It’s graduation season for students. While only a few weeks ago they were still in that springtime of life as learners, they are now ready to enter the summer of adulthood and become something.

In Circling, so many of us want to move on from being people focused on a practice and become the products of the practice. This concern is a bit like a student with a bad case of senioritis wondering just when the hell they get to graduate.

The term practice itself insinuates that it isn’t quite the real thing we’re after. After all, football practice isn’t the big game. Studying to become a doctor isn’t healing the sick. Rehearsing for the play isn’t starring in the show.

So, how do we graduate from Circling?

To answer this, it seems we must answer two questions. What is it that the Circling practice helps us do or become, exactly? And how do we graduate into that?

Ultimately, the skills that Circling hones in us are far more foundational than any vocation. They touch into our connection with ourselves, others, and existence. We are never outside of a moment where our practice can be of service.

Yes, the Circling we might be familiar with involves going to a special place and for a limited time engaging with others according to a shared set of agreements.

But in fact, we can apply the agreements of our practice as firm foundations for living in any context. As long as we recognize that others may not hold to these same agreements, we can develop skill to safely and effectively walk a path that is always seeking to Welcome Everything, Commit to Connection, Own Our Experience, and Honor Impact.

It does require understanding that the world is not as safe a place as a yoga studio filled with consenting adults seeking to deepen their relational awareness and capacity. Yet by acknowledging that and adjusting our instincts accordingly, we can still use this powerful Circling technology to rapidly bring us back into the field of the present. And it rapidly turns what once were occasions for blame and division into moments of surrender, love, and learning.

But won’t this kind of path weary us? Are we to simply learn and grow forever and ever?

Perhaps. But this wouldn’t be unique to Circling. For many spiritual paths, this life is treated as preparation for the next. Many Tibetan Buddhists, Rosicrucians, and even mainstream Christians (not to mention countless others) treat this realm as one giant schoolhouse.

This doesn’t have to be a renunciation of our lives here in service of some other, better or “more important” life that comes after death.

Maybe, instead, we could hold it as an adventure. An adventure happens on a journey, and a journey contains movement. Learning is simply another way of understanding that movement. Moments of learning take us from one point to another.

In all this moving, where is the stillness? The silence? Where is that ultimate calling to enter into one with all?

One of the most delightful distinctions in the Circling practice is that we do not engage with it to “do” something. It isn’t meant to heal, coach, or fix something (although big change seems to happen, doesn’t it). It’s about being with whatever is. That’s it.

So, the path of Circling and the journey it takes us on ultimately is about stepping into a present moment.

And this, finally, takes us to something like a moment of graduation. That is when we move into the space of practiceless practice.

It happens when we are in the Circle and we allow ourselves to let go of the sense that we must censor ourselves to “stay in the present” or that we must “do something” to Circle. We begin to move in trust. And movements themselves feel like simply allowing what is happening already to happen. It is lowering our resistance being and allowing it to unfold through us.

The final layer of resistance are all the guidelines we learned to get us into the Circle in the past. But when those guidelines have taken us there, we find we don’t need them.

It’s here, then, that we are no longer practicing. We are no longer studying, hoping to one day be a Circler. We simply are, and we find we never have to stop doing that. Even when the bells ring and the container comes to a close. Even when we go back home and shower and go to bed. Even when we rise the next day and discover what comes next in life.

We are already here. We are already in connection.

Join us for Circling tomorrow at our new location! Check out the information below or check out the MeetUp.

Look at this BRAND-NEW conversation with world-renown circling practitioner Martje Witzel. She talks with Sigh about the power of feminine leadership.