It was good. I had a job and integration into regular society during my time there, but we had a strict training regimen as well.

A friend was a monk, and that seems to have helped him quite a bit. For him it was total immersion. He started taking psychology classes and is now a psychotherapist.

I myself started zen training as part of aikido training. My aikido teacher got himself ordained as a rinzai priest then started encouraging us to show up for his “zen club” meetings. He sold it as a way to make our martial arts better.

He was an irish guy, with a shaved head and thick eyebrows. Think Lex Luthor or Professor X. He was a big time romantic. Used to have us stand in ice water while we practice sword kata, to train our ability to keep moving while in pain.

Pretty much the perfect zen teacher for a kid in his early 20s. Kept it all very low-level. “Notice how colors are more vivid once you’ve been meditating a while”. Didn’t talk about the high level stuff like suffering or transcending the ego. Just kept it simple: “If you meditate science has shown you’ll be able to tell different tones of sound from each other more easily”. That kind of thing.

Then later, the temple was part of a korean sect. Much more colorful than rinzai zen. As in, literally gold plated buddha statues covered in ornate flowers. At one point we had some monks show up with green paint. Their mission was going around to all the temples to paint mustaches on the buddha statues.

I literally just now realized those guys might have been full of shit.

Anyway this temple was in a modern city, and I had a normal life. But living in a community where everyone is dedicated to the same kind of work is powerful. And I had great teachers. Only passed like 4 of the 1500 koans available in our system, but even those expanded my mind in extremely useful ways.

I was extremely lucky, because at the same time I had zen training going on, I also had a series of ayahuasca ceremonies going on.

My “second sangha” was a group of people who had clustered around this shaman, who was offering ceremonies to people. Went to maybe a dozen over the course of a few years.

Without the ayahuasca, I would not have made much progress in my zen training. And without the zen training, I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much out of the ayahuasca.

Those two are as different, and as complimentary, as peanut butter and jelly.