Part 3: A Practitioner’s Guide – deeper and wider

Now that you have some clarity on the basics of Circle Practice, we move on to what happens when one connects deeper to this particular collective practice; because this collective element is really crucial and essential.

The primary purpose of the Collective Presencing practice is learning how to be both fully your true authentic self and at the same time fully in a group flow state. That’s not some easy state to get into. We envision that we can do that eventually with anything and everything we engage with in life — but we start at the essential level: by first practicing how to do it in conversation. We see conversation – and we name our practice as generative dialogue – as the ultimate training ground – because it’s so complex and hard; it’s so easy to fall out of our authentic self, to be triggered, to stop the creative flow, to lose the coherence…

Of course, any personal practice that builds some awareness is already a brilliant starting point. Indeed, we have noticed that all of our regular practitioners are familiar with some kind of personal practice, from Feldenkreis, to 12-step program, to meditation, to yoga, to Quaker, to Authentic Movement, to… ; as if there is an implicit understanding what practice can bring to one’s life. Our aim in this practice is to be collectively present and collectively sensing! That seems to be a whole other story.

We will distinguish below some elements that are at play in this collective journey, fully realizing that in real life, in the reality of an actual dialogue these elements are all interwoven. They are like different lenses we use to look at the full process. We make distinctions here for the aim of clarity, but they are more like threads woven together, and in the end it is the tissue that is important, not the individual threads.