Our Life
We're a small teacher-led community built around meditation and conscious living. We keep it simple: just a real, shared life, lived slowly and on purpose.
We practice, work and live together and welcome visitors to walk this path with us.
A teacher-led community
Here, you actually live alongside the teacher. Chi isn't a distant figure tucked away in a distant room meditating all day. He shares the table, the work, the ordinary days. When you need him, he's there, and he genuinely sees you. Twenty-five years of practice, kept close.
There's real value in that direction. Left to ourselves, we drift: back into stress, into worry, into the noise we came here to leave. Someone skillful setting the course and holding us to it means there's always a steady hand to call us back, every time, to the peace and the simple life we actually want to live.
A life you don't need a break from
This isn't an escape — it is a different way to live. The aim is simple: days so full in themselves that none of them needs escaping. No living for the weekend, no high to come down from. Just a steady, sustainable rhythm, quieter and more awake, built to last.
And at the heart of it isn't the setting — it's each other. Real connection, rare now: people who see you, know your days, and stay. That's what makes a life you don't need a break from, and the closest we've found to what a life can be.
Sharing the space together
The ground it all stands on
The practical shape of the days: practice, food, how we live, what we leave out. Not rules from above but a few things we agree on together and hold to daily.
First, the practice
The day opens with practice — sitting, movement, breath — before talk or tasks. Beginning settled rather than scattered sets the tone for everything that follows: steadier focus, a longer fuse, and calm that holds up against the day instead of evaporating.
The food
Cooked fresh each morning, with the earth in mind as much as the body. You feel it daily: lighter digestion, level energy. And at midday, a fresh spirulina juice: one of the few complete plant proteins, with iron and antioxidants.
The natural way
We try to live as naturally as we reasonably can: no alcohol, no drugs, nothing that alters the mind. Digital devices stay in their place as tools, not distractions. It's less a rule than a balance: the natural way where it serves us, the practical way where it genuinely makes sense.
The simple life
We keep possessions few and the days uncluttered. Less to manage means fewer decisions, less noise, and more room to actually be present. A lighter, calmer baseline you can feel every day.
The people of this place
A community is only ever the people in it. These are ours. The ones who cook, sit, teach, and tend the land, and who make the days what they are. The people who are here for the long term, who have made this community their home.
Chi Om
For twenty-five years I've walked the path I now help others find. My approach is direct and grounded: no spiritual performance, just the real work of turning toward yourself. As co-founder of The Essence, I'm part of the daily life: guiding sessions, raising my children, cooking, keeping the space clean and alive. The practice doesn't end when the session does. It lives in how you wash a dish, hold a child, or sit with an uncomfortable feeling without running. If you find yourself here, chances are I've already been where you are.
Chia Om
My days revolve around running after a toddler and caring for a baby, while staying present, grateful, and at peace with things as they are. Daily life is my practice. Nothing extravagant, but very profound: to notice when I'm dreaming so I can return to this moment. The more time passes, the more I see myself in everyone, which opens me up to the people around me. I'm committed to living this life fully, growing through its daily challenges: showing up as I am, sharing what I can, and learning from every moment and the people in it.
Ananda Om
I spend most of my days organizing, connecting, handling the digital life of The Essence. I came here by accident, really. I was hiking between communities in Portugal and ended up in the same place as Chi and Chia. Something in this approach to life caught me, and I just never saw a reason to leave after that. These days I'm mostly practicing one thing: reminding myself over and over that all is well right now. And in between a little slackline, exploring the jungle with Chitta, checking which mangoes are close to ready.
Shanti Om
I came to the Essence seeking community, clarity, simplicity, and sharing, yet I stayed to witness how far my ego resists such surrender. Here dwells a people vowed to illuminate the patterns that trap the mind, guiding us to transform them through tiny, daily steps of awareness and conscious parenting. Knowing my own cunning to justify pleasure-seeking diversions from this work, I find my place here is to break through resistance by embracing the pain: changing diapers, cleaning the floor, doing the dishes. Though my ego screams, deep down I know the only way out is through.
Mayla Om
I stumbled into this community at a retreat in Portugal, burnt out from a corporate job and living with an autoimmune disease. Within a few days here, my nervous system relaxed in a way it never had in my adult life, and I knew I had to stay. I hold the technical side, running the website and making this place visible online, but just as much of my day goes to making the salad, doing the dishes, and running stretching sessions. The rest is slower work: learning to stop running from myself and build toward a vision I'm actually aligned with.
Chitta & Tai Chi Om
The next generation, growing up barefoot on the land. Chitta is all curiosity and motion; Tai Chi is just beginning. They haven't lost presence yet. Mostly, they pull the rest of us back to why we came.
What we are reaching for
The shape of what we're building — today, and over the longer arc.
Vision
Sharing the light of awareness with all beings, so that we might support and be supported, now and for generations to come. It lives in the ordinary days of a small, real community, and in an open door for those who come to walk a little of it with us.
Mission
Creating a space where awareness, connection, and presence form the foundation of a conscious way of living. Through daily practice and honest guidance, we cultivate the clarity and steadiness that make genuine change possible, in each person and in the way we live together.
Long-term
A growing community on land of its own: food from our own gardens, power off the grid, and a way of living that takes less from the world and gives more back. Built to last for generations.
What we hold to
Five values · one community. Not slogans: the things we come back to when the days get hard or the choices get murky.
Awareness
We try to meet the day as it actually is, before the story about it arrives. It's the first practice, and the one all the others rest on.
Simplicity
Fewer possessions, fewer plans, fewer words. A way of giving the real things room to be seen.
Connection
We're a community first and a project second. The people here are not staff or guests — we belong to each other, and the work flows from that.
Responsibility
The land, the meals, the people who arrive — we treat them as ours to tend, not ours to use. What we touch we try to leave a little better.
Clarity
We'd rather say the awkward true thing than the polished half-true one. It's how the practice gets carried into the ordinary part of the day.
For those who want this as a life
Most people come to visit. A few come to stay. If you feel the pull to live this way for the long haul, here's how it begins.
Who is this for?
People drawn to a quieter, more conscious life and ready to actually live it, long-term, with both feet in. After a different way of living, not just a break from the current one.
Who are we looking for?
Honest, open, and willing to put in the work: in the kitchen, on the land, and in their own practice. Comfortable with a plant-based table, here to contribute, not to be entertained or fixed.
Four steps, taken slowly
Say hello
Commit
An honest talk
Voices of the community
The art of surrender
Releasing "my way" and merging with "the way" — what arrives when we stop trying to control our environment.
Alone with your thoughts
On the rare experience of meeting your own mind — and the freedom that waits on the other side of stillness.
Overcoming the fear of criticism
The defensive reflex to criticism is conditioning, not character. A practical path to meeting feedback as a teacher instead of a threat.
