(The term “Circling” also got recently trademarked so if you want to try it, it’s also being done under other names like “relatefulness” and “transformational connection” these days.)
Why did this happen? I feel like people who already know about circling probably know the answer to this, but that people who don't probably don't (I'm in the latter group).
I don't know the details. The official explanation is this:
When individuals with little training attempt to facilitate Circling, or teach/train others their arbitrarily altered versions and still call it Circling, then consumers and students – at best – receive a sub-standard experience and the reputation of Circling suffers greatly, along with its impact in the world.
Between the three schools there are hundreds of accounts of:
- People taking one or two 3-hour workshops, or merely experiencing Circling at a drop in event or festival, and then advertising that they are leading their own Circling workshops
- People coming to a few drop in events & turning around and offer “Circling” to large corporations for corporate culture training.
- People claiming they were emotionally abused by facilitators at an event that advertised itself as “Circling” but had no ties to any of the 3 Certified Circling Schools
In order to protect the public consumer and the legacy of Circling, we need to use the term “Circling” consistently and limit the use of the term to those who are actually using and teaching the authentic communication and relating tools taught by the Certified Circling Schools.
... but then I also heard it claimed that Circling Europe, previously one of the main Circling schools in very good standing, ended up not having a permission to use the trademark because the licensing fees for it would have been so exorbitant that CE found it better to use a different name than to pay them. So maybe it was more of a cash grab? (Or just a combination of several different motives.)
Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.
If someone asks me a question, I should answer.
No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.
In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.
That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not.
So then is circling just the voicing of the ever-present fact that you're free to violate social expectations if you're willing to annoy people?
I understand and agree with the stuff about "when you don't take social expectations as binding that's simultaneously freeing and difficult", but that's already the choice you have. If circling doesn't include any rules against trying to enforce social expectations in the usual way, then it seems like circling can't change anything. Is it just the effects of making this fact common knowledge?
Is it just the effects of making this fact common knowledge?
That wouldn't be an unreasonable interpretation to draw from my essay, though my explanation was only focused on explaining a specific subset of what's nice about Circling. I focused on that bit because someone asked, but Circling is not just that.
Duncan had a nice recent article talking about some of the other aspects:
Why?
- Understanding others. Circling is a constant stream of “X happened, and [person’s] experience of X was Y; it had such-and-such impact on them and they felt this-and-that in response.” It’s one of the best ways to really deeply get what it’s like to be another person, via a high-resolution export of their experience over a small number of moments.
- Being understood.
- Understanding yourself. Circling tends to slow you down enough that you can start to actually see what’s going on under the hood of your own mind, catch the leaps and projections and interpretations that usually happen without self-awareness. It’s a great way to make progress on thorny, confusing, intractable tangles.
- Feeling connected. The shared experience of being in a Circle with other people, and all being “in it” together, staring at the same mental objects and sharing how those objects impact each of you, is really good for closeness and connection.
- Experiencing authenticity. Circles provide a closed container that allows you to bend the rules of normal social interaction, which can allow you to relax some of the rigid shapes you have to hold yourself in just to get along with your colleagues and get through the day, etc. It’s a place where you can unmask, at least a little and sometimes quite a lot, at least some of the time.
- Building muscle. The skills that Circling requires and encourages are attentional, relational, metacognitive—the same sorts of skills required for therapy or rationality or original research. Circling can be an excellent practice ground for learning how to notice and seeing how thought works.
- It’s fun. As previously alluded, it can be trippy. It can be heartwarming. It can be fun like a rollercoaster, or a horror movie, or a long, grueling hike. There’s a wide range of pleasures and delights to be found in slowing down, dropping in, peeling back, and getting close.
When circling was first discussed here, there was a comment that led to a lengthy discussion about boundaries, but nobody seemed to dispute its other main claim, that "it is highly unlikely that [somebody] would have 3-11 people they reasonably trusted enough to have [group] sex with". Do you agree with that statement, and if so, do you think that the circling/sex analogy is invalid?
The truth of that literal statement depends on exactly how much trust someone would need in somebody else before having sex with them - e.g. to my knowledge, studies tend to find that most single men but very few if any women would be willing to have sex with a total stranger. Though I've certainly also known women who have had a relatively low bar of getting into bed with someone, even if they wouldn't quite do it with a total stranger.
But more relevantly, even if that statement was correct, I don't think it'd be a particularly good analogy to Circling. It seems to involve the "obligatory openness" fallacy that I mentioned before. I'm not sure why some people with Circling experience seemed to endorse it, but I'm guessing it has to do with some Circling groups being more into intimacy than others. (At the time of that discussion, I had only Circled once or twice, so probably didn't feel like I had enough experience to dispute claims by more experienced people.)
My own experience with Circling is that it's more like meeting a stranger for coffee. If both (all) of you feel like you want to take it all the way to having sex, you certainly can. But if you want to keep it to relatively shallow and guarded conversation because you don't feel like you trust the other person enough for anything else, you can do that too. Or you can go back and forth in the level of intimacy, depending on how the conversation feels to you and what topics it touches on. In my experience of Circling, I definitely wouldn't say that it feeling anywhere near as intimate as sex would be the norm.
You can also build up that trust over time. I think Circling is best when done with people who you already have some pre-existing reason to trust, or in a long-term group where you can get to know the people involved. That way, even if you start at a relatively shallow level, you can go deeper over time if (and only if) that feels right.
I mentioned on Twitter that to a significant extent, Circling taught me what “just be yourself” means to such an extent that I have a consistently good time on dates because I don’t feel like I need to perform. Somebody asked me to elaborate, so here’s what I wrote in response:
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For those who don’t know, Circling is… a practice that’s infamously hard to try to describe or define. That’s because it’s structurally anti-structure and anti-expectation, which is what allows for “being yourself”.
(At least, that’s my experience. There are different schools of it; my experience is from the Circling Europe style and may not apply to others.)
Many activities have rules: “soccer is played by two teams that…”. Circling mostly does not have rules, though it does have principles.
It’s done by people coming together and sharing their experience of what’s happening.
One description is “sharing what it’s like to be you, while finding out what it’s like for others to be themselves”. In any social event, a person will be thinking and feeling many things, and only sharing some of them. Circling is an invitation to share more of one’s experience. For example, if I was at a party, I might have thoughts like
“Oh I’m glad that he said that”
“I’m a little bored by this conversation”
“I think she was annoyed by that comment”
“I have this funny anecdote but I have to wait to say it, I hope the moment doesn’t pass by”
Normally I would keep all of those to myself. But Circling is an invitation to share my experience, so I might say some of them. And it’s also an invitation for me to ask about someone else’s experience, if I e.g. say something and then wonder what they felt about it.
Important caveat: there’s no obligation to share more than what you’re comfortable with. There’s a common misunderstanding of Circling as obligatory openness. But “I don’t want to answer that” is also a sharing of your experience.
No rules = no rule saying that you have to answer.
In fact, if someone says that they are curious about my reaction to something, it’s totally fine for me to just say “okay” and then change the topic to something else that feels more interesting to me.
That said, it is also okay for the other to get annoyed by that and say it, which they might or might not. I once heard someone say that if you’ve Circled once and think that you now know what Circling is like, that’s like having seen a single movie and thinking that you now know what all movies are like.
This is because things may go completely differently in different groups.
In one group, I ignore a question and the conversation moves on.
In another, I ignore a question and someone shares that they appreciate me following my interest.
In another, someone gets annoyed at me.
Just as explicit games have rules, normal conversation has all kinds of implicit expectations.
Circling is a group conversation about your current experiences where you all adopt the convention that no statement is ever an implicit bid. E.g. if I say “I feel angry at you”, that usually implies all sorts of bids, like “You should apologize” and “Others should take my side”. In circling everyone agrees to interpret it merely as “I am contributing to the conversation by reporting my current experience”.
This is what makes Circling both freeing and difficult. You don’t need to say anything you don’t want to. But if there are no social conventions dictating what you _should_ say and it’s your own choice, what will you say?
This can be excruciating. A form of Circling that takes the freedom to an extreme is called Surrendered Leadership, where the facilitator imposes minimal control.
If some people want to break off from the rest of the circle and go do their own thing? They can do that.
In one SL event I was at, everyone just arrived and sat down. For several minutes, nobody said anything; there was no intro, no preamble, no nothing.
I forget what someone’s first words were, but they might have been something like “I’m feeling impatient for something to happen”
Someone may have shared their gratitude for having another express the same thing they were feeling, and things went on from there.
I tend to be sensitive to social expectations and things like turn-taking in conversation. With no rules for that, I could speak as much as I wanted, if I was okay with taking the space from others… but I also couldn’t use those rules for guidance on how much to speak, nor could I rely on those rules to make sure that others would give me the space I wanted.
That got excruciating. One part of me wanted to take up space and another wanted to regulate it, but didn’t know how.
But, it also got magical. There’s really no other word to describe it.
Something very peculiar can happen if a brain realizes that none of its normal expectations apply and it has no idea of what to expect. The mind can drop into a state of just not knowing, and simply being open to anything that arises.
With no expectation of being judged by others, there is no fear.
With no expectation of needing to say the right thing, there is no self-judgment.
With no expectation that the next moment will be dull, there is no boredom.
With no expectation that the next moment will be predictable, there is curiosity of what it will be.
It feels like an altered state. I like to imagine it as a throwback to a young child’s state of mind, where experience hasn’t yet calcified perception and everything is novel.
It’s hard to maintain. Any expectation, including “I’m going to be without expectation” will bring in structure that the mind coalesces around. Trying to explicitly maintain it brings in the expectation that it needs to be maintained.
Even in Circling, I’ve experienced it rarely.
But having experienced it, my bodymind carries a memory of the vibe involved. An echo of what it’s like to drop any self-imposed expectations and demands, to drop into a state where I can just report on my experience and share and say what feels natural.
Since then, whenever I’ve been on a date with a stranger, I’ve been able to drop back into that. With no need for the date to lead somewhere in particular. No need to present myself in a particular way. Simply relaxing into a sense of just being and enjoying their company. (And I daresay that they’ve enjoyed those dates, too.)
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At this point, for anyone who thinks that Circling sounds really scary: I’ve focused on describing the most extremely free version of it. I wouldn’t suggest starting out with that. There’s “birthday Circling” with some more structure, that’s easier to begin with.
A good Circling group will also start out with warm-up exercises that help you get into it, so you don’t need to dive into the full thing right away with no idea of what to do or how to be.
(The term “Circling” also got recently trademarked so if you want to try it, it’s also being done under other names like “relatefulness” and “transformational connection” these days.)