circle

In November, I flew to Boston. This meant breaking my promise to myself that I'd limit my long-haul flights to one a year (I'd already taken two at that point), leaving the kids and Dan to fend for themselves for two weeks, and a bit of panic when I realized *after* I bought the tickets that I would be landing the day before the election. And what was worth all this trouble? A "circle training" a One Spirit friend was hosting at her therapy practice in New Hampshire. Which...I cannot say for certain why I was drawn to. But my friend thought I'd like it. I trust her. It's so nice to have friends! 

I have not exactly loved similar workshops in the past. Circle work seems so simple (we sit in a circle! we take turns talking! didn't we do this in kindergarten?) and powerful (down with boring lectures! up with listening to each other!), but the facilitator trainings get weighed down with special terminology, prescriptive rules, and toxic positivity. Not to mention the guru effect, where we are theoretically on equal footing but actually most of the people in the room are mainly interested in the hearing from the (often self-described) experts leading the class, who are themselves conveniently fond of listening to their own voices. Cue me desperately trying to stay upright and engaged while the tenth person in a row thanks the facilitator for their deep insights and asks if they could talk at a bit more length about the use of the time-out chime? (True confessions: I probably only got through One Spirit because the weekends were online and I could periodically turn my camera off and roll my eyes HARD.)

So what was different this time? We started with an exercise you'd think would drive the touchy-feeliest of touchy-feelers to eye rolling: the driftwood-organizing circle. We sat in the circle. There was a pile of driftwood in the middle. We had one "talking piece" (acting piece, in this case?). The rule was that the person with the talking piece could do whatever they wanted with the driftwood for as long as they saw fit. Everyone else watched. In silence. When you were finished, you passed the talking piece to the next person in the circle. If you didn't want to move the driftwood, you could pass, but the exercise didn't end until the talking piece had gone one whole round with no one passing; if anyone moved a piece of driftwood, everyone got another chance.

You can imagine how it went. Except you can't, because how it went was incredibly specific to the eight people sitting in that specific circle on that specific day. There was clearly no right answer and nothing at all riding on this. And yet, we shared ownership of the outcome. Who had an idea? Who was bold enough to mess with something someone else had set up? Who clearly tried hard not to mess with anything that was already set up? How was this going to end? Was this going to end? I don't remember how long the exercise went on (quite a while) or what the driftwood looked like in the end, but somehow: I stayed engaged, and not just through sheer force of will.

And I stayed engaged for all four days of the training, which is some kind of record. I guess it could be that our circle keepers, Leaf Seligman and Balmeet Lasky, won me over with the driftwood, because my speaking hangups didn't have to be front and center right away. But I think it was more than that. They were so dedicated to modeling nonviolence, non-judgement, authenticity, humility, co-creation and maybe above all: radically generous space-holding. I have the feeling that if the driftwood exercise had taken us four days, that would have been our training, and that would have been just fine. "This is my first time in a group in which I was allowed to speak until I was finished," said my other One Spirit friend, who is gloriously gregarious. It may have been my first time in a group in which it was truly ok for me not to speak until I was ready.

From Leaf's book:

Imagine feeling safe and valued just as you are, presenting your authentic self. What would it mean to create community in the context of being whole and being held in that wholeness - which is to say, held in our brokenness, our fragility, our tenderness, our crankiness, our head-strong stubborn-as-a-mule-ness, our yearning to belong, to be loved, appreciated, acknowledged? Think of the energy undimmed by that kind of refuge, that kind of relationship.

She calls this restorative practice - a refuge from all that is not genuine. I do get a little squirmy around the concept of the "authentic self" because I'm so aware, as a stranger in a strange land, of how authenticity is itself socially constructed. (Tomorrow I'm bringing chocolate chip cookies to choir to celebrate my birthday. I will make them using the original Tollhouse recipe and in muffin tins so they are all the same diameter. Is this authentic? In a vacuum, I like the recipes that contain random ingredients [corn flakes! coconut!] and more resemble cow pies. But I authentically want my choir-mates to enjoy the cookies and I have learned that too much imprecision will disturb the Swiss soul. So.) But that's just it, this isn't a science, or even a method - and I think that's where the other trainings tend to get off track. It's a practice. 

And it's a practice I think the world needs a lot more of. 

I need to find some people who are not a long-haul flight away who want to practice with me...