Where Does the Sangha End? Ana Muñoz and the Boundaries of Care

From an exacting meditation practice to a community encompassing the beings and conditions that sustain life. Ana Muñoz reflects on Buddhism, feminism and coloniality, alongside an editorial perspective on ritual and the politics of dirt in Delhi.

Ten days, almost ten years

Ana Muñoz supports meditation practice at Veluvana, in the Sierra Oeste area of Madrid. In her conversation with AIthropology Lab, her personal journey is more than mere background: it helps explain why she questions teaching approaches that turn wellbeing into an exercise in control and performance.

‘I first encountered meditation when I was just 23, at one of these ten-day retreats. For almost a decade, I felt that the control I exerted to sustain my attention was so intense that there was no room for mental calm to arise. My practice became rigid, tense and demanding of myself.’

‘Only after a long period devoted to practising compassion did this control (which is one of the faces of aversion and attachment) begin to dissolve.’

From that shift — from effort that tightens its grip towards an attention that can rest — comes a question running through the entire conversation: what changes when we stop seeing liberation as an entirely individual undertaking?

A community without a clear boundary

We asked Ana how far the Sangha might extend if we also considered animals, plants, places, objects and all the people who sustain our existence.

‘When we extend the idea of Sangha beyond the community of practitioners to include animals, plants, places, objects and all the people who sustain our existence, it becomes difficult to establish where that community really ends.’

‘The Buddhist tradition invites us precisely to question the idea of a separate and independent existence. Our wellbeing cannot be detached from the health of the planet or from the wellbeing of the countless beings and conditions that make our lives possible.’

Ana draws on Boddhicitta — the mind-heart directed towards awakening — and interdependence to explain why the division between the self, other people and nature is not a neutral boundary. Her reflection places care at the heart of a crisis that is ecological, social and spiritual at once.

‘So when the dualistic mind relates to the Earth and its creatures as objects to be used or exploited, we remain complicit in the ecological, social and spiritual multi-crisis we are experiencing in our time.’

In engaging with Thanissara’s work, Ana moves beyond compassion understood merely as the alleviation of individual distress: she recalls the need to acknowledge historical injustices, question the system’s unequal foundations and cultivate a different relationship with the Earth.

The Dharma of everyday life

The second question opens up a historical reflection Ana had explored in a piece published by Veluvana: how might the transmission of the Dharma have changed if women had played a central role in preserving it? Ana observes that monastic life and retreat have been privileged over family, communal and domestic life.

‘attachment does not lie in objects, but in our relationship with them.’

This observation shifts spiritual value away from abandoning our ties and towards how we inhabit them. Drawing on Rita M. Gross, Ana argues that raising children, caring and sustaining everyday life can provide demanding lessons in patience, compassion and interdependence. They are not necessarily obstacles to awakening.

When meditation becomes a performance target

The account takes a historical and decolonial turn in examining the transformation of Vipassana in Burma under British colonial rule and its subsequent international spread. Ana describes the influence of a rationalised Buddhist modernity and the spread of standardised retreats. In her reflection on coloniality and contemporary Buddhism, she highlights three figures in this process: Ledi Sayadaw, Sayagyi U Ba Khin and S. N. Goenka.

The spread of these practices made meditation accessible to many more people. Ana acknowledges this contribution, while questioning the cost of separating the technique from its ritual, cosmological and communal dimensions.

‘this adaptation fits with a neoliberal outlook based on performance and the individualisation of responsibility for wellbeing.’

The concept of self religion, used by Paul Heelas to describe spiritual approaches centred on improving the self, is useful here. We place it in dialogue with Ana’s testimony as an analytical tool for understanding contemporary spiritualities: this connection is made by AIthropology Lab, not a label Ana uses to define her own work.

‘liberation cannot be understood as something exclusively individual, but as a process that unfolds within a community of practice and mutual care.’

Editorial counterpoint: Delhi, a cockroach on the bonfire

On 20 October 2026, during Dussehra, an organisation staging Ramlila celebrations burnt an approximately nine-metre-high cockroach effigy in Pitampura, Delhi, alongside the traditional figures of Ravana, Kumbhakarna and Meghnad. The organisers said it represented dirt and that the gesture was intended to promote public cleanliness. The event took place in an especially charged political climate.

In May, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, had compared some young people unable to find work in the legal profession to cockroaches. He later clarified that his criticism was directed at people who allegedly entered professions using fraudulent qualifications. The controversy gave rise to the satirical Cockroach Janta Party movement, which channelled protests about irregularities in medical entrance examinations and, later, about the revision of electoral rolls.

The Pitampura organisers denied that the effigy targeted that movement, whose founder responded to news of the burning with irony. Yet after the event, the BJP minister Kapil Mishra used another insect comparison — ‘termites’ — to disparage those who criticised it. The opposition AAP denounced the political instrumentalisation of the festival. It is not possible to establish that the effigy was conceived as an attack on the protests; what can be documented is the public dispute over its meaning.

Mary Douglas showed that what is considered dirty also depends on social systems of classification. From a different perspective, Gilles Kepel observed that religious movements can give names to the anomalies of their times. Meanwhile, Óscar Salguero Montaño has examined the visibility of religious celebrations and their uses of public space in academic publications. We bring these approaches together to ask what happens when a ritual scene of purification intersects with political metaphors that turn groups of people into pests. Applying these perspectives to the events in Delhi is an interpretation by AIthropology Lab, not by those authors.

This counterpoint is AIthropology Lab’s editorial interpretation. Ana did not comment on the burning of the effigy in Delhi. Nor are we equating the sanitary control of an insect with the treatment owed to human beings: the political problem arises when the language of pest elimination is applied to people.

A language that invites attention to rest

Ana’s response ends where it began, in everyday practice. If excessive control prevents calm, recovering a non-directive language is not merely an aesthetic choice: it is a way of changing how we relate to our experience and to those around us.

‘Drawing on the words of Rebeca Bradshaw, we need to recover a more receptive presence, sustained by kind and compassionate language that is non-directive in the instruction and teaching of practice. A language that invites attention to rest, to be touched gently, to unfold without being pushed.’

‘When practice is allowed to be more receptive, the luminous, compassionate and immeasurable nature of the mind-heart emerges.’

From this lived experience, Ana proposes a Sangha extending beyond the human community and restoring the relational nature of practice. The question she leaves us is not only how to meditate, but what forms of relationship, care and belonging we want to make possible.

About Ana Muñoz and Veluvana

Ana Muñoz is involved in Veluvana, a meditation and contemplative practice project based in Madrid’s Sierra Oeste area. The public contact point for finding out about its activities, reflections and offerings is Veluvana Meditación’s Patreon.

Ana’s writing and contact details

• Veluvana Meditación, official Patreon — contact chosen by Ana.
• ‘A feminist/androgynous reconceptualisation of the Sangha’ (original in Spanish) — Ana’s reflection, published in September 2026.
• ‘I’m going to do a Vipassana retreat’: a reflection on coloniality and contemporary Buddhism (original in Spanish) — Ana’s reflection, published in October 2026.

Reading and anthropological framework

• Douglas Ober, ‘Buddhism in Colonial Contexts’ (2019), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.
• Thanissara, Time to Stand Up: An Engaged Buddhist Manifesto for Our Earth (2015).
• Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy (1993).
• Rebecca Bradshaw, ‘Buddhism From a Feminine Paradigm’.
• Paul Heelas, ‘Cults for Capitalism? Self Religions, Magic and the Empowerment of Business’ (1991), public bibliographic reference.
• Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966; Routledge Classics edition).
• Gilles Kepel, La revancha de Dios, bibliographic record at Dialnet.
• Óscar Salguero Montaño, ‘Espacio público y diversidad: Celebrar la Pascua ortodoxa rumana en España’ (2024), Antropología Experimental.

Delhi: documented events

• The Indian Express, 17/05/2026: Surya Kant clarifies his ‘cockroaches’ remark.
• El País, 16/10/2026: Abhijeet Dipke’s mobilisation and arrest.
• The Indian Express, 20/10/2026: the effigy announcement and Cockroach Janta Party’s reaction.
• The Indian Express, 21/10/2026: the effigy burning and political controversy.
• NDTV, 21/10/2026: Kapil Mishra’s remarks about ‘political termites’.

At AIthropology Lab

• ‘When the Cockroaches Answer Back’ (11/08/2026; original in Spanish): the movement’s background and an analysis of the political metaphor.