WHAT I LEARNED FROM CIRCLE PRACTICE IN 2024

I learned about Circles in the fall of 2023 in the early days of what I thought of at the time as the “Israel - Hamas conflict.” Lab/Shul, a progressive Jewish community based in NYC, offered a series of Courageous Conversations, led by Sarra Alpert, where a small group of people – all Jewish or what Lab/Shul calls “Jew-adjacent” – explored our feelings, experiences, and stories using a Circle process. 

In Circle Processes: A New/Old Approach to Peacemaking, Kay Pranis describes the background for these discussion Circles: 

Gathering in a Circle to discuss important community issues was likely a part of the tribal roots of most people. Such processes still exist among indigenous people around the world, and we are deeply indebted to those who have kept these practices alive (p.7).

Over the past year, I have studied Circle practice, participated in a variety of learning Circles, and led one Circle. 

I feel a gentle aliveness inside when I return to Circle. How did Circle transform me in this year of change that has been 2024? 

Circle reminded me of my early days in feminism, working to launch Take Back the Night, first in Northampton during a year away from college and then back at Yale. The most important thing I learned that year was “the rule of the least spoken,” which activists now describe as “step in, step back”: if you usually talk a lot, step back to make room for others to speak; if you speak less, your voice is welcome and even awaited. I saw how far I had wandered from listening well enough to actually step back. The first thing I learned was that I needed to learn to listen again.

Sarra introduced me to Hidden Water, an organization that uses Circle to listen to survivors of childhood sexual assault and help them to heal. One of their board members, Kay Pranis, was teaching a Circle Training a couple of months later, and I was so impatient to train in Circle that I broke our rule of asking before committing and grabbed the last two spots, one for me and one for Jed, my husband and life-partner. The second thing I learned was how hungry I was for a process that created and held space not only for me, but for everyone, exactly as the mess that we humans often are.

As I began to read the books that Kay suggested as readings for the course (see below), I learned that therapists and activists use Circle for many different ends: learning, grieving, transformative justice, and repair. Circles are part of many indigenous cultures, and also the foundation of Black women’s communities in the United States. My family has, for generations, done something resembling Circle at the Passover seder, when we cantankerously go around the table and talk about our individual and collective liberation, as if we are literally there in the biblical story and in the present at the same time. 

Kay trained with indigenous Circle keepers in Canada and the United States and she has worked with lawyers and activists who use Circle to replace retributive justice (punishment) with restorative justice (repair) in the criminal justice system and in schools. Circles is the story of Eric Butler’s use of Circle to make one public school in Oakland a model of restorative justice for high school students. The core of my training has been a combination of participating in Circles and work with Ricka Kohnstamm’s Circle Collective. 

It is a fundamental principle of Circle that every person owns their own story. The Circle maintains its integrity by each person standing in their own story and learning to listen to others’ stories. I wanted to explore what would happen if we cross-pollinated Circle with Storyhood, our community built around shared storytelling agreements. 

In our first Storytelling & Repair Learning Circle, I experienced three ways that Circle can open up Storyhood, and two ways experience-based stories can facilitate the work of individual and collective repair. 

How Circle Creates a Space for Authentic Storytelling 

1. Circles are outside the rush and crush of capitalist “time.” When you enter the space of a Circle, your job is to listen to everyone else and to your own embodied experience, and to talk into the Circle from that grounded personal place. 

1. It takes both time and conversation through conflict to establish a Circle. My first experience of co-keeping a Circle failed: the co-keeper and I hadn’t allowed enough time for collaborating, so we had no shared space to co-keep from, and just couldn’t do it together. I did not have the language or courage to discuss this with the Circle until two people called me out and asked what had happened to the co-keeper. 

1. It was at that moment I learned two intertwined aspects of Circle: if a Circle is working it generates trust, and it is the work of the keeper or keepers to build and maintain that trust. “Sturdy” is Circle shorthand for modeling comfort with conflict by taking in whatever happens in the Circle to continuously shape a space that is safe for everyone, where stories from each person’s lived experience can be told. 

How Storytelling Can Facilitate Repair … with Caveats

Storytelling – based on each person’s unique lived experience – is the heart of the conflict-mitigation and repair offered by Circle. The integrity of Circle both requires and is created by participants trusting one another enough to tell authentic, vulnerable stories from their own experience. 

That trust is precarious and infused with cultural contexts outside of Circle, including the widespread use of Circles – an indigenous practice – by white people in the United States: 

1. The origins of Circle in indigenous cultures and in the Black community are often not understood by white women (including myself) who use Circle practices as part of their own work. Circle is something we aspire to, not something we have from our own lived experience. This is, inherently and systemically, a colonial gesture that needs to be continuously challenged. 

1. Circles, the heart of restorative justice, require community change, not individual punishment. Everyone needs to be heard for as long as it takes; justice is achieved through repair of the acts – and actors – that have caused harm. Circle initiates a process to break down what is not working – individually and collectively – rather than a quick one-and-done fix for something that is identified as a problem. This commitment to community healing and wholeness takes time. It is, ultimately, an expansive and holistic way of thinking about and living in relation to ourselves and other humans, not a shortcut to feeling better without systemic change. 

With all of this quite present, I’m excited to explore this fluid, multi-voiced and embodied relationship between storytelling, Circle, and the possibility of individual and collective repair. I look forward to your ideas, input, and stories as we launch Storyhood 2.0 in 2025.

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