The Second Circle

"Then disaster struck – Jacob worried that disaster had struck" <- made me laugh a lot.

(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 must have an end other than itself or it collapses into infinite recursion [LW · GW].

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 [LW(p) · GW(p)].

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."

I've done about 15hrs of circling.

Two person circles seem extremely useful for conflict resolution or when I get a feeling of "I'd like to talk to X person, but something in our communication styles or behavior seems to be getting in the way." This works at different levels of familiarity, like when I have a friend who I trust deeply, but want to have an even deeper conversation, then a circle between us works as a small wedge to get to a point where it becomes safe (or not) to bring up the deeper thing. I've also had good experiences of a more standard "getting to know a person and why they act the way that they do", circling seems very good for querying the why's behind behavior, and why certain ideas are important --- doing closer to the first circle thing. Except when I have done this there was no topic then eventually things "came up". Sometimes the things that "come up" seem important, sometimes even more important than the things I would have thought of as important, and sometimes not. But doing this has not felt like a game --- in every 2 person circle I've done, I ended up learning a great deal about the other persons models or changing my mind about something, but I wouldn't have been able to predict the topic at the beginning.

I bring this up because I think circling with the aim of connection leads to important things -- it leads to caring about what the other person thinks is important and trying to understand it. It leads to engaging with conflict and differences. It seems like many people have high conflict aversion and will leave a conversation than try to discuss a different opinion, but when there is a commitment to connection, there is a commitment to being engaged with the other person while the different models are explored. I want this to happen more in all conversations. Another reason circling might be good for this is that people end up 'revealing their weapons'--- their social defenses, judgements, and fears are made clear, which takes uncertainty out of the conflict.

I am genuinely confused about the point being made. Is it (a) don't abuse a good thing (b) different kind of circling for different kind of purposes (serious circling vs game circling for practice) or (c) something else entirely.

It feels like a lot of words to say very little of substance - this is not meant as an attack, just a candid observation. This piece doesn't make me angry or isn't wrong, or anything like that.

It also feels very silly - this is not about the piece but about the situation. And I wonder what that means, that I find it silly. Given my priors and background, this situation is something I don't imagine being able to take seriously.

Circling feels weird to start with, but I can understand its rationale fairly well. My worry would be that it would devolve into something quite unnatural and devoid of some sort of common sense. It would be whatever the opposite of smooth is - awkward maybe, but that's not totally it either. I think in some important sense, smoothness matters a lot, but I'm still missing pieces of the puzzle here.

Anyway, this is not a criticism of circling, just some prior predictions about the experience of circling. What worries me is that this kind of experience report (and actually, your previous post as well) point towards validating those predictions. And I don't really have a point here, I'm just sharing my thoughts in case they would be useful, cause some reflection or some interesting comment.