Tamera is a community in Portugal which focuses on bringing peace to the world through free love and a sustainable ecological model of living. I Just came back from an introduction week there and It was nothing like I expected it to be! Read on…

My first impression of Tamera was of a German retirement home. There were many 60+ year olds strolling around the 150 hectors and everything was calm, beautiful and… German! I knew Tamera was founded by Germans but I had no Idea that even today, more than 30 years later, it was still a little German colony in the heart of Portugal’s farm land. The main spoken language is German, most people are German and the culture is most definitely German. There are schedules and time tables and task lists. Not what one would expect from a ‘hippy’ community. The upside was that there was almost no ‘mushy’ fake hugging and the usually endless introduction and farewell circles were limited in time, with each person getting exactly 2 minutes to speak, exactly!

I came to Tamera asking myself what enabled this community to succeed for more than three decades when so many other communities broke apart. There is no doubt in my mind that the ‘German’ management is part of the answer.

 

Daily Life

My daily life there was very different from someone who is a member of the community. In fact, we were kept quite apart from the community. This was another surprise for me. If I were living in a closed community and there were some newcomers coming I’d run to see who they are, but I suppose it might be expected with the amount of guests Tamera gets.

Breakfast was at 7:00 a.m!!! And from 8:30-10:30 we were asked to join Karma Yoga. What the hell is that, you might be asking yourself. Luckily I had heard of this new and improved way to manage slave labour from friends who came across this. You are asked to work for free in order to better your Karma and advance your spiritual being. At least Tom Sawyer had the decency of tricking people to believe painting the fences was fun. Needless to say, I didn’t join the garden work and went back to sleep after breakfast, or read a book, or practiced Karate. I figure my Karma is fucked beyond salvation anyway.

From 11:30-13:00 we had a ‘geistic hour’ about one of the core values of Tamera. Geist is a big part of the language of Tamera, along with words like ‘vision’, ‘coherence’, ‘pilgrimage’ and others. It means something between philosophic and spiritual. Basically someone was talking, quoting all these German scholars and then we could ask questions. Somehow my questions always managed to create the most upheaval. “Do you have any proof of the ‘inner goodness’ of humans?”  “Are you aware that you sound very heteronormative and seem to ignore the whole queer community?” were some of the issues I brought up. But don’t worry, the instructors from the community made sure things didn’t get too exciting, telling everyone to take a deep breath and calm down. God forbid I have some fun.

At 13:00 we had lunch and then Siesta time until 16:00.

We then met for another 3 hours doing more practical things, such as community ‘trust’ building exercises or experiencing their unique type of group psycho-drama therapy they call ‘Forum’. In ‘Forum’ one person brings up a problem or questions through acting it out and being guided by the Forum ‘leader’ after which others can become mirrors helping that person see parts of himself he might be missing or give him advice.

19:00 was dinner time.

At 20:00 the small bar opened and we could get to know the different members of our interesting group. This went on until 24:00.

And so life went on.

Free Love

Let’s admit it, this is most likely the reason you are reading this piece. As a champion of open relationships, polyamory or anything not monogamy, this was one of the main issues I was specifically interested in Tamera. How do things not get terribly ‘messy’ and complicated in such an ‘open’ community?

Well, part of the answer is they talk about it… a lot! From my prodding questions they seem to talk about it way more than they actually do it. In fact, I wasn’t the only one who felt that the whole environment was far from being ‘sexy’, even to the point of experiencing a libido decrease. Part of this might be due to the underdeveloped practice of movement methods, no morning yoga, no Contact improvisation jams (except for the one I created) and no communal sports games. Instead, their communal time is spent in lectures about current ecological issues. Their Sunday ‘church’ is used to update the community on projects that are going on and sings peace songs (one of which was in Hebrew which was super strange for me). As you can see there isn’t much that might get the ‘juices’ flowing.

“There can be no peace on earth as long as there is war in love”

This is the statement from which Tamera’s philosophy of free loves arises and I’ll admit even I like it. But their solution is quite the opposite of personal ‘freedom’:

“We must ask ourselves if each of our actions will create more peace or not and act accordingly, creating an environment of complete trust and openness between all members of the community”.

If you have to get the whole community’s agreement before you can go have some fun with someone, well you’re not going to have much fun are you? Actually, the whole ‘process’ of exposure to the community sort of takes all the spontaneity, fun and excitement out of sex and love.

Autonomy

Tamera aims to produce 80% of all their energy food and water they need. They claim that in a time of crisis a change in behavior patterns will reduce their usage by 20%. So far their greatest and most inspiring success comes from their water retention and soil management plan. They have built a set of dams to collect rain water and through planting support plants and nourishing their land they have managed to stop the desertification process that is taking place in nearby farms. They currently supply 100% of their own water and have managed to replenish ground water levels, creating actual abundance. Their permaculture gardens are well on their way and in a much better state than what I experienced in Australia. They have horses and pigs that do the digging for them (and tractors) but none of the animals are used for food as it is entirely a vegan community. For energy they mostly relay on massive solar panels but they also research and create methods that can be used in third world countries or disaster zones. For instance, creating biogas from vegetables or an ‘oven’ that is created by mirrors collecting, focusing and directing sun light.

Compared to these advances it was quite disappointing to hear about Tamer’s financial situation. They are is far from being autonomous. 60% of their money comes from guests and seminars, 20% from donations and 20% from people in the community that work outside. Although there is no rule about having to give your money to the community people working outside the community give around 50% of their income. There are no rules about how many hours one needs to work and community members trust that others are working to their best of their capabilities.

The bottom line is Tamera is in debt of 1.8 million euro. I thought that was really a lot but I guess if you divide it by 150 members it’s ‘just’ 12000 euro each. Compared to their vast knowledge of ecological issues, (which was sometimes seasoned with strange beliefs like prayer reducing radiation!?!?) I found their knowledge in economic issues lacking. For instance they live with myths about the Kibbutz model being successful while the truth is that all the Kibbutz’s in Israel were always supported by the Israeli government or the Jewish agency and their debt had to be reduced and erased time after time to prevent bankruptcy. To be fair, the myth that ‘take what you need and give what you can’ is a good idea probably comes from one relatively new and unique Kibbutz that seems to be making this work. The name of the place is Samar (sorry for the Hebrew link but there is very little information about them out their) and on my next visit to Israel I’ll be sure to check them out.

It was especially sad for me to see how they used one of the sessions to try to get us guests to donate more money. I myself ask for donations or ‘crowd funding’ for my free self defense books for children so why did this bother me?  Perhaps, as George Orwell explained in a brilliant article ‘Why Are Beggars Despised?’ (a link Amanda Palmer thanked me for so it’s worth a look!), it’s because of their failure to earn a decent living and the disparity which was present in their asking. This reminded me of the regular ‘ritual’ that accompanied every meal were those who prepared the meal ‘begged’ for people to come help wash the dishes. To me this is just bad management. This is obviously a very subjective feeling. If I would whole heartedly agree with Tamera’s vision and project I would probably be happy to donate money, just as I’m happy to donate to musicians I like (Amanda Palmer again) or the guy from the Free walking tour of Lisbon who was awesome. On a second thought, it might just be the phenomenon my favorite behavior psychologist Dan Arieli speaks about. There are two separate pathways in the brain, the empathetic-social one and the calculating one. We were already paying for our introduction week and thus the whole week I was already in my ‘calculating’ mode. If the whole week had been donation based the situation might have been different. I would have probably donated and participated in the garden and kitchen work much more.

 

Like Attracts Like

This is probably my main realization after a week in Tamera. Tamera’s history started out with two very strong and charismatic leaders (Sabine Lichtenfels, Dieter Duhm). Only after there were enough people with the same mind set the community ‘democratized’. Joining Tamera is a very slow process that takes at least two years (in which one must also pay for their stay), thus weaning out all those who are not of the exact same mindset as the rest of the community. Every new ‘electron’ added to this community ‘atom’ must fit in without exciting the rest of the electrons to a higher energy level. So if you want to join you better be a careful, meticulous and calm person who chooses to believe in the ‘inner good’ of humanity, romanticize the ‘harmony’ of nature and refuse to accept any violence in your life. I might be generalizing but I can see definite WWII post-trauma syndromes in this behavior. As for me, as one of my favorite writers put it:

“Violence is a language, perhaps the most primitive and primal language of them all.” Forgetting this language will likely cause part of ‘humanity’ to atrophy, much like a muscle that needs to be hurt and destroyed in order to trigger new muscle growth. If this is the ‘new human’ Tamara people are attempting to build and if this is their ‘heaven’ people like me don’t have a place in it. But we already agreed I’m going to Hell right?

Despite all my criticism I am very curious to see how they develop and hope their experiment does survive because I’m all for variety which makes for a more interesting reality, just as long as they don’t become the stifling majority.