Why Try Circling? Part 3
I am pretty serious about meditation. I’ve been meditating since 2006 but I really started taking on a dedicated practice in the Summer of 2019. It’s changed my life and saved me from a lifelong, previously intractable depression. I spend about an hour a day meditating, and meet every two weeks with a coach. By my best estimate, I’ve spent about 1300 hours meditating at this point.
I’ve gained some important insights about myself in the course of my practice. I’ve learned that my life is bigger than any story or label I might apply to it; I’ve learned that there is wisdom to be found in discomfort and pain; and I’ve learned that there is profound love and gratitude to be found in the moment-to-moment experience of being alive.
This stuff has been great, and the practice continues to expand, unfold, and challenge me. And yet, there clearly is a sense that there is a limit to the wisdom I can gain sitting alone on a cushion. I can drop into moments of profound bliss and equanimity and then moments later have to deal with a child that is upset about the unfairness of their screen-time privileges.
Humans are social creatures, and there is much about who we are that can only really be seen and understood in connection to others. Circling offers an opportunity for this type of insight.
In a few months of Circling I have entered into territory that has revealed all sorts of fascinating territory for growth. I see patterns that have persisted since childhood, habits that have been built out of fear and self preservation, and I’ve found a container where I feel emboldened to explore the edges of my comfort zone.
In a recent session of Circling I was watching an interaction between two other participants. One of them simply expressed a sense of safety with the other and I noticed that I felt jealous. Normally I might have ignored that feeling, or chastised myself for feeling it, or pretended I didn’t care, but within the container of Circling I felt safe enough to actually express it.
There is something about saying something out loud that not only lets you see it clearly, but also takes away some of its power. In Circling there is space to acknowledge the basic desire to be liked and accepted and insecurities that go along with this. There is space to notice the ways in which we posture and curate our image in order to protect ourselves. There is space to see that this is all part of the human experience and to learn to work skillfully and lovingly with whatever arises in our hearts.
Perhaps this is a lesson and an insight that would have come with time through meditation. Many meditation practitioners talk about slowly learning to take what you learn on the cushion and applying it to life — to learn to meditate all the time — but I like that Circling gives me a way to start practicing that directly, right now.
