(Epistemic status: intuitions built off of somewhere around 70 hours of circling over the course of the last year and a half, including facilitating somewhere around 15-20 circles.)
The topic of the meetup is… circling. Circling, it seems, is about circling. We’re explicitly supposed not to talk about anything. Or try to accomplish anything, other than connect.
The art does have an end other than itself (at least I think it does), but a beginner focusing on what the beginner thinks that end is is not a good way to begin learning the art. Circling is like meditation in that way.
Then disaster struck – Jacob worried that disaster had struck. And felt he had to Do Something. Treat the situation as bad.
Which made it bad. From there, all downhill. Nothing disastrous, but less connection, more awkward, no road to recovery.
Facilitating circles is really quite difficult and this is a reasonably large component of why; it takes a decent amount of tacit knowledge and skill to learn how to navigate issues like this as a facilitator. Part of the skill involves welcoming whatever is happening in the circle, including your own sense that Something Is Wrong and needs to be Fixed, and in the long run learning how to take all that as object.
Circling Europe has a philosophy towards facilitation called “surrendered leadership” that I’m not particularly qualified to explain, but roughly it involves thinking of facilitation as just being a really good participant, as opposed to a person who is in charge of trying to make the circle “good” as opposed to “bad,” whatever those mean.
I also think it’s in fact a mistake to focus explicitly on connection as a goal while circling, although others might disagree. At least for beginners I think this is a distraction from finding out what is even happening in everyone’s experience at all.
Tonight, we’d had a circle about circling. Previously, we’d had a circle about something quite important. An object level to work with, and build upon, to prevent the meta cycle. So tonight felt not real, like a game. Previously was not a game.
Circles are not about circling; to the extent that they’re about anything, they’re about what the participants are experiencing in the moment. Your experience is the object level.
You might be experiencing a bunch of meta thoughts about circling, and you can talk about those thoughts if you want, but a different thing you can do, that a facilitator may or may not attempt to encourage you to do, is to talk about the experience of having those thoughts, especially any emotional flavor or accompanying sensations in your body. E.g. rather than “I’m worried we’ll be going too meta,” something like “I notice I feel frustrated and impatient; I have a desire to tap my fist against the ground, and I feel a flushing in my face and upper chest. I imagine the frustration and impatience is about a worry that we’re going too meta and wasting time, and the idea of wasting time has me feeling angry.”
You also might be experiencing your thoughts wandering off to an unrelated topic, and you can talk about that—not necessarily the topic, but your experience of your thoughts wandering off to that topic. E.g. “I notice my thoughts wandering to a really interesting essay I read. I’m a little worried that I’m no longer ‘circling right,’ whatever that means, and feeling some embarrassment and awkwardness around that.”
That seems right at the end, in a unwilling-to-quite-express-preferences-but-expressing-them-anyway kind of very circling-way?
The suggestions on facilitation style point towards the don’t-introduce-everyone-at-once concept being important, since it doesn’t seem compatible with not following that principle.
It sounds like you think that having an explicit object-other-than-itself that isn’t pure raw ground level is a mistake, or at least a different class of thing than what you think is the valuable thing? Say a bit more there?
unwilling-to-quite-express-preferences-but-expressing-them-anyway kind of very circling-way?
I think expressing preferences is fine, but there’s usually some more fine-grained aspect of your experience of having the preference that you can also talk about. E.g. “I want to change topics” is fine, but better would be “I’m feeling impatient with the current discussion and want to talk about something that will feel more productive,” or something. And then someone else might ask you more about how it feels to be impatient and want something more productive to happen, etc.
The suggestions on facilitation style point towards the don’t-introduce-everyone-at-once concept being important, since it doesn’t seem compatible with not following that principle.
Little confused about how to parse this sentence. Not sure what “don’t-introduce-everyone-at-once concept” means, or what principle you’re referring to with the phrase “that principle.”
It sounds like you think that having an explicit object-other-than-itself that isn’t pure raw ground level is a mistake, or at least a different class of thing than what you think is the valuable thing? Say a bit more there?
I think it’s something like an advanced thing to try, and it’s not something I’d start beginners on by default, although this isn’t a strong opinion, and I might change my mind if I experimented with it more.
What I expect to happen to most groups of people if you try to start them circling on an explicit object-level topic is that they’ll mostly talk about the topic in a way that makes it harder for them to see what’s going on in their experience and the experience of other people in the circle, e.g. if everyone is regurgitating cached thoughts and/or signaling intelligence or whatever. If there are enough experienced circlers in the circle then I’d feel more confident that this sort of thing will get called out if it starts happening, but I’d be uncomfortable trying it with a circle consisting entirely of beginners, especially if the facilitator isn’t very experienced. There’s a thing about building form here.
What often happens in the absence of a topic to start with, especially in groups of people who know each other already, is that a topic sort of emerges naturally out of the circling dynamics, e.g. maybe Person A says something that triggers Person B and then the topic is whatever’s happening between A and B, and sometimes a third Person C gets involved and then the topic is whatever’s happening with the three of them. But in order to get to this point with beginners, the facilitator needs to be able to guide people to the point where they feel comfortable saying things that might make other people in the circle feel uncomfortable, and that’s tricky to do as a beginner.
In general, it’s worth mentioning that, in my view, a lot of the advice and guidelines people give beginners about circling are training wheels / band-aids meant to help you avoid various flavors of being distracted away from your experience, and once you get good enough at zeroing in on your experience you can mostly discard them.
(Epistemic status: intuitions built off of somewhere around 70 hours of circling over the course of the last year and a half, including facilitating somewhere around 15-20 circles.)
The art does have an end other than itself (at least I think it does), but a beginner focusing on what the beginner thinks that end is is not a good way to begin learning the art. Circling is like meditation in that way.
Facilitating circles is really quite difficult and this is a reasonably large component of why; it takes a decent amount of tacit knowledge and skill to learn how to navigate issues like this as a facilitator. Part of the skill involves welcoming whatever is happening in the circle, including your own sense that Something Is Wrong and needs to be Fixed, and in the long run learning how to take all that as object.
Circling Europe has a philosophy towards facilitation called “surrendered leadership” that I’m not particularly qualified to explain, but roughly it involves thinking of facilitation as just being a really good participant, as opposed to a person who is in charge of trying to make the circle “good” as opposed to “bad,” whatever those mean.
I also think it’s in fact a mistake to focus explicitly on connection as a goal while circling, although others might disagree. At least for beginners I think this is a distraction from finding out what is even happening in everyone’s experience at all.
Circles are not about circling; to the extent that they’re about anything, they’re about what the participants are experiencing in the moment. Your experience is the object level.
You might be experiencing a bunch of meta thoughts about circling, and you can talk about those thoughts if you want, but a different thing you can do, that a facilitator may or may not attempt to encourage you to do, is to talk about the experience of having those thoughts, especially any emotional flavor or accompanying sensations in your body. E.g. rather than “I’m worried we’ll be going too meta,” something like “I notice I feel frustrated and impatient; I have a desire to tap my fist against the ground, and I feel a flushing in my face and upper chest. I imagine the frustration and impatience is about a worry that we’re going too meta and wasting time, and the idea of wasting time has me feeling angry.”
You also might be experiencing your thoughts wandering off to an unrelated topic, and you can talk about that—not necessarily the topic, but your experience of your thoughts wandering off to that topic. E.g. “I notice my thoughts wandering to a really interesting essay I read. I’m a little worried that I’m no longer ‘circling right,’ whatever that means, and feeling some embarrassment and awkwardness around that.”
That seems right at the end, in a unwilling-to-quite-express-preferences-but-expressing-them-anyway kind of very circling-way?
The suggestions on facilitation style point towards the don’t-introduce-everyone-at-once concept being important, since it doesn’t seem compatible with not following that principle.
It sounds like you think that having an explicit object-other-than-itself that isn’t pure raw ground level is a mistake, or at least a different class of thing than what you think is the valuable thing? Say a bit more there?
I think expressing preferences is fine, but there’s usually some more fine-grained aspect of your experience of having the preference that you can also talk about. E.g. “I want to change topics” is fine, but better would be “I’m feeling impatient with the current discussion and want to talk about something that will feel more productive,” or something. And then someone else might ask you more about how it feels to be impatient and want something more productive to happen, etc.
Little confused about how to parse this sentence. Not sure what “don’t-introduce-everyone-at-once concept” means, or what principle you’re referring to with the phrase “that principle.”
I think it’s something like an advanced thing to try, and it’s not something I’d start beginners on by default, although this isn’t a strong opinion, and I might change my mind if I experimented with it more.
What I expect to happen to most groups of people if you try to start them circling on an explicit object-level topic is that they’ll mostly talk about the topic in a way that makes it harder for them to see what’s going on in their experience and the experience of other people in the circle, e.g. if everyone is regurgitating cached thoughts and/or signaling intelligence or whatever. If there are enough experienced circlers in the circle then I’d feel more confident that this sort of thing will get called out if it starts happening, but I’d be uncomfortable trying it with a circle consisting entirely of beginners, especially if the facilitator isn’t very experienced. There’s a thing about building form here.
What often happens in the absence of a topic to start with, especially in groups of people who know each other already, is that a topic sort of emerges naturally out of the circling dynamics, e.g. maybe Person A says something that triggers Person B and then the topic is whatever’s happening between A and B, and sometimes a third Person C gets involved and then the topic is whatever’s happening with the three of them. But in order to get to this point with beginners, the facilitator needs to be able to guide people to the point where they feel comfortable saying things that might make other people in the circle feel uncomfortable, and that’s tricky to do as a beginner.
In general, it’s worth mentioning that, in my view, a lot of the advice and guidelines people give beginners about circling are training wheels / band-aids meant to help you avoid various flavors of being distracted away from your experience, and once you get good enough at zeroing in on your experience you can mostly discard them.