An autist's introduction to Circling

The reason this essay exists is that I have heard dozens of people over the years say something like “Yeah, so I keep asking people to explain what Circling is, and everybody keeps refusing and claiming it’s impossible and that you have to experience it to understand and honestly it’s soured me on the whole thing.”

(Literally dozens. Refusing-to-explain-Circling is a thing.)

So I’m just going to jump right in with the explanation, as if you already wanted to know, and I’ll back up to stuff like Why and How afterward.

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“Circling” is a special kind of conversation, in which the topic of the conversation is the subjective experience of the conversation, as it’s happening.

i.e. the thing you are all talking about is what it is like for each of you to be present in the conversation as it unfolds. What you’re noticing, what you’re feeling, the impressions and stories you have of the other people, the shifts in your own physical and emotional state. You take the flurry of second-to-second thoughts, feelings, and reactions that would normally shape and inform what you would say next, and instead just talk about them directly, e.g. “oh, huh—while I was listening to what you just said, I noticed I felt an impulse to [whatever].”

This made-up example is very afterschool-Bible-cartoon cheesy, but:

Alexis: I’m noticing that my attention keeps landing on Blake. Like, my eyes just keep getting pulled in that direction.

Blake: Uhhhhhh, what, I—crap. Okay. Well. I’m, uh. Suddenly shy? …I notice that everybody’s looking at me and I feel a desire to curl up into a tiny ball and vanish.

Alexis: Oh, well, hearing that I’m feeling like … half apologetic, and half … desire to tickle-poke?

Cameron: Wait—what’s desire to tickle-poke like?

Alexis: What?

Cameron: I’m curious for something like … what were you actually feeling, that you ended up translating into the phrase ‘desire to tickle-poke’?

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Circles tend to last somewhere between 20 minutes and 2 hours, although they can go on literally all day and all night (it’s wise to use timers and alarms if you don’t want something open-ended). They tend to have 4-8 people in them, although you can do Circling just fine with only two or three people and I’ve been in Circles that had upwards of 30 participants.

(You can do Circling with just one person, if you want, but then it’s just called Gendlin’s Focusing.)

A Circle typically begins with all of the participants sitting in (you guessed it) a circle, usually on low chairs close to the floor. The focus of a Circle can be organic and freely drifting/evolving, or there can be an explicit intention for everyone to stay centered on a single person (the “birthday” boy/girl/creature). More rarely, a Circle can be about something specific that’s not a person, such as a concrete disagreement or a particular relationship.

Often, there will be some kind of guide or facilitator, a “lifeguard” on duty who’s trying to shepherd or midwife the experience. That person might bring to the role a lot of structure and rules and rituals and formal agreements, or they might be a chaos goblin, or they might behave in ways that are basically indistinguishable from the other participants. Each facilitator will have their own style, and their own range of ways-to-start-a-circle, but if you are sitting down with a few friends, having never Circled before, a simple and reliable way to kick things off looks like:

• Everybody closes their eyes and spends approximately a full minute slowing down and turning their attention inward, noticing what sensations are present in their body and what thoughts are popping up in their inner monologue and getting a handle on the overall color or feel of their present state.

• Over the course of the second minute, people slowly start to widen their attention, opening their eyes and noticing e.g. their own feet, and then the feet of the person next to them, and then the fact that there are multiple people next to them, while tracking the impact of this expanded attention on their present experience.

• Over the course of the third minute, people lift their attention all the way up and start making eye contact around the circle, feeling what it’s like to see the other people and be seen in turn, noticing where their attention sticks and where it slides off, noticing what it’s like to be themselves in this moment.

• At some point, someone will feel sufficiently moved to share something, often starting with words like “I’m feeling” or “I’m noticing that” or “I have a story that” or “When I look at X, I [whatever].”

Usually, someone else will be sufficiently impacted by that first person’s statement that they’ll feel like speaking in response, often starting with words like “Hearing that, I notice [blah].” If not, return to silence until the spirit moves someone else.

(It’s pretty important not to speak up just because you think you should speak up, because someone’s supposed to speak up, because that’s what you do. You might notice an urge to speak up out of duty that’s strong enough that it’s worth mentioning the urge, though—i.e. “Wow, I notice I’m really uncomfortable with the silence and I feel like I’m supposed to say something profound to end it.”)

(To which someone else might reply “Where did you feel that in your body?”)

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Honestly, I swear, that’s like 96% of the way to being a complete explanation of what Circling is. But in defense of the people who are loath to describe it:

• All of the above is a sazen; there are in fact ways to behave in perfect accordance with what you just read that nevertheless manage to not be Circling.

• There is in fact relevant skill, and that relevant skill is implicit and often hard-won; I could describe “painting in the Renaissance style” in a similar number of words, and reading those words would probably not enable you to pick up a brush and rival Michaelangelo.

The spirit of Circling is one of curiosity, groundedness, connection, and discovery. It’s sort of the opposite of small talk, of reflexive responses and fill-in-the-blank pleasantness. Your goal is to be actually present with the other people in the Circle. The real you, awake and aware, not just following your usual scripts but noticing what you truly feel, truly care about, truly want (and truly don’t want).

And that’s quite hard to “talk” people into. It’s much easier to sort of directly infect them with the vibe, osmote the mood. People who are merely Told what Circling is are in fact likely to have a harder time locating it than people who are Shown (and even people who are shown generally find it takes multiple Circles before they start to feel like they’ve properly found their feet).

But still. I’m not a fan of “if I just tell people what this is, they’ll do it wrong; therefore I will pretend that no straightforward explanation exists.” I think you should just tell them and also give them the warning.

(I’m also not a fan of “it sounds small or lame when I put it into words; I’m going to try to make it seem Mysterious™ and Complicated™ in a way that’s more true to my own experience of it, and also has the side effect of making me seem cool and aloof and statusy.” Just tell them that it’s really cool, actually, and that people are often surprised by how rich and deep the experience is, compared to the basic description.)

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Content warning: Circling can be psychoactive and deeply impactful in the same way as things like therapy and LSD. It certainly isn’t always those things, but I have led some hundred-or-so people through their very first circle and have heard “wow, that was like an actual psychedelic trip, I am in an altered state now” at least five times, and seen people scream or cry or break down or otherwise come out of it pretty shaken at least five times as well.

(That’s part of the draw, to be clear. The power of Circling is a feature, not a bug—it’s for times when you want something other than normal boring sanitized anesthetized everyday predictable conversation. You shouldn’t go into a Circle needing or expecting something Big to happen, because you’ll often be disappointed, but you ought to go into Circles ready for something Big to happen, because it often does. If you aren’t ready for something Big to happen, consider not Circling.)

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Contextual note: It would be silly to go to two or three Circles and conclude “ah, okay, I understand what this Circling thing is.” It would be silly in exactly the same way that it would be silly to watch a grand total of two or three movies ever and conclude “okay, I know what movies are like. I understand the scope and range and potential of this medium.”

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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.

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How?

As alluded to above, there’s a lot of subtle skill in Circling. The below is, metaphorically, the set of kicks and punches that a white belt knows how to execute; it’s not how Bruce Lee would go about doing things and there are plenty of very good Circles in which the following suggestions are broken many times.

But if you find yourself in a Circle and it feels like you’re slipping and you feel like you’re not-quite-doing-the-thing and you want to move toward good Circling practice, these are some reliable moves:

• Slow down. By far the thing that pulls beginners out of “Circling mode” the most is the slippery slope back to regular conversational speeds, in which people just blurt and react and are not in connection with what’s going on for them.

• Say less. If you’re talking for 30 seconds straight, you’re far, far more likely to be not-Circling than Circling, especially if you’re a beginner. Nonstop, fast-paced strings of words that take 30 seconds or more to say are hard to generate, from a properly dropped-in Circling mindset; quickly and easily emitting such a string of words is therefore strong evidence that you’re not in that mindset.

• Limit your vocabulary. It’s a bit of a blunt-force move, but if you feel like you’re slipping, you can pull back to only saying sentences that start with “I notice,” “I feel,” and “hearing that, I notice/feel.” If you’re feeling bold, you might also add “I have a story that,” or, in response to other people, “What’s that like?”

• Drop down the ladder of abstraction, toward direct sensation. “You’re an asshole” is abstract. “I feel like you’re being an asshole” is only slightly better; that’s a normal conversational move wearing Circling’s skin as a mask. “I feel frustrated, disgusted, and angry; I have this story in my head that you’re just being like this to be an asshole” is much better. That person has noticed that their story is, in fact, a story, rather than thinking it’s Just Reality, and they’ve put some handles on their emotions that might let others empathize. But even better is something like “My chest feels hot and tight, like a furnace. I notice my jaw is clenched and my fingers keep wanting to curl into fists. When I look at you, it’s like my whole body starts to coil up like a cobra.”

• Drop down the ladder of strategy, toward base motivation. Most utterances are for something; your brain has a sense that Y would be a good outcome and that saying X will get you there, and often the words spill out of people’s mouths without them even being consciously aware of the Y their brain is angling for. To move toward Circling, practice peeling back the top layer of what-was-actually-said, and trying to understand why it was said, in that moment. What were those words trying to accomplish? What motivated them? What was the Y, that saying X was a tool for achieving? You can ask this of others, in the Circle, but even more powerful is catching yourself, before you actually say X—instead, replace X with something like “I notice that I want Y to happen.”
  
  (Another example: when someone asks you a question, you don’t actually have to answer it! You can instead share what happened inside your experience, upon being questioned—did you feel an impulse to answer? A desire to be helpful? A splash of pleasure at someone else’s interest in you? Irritation? Frustration? What was that like? What do you feel an urge to do, in response?)

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Remember: this is an autist’s introduction to Circling. There is, in fact, quite a lot to be said about Circling that is not contained in the above.

But there’s this thing that happens, when a practice is named and codified and professionalized, where people stop feeling like they’re allowed to Just Go Try It. More people tried parkour “on their own authority” before parkour gyms became a thing; many people feel like they shouldn’t try to dance without taking lessons, first.

I don’t like it. I think that, if you go out and try Circling on your own, you’ll make lots of mistakes, and probably get some emotional and interpersonal bumps and bruises, and probably experience frustration and confusion that you could have avoided, if you had a veteran around to guide you.

If you have access to a veteran Circler, then sure—go ask them to guide you!

But if you don’t, don’t let that stop you. You’re allowed to Circle just like you’re allowed to dance, just like you’re allowed to sing, just like you’re allowed to pick up a paintbrush and do whatever you like and who cares if you suck, for one thing you can have fun painting even if you’re not skilled and for another, you’ll become skilled faster by actually trying than by forever waiting for an intro class that you never manage to actually get around to taking.

Yes, it’s nice to swim with a lifeguard. But it’s fine to swim without one, provided that you keep in mind that there’s no lifeguard on duty, and stay within your limits.

Grab two or three friends. Show them this essay. It’ll only take them five minutes or so to read it, and five minutes after that, if you want, you can all be Circling together. And it really will be Circling, at least a little, no matter how much it might make an experienced Circler wince.

It’s not your job to care about their wincing. It’s just your job to do something real. Something that’s alive for you, something you can actually be present-to and fully participate in.

Good luck with it.