Maybe after spending a long time on a runway, you have taken off into the open sky. You’re able to fly. You have done your meditations, yoga, ceremonies, plant medicines, therapies and the blinders have come off. You have become streetwise as well, with some or a lot of career accomplishment. You can see clearly.
Besides the blessing is greater awareness of your own stuff, which is really helpful to your loved ones and community, what do you see? What’s your perception in all this space, this great cosmic mirror?
If you are like me, it’s impossible not to see the fragmentation, the brokenness–ten thousand things to reflect what is being lost… I read it in the brutal news every day.
The next question is, perhaps at arm’s length, to be part of the solution? How can I be of service? And maybe that becomes an orientation. Creating nodes of beauty and affirmation through community.
Yet, you’re still flying and maybe, just maybe, as the years go by, you still feel in some part of you, what’s up, what’s down, what’s left, what’s right? Each of the systems you’ve approached or theories or practices you approach have a piece, but still, the path can feel like trying to fly an airplane without controls.
We are saying, now, there might just be a true north that you have not considered. To step into it is like passing through a cubic centimeter of chance into an entirely different world.
We borrow this term from Carlos Castaneda. He was an anthropologist who, back in the sixties and seventies, wrote a series of books on his encounter with Don Juan, a Yaqui shaman. Though the books are now widely considered to be fiction, they were a kind of cultural phenomenon that shifted many people’s views of reality.
The idea is, opportunities, tiny cubic centimeters, are in our field of perception– gateways, wormholes. If you step metaphorically through this tiny window, that cubic centimeter of chance– you can enter an entirely different world. Yet our own sense of self, of who we are, of how the world works, means we often miss them.
Circle thinking is such a portal.
Enter into Circle thinking and you find yourself in an entirely different way of perceiving and understanding your life because we place our individual experience within the framework that birthed the matrix of life.
It starts with anchoring your right to exist, in your essence, in a coherent relationship to Earth and the infinite potentiality. It deepens when you learn how you can orient. You work with your threads in your broken arcs. You learn how to use Circle as a compass and map.
Our perspective is not new—it’s often talked about as “ancient wisdom.” We learned our approach from decades of Buddhist practice, indigenous mentors, and plant medicines.
Circle thinking strengthens whatever you have developed on your own. Even in your work, whatever you’re doing in the world, you can come from a greater sense of wholeness and safety within your being.
The most profound human centric frameworks emerge from this wholeness which sees only brother and sister in a common human struggle. It’s ML King in Selma. It’s Gandhi gathering salt. It’s in the profound work of Daryl Davis, gathering robes from the klan, Dr. William Barber in his social justice campaigns, and Valerie Kurr writing about “See No Stranger.”
There is just continuity within the common field of energy which we share with all of life. The poet Rumi says, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
From this wholeness, you are not more vulnerable. You are safer because your actions are emergent from greater awareness of the energy in yourself and the world around you. You can be clearer and more strategic in how you move through your pathways.
Yet your grief, your anger, your confusion—it is all welcome. You have a right to be. This is not about trying to get to a higher place or higher ground. Higher, lower, wider, narrower– they are just perspectives in awareness that opens up. Awareness can go anywhere. Over time, working with Circle processes, the meditations and energy work will help you to metabolize the areas in your life where you feel stuck.
In fact, this is our work, together. We are engaging in it too, through our own application of what we are teaching. We open up that passageway, that transition point, and offer you a process into your own wisdom, you’re very essence, and from there, finding orientation within Circle. And, to give you a methodology of working with Circle that you can apply to your new orientation.
It takes time and engagement. The knowledge has to be earned, just as we earned it by engaging with it. It can’t be done in a weekend, week or even a year. You bring it into you cells, you live it. But over time, you will feel a greater ease within yourself, and that reflects in your world.
You will also, over time, find an orientation that will enable you to orient. That orientation, that new place that will allow you to navigate, is no longer oriented around the brokenness. It’s connected to your wholeness– your relationship to earth, to potentiality, and your own center point, your essence and life purpose. You can fly, you can land, you can be yourself totally.