“What the eye sees better, the heart feels more deeply.” —Robert Kegan

This past winter I facilitated a two month Circling course in the midst of the pandemic. For those who might not know, Circling is a relational meditation practice that is ultimately about connection—with self, with other, and beyond.

It is largely a practice of seeing and being seen. And while that might sound almost sentimental, it isn’t a soft or “lite” affair. In fact, it comes at a “cost” in that it unwittingly pulls us into a kind of care that’s not negotiable. In other words, these fellow humans begin to matter; their impacts have gravity. This is tricky business as we tend not to like being at the mercy of one another. The core wound lives there, after all.

Robert Kegan writes about the “dangerous recruitability such seeing brings on.” When we see others in this deep way, we “increase the likelihood of our being moved” and we also “run the risks that being moved entails. For we are moved somewhere, and that somewhere is further into life, closer to those we live with.”

This is, I imagine, in sync with how psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips elucidates true kindness; not as a saccharine or romanticized “selflessness,” but rather as an impulse toward embracing the sympathetic quiver in one’s heart prompted by evolving affinities of being.

He writes: “Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can (the notion of self-interest implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is and what its interests are. It forecloses discovery.). Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality.”

It is always my experience that no one really understands Circling until they actually experience it—and maybe not even then. I find that, seven years in, satisfying explanations still elude me, even for all of my articulateness at times. Such is the dilemma of explicating a bottom-up, non-linear practice in a top-down, logical world. It can never quite be captured in words.

And yet I continue to try, even as I say, “I am so tired of maps, of endless stories, of sense-making.” Selfhood, identity, and the need to understand can be exhausting ventures—tyrannical even. Lately I find myself called to a simpler (but perhaps more provocative) enterprise—“being-with” as a form of dialogue. This is currently how I might articulate what Circling is, or at least what it has the potential to be.

Phillips, in another work, advocates for what he calls an “impersonal narcissism” in the evolution of psychoanalysis; he is interested in a way of relating that would depend less on the excavation of personal history and psychic material and more on a process of cultivating attentiveness to what is becoming in the living presence of the other. He likens this experience to the way that a mother endeavors to “know” her newborn—through attunement and what Christopher Bollas calls the “aesthetic of handling.”

As synergy would have it, early wounding has been the predominant theme in my therapy practice over the past year. The call has been for precisely this kind of simplicity and holding—for returning to a kind of innocence uncorrupted by the ravages of identity and self. There’s been a need to tend to fried nervous systems, which has amounted to lots of non-doing and being-with.

Our collective exhaustion seems to be prompting us back toward an almost primitive impulse—one that involves knowing and being known in a wholly different way. In that, perhaps there is a provocation toward the kindness Phillips points to that threatens to entangle us. Perhaps this is what we need at this time on the planet.

Something happens when the usual stores of energy are depleted—we naturally loosen our grip. Maybe we don’t have the bandwidth to fight so hard to “get it,” or to understand. Maybe all we can do then is to show up breathing, with simply the tremor of our raw humanity. To be witnessed in such tiny dignities is an unparalleled experience of intimacy.

When this occurs, perhaps paradoxically, we get nourished from a different source—a taproot.

I think this is what happened in the series I facilitated during the winter—nourishment came in via a mysterious route. What could have easily been the nail in the coffin for me (a course on top of my workload which was unprecedented during a global pandemic) ended up being a source of inexplicable aliveness.

But this was not just my experience. Everyone else arrived, equally exhausted and stretched beyond reasonable limits. (Half of the group was comprised of therapists/helping professionals. Many of us had been working overtime during the pandemic, simultaneously navigating a global trauma while attending to our clients and their wounds.). Some evenings, another Zoom call might have felt like too much to bear.

And yet this group of humans kept showing up. And they kept opening to each other, even as they didn’t “understand” what one called this “wild ride” of a practice. Miraculously, I stopped worrying about them out on the rugged frontier of connection (I simply didn’t have the extra energy)—it was okay if they didn’t “get it” in the familiar, top-down way. In fact, maybe it was ideal.

When we are cognitively confused, we have to rely on a different kind of compass to navigate—one that’s much more instinctual. I sense that a return to primacy is at the heart of what was so satisfying about the experience of those eight weeks; something profound happened in our opening to what was unknowably evolving as potential between us.

I didn’t “do” much. Some other force—the collective field, I suspect—told hold. I still don’t fully understand. But perhaps I really got “surrendered leadership” for the first time. I think I also got something deeper about Phillips’ notion of kindness, and the delicate rigors of what it recruits us into.

All of this brings me back to Kegan who reminds us that human survival in fact depends on whether or not an infant moves (or recruits) someone in exactly this way. Quite literally, it is a life or death matter. Babies die for lack of holding.

The word “attunement” came up more than any other word among participants in our last session. As it turns out, there is actually a neurobiological state of limbic system resonance that we might say is equitable to love. Somehow, this mighty force of connection inexplicably penetrated the clunky technology and enlisted us into a reciprocal seeing and attending. For this there was great praise.

And that great praise bespeaks a great grief as well—for our isolation, for our lack of exquisite attention, for our disconnection from body and instinct, for the ways in which we have failed to recruit one another into a more risky but vital commingling.

Lest this all sound too romantic, I want to let it be known that there was grit too. To be recruited into care is to surrender to being hurt. When we mingle our needs and desires in the relational pool, there will always be some precariousness—the one who can satisfy us is the same one who can frustrate us, after all.

And yet there is the possibility of being with this too—of saying “yes” to holding the tension of opposites; of building enough courage to bear the otherness of the other while still staying in connection. And to trusting the wild, weaving path back to each other when we stray.

In relationship there is a moment in between nothing and everything. We humans often get stuck there. This practice can teach us how to hover in the liminal space of ever-unfolding potential; to find humility out on the frontier of what is still being discovered, and to dwell in the rugged magic of that eternal landscape.

It’s a pioneering enterprise to be sure. And it might just be the work of our time.