Building intimacy (with strangers)

Reflections on the practice of circling

I spent six months in a group of eight strangers on weekly three-hour Zoom meets practising circling in a course with Circling Europe, facilitated by the organisation’s founders. The format of circles varied, but the basic instructions are constant: to speak about what’s alive for you, to go into the body and sensations, to own your experience, to speak your truth, and to value the connection above all. No topic, no goal, no direction.

It took a while to take on, to feel into it - weeks. There was some discomfort and a lot of wondering what the hell we are doing. Over time we got more used to each other and it became less strange. And we started taking steps to deepen the connection. These steps felt like small raptures in the neutral and pleasant fabric of the group by sharing something risky - either vulnerable parts of their experience, like being sad or feeling stuck in some way, or by expressing something antagonistic towards someone or the entire group.

Each time we clumsily would figure out what “trusting the connection” means. It meant staying curious - somewhere between triggered and apathetic - and leaning in. Finding ways of reacting truthfully and yet being aware that it’s just one possible take. Over time, as trust in the benevolence of the group deepened, we became less filtered.

I also took risks - and I was definitely not among the first ones to do so. The first risk I took was that I allowed myself not to be fully legible before I earn the right to say what is going in for me. My previous conditioning meant that I need to be precise and articulate before I speak. Eloquence as a protective mechanism was scary to let go of. And it was hard to be eloquent and express something raw at the same time. I remember I said I felt quite torn up about something and was afraid to speak so I didn’t break down crying. It felt like stepping off a cliff. The fear that it would be brushed off or minimised was strong. Feeling relief when it was met with curiosity and care. I realised it would be a totally small thing to someone else, but for me, it was a breaking of a pattern and though tiny, it felt big - and freeing.

Increasingly, I realised that I can create my own sense of safety when I speak from the body and voice a felt sense of what is true. That was a kind of new feeling of not having to read the room to check if it was safe. Knowing that something that is being felt by me cannot be disputed was empowering. I discovered that this first-person way of expressing has its own authority, although it might sound wobbly from the inside. It often turned out useful, too, naming some missing energy in the room.

Doing this more and more, I noticed how much underneath of what I say is a desire to appear nice. How I habitually pre-package what I say to elicit positive feelings in others. I did not even know that I basically don’t feel “negative feelings” in conversation unless I sense I can express them - they may come after. Basically, what I find hard to express becomes absent from my own consciousness for the sake of safety, I guess. And a big revelation - if I allow myself a wider range of things that I am able to express, I have more access to feeling things. I literally started to feel more alive. 

The next thing that became apparent is that this motivation of being nice is control for safety. The circling environment showed me the upside of releasing this control. I saw, time and again, when I let go of this control and favour fuller disclosure, the conversation deepens. And it brought a rather painful revelation that I am the master of not letting deeper conversations happen - the very thing I so much seek. I found the pleasure of speaking the truth and the sense of feeling, being more alive that comes with it. It became clear that control was a premature closure of a connection that did not need to happen.

And once the fog of people-pleasing started lifting, I was less afraid to reach out for real things underneath it. This led to exploring personal boundaries and fears around being in truth, even if it felt uncomfortable to reveal it. Training my nervous system to be authentic. Training it to receive the energy of others and let it be where it is. Not fixing, not overriding. Watching divergence and being ok with it. Expanding understanding of various lenses on truth.

As my own drama of expressing myself became easier to manage, I became able to see myself and others more clearly, to see patterns and tendencies in how we think, speak, and feel. It became easier to notice how people have different ways of expressing themselves and how they are hungry to be heard and appreciated in their different ways of doing that. And, as the result, seeing how all our lenses and ways of being are valuable and add up to a more true and dense picture of a moment that we are in. 

And it became so much easier to listen. Not to extract information but simply to see another person better. This deep kind of listening is more akin to witnessing an unfolding without it needing to amount to a resolution. And feeling the simple joy of presence with another in that. By truly listening, a channel of curiosity, exchange and co-creation of reality would be open between us that would touch something real.

And I learned about judgements - what a constant stream of them is occurring. Of myself and others. Things I judge myself for and things I judge others for. There is a constant filter of craving and aversion - more of this, less of that. Pull and push. Because more safety was present, it became easier to pause and look inside these judgements from the side, more clearly and more in the moment. It was possible to find a way to voice and check them. To see their meaning before the first hit of tension or relaxation. 

Now if you got this far, you are probably asking - where is conflict?

This was a transformative experience in terms of the way I think of conflict too. While we did not have scream-out conflict, there were moments of disagreement, sometimes quite deep. But whilst it felt uncomfortable, it was workable. With all the heightened emotions present, conflict became an opportunity for clarification. People would turn toward it to understand what was happening better. Often there would be deeper, denser convergence after this, a release. And other times, simply a clearer, calmer ability to see different lenses on truth. 

I recently read a book on the formative power of metaphors by cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson “Metaphors we live by”.  Their key postulate is that metaphors that we use to describe things and behaviour are not just figures of speech that convey meaning, they also shape our cognition, and how we see and act in the world. Authors devote a great deal to talking about how we view arguments. Authors describe how in English, arguments are talked about as war. Participants take positions, have weak and strong points, one must surrender if another is to achieve victory, there needs to be a strategy, we attack and defend, manoeuvre, retreat or win. And this way of seeing conflict leads to how we act in conflict without fully realising it. Later in the book, they offer an idea to “imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way’. This is how it felt in the circling experience. The argument as a dance. Or I would even volunteer another metaphor - the argument as a gift, offered to be unwrapped by all parties to see what is inside.

In my exploration of circling, I also read a book by humanist psychologist Carl Rogers on the practice of group encounters that he pioneered in the 60s and 70s, one of the precursors to the current iteration of circling practice I was experiencing. He says: “To me, the group seems like an organism, having a sense of its own direction even it could not define that direction intellectually. This is reminiscent of a motion picture that once made a great impression on me. It was a film showing the white blood corpuscles moving very randomly through the bloodstream until a disease bacterium appeared. Then, in a fashion which could only be described as purposeful, they moved toward it. They surrounded it and gradually engulfed and destroyed it, them moved on again in their random way. Similarly, it seems to me, a group recognises unhealthy elements in its process, focuses on them, clears them up or eliminates them, and moves on toward becoming a healthier group. This is my way of saying that I have seen the “wisdom of the organism” exhibited at every level from sell to group.” This is what this experience was like.

And I often asked myself, with a certain degree of shame - am I finding this so valuable because I am so inept in developing my communications to be deeper? This is likely very much the case. What circling has helped me to see is how intimacy develops slow-motion, without things like common settings, histories, and compatibilities to fall back on. How it consists of these ingredients - openness, vulnerability, being met in that and returning it back. How nourishing it feels. In fact, when we gathered for a session after the course, we discussed how we missed this depth with people close to us - and are a bit at loss at how to create it. 

And it also made it painfully clear how lacking in intimacy our normal conversations are. How they are often rushed, judgemental, isolated and disconnected. How things move at a speed that makes it hard to explore anything beyond judgements. How unsafe everything feels. How much is at stake. How effectively there is a constant state of disconnect. How this disconnect easily flares up into conflict, escalating from fairly benign exchanges and leading to fractures. How we plaster over it rather than through it, and how fake everything feels as a result. How the circling practice itself does not make me any better in doing this, apart from feeling a deeper sense of lack.

This has left me with my two practice points. One is around the sense of congruence - a sense of alignment when body, feelings and mind are synchronised. I do feel this a lot on my own, especially in nature. But things get much more muddled in the group. Being grounded in my body, noticing when it shows signs of avoiding things, trusting myself to feel them and generally trusting in the power of first-hand sharing has been helping my communications outside of circling. This also made me conscious of this polarity - between safety and congruence. How do I take small risks to check the sense of safety in a connection to try a bit more congruence? This is a direction I am exploring.

Another one is the somewhat fuzzy idea of prioritising connection over my personal experience. This is also a polarity. Some connections only make sense if my personal experience is ok or I can walk away. In others, though, there is no choice, or there is a higher purpose. So the aim is to prioritise the experience of a connection even when something feels off and I am not enjoying the connection - like there is an argument, there is something unspoken. What if I am able to say to myself that this connection, this moment, is all we have, what if I let it be and feel into it? What is good about it? What IS worth savouring? What I sometimes find is that this connection can reveal what it wants - a topic to discuss or a thing to do together that helps to move past a disconnection. This is another direction I am trying to move into. 

And yet it is so hard. Vulnerability is hard. We have patterns that prevent us from being hurt in ways we have been in the past. We use power in place of intimacy. We have hierarchies, status signalling, and various withholds. It’s a lot of undoing. 

I am curious to hear what your experience in building intimacy

And I also want to share Carl Rogers’s talk on his experiences of communication. I reread it every now and then, when I need to find a connection to myself. And it has inspired this reflection.