Circle Sharing

Circle sharing is an opportunity to benefit from each other’s insights and experience of the practice. It is a special time for us to share our experiences, our joys, our difficulties and our questions relating to the practice of mindfulness. By practicing deep listening while others are speaking, we help create a calm and receptive environment. By learning to speak about our happiness and our difficulties in the practice, we contribute to the collective insight and understanding of the community.

We base our sharing on our own experience of the practice rather than about abstract ideas and theoretical notions. We may realize that many of us share similar difficulties and aspirations. Sitting, listening and sharing together, we recognize our true connections to one another.

Please remember that whatever is shared during the circle sharing time is confidential. If a friend shares about a difficulty he or she is facing, respect that he or she may or may not wish to talk about this individually outside of the circle sharing time.

Circle sharing is the occasion when sangha members gather together to learn a point of view or an attitude based on the Buddha’s teachings, to empathize with each other, and to help one another to improve and develop.

It is said that circle sharing is the life and soul of the sangha and it is indeed one of the important basic practices of our community. In circle sharing, sangha members unite their hearts into one, regardless of their social status or whatever differences they have, and share their innermost thoughts, from worries and suffering to joys and happiness, and feel empathy for one another. In the process we come to realize that the Buddha’s wish is present in our worries and suffering as well as our joys and happiness.

The participants attentively listen and speak about their understandings and experiences. The most important thing is that by participating in circle sharing, along with learning how to resolve suffering and anxiety, people reflect on the guidelines and aspirations for their lives, and acquire the courage to live.

Furthermore, through hearing many people’s stories, we can discover our life’s purpose as human beings.

Our Shared Agreements for Circle Sharing

• Speak from What you Live:
  If you notice yourself speaking for others (your conversation partners, tradition, community, people like you) come back to the first person. What have you felt or witnessed? What do you know? That ground is enough.

• Take Space / Make Space:
  Full participation is itself a practice. Notice who is speaking, who is not, and what that might be asking of you whether that’s stepping forward or stepping back.

• Listen with Full Intention:
  Receive others without rehearsing your response. Be willing to be surprised, to be moved, to be changed by what you hear. When something touches you, in that it opens something, disturbs something, or lands wrong, let it register before responding. The pause before speech is itself a form of wise speech.

• Witness, Don’t Fix:
  When someone shares something vulnerable, the instinct to offer wisdom, perspective, or a helpful reframe is itself worth examining. What’s being offered may not be a problem to solve. Receive it as it is. The greatest gift is often simply to be heard without being redirected.

• What’s Said Here, Stays Here:
  Carry your insights and learnings home freely. The stories, names, and vulnerabilities of those present belong only here. If something someone shared stays with you and you want to follow up, ask first.

• Accountability as Practice, Not Failure:
  If you experience or cause harm, treat correction as part of the path rather than a rupture of it. We can model what it looks like to give and receive feedback with steadiness… and repair with honesty and grace.

• Name What’s Difficult to Name:
  Brave space means we risk saying what might be true but feels uncomfortable about our traditions, our roles, our blind spots, our collective situation with the Earth. We hold each other with enough care that the difficult thing can be said, not despite our practice, but because of it.

• Speak From the Edge of Confidence:
  Many of us are trained to offer what’s settled and clear. Here, we also invite you to speak from the edge, from what’s still alive, uncertain, unresolved in you. Our gatherings are enriched by your questions as much as your knowing.

These are not rules but practices.