Summer has arrived in the year of the Fire Horse!

A wonderful time to Circle (especially if you can get some air conditioning).

Let’s begin with details on our regular Circling night in July. If you’d like you can check out the MeetUp or peruse the information below:

We also have our two-day Immersive coming up July 31-August 1.

Here are the details for that:

If you are planning to go to the Immersive, we are offering free Circling coaching ahead of time. This will help us gauge where the community is at and how to best use our time together. It will also help you make the most of the Immersive.

Schedule a free Circling coaching call here: https://calendly.com/sgoldsmith-bjy/1-on-1-with-jonathan

And now, it’s time for some theory.

In the Circle, as in life, we spend so much time justifying ourselves. Let’s see what that can look like.

Someone leans over to another and asks, “Are you sad?”

And the reply comes, “Well, I don’t like when people go quiet like this. It’s like we have this chance to connect and yet we’re all shrinking away.”

Do you notice what happened?

The person replying moved to justify why they feel sad, rather than being with someone else in their sadness. They never took the time to just say, “Yeah. I actually feel really sad right now.”

That might seem like a small evasion. After all, one could assume by the way they responded that they were, indeed, feeling sad.

And yet, something very big in the practice of Circling is lost here.

When we explain why we feel a certain way—especially when we do this instead of simply saying how we feel first—we operate on at least one of these premises:

Neither of these are necessarily true, and they both prohibit you from the earth-shattering surprises that Circling makes available. So, let’s go through both.

The first premise is heartbreaking. In the Circle, you don’t owe anyone a reason for feeling the way you do.

Many of us experience some amount of shame around being seen as having an emotion. Sometimes this shame is conscious, sometimes less so. Either way, we can find it uncomfortable or even viscerally upsetting to be seen as having an emotion.

This may stem from the perception that emotions are “wrong” or “unintelligent” or “girly” or “gay” or “unsophisticated” or simply not allowed.

Circling gives us extremely powerful technology to identify these hidden prejudices in our heart, to love them for doing the (possibly misguided) work of protecting us, learn to listen to them rather than be dominated by them, and eventually let them go.

But you can’t untangle yourself from these impulsive and often unconscious judgments if you rush to justify yourself.

Instead, go slowly and, if you feel the need to self-justify, name that you want to justify your feeling instead of launching into that justification.

And in the slowness, maybe ask yourself what the body wants to do. Maybe listen to what happens when you don’t rush in to explain yourself.

The second premise forgets one of the most important insights about emotions: feelings are intelligence.

You don’t need to do anything to feelings to benefit from them. They are not simply a signal to psychoanalyze and then “fix.”

They already give you a sensory rich, direct experience of knowledge.

What’s more, feelings are never false, unlike some forms of knowing that the mind can become enamored by. Almost all data is tainted by false information or hidden bias. Almost every theory will prove, in the fullness of time, to be insufficient (or an outright obstacle to knowing). Almost every answer we give for a Why question will inevitably fall short of reality’s full magnificence.

Yet a feeling is never wrong.

If you feel sad, then you are sad.

This kind of justification might also come out of a sense that other people can know us better if we give them more context, more psychoanalysis, more understanding.

But that’s all, ultimately, a mask that hides you from bracing connection to what’s real. You will surprise yourself with what happens when you let go of these additions.

Next time you Circle, give it a shot. Justify nothing. Offer no context. And see what happens.

Self-justification appears throughout the practice in ways large and small.

We’ve already covered how we often explain ourselves with words. But this compulsion also appears in a million other ways. It shows up as feeling accused when someone senses our emotion. It shows up as hesitating to share in the Circle. It shows up as anxiety around coming to the Circle at all.

When we justify our experience, we rob ourselves of the greatest fruits in the practice. We never find out what it is like to be held in the present by pure love. When you find a way to feel whatever you feel in this moment, to make that known, and to let go of the need to justify anything… then you experience the true bliss of the Circle.

Held in this way by others, you will find that so much of your justification was not only unnecessary. It wasn’t even true.

Our self-justification runs on programs designed to make our emotions okay in the eyes of others, and so it often bends and obscures the truth—often on a subconscious level. Because we never slow down enough to really look at what’s going on, we end up being the first person duped by our own reasoning.

And this self-justification goes on in our heads all the time, even when we don’t vocalize it. That means we are constantly churning out propaganda to ourselves justifying our emotions, and we believe every word of it because we’ve never taken the time to Circle it.

We can gently let go self-justification through Circling, that is, naming that we want to do it rather than doing it. In this way, we reveal our real selves to ourselves. We return to a state of natural, easy knowing of the truth of who we are right here, right now.

Astrology is among the most esoteric ways to understand your spiritual path. But the truth is, it can also be a deeply embodied process. Amanda Walsh, the founder of Astrology Hub, came on The Container to talk to us about how to bring this ancient art and science into our daily life.