Practices

The lived, embodied, and relational practices that translate ideas into direct experience. Philosophy without practice remains abstraction; practice without philosophy lacks orientation. These nodes attempt to hold both.

Practice Nodes

• Circling — Guy Sengstock’s interpersonal meditation practice: sustained group attention on one person, cultivating genuine presence and intersubjective encounter without agenda.

• Dialectical into Dialogos — John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro’s structured philosophical dialogue practice, moving from debate into shared transformative inquiry. A four-role, four-stage format that creates conditions for metanoia.

• Authentic Relating — the broader movement from which Circling emerged: a family of structured games, dyadic exercises, and group practices oriented toward honest, present, embodied communication.

• Internal Family Systems — Richard Schwartz’s model of the psyche as an ecology of parts (Exiles, Managers, Firefighters) organized around a Self characterized by curiosity and compassion. An intrapersonal relational practice.

• Focusing — Eugene Gendlin’s practice of directed inward attention, working with the “felt sense” — the body’s pre-conceptual knowing of a whole situation. The foundation for much somatic and process-oriented work.

• T-Groups — the historical predecessor: unstructured small groups designed to surface interpersonal and group dynamics in real time. Originated with Kurt Lewin in 1947; the ancestor of nearly every relational practice here.

• Contemplative Practice — the broad territory of prayer, meditation, stillness, and attention as it connects to the garden’s philosophical and relational work; hub linking to Vipassana, Zazen, Centering Prayer, and Lectio Divina.

• Vipassana — Theravada Buddhist insight meditation; body scanning and systematic attention to the three marks of existence: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self. Practiced widely through the Goenka 10-day retreat format and the Mahasi noting tradition.

• Zazen — Zen Buddhist seated meditation; the Soto tradition’s shikantaza (“just sitting”) and Rinzai koan practice. Posture as practice, not preparation. The body as the site and expression of awakening.

• Nonviolent Communication — Marshall Rosenberg’s communication framework grounded in four components (observation, feeling, need, request) and the influence of Buber’s I-Thou. A practical attempt to sustain empathic connection in ordinary speech.

• Somatic Experiencing — Peter Levine’s body-oriented approach to healing trauma, working with the nervous system’s incomplete survival responses through titration, pendulation, and discharge rather than narrative processing.

• Centering Prayer — Thomas Keating’s 20th-century recovery of Christian contemplative practice; consenting to divine presence using a sacred word; grounded in The Cloud of Unknowing and the apophatic mystical tradition.

• Lectio Divina — ancient Christian practice of slow, prayerful engagement with Scripture; the fourfold movement of reading, reflecting, responding, and resting; encountering the text as a living word.

• Authentic Movement — Mary Starks Whitehouse’s “movement in depth”: closing eyes and following movement impulses from the body; a contemplative practice at the intersection of dance, Jungian psychology, and meditative discipline.

• Contact Improvisation — Steve Paxton’s post Judson Dance Theater form: two or more people moving together while maintaining physical contact, sharing weight, following momentum; a radical egalitarian practice of embodied dialogue.

• Feldenkrais Method — Moshe Feldenkrais’s system of somatic education: bringing awareness to movement patterns to create new neural pathways; two modalities (group ATM lessons and one-on-one Functional Integration).

On Practice

Practice nodes describe living traditions — ongoing, evolving, contested. Each page reflects a working understanding of the practice as it exists in its current forms, with attention to origins, philosophical grounding, and relationship to adjacent practices.