Circling

What is Circling?

Circling is a facilitated group communication and meditation. We impart from a position of profound presence by tuning into our experience of the moment and sharing what it’s like to be connected.

In Circling, the emphasis is on the here and now – the present moment – and we guide a reflective focus toward what’s going on among us and inside us. Every individual brings their own insight into the current moment to the gathering.

Why Circling?

As everyone pulls in with curiosity and shares their own perspective, you realize that your identity is more prominent than any preconceived notion of who you „ought to“ be. Circling has the capacity to unearth your true core and build significant linkages by relating right now

Benefits of Circling

• Connects you with others on a more fundamental level – usually within minutes of meeting them.
• Shows you the best way to express whatever you might be thinking from a position of certainty – and have others hear it!
• Have more opportunities for articulation and an ability to answer instead of respond when others speak with you.
• Turn into a more profound audience who can offer others to feel appreciated and seen with you.
• Foster specialized skills you can use in all parts of your life – business, partner, family, outsiders, and kids.
• Grow your reach and association with yourself as well as other people.
• Give and get significant, direct feedback conveyed with authentic truth and non-judgment.
• Fosters more confidence in yourself.
• Mends your body as you embrace and incorporate all of yourself.

Gives you the experience of “being seen”.

Many individuals have never felt really seen, which can be exceptionally detaching and difficult. At the point when you’re profoundly seen for both your exceptional gifts and excellence – AND the shadow parts you as a rule keep stowed away – you easily become happy with just being yourself.

Uncovers your „vulnerable sides“.

The disparities between who you assume you are and the way that you really appear will show you your vulnerable sides, which frequently drive love and association away without knowing it.

The Awakening of your being what you have been heedless of will give you revolutionary access to genuineness, association, and ability to decide.

Opens you to presence, aliveness, and a condition of flow.

By giving stunning consideration to the current moment and the powerful experience of relating with others, you can rapidly enter conditions of mindfulness. Along these lines, Circling can be viewed as a type of „social yoga“ or „social contemplation“.

Makes profound and significant associations.

Circling won’t just encourage more sense of affiliation and a sense of „family“, it might increase present expectations fair and square of closeness and association you experience in each connection and relationship in your life — from friends and family to clients, to outsiders.

Trains you in the craftsmanship and abilities of genuine relating.

Circling will dramatically build your capacity to non-violently communicate your experience as it emerges, second to second.

It will likewise show you the specialty of getting another person’s reality in a manner that has them feel seen, known, and appreciated, maybe more profoundly than they ever have previously.

These abilities can soar your ability to bring truth, validness, and association with each relationship in your life.

Envokes significant change and self-awareness.

The bits of knowledge and affiliation accessible in Circling help you shift and develop at the underpinning of your being. From this spot, making changes in your day to day existence is a characteristic result, as opposed to a battle.

The five principles of circling

The Five principles shine a light on how we can be more present. Circling enables you to make your own inferences, while constantly permitting them to be re-drawn. The accompanying portrayals are not complete — yet they will give you enough to begin trying out how you can develop your presence both inside and beyond Circles. 
 
They are not rules, they are recommendations. They are not replies, they are inquiries to be lived. They are not static, they are advancing as we develop.

1. Commitment to Connection

An invitation to stay in connection with whatever is emerging among you and others. 

This incorporates uncovering yourselves and being available to the effects from — and on — others. This implies no constrained feeling of being open or powerless; it implies we ask profoundly into the reality of what is here rather than routinely responding or keeping away from it. We can straightforwardly share and investigate our sensations with somebody. 

Discovering this guideline, consider when you talked about something awkward — perhaps you stood up for a companion being harassed or said the obvious issue at hand at a family gathering. How’d it go? Could you at any point recall not shouting out about something that appeared to be valid and critical to you but you didn’t voice it since you feared others‘ responses?

We encounter these sorts of circumstances and feelings in the present and thereby create powerful and nimble strategies to go from conflict/pain into a deeper win-win connection.

Consider whether there are any relationships in which you are now avoiding the truth. Can you envision saying that and being open to how the other person reacts? Although it is not always simple, and resolution is not always assured, Circling is an atmosphere that may help you confront these issues with others.

2. Owning Your Experience

Getting to our most profound truth, our unarguable experience past our projections. Urges us to assume a sense of ownership with what’s going on inside us, and being available to that evolving. Frequently this requires relinquishing results and conceding sentiments that challenge our feeling of what our identity is.

It includes the ability to feel our body, the nuances as far as we can tell, and our (difficult) feelings. The most elevated level of this guideline is feeling 100 percent liable for the entirety of our experience. To discover this principle, consider some spot in your life where you are accusing outer conditions, where something feels beyond your reach. 

For example, moving from ‚my supervisor is unjustifiably misleading me‘ to ‚within the sight of my manager I feel tense and shaky‘. The primary assertion is questionable, however, the second articulation you can be aware of is valid in yourself and is more a claimed insight.

Have you encountered somebody who appeared to fault you for being what your identity is, contrasted with somebody who was able to be truly accepting of who you are, in association with you? The distinction can be little but so strong.

3. Staying With the Level of Sensation

We can share with greater strength, presence, and truth by adding subtle body sensations in our awareness and expression. These experiences frequently include the least interpretation and, as a result, might startle us with connections that go beyond rational reasoning. This is about communicating embodied, alive sensations and emotions, not ‚dry‘ body sensations.

Take note of your breathing to obtain a sense of this. Can you feel your stomach moving in and out? Is the air brushing against your skin behind your nostrils? What else do you notice about me, the writer, and the content, any emotional reactions or feelings of opening or tension?

4. Trusting Experience

Invites us to respect the relative truth of every given experience within us while assessing what is going on. It is frequently an appeal to trust the unknown, to incorporate non-rational sensations, and to look beyond our own awareness.

Find a self-judgment that you wish to get rid of to get a sense for this. Consider a judgment delivered with kindness and intelligence… What is the gift it is presenting to you?

5. Being With the Other in Their World

Deeply enjoying someone’s excellence in each moment while gaining an in-depth understanding of the complexities of their manner of being. Seeing their innate innocence, making no assumptions, and being willing to examine preconceptions in both of you (without making any attempt to change how someone or something is).

This idea is a reminder to submit to being with someone in that precise time, rather than merely intellectually understanding them. 

Consider a politician you dislike, or a person in your life if the situation is more heated. Now pretend you are them, doing exactly what they are doing. However, unlike them, you may inquire into your experience as it occurs: what is it like in your body, how do you see others, what is prompting you to feel that way and do that?

Do you feel frightened, terrified, or yearning for something? What makes sense to you about what you’re doing?

Main Practice Formats

Birthday Circles (also known as “Circling”)

The Setup

In a normal Circle, three to ten individuals sit in a circle and focus their attention on one person for a certain length of time, usually 20 to 45 minutes.

The Plot

The Circle begins with the Circlee (the center of attention), is followed by a brief (about one minute) guided meditation, and then transitions to a more open exploration phase of dialog and participation.

During this phase, everyone in the group can do the following at the same time:

• Ask questions to obtain a sense of what the Circlee’s current moment experience is like for them (rather than intellectual comprehension)
• Speak about their firsthand, in-the-moment encounter with the Circlee.

This activity of (1) getting a sense of the Circlee’s present-moment experience and (2) speaking one’s in-the-moment experience of being with the Circlee accounts for 95% of what happens during the Birthday Circle.

The Finale

Near the end, the facilitator draws attention to the fact that the Circle will end in a few minutes and searches for a simple way to officially close the practice and acknowledge what has occurred (such as hearing one word from each participant that captures a personal experience of the Circle).

Surrendered Leadership Circles

The Setup

Surrendered Leadership Circles have ranged in size from 3 to 130 participants and have lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to 5 hours. When space allows, everyone faces each other in a nearly circular form (or with online video-conferencing software); otherwise, there are two or three „rows“ similar to stadium seating.

The Action

The Circle usually starts with the facilitator acknowledging in some way that the Circle has begun.

While this is most commonly done through spoken communication — for example, „If you haven’t already begun practicing, I invite you to start now… let’s expand the kind of attention you just brought in the Birthday Circle to the entire group, including yourself“—different facilitators may use their own creative expression to signal the Circle’s opening.

This can involve a communicative quiet. The facilitator will frequently offer a line or two that establishes the tone for the Circle and serves as context. Because this is a personal and artistic expression, it appears different practically every time.

However, it nearly invariably refers to an in-the-moment experience while urging participants to:

• Accept responsibility for guiding oneself,
• be conscious of their connection to the group,
• and listen for an intuition that takes them to something bigger than themselves.

People interact in a variety of ways during the rest of the time, including speaking plainly, „Circling,“ physically moving (which can include consensual interactions with other participants, such as a hug), sharing meta-observations, and integrating other forms of meditation and personal practices.

The facilitator(s) participate in all of the behaviors outlined in the preceding paragraph, as well as directing individual and group interactions toward increased „presence“ and „surrender“ while continuing to weave the overall framework.

They also create limits around types of engagement that deviate from them, such as forcing everyone in the Circle to participate in one specific healing-oriented activity.

Founders

Guy Sengstock is the Circling approach’s originator and founder of the Circling Institute. For over 20 years, he has been facilitating transformation for individuals, organizations, and businesses all around the world. Based in San Francisco, he is a visionary, an artist, a philosopher, a poet, a bodyworker, and a philosopher.

Later the Circling Europe Institute progressed the approach significantly, especially by working on the Surrendered Leadership Circle approach, another Circling practice.

Lastly, circling, coaching or therapy?

Therapy

The main role of therapy is to work on one’s mental well-being and to lessen side effects or horrendous examples. Therapy expects that something in the client should be fixed or recuperated, and the attention is many times on the past. By definition, psychotherapy is offered by authorized experts and isn’t presented in Circling.

Coaching

The main role of coaching is to improve one’s life, performance, and role representation at work, among other things. Coaching assumes that the client is already high functioning and is capable of taking consistent action steps towards his/her life vision. It is results-orientated, generative in nature, and requires the client to be responsible for their lives. It is often centered from now on, particularly the sort of future the client needs to make.

Circling

The main role of Circling, paradoxically, is the change of your approach to being through genuine relating. It is centered around the amount of admittance to aliveness and association you possess right now. We might investigate considerations, sentiments, and wants about the past and the future, however just to the degree that they are alive right now.

What’s next?

Join our fabulous online community for deep talk like circling, with regular circling events online (and offline sometimes), at: www.nas.io/deeptalk