mindfulness, insight meditation, loving-kindness, and the cultivation of wisdom in daily life. For those seeking Buddhist meditation in Honolulu or a small meditation group in Hawai‘i, Aloha Sangha has long offered a quiet place for practice, reflection, and spiritual friendship.
Second, 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.
Third, this website contains my personal reflections on 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.
Practice and Training
After many intensive retreats in the United States, including long retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, 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.
On my return journey I spent time practicing in India with Anagarika Munindra before eventually returning to the United States.
Aloha Sangha Today
I moved to Hawai‘i in 1990, where I later met my wife, Katina. Alongside meditation practice and teaching, I attended nursing school at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and recently retired after a 30 year career in an inpatient psychiatric facility.
Katina and I founded Aloha Sangha in February of 1998. What began as a small home meditation group gradually evolved into a long-standing spiritual community centered on meditation, inquiry, kindness, and the sincere practice of Dharma in ordinary life.
After all these years, Aloha Sangha remains a small, home-based community devoted to sincere practice, spiritual friendship, and the possibility of genuine awakening in the midst of ordinary life.