Circling is an arena of personal experimentation

What is the practice of Circling? What is it for?

Guy Sengstock called it a relational yoga, and it is generally thought of as a meditation, applied to connecting with other people.

To me, it is an arena of personal experimentation.

It is where I have found the most space for epistemological growth.

I go there to refine my principles of relating: how I want to act around other people. Yes, also how I want to be. But there is most choicefulness around act; there is a richer inquiry, something sharper and more nourishing, more payoff for time spend contemplating.

It is where I question the authority that guides whether I speak or stay silent, whether I try to nurture or challenge, whether I move or stay still, make more noise than is traditional; when is right to expand connection outward from myself.

Circling is a practice of personal epistemology. It can be where you wrestle with your principles, and more than that, get a somatic felt sense of the principle and its results, so that the principle doesn’t just become an ignored message on post-it.

Circling therefore can be how somatic practice gets linked to intellectual integrity; for the intellect is a part of human nature too, though a singularly precarious one.