I recently circled for the first time. I had two one-hour sessions on consecutive days, with 6 and 8 people respectively.
My main thoughts: this seems like a great way for getting to know my acquaintances, connecting emotionally, and build closer relationships with friends. The background emotional processing happening in individuals is repeatedly brought forward as the object of conversation, for significantly enhanced communication/understanding. I appreciated getting to poke and actually find out whether people’s emotional states matched the words they were using. I got to ask questions like:
When you say you feel gratitude, do you just mean you agree with what I said, or do you mean you’re actually feeling warmth toward me? Where in your body do you feel it, and what is it like?
Not that a lot of my circling time was skeptical of people’s words, a lot of the time I trusted the people involved to be accurately reporting their experiences. It was just very interesting—when I noticed I didn’t feel like someone was honest about some micro-emotion—to have the affordance to stop and request an honest internal report.
It felt like there was a constant tradeoff between social-interaction and noticing my internal state. If all I’m doing is noticing my internal state, then I stop engaging with the social environment and don’t have anything off substance to report on. If I just focus on the social interactions, then I never stop and communicate more deeply about what’s happening for me internally. I kept on having an experience like “Hey, I want to interject to add nuance to what you said-” and then stopping and going “So, when you said <x> I felt a sense of irritation/excitement/distrust/other because <y>”.
One moment that I liked a lot, was around the epistemic skill of not deciding your position a second earlier than necessary. Person A was speaking, and person B jumped in and said something that sounded weirdly aggressive. It didn’t make sense, and then person B said “Wait, let me try to figure out what I mean, I feel I’m not using quite the right words”. My experience was first to feel some worry for person A feeling attacked. I quickly calmed down, noticing how thoroughly out of character it would be for person B to actually be saying anything aggressive. I then realised I had a clear hypothesis for what person B actually wanted to say, and waited politely for them to say it. But then I noticed that actually I didn’t have much evidence for my hypothesis at all… so I moved into a state of only curiosity about what person B was going to say, not holding onto my theory of what they would say. And indeed, it turned out they said something entirely different. (I subsequently related this whole experience to person B during the circle.)
This is really important. Being able to hold off on keeping your favoured theory in the back of your head and counting all evidence as pro- or anti- the theory, and instead keeping the theory separate from your identity and feeling full creative freedom to draw a new theory around the evidence that comes in.
There were other personal moments where I brought up how I was feeling toward my friends and they to me, in ways that allowed me to look at long-term connections and short-term conflicts in a clearer light. It was intense.
Both circles were very emotionally interesting and introspectively clarifying, and I will do more with friends in the future.
I recently circled for the first time. I had two one-hour sessions on consecutive days, with 6 and 8 people respectively.
My main thoughts: this seems like a great way for getting to know my acquaintances, connecting emotionally, and build closer relationships with friends. The background emotional processing happening in individuals is repeatedly brought forward as the object of conversation, for significantly enhanced communication/understanding. I appreciated getting to poke and actually find out whether people’s emotional states matched the words they were using. I got to ask questions like:
Not that a lot of my circling time was skeptical of people’s words, a lot of the time I trusted the people involved to be accurately reporting their experiences. It was just very interesting—when I noticed I didn’t feel like someone was honest about some micro-emotion—to have the affordance to stop and request an honest internal report.
It felt like there was a constant tradeoff between social-interaction and noticing my internal state. If all I’m doing is noticing my internal state, then I stop engaging with the social environment and don’t have anything off substance to report on. If I just focus on the social interactions, then I never stop and communicate more deeply about what’s happening for me internally. I kept on having an experience like “Hey, I want to interject to add nuance to what you said-” and then stopping and going “So, when you said <x> I felt a sense of irritation/excitement/distrust/other because <y>”.
One moment that I liked a lot, was around the epistemic skill of not deciding your position a second earlier than necessary. Person A was speaking, and person B jumped in and said something that sounded weirdly aggressive. It didn’t make sense, and then person B said “Wait, let me try to figure out what I mean, I feel I’m not using quite the right words”. My experience was first to feel some worry for person A feeling attacked. I quickly calmed down, noticing how thoroughly out of character it would be for person B to actually be saying anything aggressive. I then realised I had a clear hypothesis for what person B actually wanted to say, and waited politely for them to say it. But then I noticed that actually I didn’t have much evidence for my hypothesis at all… so I moved into a state of only curiosity about what person B was going to say, not holding onto my theory of what they would say. And indeed, it turned out they said something entirely different. (I subsequently related this whole experience to person B during the circle.)
This is really important. Being able to hold off on keeping your favoured theory in the back of your head and counting all evidence as pro- or anti- the theory, and instead keeping the theory separate from your identity and feeling full creative freedom to draw a new theory around the evidence that comes in.
There were other personal moments where I brought up how I was feeling toward my friends and they to me, in ways that allowed me to look at long-term connections and short-term conflicts in a clearer light. It was intense.
Both circles were very emotionally interesting and introspectively clarifying, and I will do more with friends in the future.