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Welcome to Circling Europe!

Circling and Surrendered Leadership are practices that involve looking at and being intimate with the structures of one’s personal reality, which includes how we make sense of experience, individually and collectively. We find these practices to consistently deliver deeply meaningful experiences, and believe a few clarifications now will likely make this more accessible to you. 

Because Circling is unique, carrying over assumptions from other practices can lead to misunderstandings about who we are, what we do, and how you are invited to engage. It is our intention to make it as clear as we can what Circling is and isn’t.

Responsibility

  • We see you as a free agent capable of honest self-assessment and responsible choice
  • This is an invitation to take responsibility for:
    • yourself and your experience
    • choices you’re making about what you’re accepting as true and significant
    • how you’re participating in and helping to sustain your situation
    • the beliefs and choices you’re bringing to the situation (wittingly or unwittingly) that are informing your experience.
  • We refer generally to the willingness to take responsibility in these terms as “owning your experience.”

Not Psychotherapy

Circling and Surrendered Leadership as we practice them lead to transformational growth, but we do this through surrender, self-leadership, and interconnection rather than aiming for healing outcomes directly (like many modalities do). While honouring a wide variety of wisdom and psychological discernments from many schools of thought, we do not follow a therapeutic model of diagnosis and treatment. Our method is educational. Our emphasis is connection.

Circling Europe’s leaders and coaches are guides in a journey of presence, connection, and aliveness. We do not prescribe choices or actions. We do not see you as being in a therapeutic relationship with our facilitators. We work in the present moment, assuming wholeness that can include greater wholeness, exploring connection, staying mindful to notice the cost of reality choices and labels that too easily lead to misunderstanding or pathologizing. We bring a fresh set of eyes to what is happening, with the aim of understanding how updating our beliefs about what is happening can update our reality.

Circling and Surrendered Leadership:

  • Are practices of connection and meditation
  • Focus on the present moment.
  • Maintain a non-goal orientation that is encapsulated in the principle of “being with the other in their world.”

The Structure and Expectations of Leadership

You may have specific expectations about what a leader should do, or what a practice group should look like and include. We may not follow these expectations, partially because we may not know what they are (and you may not either!). Some examples are:

  • Telling people what to do
  • Stating the “right way” to act
  • Making sure everyone gets along
  • That the internal experiences of the leaders are not part of the process
  • That the leaders will provide a clear interpretation of what is happening, why it is happening and the way it is happening.                       

In lieu of these, we adhere to the precepts of “Surrendered Leadership,” inviting you to “lead” yourself in any way you feel is right for you—taking a bathroom break whenever you need, for example, asking a question—and to “lead” the group in full acknowledgement that others are practicing the same sort of self-leadership and to consider their responses as feedback to that leadership, in the context of the moment. This invitation to listen to the voice of inner direction follows the principle of “trust your experience.”

Is this Right for You?

Our workshops can be intense. People encounter places, states, emotions, beliefs, and sensations in themselves and others that are sometimes unfamiliar. We explore the unknown, the volatile, the ambiguous, as well as welcome emotions many deem as “negative” or “inappropriate” such as feelings of inadequacy, anger, sexuality, and joy. We refer to the willingness to feel difficult and uncomfortable truths as the “commitment to connection,” which of course includes a willingness to set appropriate boundaries, and speak a desire for space, distance, and non-contact. By attending our events you take responsibility for choosing to leave the practice or participate in any given moment—which might include getting intimate with these kinds of experiences.

We will often explore multiple sides of seeming opposites at once, such as independence and interdependence, chaos and order, agreement and disagreement. We believe this can reveal an underlying unity of the immediacy of experience.

If the above description of our workshops sounds potentially overwhelming or destabilizing for you, if you have mental illness or significant emotional challenges that you feel may be exacerbated by this type of transformational environment, or if you are not sure that you can be self-directed in taking care of your needs during the event, then we advise you not to enroll.

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Online Meditation and Circling Retreat 5th-10th July

Led by

Details

  • Dates: 5th - 10th July, 2022
  • Day 1: 15:00 - 21:00 CEST / 10:00 - 16:00 EST
  • Day 2-6: 10:00 - 21:00 CEST / 08:00 - 19:00 EST
  • Location: Zoom
 

This retreat is for you to take a committed journey to integrate your depths and harness your innate intelligence and aliveness!

The retreat is for you to have sufficient space and time with experienced guidance and fellow practitioners, all participating in high quality, deep practice.  

You will be immersed in a cross paradigmatic exploration. This will be primarily centred around the beautiful combination of Meditation and Circling. As a group, we will also be weaving together embodiment, coaching and developing your understanding of how the integration of traumatic experiences can happen innately within us. 

This retreat is more than a personal journey to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday living. It is about your leadership and becoming even more who you are meant to be, to lead others from a truer and authentic source and to engage with real purpose in the wider world.

And all from your own living room!

 

What the Journey is About

I had a life defining period in the last few years that showed me the profound importance of the practice of meditation for more than awakening. 

Meditation is essential for us in really starting to meet and recover from the harm (sometimes even severe trauma) we have experienced in our lives until now and to begin to engage more fully with the life we are already leading. 

Meditation is also fundamentally about falling in love with the simple sensations of being alive. The gentle ways we sense and feel reality are so easy to overlook and so foundational to our fulfillment as human beings.

In my twenty years of experience, this kind of development does not happen so readily in any typical meditation approach. It requires an orientation that supports real integration and shows how simple being with ourselves in a transformational way can be. On this retreat, you will learn this approach. 

However, there is more.

Circling and Meditation have also proven to be highly synergistic and mutually supportive when combined skilfully. 

Thus, in this retreat, you will surf;

- an innovative approach to meditation that makes it more effortless and more generative of inner healing of core long-held traumatic experiences; 

- you will significantly develop your Circling leadership capacities, being able to come from a more connected sense of yourself as you artfully explore intimate connection with others; 

- you will be in embodiment practice to explore a fuller aliveness and a more intuitive expression and grounding through movement and touch;

- you will have an opportunity to get coaching that works with the depths of you, to step further into your potential and understand what is currently getting in the way of this; 

- you will be in a practice environment where you will be immersed in a group consciously exploring and cultivating collective intelligence.

 

Circling

In this retreat, you will see how Circling and conscious connection is enhanced as you more readily recognise the subtle resistances to yourself, the attachments you have to emotional states and a clearer sense of what you are integrating in yourself on a more subtle level.

Being with others can often challenge us in surprising ways and point us to how we resist or react to the many stimuli relationships bring us. As we become more self-aware, we can then often get entangled in subtly reacting against our own resistance!

In this retreat, you will be developing the capacity to see and not react to resistance and discover what is living at the core of these patterns. 

This is mainly about cultivating a surrender to your own truth in your bodily experience and the emerging potential often touched by being with others and the collective. 

 

Why come to an extended retreat?

On this retreat, you will be developing your capacity to participate in the deep feeling processes in you as a body. What I have discovered in this period is that previously in my practice, I was not quite being with myself in a way that supports the activation of the deepest layers of myself. 

Even with sincere and very committed cross paradigmatic practice over 15 years, including ten years of full time, almost 24/7 immersion of Circling, I was not able to consistently contact what I now consider the real feeling process. I needed exceptional guidance for this. 

On this retreat, I will be sharing this guidance, and I imagine for almost everyone, it will be equally illuminating of what it truly means to feel ourselves. Part of this is having sufficient time to allow the feeling process to mature and reveal what really wants to be felt within you.

At the same time, you will see that this approach is not seeing our development as a discipline we have to push ourselves into and work hard for. Our practice, especially our meditation, can be elegant and done with a sense of gentle attunement to ourselves in an environment that feels supportive, inspiring and intimate. 

Furthermore, we can see the mystery of the process and be open to transformation being possible at any moment without any doing on our part. 

Therefore, this retreat is both rigorous and committed, within an atmosphere and ethos of trusting the process, going easy with ourselves and enjoying the intimacy of being together.

 

Can You really be in a transformation process like this online?

Despite the obvious beauty of being in person for an event like this, there are significant benefits online. 

It is a platform we can use with much less disturbance to our daily lives. We don’t need to travel away, using planes and trains, and there is much less expense on accommodation and provisions. 

And, crucially, the transmission of the practices is still very potent through this technology!

Being in meditation and embodiment practice naturally gives us plenty of time not staring into a screen. I have also purposely designed the retreat to provide you with time in your day to either be offline or to allow you to keep some of your family responsibilities or do some work if you need to. 

If you can give yourself at least some retreat atmosphere at home, this is highly recommended as it can be supportive to your process. 



Big Welcome to those new to the practice and experienced veterans!

You can still participate if you are new to Meditation or Circling. You will be guided at your pace into the depths of the practices. At the same time, this is an advanced training, and so, for experienced practitioners you will be encouraged to step further into wherever your evolutionary edge is guiding you next.

Places limited to 20 participants.