Here are some excerpts from the most inspirational piece
on Circling we have read in a while… The graduation statement
from one of our beloved Level 2 students, Brit.
My Circling vision statement contains a mix of personal confession, practical ideas, and hopefully-coherent musings about how I view Circling. Circling, meaning both the practice itself and this community of circlers that I love, means the world to me. Our trainings, Drop in Events, and pods provide a certain rhythm to my life.
The faces of the instructors, all of the others in our community, light me up. In many ways, our community feels like home. It is inviting, warm, full of crazy people I love, and safe – even when it’s scary. My Circling vision is inspired by this feeling.
Circling has the power to make an individual feel more at home within themselves and then within their families, communities, nations, and within the universe itself. When I write about how I want to carry Circling deeper into my internal and external world, what I mean is that I want to use our Circling practices, principles, and community to spread the Platonic ideal of home into all of the places where humans “be.” Because I believe that being at home in ourselves, with others, and in the world is the start of all kinds of Good things.
At the start of my Circling experience, I thought that it was easier for me to be with the emotions of others than it was for me to be with my own somatic experience of my emotions. And that was true, in a shallow way, but the deeper truth is that I wasn’t really able to be with other people that much more than I could be with myself. I liked that circling was helping me go deeper with myself, find my edges relative to others, have better boundaries, and heal from the chronic self-doubt that followed decades of invalidation and gaslighting. As Circling has expanded my ability to be with myself and feel myself, being with others and feeling with others has tracked pretty closely.
The deeper I go with my Circling practice, the more self-possessed I become. I continue to learn how to sense myself better, how to move beyond tolerating my somatic experience to really welcoming it, how to self-soothe, and how to be a much better listener and more supportive presence. I have always loved people but, much more than ever, I notice a lot more dimension to them right from the start. Life is so much more interesting when you are surrounded by interesting people – and Circling gives you the perceptual super powers needed to notice that everyone around you is interesting.
I am so very thankful for everything this last few years of my Circling adventure has brought into my life and I am so excited about what comes next.
Circling is healing for the individual’s world. I feel it as it heals, expands, and pours light and possibility into my inner world. The amount of change that our practice has blessed me with in only 2.5 years is inspiring to me. That change came from being held fearlessly by many, many people and watching myself fearlessly hold many, many others. Revealing myself is healing myself.
Circling is healing for communities. I watch it bring together our community for a common purpose, giving us all a space to love one another as human beings who are perfect in our imperfection. We come together from different backgrounds, with different belief systems, different scars, different politics, different bodies, different gifts and burdens…and somehow none of that seems to matter. Our group is a model of how Circling can heal the world because our shared commitment to Circling principles allows us to be truly intimate with one another without pressure to conform. There’s no need to conform when you’re accepted as you are. We trust one another. We trust that we can find our way to love through our hurts, disagreements, and confusion.
Circling is a social technology that teaches humans to better honor our own nature as beings-in connection-with-other-beings.
We are within fractals and contain fractals, like the physical universe, and like the natural, spiritual condition of oneness that we emerge within. The universe reflects us and we reflect the universe – to a degree that we can learn to sense but which our measly meatsack hardware brain simply cannot process cognitively. We simply do not have the processing power to understand it but, with Circling, we learn to welcome the sensation of being attuned to it.
When we practice Circling, we learn to float in the chaos with ease and to release the fear that comes from being (ostensibly fragile) complex adaptive systems nested within (ostensibly dangerous) complex adaptive systems. Internally, we learn to recognize that our emotions emerge within us, that we can trust ourselves with our emotions, which then opens the door to truly acknowledging our essential connection with others. Externally, by recognizing our own complexity, we more readily trust the complexity of others.
When we find that inner and outer trust, the more essential aspects of our nature are given room to express themselves. And that is a virtuous end, aside from any instrumental value to us or the world that expression might produce.
If Brit’s graduation has you wanting to hear more from her, you can follow her on Instagram and/or Tiktok @britmeows
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