Circling

Circling is an interpersonal meditation practice that emerged from the collaboration of Guy Sengstock, Jerry Candelaria, and their community in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1990s. A group of participants focuses sustained, curious attention on one person — not to analyze, advise, or improve them, but to genuinely encounter their present experience. The practice trains what is difficult to train otherwise: the capacity to meet another person without agenda.

The Circling Institute defines the practice as “a dynamic group process that is part art form, part skillful facilitation, and part relational yoga.” Sengstock put it simply: “Circling teaches us to get in a deep relationship with what is.”

Origins

Pre-History: “The Community” (1989–1997)

The roots of Circling reach back to 1989, when Erwan Davon, Jerry Candelaria, and Scott Hannon became friends as teenagers taking courses at the Santa Clara, California Landmark Education center. By 1991 they had built a shared community of growth and exploration — informally called “The Community” — centered around personal growth workshops, encounter groups, and communication practices drawn from Landmark and More House.

Around 1994, Chris “Damien” Jones introduced the group to rave culture. Late-night parties became spaces for something more than dancing: in the small hours, hearts open, the group would process relationships and explore the depths of each person present — often with everyone’s attention focused on one person at a time. Erwan and Scott also independently hosted encounter groups, and the community developed a practice called the “What’s So Spiral” — going around the circle saying only what related to present-moment experience.

The Birth at Burning Man (1998)

At Burning Man in August 1998, a group including Guy Sengstock, Jerry Candelaria, Tom Wroble, and Chris “Damien” Jones sat down to work through a conflict that had emerged between two of them. What began as conflict resolution turned into something else entirely: twelve hours of sustained, curious, loving attention — unpeeling defenses, investigating the depths of each person in turn. In Guy’s words, they had seen “through the Matrix of the interrelationships of our group of friends. We saw the essential nature of the people — what must be true about each for them to be the person they were.”

After that night, Jerry and Guy recognized they had created something with a calling. They began organizing groups of men for authentic processing, and by late 1998 had structured their first for-pay weekend course: half a day of holotropic breathwork to open participants up, followed by two and a half days of intensive Circling (what some now call “birthday Circling,” with the group’s full attention on one person for the duration). They called their course “The Arete Experience” and in 1999 incorporated as “The Arete Center for Human Excellence.”

Influences and Precursors

The early architects of Circling drew from multiple streams:

• Landmark Education / est / Werner Erhard — the communication and authenticity framework that brought the founders together
• David Deida, Justin Sterling, and Vic Baranco / More House — relationship, sexuality, and communication teachings
• Rave and Burning Man culture — the sense of tribe, chosen family, and the altered-state processing that happened in those spaces
• The human potential movement — Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork, Carl Rogers’ encounter groups, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt practices of presence
• Ken Wilber and integral theory — which became increasingly influential as the practice matured
• Buddhist traditions — particularly Tarthang Tulku’s Nyingma “Time, Space, and Knowledge” lineage and Vipassana
• Western philosophy — especially, for Guy, Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology and A.H. Almaas’s Diamond Heart / Ridhwan School teachings
• Authentic communication — Marshall Rosenberg (NVC), Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty), Susan Campbell

Three Lineages

As Circling spread, three main schools developed:

• The Circling Institute (Boulder, CO) — the original school founded by Sengstock, grounded in integral theory, now led by multiple senior teachers
• Circling Europe — co-founded by John Thompson, with a strong presence in Berlin; known for a more structured, principle-driven approach
• The Austin school — associated with Marc Beneteau; sometimes called “surrender” Circling, emphasizing radical allowing over conceptual overlay

John Vervaeke acknowledged Sengstock’s influence directly in his paper with Christopher Mastropietro, “Dialectic into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-thingness in a Time of Crisis” (2021) — recognition that points toward the deep philosophical territory the practice opens.

How It Works

A Circling session typically involves 4–10 participants. One person becomes the “subject” — the person being Circled. The others orient their attention toward that person’s experience: what is happening in them, what arises between the group and the subject, what the Circler notices in themselves as they sit with this person. The session runs 20–45 minutes.

What distinguishes the sharing in Circling from ordinary conversation is its register. Participants are not offering interpretations, analysis, or advice. They are reporting their immediate phenomenological experience: “I notice I’m leaning forward.” “Something in me wants to look away.” “There’s a quality of waiting in the room.” The orientation is toward the felt, the immediate, and the interpersonal — not the narrative.

Five core orientations guide the practice:

• Staying at the level of experience — reporting what is happening rather than explaining it
• Owning your experience — using “I” language, taking responsibility for what arises
• Trusting the process — allowing the session to unfold without forcing it toward any outcome
• Being with rather than doing to — receptive, attending presence rather than intervention
• Following genuine curiosity — not performing interest, but tracking what actually draws attention

The person being Circled is free to respond, to share what it is like to receive this quality of attention, or simply to be with what arises.

What the Practice Develops

The Circling Institute identifies several capacities the practice builds. Being the subject of a Circle creates the experience of being genuinely seen — not evaluated, not advised, but encountered. For most people this is rare enough to be striking. It can surface blind spots: the gaps between how a person understands themselves and how they actually appear. It opens presence and aliveness through the sheer quality of attention.

From the Circler’s side, the practice trains the capacity to track one’s moment-to-moment experience in the presence of another person — including discomfort, confusion, attraction, and boredom — and to share from that experience honestly rather than performing a relational role. This is harder than it sounds.

Philosophical Grounding

Circling operationalizes several philosophical positions that are otherwise difficult to enact.

I-Thou encounter: When a group holds someone not as an object of study but as a living presence to be met, the practice enacts what Buber called the I-Thou relation. The person being Circled is not a problem to be solved but a Thou to be encountered. Staying at the level of experience — refusing to move into evaluation or analysis — is the practice of remaining in I-Thou territory rather than retreating to I-It. The “between” that Buber identified as the site of genuine meeting — what he called das Zwischen — is the field that Circling creates and inhabits. See I-Thou.

Intercorporeality: Merleau-Ponty’s account of intercorporeality — the pre-reflective, bodily way in which we are already intertwined with others before any conceptual separation occurs — describes what Circling participants report: a sense of the group “breathing together,” of sensing things about the subject that exceed what observation alone could account for. This is the lived body meeting other lived bodies, not the objective body under examination.

Participatory knowing: Vervaeke’s category of participatory knowing — knowledge that arises through engaged participation rather than detached observation — maps directly onto what Circling produces. The understanding that emerges in a good Circle is not information about the subject but a quality of contact with them: gnosis rather than episteme.

Felt sense: Though Circling is interpersonal rather than intrapersonal, participants track what Eugene Gendlin called the “felt sense” — the body’s pre-conceptual knowing of a situation. A skilled Circler is essentially Focusing in the relational field: attending to their felt sense of the other rather than their own internal process alone. See Focusing.

Relationship to Other Practices

Authentic Relating is the broader movement from which Circling emerged. Many AR communities use Circling as a core practice; the two are deeply intertwined, though Circling is a specific format within the larger AR family.

T-Groups are the historical precedent. Both use a small group as a relational laboratory, directing attention toward present-moment interpersonal experience. Circling’s sustained focus on one person creates a different depth than T-Groups’ attention to group dynamics as a whole.

Focusing attends to the felt sense intrapersonally; Circling extends that quality of attention interpersonally. Many Circling facilitators are trained focusers.

Dialectic into Dialogos shares Circling’s orientation toward participatory encounter, but works more through dialectical exchange and language than through sustained phenomenological attention. Vervaeke’s acknowledgment of Sengstock in the Dialogos paper suggests a direct lineage between the two.

Meditation traditions: Circling is sometimes called “interpersonal meditation” because it applies the quality of sustained, non-judgmental attention that meditative practice cultivates — directed toward another person rather than one’s own inner experience.

Key Figures

• Guy Sengstock — co-creator of the practice, founded the Arete Center and later the Circling Institute in Boulder
• Jerry Candelaria — co-creator of Circling alongside Sengstock; brought the organizational and course production expertise from his Landmark background
• Erwan Davon — pre-history figure whose encounter groups and weekend courses in the early 1990s laid groundwork for what became Circling
• Chris “Damien” Jones — present at the 1998 Burning Man birth of Circling; served as production manager for early Arete courses
• Marc Beneteau — Austin school, early developer; sometimes called “surrender” Circling
• John Thompson — co-founder of Circling Europe
• Jordan Myska Allen — teacher and writer on Circling and integral theory
• Decker Cunov — Authentic World, community building across the AR/Circling world

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See also: I-Thou · Intersubjectivity · Mutual Recognition · Participatory Knowing · Relational Ground · Authentic Relating · Focusing · Dialectical into Dialogos · John Vervaeke · Martin Buber