Secular alternative to joining a monastery?

I'd join you in the woods but it sounds like you are tired of people.

I can happily say that by the end of 2012 I did this:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Become a mountain man, like the double rainbow guy

Burning Man.

I've heard of some communities that might do something like that. Some kind of self sustaining community. In the US.

Go live in a small cabin in the woods (Unabomber style)

Caballo Blanco II?

ENLIGHTENMENT.

(Holistic alternative)

just move to a cabin in a rural or wilderness area. I'm sure you could find a cabin in the woods in appalachia or the rockies. Maybe something in the desert in the Southwest.

Prison is the closet thing to being in a Monastery.

There are actually quite a few communities that have little or no religious ties. Most of them a reminiscent of hippie communes. Here are links to two of them. The second link is for a Catholic worker farm. Catholic worker communities have varying ties to catholicism with some have no catholics in them at all. I live in an urban religious community that often connects with other communities in the surrounding states.

http://www.heartlandconnection.com/news/story.aspx?id=793985

http://www.mustardseedfarm.org/?q=node/4

Just go with the Amish or monasteries. Jesus is a pretty good guy.

Or you could move to Tibet and live with the monks and do ridiculous things like beating yourself to attain greater ability to meditate.

Or you could read Into the Wild and do what that guy did (though he seemed to be pretty tight with God, even if it wasn't emphasized)

...the best answer I see is just to go with the Jesus and go with the Amish or monastery thing

Start by reading some of the material here:

http://zenhabits.net/archives/

Simplify your life at slower pace rather than jumping fully into some sort of monastic living, then see where it leads.

Surprised nobody's brought this up on a running website, but you could seek to emulate Sri Chimnoy or :

http://www.allaboutrunning.net/sri-chinmoys-running-career

You could also join Divine Madness in Boulder or wherever it is based now, though it is rarely talked about anymore. Or, you could revisit your belief system and realize that true happiness can be found in how you loved and lived, and Jesus is perhaps the best model for that.

Yep, just what this world needs - one more crazed atheist loner.

Certainly the English language, which is chock full-o many excellent words, can accommodate, for the amelioration of poetry or politics or pornography, differing degrees of abomination in describing the sexual oppression of women. That’s because the English language is the language of men, a proud culture of domination that glorifies its lust for oppression with infinite variations. A woman can be violated, fvcked, nailed, hit on (or just hit), ogled, degraded, fallen, debased, put on a pedestal, married, prostituted, impregnated, pronged, boinked, ravished, seduced, cajoled, beaten, videotaped, courted, sold, assaulted, wolf-whistled, harassed, enslaved, dominated and killed. O the pageantry.

On one end of the spectrum in this splendid tableau of violent misogyny is the boyfriend/husband who cajoles ‘consent’ with guilt and low-level duress (“come on, just a little longer, I’m almost there.”). On the other, the jewel in the crown of patriarchal dominion: physical assault under threat of injury or death, or what is popularly thought of as rape.

There are 578,843 different little hate crimes in between. Here are a few of them: High heels, BJs, street harassment, feminist dudes, the normalization of porn culture. If you are a woman, you have experienced nearly all of them. If you are a straight woman, you have experienced nearly all of them a million times. When experienced incrementally, in small doses over the course of a lifetime, many women are Stockholm-syndromed into viewing these “lesser” violations as tolerable (or even desirable). Taken all at once, in the single violent outburst known as rape, it is a devastating, debilitating trauma.

But for the level of intensity, these are all points on the same continuum. What continuum is that? Why, the continuum of rape culture, which is porn culture, which is male culture, which is the dominant culture. Duh, of course victims of violent assault have had a different experience than women who reluctantly pornulate themselves for their boyfriends. Rape survivors have been slammed with maximum hatred all at once in its most unambiguous form, whereas the lingerie girlfriend, ostensibly of her own volition, is merely putting on a cheap polyester teddy made in China. Different experience? Hell yeah. Different concept? Hell no.

It is of dire importance is to recognize that, within the profoundly misogynist climate of our social order, it is considered consistent with women’s essential nature that we are dudesex, and only dudesex. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this condition of oppression absolutely precludes the contingency of a woman’s genuine consent to anything. Therefore it does a disservice to all women if we reserve the concept of coerced sex for its most sensationally violent incarnation.

Get a job as a university professor and don't ever have sex.

Living in the woods by yourself is not like being in a monastery. They are fairly social places.

Run some more. You will find your peace there.