What is the heart of Circling? Our upcoming retreat in October focuses on the center of the practice: going beyond processing, beyond understanding, and into full connection with being.

In the past, this experience was called mystical union, this practice was called contemplative prayer.

The Retreat will let the roots of your Circling tap these endless waters. It runs October 16-18, and we’d love to see you there.

Click here to buy your ticket to the Fall Circling Retreat.

And of course, join us for Circling this Thursday at 6:30pm (MeetUp Link) and Saturday at 5pm (MeetUp Link). As always, we’ll be circling at Ashtanga Yoga in Charlottesville (1208 East Market Street).

Want to learn and think and dream more about the mystical heart of Circling? Below are some words to help nudge your boat a little deeper into those waters…

Last week, I was sitting with two friends, looking out at a lake while rain washed away late summer heat.

We’d dropped into a quiet time of contemplation.

Today, the word “contemplation” typically means something like: the act of thinking about something. But for millennia, contemplation has been the name of that most special type of prayer.

Not the kind where we ask for help.

Not the kind where we offer thanksgiving.

Not the kind where we talk to God about whatever is going on in our lives.

All of these are beautiful, of course, but they are not contemplation.

Contemplation is invitation to the presence of God.

Each time I discover it (or it discovers me), it is like the first time.

I become a child walking a path in the woods who discovers a shining object on the ground.

I grab it and hold it up, and it glistens in the dappled light. I do not know what it is called or who made it or why it was left half-buried in the pine needles.

It is cold and clear and bright like a diamond but gently pulsing and soft and sucking like an orifice into the way of flesh. And as I turn it, the shape reveals new aspects and conceals others until my ignorance becomes total as an eclipse over a fearful early human civilization waiting at the foot of mighty pyramids for a hero to slay the mighty snake, eater of suns.

And my unknowing is somehow a truer encounter with this treasure, and the unknowing blooms out to encompass everything, everything, everything. And in my unknowing, I continue to turn this object to enjoy the light glimmering on its body, and I am captivated into a wordless state of grace, and I am transported somewhere else—a somewhere else that is also right here.

And then, like a sleeper finding themselves again incarnate among the pillows and sheets, I find myself staring off into the trees and drawing up out of the smell of trees. And it is late now, and the trinket is no longer here, and I am half willing to believe it was a dream, and I am half willing to believe that the dream is everything but the gazing upon that mesmerizing foundling.

And I know that I came from this gazing and that one day I will return wholly and undivided so that the gazing will devour every last needing inch of my shivering body and every syllable of my prideful name.

It was this way again standing on a porch, beholding the lake with two friends as the rain fanned into September.

There are words I can share that are part of the wonder for me, a thimble-full of the living water offered in contemplative prayer. But it is a thimble-full that, if I allowed myself to drink it all, would slake my thirst forever.

This is what the thimble carries: God is not the one who needs to be invited.

Or I might name it: God is always and forever present in the most intimate depths of you, witnessing in compassion beyond human compassion with attention beyond human attention.

Or I might name it: You are inviting yourself to the intimacy that you’ve been longing for, the intimacy which is only frustrated by your own resistance that can be overcome by the softest release.

Naming it these things, we might nod and know, accept and agree.

Before we fell into contemplation, my two friends and I were talking about Welcome Everything, this mysterious first agreement in the Circling practice.

What does it mean to Welcome?

Surely, it is something like acknowledgment: This is what is here—what’s really here.

I do not need to like it or feel attuned to it to say, “Yes, you are here.”

And maybe, like the intention to contemplate, it is simply an invitation.

But then, if I have learned anything from all this, I must admit to myself that the foundation of Circling is not an invitation to others. It isn’t even an invitation to my experience. It isn’t an invitation to presence.

It is an invitation to me.

Welcome Everything is not about me welcoming something to myself. It’s me welcoming myself to the moment as it really is, to myself as I really am.

And once I am welcomed, I awaken to the grace that if something is, then God is intimate with it. And if what is here is suffering, then God suffers. And if what is here is joy, then God enjoys.

It is an endless wonder that somehow ends, but only gradually, only in the waking up in that other place. Whether that’s standing with friends on a porch overlooking a lake as she receives the rain—or whether that’s staring into the trees, smelling trees, becoming ready to take the next step on the path.

Richard Tarnas wrote the classic The Passion of the Western Mind, which is one of the most widely assigned books in college classes to this day. He also wrote Cosmos and Psyche, a magisterial work on the relationship between the outer planets and human history.

He came on The Container to talk about thinking with both depth and breadth in the midst of a tumultuous time on Earth.