Here’s someone else’s attempt to define and describe it: https://aella.substack.com/p/the-heart-of-circling
My favorite description is interpersonal meditation. Much as with regular meditation you sit and notice your experience, and then notice yourself noticing your experience, with circling you notice your experience in relation to others, and then notice yourself noticing your experience in relation to others, etc. You can also communicate your experience to others, much as you might communicate your experience to different parts of yourself in traditional meditation. The entire group becomes, in some sense, a single unit, exploring what it’s like to be in connection with each other.
This is an activity I found really interesting for a few years. I think it’s mostly a thing in Europe and the US west coast. I did maybe 7 sessions averaging two hours, an d it had an outsized impact on my life.
You sit in a circle with like 4-25 people. You track how you’re feeling – especially how you’re feeling about something someone else said – and say it, maybe. You can blurt things out if no one else is talking. You can ask questions of others – “I’m curious how that thing X said made you feel” is a common one.
For the most part, you cannot bring in context from outside the circle. It’s largely okay to say, “There’s some stuff going on in my life and I’m holding onto stress. I can feel it in my shoulders. It’s making it hard to focus on the people here.” (This is boring to say so I wouldn’t, but it’s allowed.) It’s not okay to go into specifics.
The visualization I have of circling is a pond where ripples hit objects, which then throw back their own ripples in response. Your job is to pay attention to the ambient ripples and, where they cause motion within you, make that motion apparent by speaking or moving, which puts more ripples back into the pond. Your job is not to be a pebble – you only put back motion where it was elicited by motion within the pond.
(But where does the first motion come from? From the tiny, minute random motions of the initial conditions. This makes the first 30-60 minutes of circling really boring.)
In the circles I’ve done, there have rarely been rules around what you can or cannot say. Circling suspends many social rules in favor of honesty, but it not a consequence free zone. In my experience, people are pretty conservative. On a scale of 0 to 10, where total honesty is 10 and the normal social level is 4, circling seems to produce 6.
I found it useful because, before circling, I’d never had an opportunity to tell someone to their face that I found them irritating, or that what they said didn’t seem honest and it made me mad. Simply getting to tell the truth made me more okay with not telling the truth when I judged it wasn’t appropriate, and also let me find ways to tell the truth in ways that would be well received.
Here are some ways such an admission might play out during circling.
- X would say something.
- me: I notice I’m irritated at you.
- X: I’m curious what it’s like to be irritated.
- me: It’s… gritty in my mind? Like having sand caught in soft tissue. I feel like an oyster, spinning out all this material over something quite small, this single comment, this single perception I have about you. It spawns all these other expectations about what kind of person you are, how you treat people around you, etc. Not sure if they’re true.
Or:
- I’d say: I notice I’m irritated.
- X: I’m sad that you’re irritated. I feel insecure and a little hurt.
- me: I feel a strong desire to cause those feelings to not be there, by taking back what I said, or apologizing.
- X: I feel a little violated and intruded on because you want to make my feelings not be there.
- At this point I have little to say, so I nod, looking at them, soaking in the sense data I’m getting from this person who feels a little violated and intruded on.
- Or maybe something about their comment strikes me as disingenuous – I think they’re having some bad feeling about me but it’s mostly about being rejected rather than being intruded on – but I have a high bar for expressing disbelief about someone’s honesty in the circle, so I don’t respond. I hold both possibilities in my mind, still looking at them, still taking them in.
or:
- me: I notice I’m irritated.
- X: I kind of don’t care? Maybe I should? But I’m glad I said what I said. Does that make you more irritated?
- me: (long pause to think about it, because no one has ever said that before and therefore I can’t use predictions to speed up loading a response) I think I’m a little delighted actually? I’m relieved that you kept your center, or something, that my saying my feelings can’t destroy your happiness about the way you expressed yourself.
or:
- me: I notice I’m irritated.
- X: I kind of don’t care. Does that make you more irritated?
- me: Yeah. Irritation with an edge of… uh, not hurt exactly, but there’s a sensation of giving up? Because if you don’t care about whether you communicate in a way that irritates me, that probably means we don’t have enough cooperative will to make pleasant conversation. And because I feel given up, I feel less interest in you.
- X: I’m sad you feel less interest.
- (a pause that feels both tense and amiable. My heart is racing but I also feel good because we’re being honest. Things may be hard – but the hardness of having to figure out what social lie to tell is gone.)
- me: I’m curious if there’s any lashing-out-ness accompanying that sadness. I think I might feel that way in your shoes – like, this person finds me irritating and isn’t interested anymore? Well! I, too, don’t care about them.
- X: Hmm. No. I don’t think so.
- (I nod; there’s a longer pause)
- me: Now I feel inferior to you because you’re, like, more emotionally advanced than I am.
Getting to say such things let me see what (a limited sample of) people look like when they hear those things. Having any data on how those conversational branches could go allowed me to not spend enormous effort giving those branches berth.
You know how you tense your body to let a cart pass you in a narrow aisle? I used to be like that but with any conversational branch where I or the other party communicated that we didn’t like something the other person was doing. Going down those branches on purpose changed my relationship with the cart.
I stopped because of the energy injection problem: because you can’t bring in outside context, you sort of have to wait around for the initial conditions to snowball into a context meaty enough to start reacting to. It seems like there’s a period where people have to lie to get the circle to a point where the truth alone is interesting.
As a result, people grandstand. They do weird things or have showy emotions that seem inauthentic. It’s prosocial, because it shortens the waiting time. But it also irritates me.
I’d bet that a variant that started with everyone getting 2 minutes to talk about some of their life context would be better, as long as the circle after that banned followup questions that tried to drag in any context other than that provided at the beginning.