The Practices That Hold Presence and Emergence.
- Enter as Ceremony. We treat this time as sacred, because it is. We cross the threshold with reverence, leaving the noise and the hurry of the outside world at the door. Together we mark the beginning, with breath, with sound, with a moment of shared silence, so that the space between us becomes consecrated ground. This is not simply a meeting, and it is not therapy or a workshop. It is a rite.
- Welcome Everything. There is nothing to fix or hide before you walk in. We do our best to set the presentation self down at the door and let our whole being have a seat: the tender, the unfinished, the parts still becoming. And once we are here, we keep welcoming, meeting whatever rises in us and between us, even the awkward, the uninvited, the hard to hold, without turning it away. We even attempt to welcome the parts of us that other parts would like to annihilate.
- Move In and Through the Body. The body is a more attuned assessor of truth than the mind. We do our best to let the embodied experience lead, while the mind follows. The body is a better barometer of truth than the mind, which will often edit it. We listen beneath the words, to sensation, to breath, to the felt sense of what is alive in us, and we let that be our compass.
- Honor the Yes and the No. Your consent is sacred. You are always free to choose your yes and to speak your no, to pass, to pause. We honor each person’s own pacing and sovereignty.
- Let It Land. We pause, slowing the pace to absorb what we are hearing, allowing our bodyspirit to digest before we move to speak. We use the breath and resist the urge to jump in the moment someone stops speaking. We let a person land before we respond, we notice the impact rippling through the room, and we oscillate our attending, letting our attention move gently between our own inner world and the person in front of us.
- Own Your Experience. Your feelings are yours, born of your own history and heart. We speak from “I,” and we resist the pull to make anyone else the cause of our inner weather.
This circle is not therapy, though it is often therapeutic. When someone speaks something true it can stir something old in you. That is the space working, not breaking. Owning your experience means you can stay with what rises: notice it, breathe, pause if you need to, and tend it as yours rather than ask the room to fix it. Nobody does this perfectly, myself included. The capacity this circle asks for is not composure. It is the willingness to turn toward your own discomfort instead of handing it to someone else. - Reveal Your Experience. Connection deepens only as far as we are willing to be seen. Here we invite the hard, the uncomfortable, the not-quite-socially-acceptable truth, the thing you might swallow anywhere else. We speak for our parts, letting the many selves within us have a voice, the frightened one, the fierce one, the longing one, rather than speaking as if we were one fixed thing.
- Be Kind, Not Nice. Don’t be nice. Nice keeps us on the surface. Kindness is willing to say the harder, truer thing because it cares enough not to look away. A nice person will not tell you that you have a booger on your face. A kind person will. So we practice the kindness of unflinching honesty, while eschewing brutal honesty. And we hold all of it with a shred of discernment, because not everything true needs to be spoken in every moment.
- Do Not Advise. Advice offered uninvited, however kind its intent, can place the giver above the receiver, as the one who knows better and the one who needs sorting out, and it can pull a person out of their own knowing right when they are closest to it. We witness, we listen, we attend, we stay in curiosity to support our circle friends in discovering their own path. To advise without consent, for the person who is seeking presence and attendance, is often experienced as an invasion, which breaks the connecting we are in the practice of cultivating.
- Do Not Reveal Others’ Experiences. What is shared here is sacred, and it stays here. People let themselves be seen in ways they may never have risked before, and that courage depends on trusting their tender truths will not travel. Speak freely of your own experience, but the revelations of others are theirs alone to tell. We do not carry another’s story out of this room, not as gossip, not as a lesson, not even as praise.
A Note About Contributions
Everything I had went into this house: into buying it, into all the supplies, and into renovating it as a place where people could gather. I would make that choice a hundred times over, and I am glad every single time someone walks through the door. It is also a choice that keeps asking, in mortgage payments and heat and in the hours of cleaning and designing and preparing that happen long before you arrive.
However you come to this circle, and whatever you are able to bring, you are welcome here. A contribution is not a price and it is not a ticket. It is a share in the keeping of a place that belongs to everyone who gathers in it.
Whatever you bring is received with gratitude. If you sit with us and find you have received more than you gave, you can support the sanctuary any time. And if you are well resourced, consider giving to the Pay It Forward Fund, which makes room for people for whom cost is a barrier. That is how the door widens.
There are other ways to hold this place too. Come to a gardening day. Tell someone about the sanctuary when they are looking for a room to gather in, or about a circle that might be theirs. And the one that matters most to me: become part of this community, and keep coming back. A sanctuary is not a building. It is the people who keep showing up in it.