On Reality Shifting

The above image is one of the world’s most famous optical illusions. In it, the human eye can see a young woman turned away from the viewer. Or they can see an old woman staring contemplatively into the distance.

Which is it?

Of course, we all know that it is neither. Or maybe it is better to say it is both. Or maybe it is best to say that it all depends how you look at it.

If you dwell a bit longer on the image, you can start to feel the moment your perception flexes and you shift from resolving it one way to the other. There is a second of effort, then the young woman disappears, and the old woman emerges. With another push of your perceptual engine, the old woman is gone and the young one returns.

What does this have to do with Circling?

The Practice of Perception

In a Circle, we often hear people begin sentences saying, “I have a story that…” We’ll also hear them asking if their perception about someone is true.

These are signs that people in the practice are looking at the other the way we might see an optical illusion. You might seem very clearly one way to me. But with just a single question, it might be revealed that your inner world is entirely different from what seemed certain to me mere seconds ago.

This exploration is core to the practice. And over time, it gives us the ability to much less firmly hold onto our hunches and assumptions about what someone else is experiencing.

It is here that many of us believe things remain. But we can go even further yet.

In the optical illusion above, the cartoonist who designed it meant for us to be able to see it two different ways. That gives us the ability to freely move between our perception for the fun of it. And it also gives us a certain confidence that the image isn’t one way or the other. It’s both, neither, and really all how you look at it.

Circling can take us to the same holding of what is going on in the present moment.

This becomes true for all kinds of content in the space. It’s true even of our experience and that of others. The impact someone has in the space is both how they are perceived and how they perceive themselves. It’s both the truth of their experience and the truth of our experience of them. And when we know how to hop between the two, it’s also this experience of holding both in our knowing.

As we can see, if we learn how to flex those perceptual muscles that shift between seeing the young woman and the old woman, we can get quite good at choosing where we want to be at any given moment.

Being at Choice

What happens when you can choose how you see the world? What happens when you can choose how you resolve the inner swirl of physical sensations and emotional textures?

You become radically at choice.

This freedom begins to shift reality. Moments of scarcity, where your focus is on difficulty and unmet needs, can become moments of abundance, where your focus is on available resources and possibilities. Moments of conflict can become moments of connection. And moments of despair can become moments of profound gratitude.

These are but a few ways that this choice redesigns the universe all around you.

It’s no mere parlor trick.

The stakes to this are quite high. They are the difference between being imprisoned in the “way things are” and being a cocreator of reality itself. This can lead to quite transcendent breakthroughs, especially on healing journeys. When we heal trauma from the past, we open up the potential to entirely rewrite the story of our lives—creating (seemingly out of thin air) positive relationships out of those we once struggled with. Our challenges with money become training for mastery over wealth creation. Our long-term illness becomes a process of rediscovering the love we have for our body. Our absent parent becomes an ever-present figure who shaped us at every step.

And the objection might come that just because you choose to see things a certain way doesn’t mean they magically become that.

But this is where we must return to our optical illusion.

Choosing to see the young or old woman isn’t to deny the other isn’t there. It isn’t to say one is true and the other isn’t. It’s not even to say one way is better or worse than the other. It means that, for however long you’d like, you can be in one place to live and work and play. And, when the time is right, to know that you’ll be able to change perspectives once again.

Shift realities with us at our upcoming events. Note that the location for our drop-in circling event has changed! Also, check out our new offering at the University of Virginia’s Contemplative Sciences Center!

Power and Circling

In the last episode of our podcast, we spoke to Jordan Myska Allen about power dynamics in the practice. On this episode, Sigh sits down with Charlottesville’s own Hannah Hellsing to dive into the topic from a fresh perspective. What follows is a scintillating deep dive into what power means and how we work with it in society at large and the Circle in particular.