The Five Circling Principles
The Five Principles Can Be Lights on a Path to Presence with Each Other. The practice of circling encourages you to draw your own conclusions, while continuously allowing them to be re-drawn. These principles can be lights on this path to presence with each other.
The following descriptions are not comprehensive—but they will give you enough to start testing out how you can deepen your presence both inside and outside of Circles.
They are not rules, they are guidelines. They are not answers, they are questions to be lived. They are not static, they are evolving as we evolve.
I Commitment to Connection
An invitation to stay in connection with whatever is arising between you and others. This includes revealing yourselves and being open to the impacts from—and on—others. This does not mean any forced sense of having to be open or vulnerable; it does mean we inquire deeply into the truth of what is here instead of habitually reacting or avoiding. We can just as easily share and explore the feelings of being guarded, distant, confused, or unknown with someone as we can the feelings of vulnerability, closeness, or appreciation.​
To get a feel for this principle, think of a time when you spoke something uncomfortable—maybe you stuck up for a friend being bullied, or said the elephant in the room at a family gathering. How’d it go?
Can you also remember not speaking up about something that seemed true and important to you but you did not voice it because you were afraid of others’ reactions?​
It is these types of situations and feelings that we meet in presence and therefore develop powerful and agile ways to go from conflict/pain into creating deeper win-win connection.
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II Owning Your Experience
Getting to our deepest truth, our unarguable experience beyond our projections. Encourages us to take responsibility for what is happening within us, and being open to that changing. Often this requires a letting go of outcomes and admitting feelings that challenge our sense of who we are. It involves the willingness to feel our body, the subtleties in our experience and our more challenging emotions. The highest level of this principle is feeling 100% responsible for all of our experience.
To get a feel for this principle, consider some place in your life where you are blaming external circumstances, where something feels outside of your control. Now, can you simply name how it feels to be you?
E.g. Shifting from ‘my boss is unfairly victimizing me’ to ‘in the presence of my boss I feel tense and insecure’. The first statement is arguable, but the second statement you can know to be true in yourself and is more an owned experience.
Have you experienced someone that seemed to blame you for being who you are, compared to someone that was willing to be really honest about how they contribute to a challenge in the connection with you? The difference can be small and yet so powerful.
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III Staying With the Level of Sensation
By including the subtle bodily sensations in our awareness and expression, we can share with more power, presence, and discover more truth. These sensations often contain the least interpretation and therefore can surprise us with connections outside of rational analysis. This is about alive embodied sensations and emotions—not ‘dry’ body sensation sharing. To get a feel for this, notice the act of your breathing. Can you sense the belly moving in and out? Can you feel the air brushing against the skin beneath your nostrils? What else do you notice in relation to me, the writer, and the content, any sense of emotional reaction or feelings of opening or tension?
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IV Trusting Experience
Invites us to honor the relative truth of any given experience inside of us, while discerning what is happening. It is often an invitation to trust the unknown, to include non-rational experiences, and points to something beyond our individual consciousness. To get a feel for this, find a self-judgement, especially one you want to get rid of. Now imagine the judgement spoken with compassion and wisdom… what is the gift it is offering you?
An example for me is I often judge myself for taking care of others when I’m really just uncomfortable with something in the connection. Listening to this discomfort underneath caretaking and sharing it openly can bring a deeper care, and a greater sense of my own power. So instead of a tepid caretaking I’m able to bring a powerful love that embraces both of us.
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V Being With the Other in Their World
Deeply appreciating the perfection of someone in each moment, while getting penetrating insight into the nuances of their way of being. Seeing their inherent innocence, assuming nothing, and being willing to challenge assumptions in both of you (without any effort to change how someone or something is). This principle is a pointer to not just understand someone intellectually, but to surrender into being with them in that particular moment.
To get a feel for this, think of a politician you do not like, or person in your life if that is more charged. Now imagine you are them, doing the exact things they are. But unlike them, you can inquire into your experience as it happens: what is it like in your body, how do you see others, what is causing you to feel that way, and do those things? Are you threatened, afraid, or yearning for anything? How does what you’re doing make perfect sense to you?