Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #373 The Power of Presence w/ Guy Sendstock

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

This podcast episode features Guy Sengstock, an expert in relational practices, who delves into the concept of circling and its significant impact on personal development and interpersonal relationships. Guy discusses the origins of circling, the importance of listening, mutual respect, and how these practices foster deep connections. The conversation highlights practical applications, including long-term training programs like the Art of Circling, and touches on circling's relevance in parenting and homesteading. The transformative power of circling is emphasized, showcasing its ability to naturally integrate growth into one's daily life, enhance communication skills, and improve relationships.   Connect with Guy here: Check out the Circling Institute for more information on their self study programs, drop in intro events, weekend workshops - and of course this year long training we just spoke about. If you'd like to talk to someone about the Art of Circling Program before registering, email [e-mail] to set up an appointment. Registration closes November 15.     Our Sponsors: - Caldera Lab is the leader in men’s skincare and is here to save the day. Use our exclusive code KKP at calderalab.com/KKP to enjoy 20% OFF their best products. - GO to MagicBag.co that is DOT CO, and use code: KKP at checkout! - If there’s ONE MINERAL you should be worried about not getting enough of... it’s MAGNESIUM.  Go now to magbreakthrough.com/kingsbufree and get your bottle of Magnesium Breakthrough for FREE today!   Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site   If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!   We always love to hear feedback and are interested in what you want to learn. Reach out to us on social media!

Welcome back to the podcast. Today's guest is Guy Senstock. I met Guy at Fit for Service years ago as one of the keynote speakers we brought in. That's one of my favorite things about being a coach in Fit for Service is that we don't know it all. We're not afraid to admit that.

We have our specialties and the things that we're good at, but we're always searching for people who are amazing in their own field and bringing those people in to teach the crew, really to teach the whole cohort that's there, whether that's 100 people or 200 people, to be able to give back to them in a way that's truly meaningful and profound,

but also at the same time greedily so we can meet these fucking awesome people, befriend them, have dope podcasts, and learn from them more personally. So I was chatting with Guy about his upcoming year long that he's got coming up and it is absolutely incredible. And I do need to sit this year out, but I will be in in 2025. I have too many changes coming up with the changing of fit for service, launching my own community, doing

that kind of stuff. And I didn't want to bite off more than I can chew. But rest assured, this podcast is incredible. We dive into circling what it is, what it can do, the meanings behind it, the deepening that happens. And I love this conversation. It really reignited in me a deep burning desire to dive into this further and to do it with Guy. Maybe I won't drop tons of knowledge, but I'll at least help facilitate a deepening and an understanding of what it is that we're actually talking about. I love this podcast in part because I've been on the receiving end of this. If you've been in Fit for Service and experienced circling, you know this firsthand.

Something weird happens. It's incredibly deep. It's kind of like trying to describe a psychedelic journey, but Guy has a beautiful, beautiful way with words. And it all starts out with, with poem and real rookie and a Rilke and a really cool, really cool how he starts to connect these dots. And he's been teaching for so long. He's really had the ability to open up. He's also a new father. He's an old father and a new father, which is a really cool thing. I thought my kids were spaced out. His kids are very spaced out. And as his knowledge has deepened, uh, it's really interesting. You know, the comments that he has and how he's viewed his son's growth. Very cool shit. So love this podcast, share it far and wide. Um, if you have an interest in working with guy, you can, um, and they have other courses outside of the one year, but really the one year is where it's at. Check it out in the show notes.

We'll link to all of that stuff, Art of Circling. We'll link to his Facebook page and his Twitter account. So if you want to get in contact with him or ask him more, he'll be there and available for you guys. As I mentioned here, this is our last year of Fit for Service. This is it. We're going to Sedona. I leave for Sedona tomorrow.

Game over. One last round in Sedona. And then our very last summit we're going to doona I leave for Sedona tomorrow game over one last round in Sedona and then our very last summit we're going to do as as the fit for service we've grown to know and love is going to be in Malibu our courses are open the summit's open you can do both you can do one or the other go to fitforservice.com and check it out this is literally everything that I've been involved with for the last six years. And it's been my pride. It's been my joy. It's been so much growth, so much education for me personally and such a whirlwind.

It's crazy to see that it's moving on. So if you want to be a part of that, one of the last rides ever, join us in Malibu. Go to fitforservice.com. Supporting this show's sponsors helps support this show. I love these guys. I've handpicked every single one of them. We have a phenomenal product called magicbag.co,

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That's 20% off at calderalab.com slash KKP using code KKP. Jump into skin and first impression royalty with Caldera Lab. And without further ado, my brother, Guy Senstock. All right, we got the return of Guy Senstock today. I'm very excited for this. I was gonna have a bit of pre-podcast jibber-jabber, and then I realized, like, all this shit's good for the podcast,

so we should be talking about this right now. Let's get it started. Guy was on, what, like a year ago we did a podcast swap i think so yeah yeah something like that something like that so so if you have it if this is your first time listening totally fine we'll recap a lot of the stuff because a lot of what we're talking about today it circling the story of circling how it came into being and what you're doing with it now which is really rad um you're a bay area guy i was a bay area guy you're out in modesto now and this is really cool this practice you're just telling

me about i think it's rad because you're in the farmland of central california and uh you're talking about going out and just finding a place to sit talk about that experience i think this is a cool practice yeah this is actually this is both is a, a practice actually inspired by the poet, um, Rilke. Uh, uh, it's basically this, this practice of where I, what is what it looks like is I'll just, I'll, I'll pick a spot somewhere in nature and being in Modesto, it's usually like trespassing on a farm. Right. And I'll, I'll sit in a pretty secluded spot and it'll just call to me. And maybe I bring my meditation cushion and I have a pad of paper and a pen. And I usually just start kind of meditating. And then I just start looking at whatever it is that drew me to that spot.

Maybe it's something really beautiful. Maybe it's something I don't quite know. And I, but I just kind of feel into it. And I I'm there at least three to four hours. And here's the only condition is I can't leave until I put, I put whatever it is that I'm in the presence of in, whether it's a tree, like the dirt, the sky and the earth or whatever, whatever it is that like shows itself. Um, it, it's gotta, it's gotta come out in the constraints of words. So I can't leave until, till the being of the being of whatever it is that I'm confronting in that moment. Right. Um, uh, that's constrained by time and space is gotta take that form of being constrained by my words. I love that. We have a practice I learned from Tim Corcoran that's really similar in that what he calls a soul wander. It's not a hike.

You're not going from point A to point B. There's no destination. You're just going to wander into the place that you're called you stay there and you and you listen to the medicine that's already inherently there it could be you know he's he's of course he's you know he's from northern idaho so he's got famous grizzly bear encounters and super cool shit what do you think about the spirit spirit animal totems you're flicky or totally across the mama bear 20 yards you know it's the whole shit oh my god all right hands up i'm gonna back over you slowly she charges them he doesn't flinch she backs away slowly that kind of stuff you're like we're more often than not it's an ant or it's a it's a it's a group of pebbles that

don't belong there or seashell you know and it's those kind of things that really speak to you yeah so i love that we're gonna do this we have our uh today today's my last day here we leave for sedona tomorrow a lot of members are already heading out there right now and this we have our uh today today's my last day here we leave for sedona tomorrow a lot of members are already heading out there right now and this will be our last trip to sedona paper service is ending at the end of the year or changing and morphing into something completely different but um still might have the same name but this is it for the six years that i've known it and uh it's gonna be really cool you know we'll get another we'll get another wander on the land out there it's spectacular land aubrey's got that 46 acres you've been out there and then right behind it it's all natural national park so like yeah just

really really secluded really awesome um bear mountains the largest mountain range you know that's in his backyard that's the largest mountain range is sedona so i'm very much looking forward being able to do that and the second piece you talk about with the with the writing is such an important piece too because it's even though words never do it justice whether we're talking about psychedelics meditation breathwork any of these things um it still is the translation from the etheric and the astral into the 3d right it's still it still does some version of that where we take the idea and the impact of an experience and express it into being here and i think that's a really cool that's an awesome an awesome way to work with that brother

well it's interesting because this this uh this practice is inspired by by rilka and what's interesting if you look at rilka's life and his poetry, you know, he's probably one of the most famous poets in the world, right? What's interesting is he's famous not just like academically, right? And even religiously, but also in this postmodern way, but also in this way where he's on Hallmark cards and stuff, right? There's this, Rilke hits a spot that's like so intercategorical, it's hard to really place him, which I think is telling. And he, he talked about, and you can see this switch in his poetry, like his early work

is kind of sentimental. It's pretty, it's like a little, it can be, get a little sappy. It's like fit, it's, it's beautiful. I mean, he's like a little, it can be, get a little sappy. It's like fit. It's, it's beautiful. I mean, he's Rilke, right. But you can really tell it's in this mode of like, um, it's, it's so much about his own subjectivity, right. His own internal world. And then he goes and studies with Rodin in, uh, the sculptor and sculptor in Paris. And he starts apprenticing with him and he starts witnessing the way Rodin worked, which was completely different, right?

Rodin would set a schedule. He'd get up at 5 a.m. He'd start working with the clay and the mux. There was almost none of the, you know, his Cartesian subjectivity was in consideration. It was all about, like, in some sense, listening to the world, right? And trying to, like, get the most essence of the world

to speak in his art. And so Rilke started to do this thing where instead of whereas before he would only write when the mood would move him right as he started scheduling times to write and he would any any and he started he did this whole series of columns and you can see this dramatic change in his poetry right where uh and it's, you can see it in the book of, it's called New Poems. That's where you can, if you go and buy it,

it's like New Poems. All they are, these vignettes, right? Of the world, right? In some sense, you can kind of feel the sense of, he'll write a poem about a statue, but he'll write it in such a way

where it's almost like the being of that statue, but they'll write it in such a way where it's almost like the being of that statue, right, actually gets communicated in his words, right? It's not like that the poem is about the statue. It's more like the poem, the statue is like the being of that statue is the words. That's the practice. And what's interesting is because so much of the circling practice has really evolved to be about really getting someone's world, right? In this deep way, in each person's originalness and Rilke was somebody in the very early days of, of, of practicing circling as we

were discovering it, creating it, forming it, shaping it. Rilke was somebody that I, I like, I, I was obsessively reading and forcing everyone else around me to read. I, and I, and there were a lot of authors like that where I was like reading them and I didn't know exactly why I was so like obsessed about it and struck by them. And over time, right, that's my understanding of that is kind of revealed itself to me. Right. And I think that Rilke was really tuned into this mode of listening, this mode of revealing that, that is like an action. That's more like a midwifing of the world. Right. Which is so much what circling is all about. That's beautiful. I want to, I want to jump in for us for, so this is your first time listening to Guy.

Let's talk a bit about, you know, recap, um, the birth of circling via Burning Man, you know, like recap the early days, talk about, about how, you know, this came into being and all great things are birthed out of necessity. And then we'll dive into some of the mechanics of it, but I'd love to talk about, you know, like the, the story of case somebody missed this first podcast, let's give it a recap. So they have an understanding of what it is that we're talking about when you say something like circling. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You know, it's interesting when i look at um i look at the origin of circling i have to say that like it's it's really living i just want to say that first of all it because i keep

discovering what the origin is because we usually what's strange because we usually think about like the origin is somewhere behind us right it's the it's the thing that came first and everything else was after that but my experience has been the more i've been learning about circling the more i've been understanding the origin of it and what it meant right and in the way that we got together so this is i want to say it's the origin to something very living, first of all. So essentially, I moved from Arizona at the time when I was 22 to go to the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco. And my, I think it was my second year of school. I'd been in San Francisco a couple of years. Um, I just met somebody by the name of Jerry Candelaria that introduced me to a whole community of people he had been involved

with. Um, he had been in this whole world of the human potential movement, right. Of, of, uh, he was, he almost became like a, uh, what they call a landmark forum leader. He was, you know, went to a bunch of Esalen courses. And I, my world wasn't really that world. I came from, you know, I grew up with two, two drug addicts and alcoholics that got sober when I was, when I was 12. And so I started being around really deep people when they got really involved in AA and from a very early age. And I really, for whatever reason, I tuned into that conversation and felt the wisdom of it and was drawn to that, right? Even in some cases, more than my parents were. It was interesting. So I met Jerry and he kind of introduced me to this whole world. And I, in a certain sense, introduced him to a language or a way of speaking or listening that he saw as kind of unique.

And we just started hanging out. And what came out of us hanging out together was all of our friends that we were making at the time in his community, we would like just get together and then we would have these profound experiences of relating, right. That would just emerge. Like no one would plan on it. No one would like, you know, go in and say, Hey, we're going to sit down and have a profound conversation or something like that. It would just be, we would be gathering. We'd usually end up in kind of a circle thing. Sometimes it would be in the redwoods of Santa Cruz, right? It'd be different places that we would meet. And we'd end up in this kind of usually a circle thing where some kind of deep and tense relating would spontaneously happen that would just change all of our lives. It would just, it would be on, it went beyond just our relationship, but it would call into

question, you know, all of our understandings of our lives and what it was to be human, what it was to exist. You could feel that in these interactions. And there were a number of those. And then Jerry talked me into going to my first Burning Man, which was in 1998. Which, by the way, what's funny is I discovered when I got there that it wasn't my first Burning Man. That my roommate took me to my first Burning Man on Sunday night after the burn. I didn't remember though. I didn't have any context for it. We went out of the desert and I,

all I knew is did this weird rave and this crazy thing. And I, I had no association with it. So when I went back, I was like, wait, I've been here before. Um, that was back in 1995. Um, and then I would say that like circling became, the first time circling became something that really, like where Jerry and I went, this is something. Like where we could point to something and we went, okay, this experience, because we ended up having just a conflict amongst, like our friends, as we were walking around Burning Man. We end up sitting underneath this kind of, I don't know, weird art structure way out in the

middle of nowhere, right? In the middle of the night, it was this kind of spiral teepee that I discovered years later that one of my students actually built and we didn't know it. It was an interesting synchronicity. And we ended up just sitting in this circle and I just started getting interested in the conflict. And before I know it, the conversation shifted from the level of the conflict into something much deeper going on for both people. And that shifted even deeper into essentially this experience of person by person. We just spontaneously had this experience of feeling into and seeing this person's deepest, most unique essence, right? And it kind of drawing it out and then everyone being moved to describe it, right? And be changed in the process of that description.

And then we go to the next person and the next person and the next person. And Jerry and I like roughly kind of just teamed up spontaneously, right? And kind of facilitated it, but like without any awareness that we were really facilitating anything. And then 12 hours later, you know, as the sun's coming up and we're walking away from that experience, Jerry and I kind of catch up to each other

and we both stop. And he points back to where we were and he's like that. And then I, then I point back to where, where we had just come from. And I'm like, yeah, that, and we didn't have a word for it, but we just, we just spontaneously turned to each other and, and shook on it and committed to it. And we didn't have any idea what that meant, right? Well, we just did that. Right. And so out of that handshake, right. Emerge what would be called circling. And, and it started, we, you know, as we were doing it, like we, and I would put it like this. It's what we were pointing back to. It's, if I were to put it

into words, it would be something like this. It'd be like, that was deep and profound in this way that was distinct from all the other deep and profound things that we were looking at at that time. Right. There's something unique that caught us there. And, and so we really committed to letting it catch us. Right. And out of that came organizations, courses, communities, different schools that, and, and, and then it kind the things that were involved, right, it's something caught there and is still catching. That's incredible. And you, even though circling is different than one of the practices that you took us to, I think a year and a half ago in Montana with John Vervaeke. What is the name of that practice again? It slipped in my mind right now. Yeah. So John, John Vervaeke and I, and Chris Masipietro, many, many others kind of came together. And what started happening is John Vervaeke and I started

talking on my podcast. And then we, he started to have this experience with me of like, there was something different going on in that conversation than all the other conversations he was having. And out of that, right, kind of emerged something he had been thinking about for years called Dia Logos, right? Which we actually ended up co-forming practice, right? And we're still forming it a way of go of going into basically deep in the original sense socratic um dialogue and i would say that it's like you could say in some sense it's kind of the like the course that we had um developed to train it we called it circling into dialogos so this kind of really combat like like um dropping into this personal intimacy right which is what much of circling is really practicing right but then taking that intimacy that you could say horizontal intimacy and then turning that in service of the right.

And then like taking an idea like a virtue. And we set up a whole, like a whole way of practicing that goes deeply into the mystery of something like a virtue or a philosophical idea. That's this combination of, you know, something that's more considered more abstract, but also having it reciprocally, having us dwell in a deeper intimacy, those two things working together. Yes. I love that you put that, you know, the, the, uh, I have this vision of kind of a spiral, right?

So like when, when we're circling, we are, you know, as I've experienced it thus far, I don't have nearly the experience that you do. Obviously, I've been on the benefit of a small handful of times, but it feels like almost like a layer is coming off each time we go around. Like we're taking off clothes,

we're taking off the persona, we're taking off pieces of the self till we arrive at the core. And in that, we are truly the core and in that we are truly witnessed right and we also truly see another and that's that is a it is hard to fucking describe how amazing that feeling is you know when it happens for the first time it's truly a holy shit i didn't know this existed you know on par with ayahuasca i didn't know this existed wow yeah right and um when we did the circling Logos, it was such a circling just paired so perfectly with it to come in like that, to open us in a way that would bring us to our core, to our most authentic self and then start.

And the virtue we had chosen was courage. And it has kind of this looping you know spiraling feeling to it right whereas we go around and change positions in the dialogos uh you know from from being a scribe to be you know being able to well however that worked right that we saw it not only from new angles but there was you know a continuing to peel back off of things and then adding into it you know it's like it's almost like rolling dough or folding it and mixing it and pulling it back over itself and um you know by the end of that i never thought in a million years if you told me like hey have a conversation with your friends on courage you'd be like it's might be worthwhile they maybe they know me uh no i should

maybe you know what i'm saying yes but like in that and and there was any you know this was by no means just four meatheads sitting down. I had Kathy with me. I had, um, another female member and I think a couple or one male member, and it was so revealing, right? Like it was just in a, in a way that really took, uh, my thinking around a subject because of the co-witnessing because of the co-relating to it with other people with different angles and interpretations, it expanded upon something in a way that I didn't know was

possible in that short of a period of time. Yes. Yes, totally. That's the, that's, I really love the way that you described that, right? This, and what I heard was this kind of mutual thing where something in me peels away, but something else then comes in that was beyond what was just peeled away, right? This strange sense where, and I've noticed this about learning that in some sense is synonymous with my own transformation. So it usually involves this quality of not just learning new information, but actually simultaneously unlearning something else at the same time, right? And who?

It's this unlearning or this dropping away, right? That kind of creates this opening and this recognition for this new, new something or other to come in. And that, that registers in our being right. That's not just a change inside of the shape that I take. It's like, it's changing of the shape itself. Right. Yeah. It's, it's, it's something that's beyond, I mean, it sounds woo is all shit to be like,

yeah, like it struck my soul, but like literally there isn't, there's an inner knowing that rings true. Like, like every cell of my body wakes up and says, holy shit, this is pay attention. Right? Like every part of me is saying, pay attention right now because it's drawn towards the truth, right? There is a piece that when it's revealed, right? Like everything lights up. Okay. We're all we're on, we're on something right now. We're, we're on a piece of the truth right now. Continue to listen, pay attention. Right. Yes. Yes, totally. And that quality of where somehow where we get together and we start to dialogue, right. And the dialogue goes from dialogue into Dia Logos, where all of a sudden we start to learn things that we didn't know that come out of our own mouth, right? There's something about where it goes beyond the sum of the total of

the people and it seems to open up to something else, right? That everyone can feel. And it's a living, it's a living felt direct experience of that. And I would say that one of the words that you could use for that, right, is logos, right? And logos is something, it's an ancient Greek word in the original sense of the Greek sense of the notion. There's lots of ways of talking about the logos, but like in the original Greek sense, logos is that which gathers, it's, you could say it, it you could say it gathers something into itself and shows itself as that gathering, right? And that basically describes any being, right?

Every being is the being it is by virtue of it being gathered together and showing itself in that wholeness of gathering. But what's interesting is that the gathering itself, i.e. the logos, is not one of the things gathered. Yet it's the thing that shines through, yet is also recedes into the mystery. And it's that shining forth and this receding into the mystery, which is what I think the Greeks really tuned into, in which they use the word logos. And so in the circling practice, when we practice circling, when we practice dialogos,

and I think all of it is about, and here's the kind of, you could say, the ontological, the metaphysical, the spiritual aspect of this is that we're tuning into this gathering, right? This kind of gathering power that's underneath, not just our conversation, but it's underneath every cell of our body. It's underneath, right? The organization of the earth and the, you know, it's connected to all of that. So in some sense, these practices, right, are these, these is, is a way of really coming into a deep contact with not only the specifics of what's happening right now in relationship with each other, but also in a way that reveals somehow the whole, and it's that mutual relationship that I think is so renewing. Right. And in what you're talking about when i hear you say yeah like it's on the on par

with like ayahuasca journeys right this that's that that sense that's how i make sense of what you said in your experience yeah absolutely i mean it's just uh it's you know the soul ping or like the tuning fork effect or like every part of me goes bears witness right and you recognize the truth when you hear it and see it and feel it. It, there's a, I mean, to use Galkany's words, like there's a straw, very strong allurement towards that. Yeah. Right.

Or like the aha. Yes. Right. And you lean in and it's not a grasping for it. Right. And I think this is so cool that you guys set this up, you know, with, with the, the, the concepts before we get into it, you know, where you build, you set up for the fire, but no one likes the fire,

you know, and through the practice, eventually this fire is going strong. Right. But no one says throw to the log in the fire, the conversation is getting dull, right? Like you just could, you stay in the thing and by remaining on the interior of it, the fire has everything it needs to continue. Yes. Yes. Totally. And I think there's no, I think the most direct, the most direct, you could say, place in which we can feel that fire directly is in relationship. Right. It's like these relational practices,

these dialogical practices, right, I think are so crucial today, right? In that, I think in the age of technology that we're in, one of the things that technology and the internet has done is it's made, it's uncoupled, it's uncoupled two-way communication, informational exchange, right? It's uncollapsed it from relationship. So in other words, like before, say the answering machine, if we wanted to have a communication, we at least had to talk on the phone, right?

Now we had one way monologic communication through the press and all that kind of stuff. But like, at least we still had this thing. If we wanted to have to do exchange, we had to relate, right? To have that exchange, right? We had to do this weird, awkward, ambiguous thing called talking, right?

And you think about that, like what's happening in a conversation, like think about the range of possibilities that could happen whenever you turn your face another human being. In other words, I can misunderstand something that you say that hurts me so badly that I need therapy for 10 years. Or it enlightens me to where I leave the world or something. It's like the range of possibilities that happens when two people connect are intense. So if you make that optional, right? Where you can, you can like bypass, right?

You can have the exchange without having the relation. Our nervous system is just going to do what it always does, right? Which is, is just going to go towards the, the, the path of least resistance. And so I think there's a real famine, right? That's been happening that we're barely, we're just beginning to, to understand, right? Of, you know, in some sense, human beings become human beings through in and through other human beings. And so having a famine of that connection and making it optional is, it puts us in a very strange time. And I think in some sense, these dialogical practices and especially circling, right, in this way before we even understood it, was in some sense anticipating this and responding to

this. And I'm still understanding all of that. It took me years to figure that out. I was like, why is this spreading so much? There's all kinds of business people that would want to do this, that couldn't do this. Why is this in this grassroots original way spreading like this? And, and I, it's, it would took me years to understand like, oh, okay. Circling happens to be, um, something that practices explicitly the qualitative dimension of, of inner subjectivity, right? That qualitative space of you and I in a conversation or the group of us in a conversation and just dwelling in that qualitative place of relation,

right. Um, and making it an actual practice. Yeah, that's huge. And it is quite time. That's something that I've come to recognize. If I ever hit the panic button, like I did in 2020, I have to just remind myself that, that the law of duality shows if there's a problem, the solution is already built into the equation somewhere. Yeah. I may not know the solution, but there can be no problem without a solution, right? Like that has to be baked at the exact same time. Yes. And so it's interesting is I think Rogan's talked a lot about this. I've mentioned on my podcast, you know, how the long form podcast, and even, even though mine's like an hour, hour and a half long, occasionally three hours, that's still quite a bit longer, you know, back on Instagram.

And, you know, working with some, some guys, some, one of my buddies, Cole, who's my podcast manager, he's listening to this, not now, but later. He's like 15 seconds is the video. I want to talk for three later. He's like, 15 seconds is the video. I want to talk for three minutes. It's like 15 seconds of what people want. Then they're going to rewatch it. Then they're going to share it. I'm like, is that what it is? 15 fucking seconds?

That's crazy. You're a bit like fucking, I got to find a nugget to express in 15 seconds. And TikTok is even shorter, shorter length videos, right? People are scrolling three, five seconds. They might get a video before they spike. um podcast is an answer to that right we see because podcasts have grown exponentially people don't want to have fucking some mainstream media voice telling them what to think and that kind of stuff and now everybody can express and the cream rises

to the talk like anything yeah but um to your point you know with circling and dialogos it is it's the antithesis in the answer to somebody just writing you on social media and then jumping off their phone you know it's the antithesis to the ship talking on social media right like you could there's no relationship there i have to explain this to my son now and it's funny one of the best synchronicities this is great i was explaining to my son's nine now and um you know he won't have a cell phone until he's driving and he won't be on social media until he's 18 hopefully uh but i want to prepare him for that i want to prepare him for what that's going to look like you know and and um you know he's big he's strong he's handsome he's doing jiu-jitsu he's doing a lot of things that that um that i think will help facilitate him being a a whole person and um and a balanced individual and you know telling about how things

work online is not how things work in the real world you know and a prime example is that as people behind a car when somebody's driving because of this the glass or them being in a vehicle you know they behave quite differently and sure enough we were leaving jiu-jitsu one night and um i was changing lanes at the same time somebody's trying to speed up and go around and this woman lost her mind she jumped back on the side of us she was flipping off me and my son she jumped in front and slammed on the brakes and i was i don't just talking calmly with them like this is this is exactly what i was talking about with social media buddy it's the same thing it's a disconnect from relationship this person would never do this in front of me right a grown-ass man wouldn't do

this to me face to face especially in front of you right like there's there's just a complete cutoff of hey there's a kid who's under 10 you think it's a fire and there's no regard of that there's no regard of anything and i truly don't i always fall over people i'm gonna shit you wanna go faster than me please do so i want to go five miles over the speed limit i don't want to get a ticket if you want to go 20 miles over the speed limit let me get out of your way and i'll jump right back behind you um yeah but yeah that was that was a prime example of that you know and this this idea that we have you know it's it's like Kathy says, the answer to extreme pain or outrageous pain is outrageous love.

Has to be. Outrageous love is the only way to balance the outrageous pain. We're not going to get rid of the degree of pain that we have in the world, but we can elevate how much we love. And I think to your point, with the way social media has just snowballed, we're not going to end that, right? Like that's just not going away anytime soon. And we can't shift the behavior of those who are ingrained in that style of disconnect. But what we can do is relearn how to connect in a way that brings us closer, that not only makes

me better at relating to one another, but also allows me to know myself better internally, right? Like it's usually, it's beneficial. It benefits everyone, almost like regenerative agriculture. It's good for me, just as good for me as it is for the people that I'm around, just as good for them on a personal level as it is for me. Yeah. Wouldn't you say in some, in some level, this disconnection, you brought in the agricultural piece and I've been been wanting to talk with you about this for a while because I know that you homestead. right, working the fields, doing, right, actually needing to sacrifice, right, to cultivate the and bring out the land and the, you know, homesteading. I would imagine being disconnected from it and then coming back to homesteading allows, I would imagine it allows a kind of appreciation, right, for this, like the spiritual connection that provides that I would

imagine in some sense, maybe even more intense than when we all had to homestead, right. By virtue of, because we didn't have the tech, the technology to do any, anything else. I'm wondering, I'm wondering if that, if that feels true for you. Oh, it's, it's a hundred percent spot on, you know, and I think think i mean growing up in the city you know i thought sunnyvale was a small town 120 000 people in sunnyvale it was painfully small compared to san jose or san francisco and oakland right but that was my small town you know i'd get out here we live in lockhart there's like 11 000 people population there's towns in the panhandle with 400 people in the whole town yeah that's that's a real small town right and texas is spread out but to your point uh yeah i imagine somebody's like a fifth generational farmer who's

just born into it this is what you do these are your chores this is how it's done and they never really think outside the box they're probably just as programmed as the kid or just as you know just as cut off from it as the kid in the city maybe not the same way you know they at least understand that the the life and death and regeneration cycles are daily here like we just lost one of our one of our these female black bucks she gave birth like a couple months ago before the summer and she had a really hard time giving her baby all the milk and she just just passed away a couple of days ago. And it's, it fucking, it got us, all of us. Like, is she food?

Yes. But she's also family. It's my job to make sure she lives well and that she has food and water and that she's got, you know, enough grass on the land and all this. And she was the only one that was brave enough to come up by our house and she'd eat all my plants, you know, so he did it to wrap the plants, that i'd plant she she liked it she enjoyed but there was that connection there right and i think for even a fifth generation farmer they still have they're not cut off from that connection of life and death um which which innately does bring us closer to the truth you

know if we avoid that we never see someone die you see them with paint face paint on and a casket pump full of formaldehyde. That's not the same thing as, as leaving an animal above ground and seeing that it takes four hours for them to be picked completely clean, like four hours. There's no smell left, right? Like that, that brings a new layer into it. But yeah, for me personally, you know, I, I, I loved being in nature as a kid. I loved going fishing. I loved going fishing.

I loved going camping. I'd go on my hunting trips with my dad and my uncles. I wouldn't hunt. I was too young, but I'd be there with them for it. We'd cut back strap right when they got back if we were lucky enough to be successful. And I loved the flavors of it. I loved everything about it. But it wasn't until, you know, early fight career with ayahuasca that I had this totally

different appreciation, understanding of what nature is, you know, and that I could witness, you know, the God self in me, you know, the Tatuamasi on that too. And, and as well as the namaste, you know, the God that we recognize the God in you. I could do that with a tree. I could do that with a mountain. I could do that with the wind itself. Never before those experiences that I viscerally understand that i could read about those things but having that remembering having that gnosis now coming into farming you know it's just a timber just a completely

different angle you know we're doing seven directions prayers we're we're working on you know the rains we're working on how what do we need to change before it rains? Because if, you know, we had the two year drought, like what can we do to really, you know, in the time of drought, say yes to the drought, but still buffer us for when the rains come and we get the flood, you know, those kinds of things. And it's been a, it's been a beautiful process in re-educating and remembering. And it's been, but to your point yeah it's 100 like i coming in from the plant medicine world into the farming world um everything we do is intentional everything we do i'm touching tree leaves with saliva on both hands and meditating with them a lot to connect everything here yeah and there is there is a very deep appreciation for all the ins and

outs and i'm still a white belt at best. You know, it comes to that. Um, I have so much, so much learning left. Yeah, totally. And the gnosis part, I appreciate what you said is like, there's something about coming back into it, right. From having been disconnected to it from it. There's a gnosis that can arise in that reunion with it.

Yeah. There's something, I would imagine that there's something really similar that goes on with the practice of circling, which is really the practice of essentially welling in the I-thou relation. now relation and learning how to dwell in it, learning the kind of the laws of physics of it, right? How to cultivate it, how to be in it, how to listen, how to speak to it. And it's a, in what we're speaking to in this I,

now, right? Basic unit of relation. We think about it like it's probably, it's probably the most primordial thing it is for a human being, right? Thinking about this, you have kids. I have a 21 year old and I have a three-year-old, right? I love the split parrot. Yeah, totally. Hopefully more coming on the way. We're working on it. But with my three-year-old, I'm re-seeing in some level. It's interesting watching his relationship with his mother and his mother's relationship with him. I feel like I'm always witnessing something so fundamentally primordial in that, like, he doesn't have the brain capacity to self-reflect.

He has really no sense of self that seems on board yet. That'll probably come four or five years old or so. But the very first thing he had, right, the very first experience that he had, he definitely, there is mother. Like mother was first, the identification with mom, she was everything, right? And it's funny because being the dad, I'm, I, he's just starting, I'm just starting to become a, you could, you could say an entity for him. I've just been mostly a kind of relatively, uh, consistent unfolding event for him, like an event of tickling and wrestling and right. But, you know, I don't ever really get the sense that like with mom, it's like, mom, I want mom.

And she's like, boom, totally like a, an, an entity, right. For, for her. I'm kind of like this event that erupts, right. That he can recognize, but I'm not quite the entity. And I think that this, this sense, and like, when you think about this, by the time he, he, his consciousness has the ability to fold back on itself and say, I, or me for the first time, that, that which he folds back on is a complete donation, right? Of an inner subjective relational world that he's been swimming in. Right. And I think it's, and it's been interesting to really kind of witnessing this in my household again, right. From hopefully wiser eyes as I get older of it's,

it's had me really in a very like concrete way, re-appreciate how primordial relationship is for us. In fact, it's so primordial. It's like, it's way before our sense of self comes on board. It's before all of that, right? And in some sense, this I is given by these relations. And I have a feeling and I have a sense is that that definitely happened in childhood. And I think in a certain sense, we become person through other people for the rest of our lives. At least that's how it's supposed to go. And you could say that I think that one of the things that circling really hones in on, right, is this element that can happen in conversations where we actually become people through other people, right?

And dwell in that qualitative place of intimacy, right? And you could say intimacy is that, you could say as I think about intimacy is, it's like intimacy is what affords this reciprocal opening to manifest, where, you know, if you think about your most intimate moments, you can almost say it's like, you could probably say it's like, oh yeah, in intimacy, I come to dwell within you and you come to neutrally dwell within me. This kind of co-dwelling in such a way that the very dwelling opens us up to dwell deeper, right? And that's the practice of surf leg, really hones

in on that neutral dwelling. Right. And therefore learning how to lead circles is about being able to facilitate that space, you know, consistently and deeply, right. With groups and organizations and all kinds of things. Yeah. This is awesome. And a perfect segue because we're at the 45 minute mark. I'm going to definitely segue into, um, you know, the practices behind what

you're teaching. Right. And, and really, you know, how you laid this out. I think you did perfectly, especially considering how busy everyone is in the modern world. Um, but that speaks to something, you know, that you touched on listening to me. That was the first thing that, that blew my mind. I think you had me on stage at FFS and you asked me like, what was the thing that stood out to you the most? And it was, I don't think I've ever listened in the depths that I listened as well. Circular, right? Like it was, it added distinct layers of depth beyond like whatever, you know, the glass ceiling. I picture myself dropping into something, not expanding beyond it, but whatever, whatever analogy you want going up or going down going within it was well beyond whatever i thought my capacity to listen was just just layers and layers deeper

than that and i think um that too is something that we've seen diminish whether that's social media the internet who knows but it has diminished the ability to truly listen to somebody. And then as you pointed, you know, there's the old saying, you know, walk a mile in someone's shoes. Like circling is a way in where we can walk in their shoes and we can practice that in a way that's very hard to achieve with other modalities. Like I can say, I want to do that. Or I can say, yeah, I had a similar experience with that. Um, or I empathize with that, but circling allows me to actually walk in the shoes. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

There's a, it's interesting because the, what you peed in on there, I really feel impressed by, right. Cause I think that's the hardest listening, but you, you know, if you go, If you go to Barnes & Noble, there will be two or three shelves about relationships and communication. And most of the communication is really a lot of the books on communication are about what to say, how to speak, what are the, right? When to speak, all these kinds of things. It's like, it, it, it emphasizes this kind of that side of that side of communication, but it seems a lot rare to me, um, to, to look at the role of listening, right. And communication and conversation. And, and that, I think what you were keying in on there

is that listening in some sense always presupposes speaking, right? I, if you think about it, you can, you can imagine someone listening, right? Listening with no one speaking, but like, you can't imagine someone speaking that doesn't presuppose a listener, right? Speech, it's like what calls forth speech is the hearing of a listener and speaking into a listening. And I would say that most, and I think Huber has, you know, Martin Buber has great language around this. He's he, he says that, you know, very rarely do people actually, um, actually speak to another, they usually speak to pass someone where they speak. They speak not to the one listening to them, right.

But to a generalized other, right. And that there, that there is a much more profounder way of speaking and of listening, which has this direct contact where I am listening to you. And I am then conversely, when I listen to you, then I can conversely speak directly to you. And what do I mean by you? Right. And in some sense, this is the big mystery that in how we become people with each other. It's like when we're looking at another person and we're really before a thou, right? And we're relating to them, not as my representation of you, not as my model of you, right?

Not as my resentment of you or my concept of you, but I actually can kind of feel into and shift from I it into I thou. There's a different I that arises when I relate to you as thou. And when I'm looking at you as a thou, you are a thou by virtue in that you are that which can never become my own subject. You will always be other to me, right? In this very, very profound way. In that same way that my son T and mom, mom is always other. And he doesn't like that otherness all the time, right? He wants to like, you know, it's been a year since he's he's uh he's breastfed and he's still

asking to nurse right like oh there's something agonist about this otherness and challenging about this otherness and this kind of desire just so want to know you but yet you being something that is ultimately cannot be consumed by me or ultimately known by me, you are an inexhaustible fount. That, and in relating to you profoundly as a thou, right, as a unique other in which I am, I really get to suffer through, I get to listen to, right? I get to key in on, right? In some sense, this is what develops myself as an I that can do that, right? And that mutual reciprocity, right, is the foundation, this kind of way in which, you know, it's, I think it's almost impossible to listen without respect. I think respecting and listening are like

one in the same in a certain sense. Right. I love that. I love that. You, you touched on a really important concept that I learned from Aubrey Marcus back in the day that there's a Quechua word from ancient Chavin up in the, in the mountains in Peru, where supposedly they had at least an 800 year period where there was no weapons, no nothing, they just lived in harmony. Uh, what Chuma was the plant medicine of choice there.

It was a balcony Amazon by many feet in elevation. But the Quechua word was Aini, and that represented the law of reciprocity, right? That all things were contingent upon this law. The function of the tribe was contingent upon Aine. Right. If people, if anyone, if anyone, you know, it's so easy to think of now, you know, we, we, you move from like an indigenous understanding of, of ownership, which needs you own nothing. We're a part of everything. And to own it, like, Hey, I like having a house. I like considering these things mine. Um, ultimately I'm the caretaker of this land right i'm a steward

here i'm i'm here to serve this place and at the end of the day like you take nothing with you where we're going so i don't own any of it i'm just gonna have the opportunity to serve while i'm here but that that reciprocity too is something that's there's a disconnect from when we only think of in an exchange oriented you know and, I, I hate to shoot on LA all the time, but there's a lot of people in LA that'll ask you what you do and they don't really give a fuck. They just want to know how can you help me? Right. New York too, at times. Right. And, and not everyone there get a lot of homies in Southern California, but there is that feeling sometimes when somebody is talking to you and they're trying to get to know you. And it's like,

are you, are you just wondering what, how I can help you right like that's that's kind of how this feels yeah uh you know there is that disconnect from any for for the sake of on for the sake of reciprocity right and and that reciprocity can it it is an inherent truth in the way you know if there is an ox you know and how we live uh reciprocity is a big piece of that yeah totally totally and it's in that reciprocity in some sense it's it's it's interesting it's like we we discover it and we in some sense abide by it in relation and and i think we as you were talking about this you know that that experience that you're talking about when, you know, that, that person that cut you off and then went into a rage, there's this division, right?

You were, you said something really interesting. You would know that she wouldn't do that if we were sitting across from each other, right? Because there's something that's obvious, right? Then when, when we face one another, right, that attunes to something much, much, much deeper, right? That draws on, right? These much more deeply moral congruent, right? Almost transcendent values that we can enact, right? And there's so much that's inherent in relationship

that does that, right? And in some way, this is really what I think that circling is is kind of keying in on are what are the you know if you took that way of you know in some sense i guess you could you could also say it like my my uh one of one of my co-teachers um john called the other days he says it's like it's like convert like imagine if conversation were prayer i really i really like that a lot yeah that there is there is this way where there is this way where we if we if we really take if we take you know take relationship seriously and take this

this gathering between us seriously and that it does, it, it, it creates a possibility to be something like the word prayer, whatever prayer points to, right. That there's this way that we can engage, right. With the depth of ourself in an, in a very deep way in, and, and if you make that a practice in some sense, just like with yoga right they have what they call asanas right which are you know the positions that you stand in and those asanas in some sense is like it in some way you could say it's like each asana has like a body component right it has a mental component it has a spiritual component. It has a spiritual component. It's a principle, right? Basically that comes together. And so when you're going into an asana,

you're going deep into a principle that you can't ever fully achieve because it goes, it's like it goes infinitely down, like just like a principle does, right? I would say that circling in some sense takes profound interaction and conversation or relationship. And what we've done with the training, right, which is we have the Art of Circling program, which is where people come to mostly for self-development, but specifically through learning how to facilitate these conversations, how to facilitate circles. And you could say that in some sense, what we're practicing in circling is we've drawn out over the years

like the particular asanas of listening, right? The asanas of speaking, the asanas of paying attention, right? The asanas of relating, if you will. And that circling in some sense is learning the asanas of paying attention, right? The asanas of relating, if you will. And that circling in some sense is learning those asanas and then like instantly dropping into those asanas, right? In a deep way. Such that so, right? Just like with the yoga person, right? You know, they go to the yoga class in the morning and they're dwelling in these asanas, but then they go out in their daily life and their relationship with gravity, their relationship to

stress, right, is just naturally more congruent, right? Because of these deep stretches that they do without even thinking about yoga. And I think that's one of the things I've noticed with people who have really taken on circling as a kind of practice and like learned how to facilitate it in some way. It's, it's like they, um, it is, and I've, and I've noticed this with these, like since I've been doing these longer trainings, right? Like a 10, 12 month trainings to teach people how to facilitate. I've learned so much, right? About us, right? Through that.

Because for the first number of years of circling, all we did were kind of events, like weekend events, right? And like not something that was going on, did were kind of events, like weekend events, right? And like not something that was going on, but like kind of events. What's great about those is that it can be, those can really create a like life-changing kind of transformations, right? That are deeply about your life. But once I started to actually train people in the same cohort for a year, I realized something different started to happen, right? Through that, which is the, I think the opportunity of doing a longer, a longer term commitment is that it's not just, it's not just about your life,

but it becomes something in your life. And that's where we start to talk about where it's not only does it have these kind of deep, insightful, transforming experiences, which it does, but actually by committing into a context like the art of circling, which hopefully you're going to be doing next year, which I'm looking forward to having you in it. Perfect. Yeah. Now we're at a different level, right,

of where it's not just having insights, right, that are relevant to your life, but now you have something in your life. You have real relationships with people, right? That you see, you know, every six weeks in these intensive weekends, but then you're doing all the practice groups, right? And practicing everything that you're learning with the same group of people, right? Like usually there's, we have, we have practice circles every, every day. So you can, you can go deep into that. And once you, you go from an event to a process that you're inside of,

one of the things I've noticed is that it starts to get not just it, not, you learn, not just through being transformed, but actually you start to develop, you start to actually develop as a person and I think in some sense, I've been thinking about this in terms of what in biology they often call, in kind of cutting edge biology, they have this concept called niche constructions, right? And a niche construction is basically what it means. It's where there's an environment and then there's an organism that evolves in its fittedness to the environment in such a way that the environment co-evolves to its fittedness and they mutually afford each other. That's niche construction, right? So like, you're still discovering, you know, in the Amazon, like there's all these different niches of these unique organisms that have just

thrived for millions of years, just in this place that where the environment evolves and the organism evolves with it in this co-reciprocal way, right? That's, in some sense, I think that's what happens in these longer term, these longer courses, like the art of circling, is that in some sense, you're engaging in an environment, right? That have to do with these principles. We're all committed to the same thing, learning the same thing, but you're actually having to also deal with that environment, right? Yourself, right? Coming and circling when you're in a good mood, when you feel like it, when you don't feel like it, right?

Opening up, right? When you're resistant, right? Like, because anyone could just show up for an event and pull something off, right? But when it becomes part of your life, right? You start to have this experience with, where all of you meet this environment and the relationships that you form with it and the curriculum in such a way that as you evolve and are fitted to it, the course itself evolves and fits to you. And it's this mutual, you could say, reciprocal opening that forms into what I think what we call psychological development. And the thing that I've noticed about that is that usually in psychological development, people don't notice, right?

They don't notice that anything's changed. It's just part of their nature. It's like, where's transformation? You're like, oh my God, I did this thing. And I came out and my mother looked completely different than the mother that I had before. And it's super, super conscious. Development is more of this sense. And I'll never forget it. This is when I first saw this and I think saw this distinction was at the very last day of the first year long training that I did, right?

And training people out of circle. And it was just, I was on a break and I was sitting on the stairs and I was just drinking some coffee on the break and just watching people interact. And I started thinking about what each person was like when they first came and what they wanted out of this. And I was watching just the way that people were responding to each other. Right.

They were more open. They were more generous. Right. They were more like in a more sovereign, all of these kinds of things. Well, one of the things that hit me is they weren't noticing it. It was just the way that they were, right? Like I could point it out to them, right?

And then they would notice it. But like, it wasn't like it got at this level that was not about super deliberate consciousness. It's much deeper than that. And I think that's the opportunity of AOC is to really dive into a container in which, in some sense, it becomes the context in which your life runs through and where that comes out is in all your relations with your family, with all the people that you talk to, you know, the CEO of your company, the next company that you start, right. But the world is, the world is a network of relations, right? So the, the deeper you're able to like really, really appreciate and be related, right. More that's just going to spread throughout your life.

Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. My biggest draw to it has been briefly, my wife and I were in an open marriage for a few years, three or four years. No longer, we consider ourselves monogamous, that kind of thing. But we learned some hard lessons. We were challenged immensely. And through those challenges, I realized i need to learn a lot like i need to learn how to be a better communicator i need to dive into this stuff so i started reading the mastery of love by you read it together out loud i got nine month non-violent communication i read a lot of these things it is going through the practice of circling at an event not taking the year-long course i was like this shit's on non-violent, this shit's on nonviolent communication.

This shit's on any book I've ever read. You know, I'm not saying anything's wrong with nonviolent communication. I think it's wonderful. Yeah. Right. But it's so much beyond that. And it's so visceral, right? Like there's a way in where you can communicate by script via nonviolent communication that

becomes very cerebral. And it almost is a disconnect here from the heart space where within circling is it's just all heart space and yes there is some dialogue and things like that that make it cerebral but it it's a way of connecting that i've never experienced before you know when i think about that like what is bears into uh superheroes you know so we're doing a lot of the you know all right do you be one superhero who would it be or you get one superpower only you know what would we're doing a lot of the, you know, all right, do you be one superhero? Who would it be? Or you get one superpower only, you know, what would it be? I'll tell them a portation. Cool. I want all ovaries regeneration. You just go back and forth

on the drive to Jitsu for 40 minutes. We'll have this conversation. And when I think about real life superpowers, the ability to communicate in a way that is revealing of your true self and to understand others of what, what is their true self and what are they working towards to, to be able to relate in a way in which your cancer circling improves all relationships. The most important things in your lives are those, right? The most important things in my life are my, are my wife and kids, those relationships, my friends and the people I work with next most important, right? But you go down that list, it's all relationships that are the most important and the ability to improve that

rapidly, you know, inside the course of a year. I haven't, I'm not sure there's things like that, that exist outside of what you're doing. That's why I'm really excited to talk about it. I'm really excited to do it. You know, you, you, you guys have polished something so beautiful. And, and, you know, the rewards of that are far beyond, I think we can wrap our heads around unless for somebody like you is teaching it, you can wrap your head around that. Right. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't take that for granted.

I think in some sense, I'm more, I'm more discovering what it is each day than the more than I learned about it, which kind of kind of points to what, you know, what it's, what, what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate what you said that there is, you know, there is this way in which it goes beyond the propositional as John Verveke would call, would say it right. Like it's not, it's not just information.

It's not just learning a bunch of things in your head. It's like actually a full-bodied experience, right? That the knowing through participating, through witnessing, through being, through being a deep kind of involvement is the essence of it is really what circling this is, right? And at the same time, what's really interesting about it is it took, man, it took it took years. And I have to say, I have so much respect for this process of how difficult it was to begin to take circling, which is this thing that kind of just emerged and happened spontaneously in this embodied way. I think Jerry and I discovered that we had no idea how it happened until the moment that we had a group of students, right, committed for a two year program for us to teach it was the moment that we realized we had no idea how to teach it. It was, it was in itself was such, um, an extraordinary mystery and lesson to me.

Right. So in the very beginnings, what we just did is we just, we just circled the shit out of everybody, including ourselves for two years and hope for the best. And in some ways that really, really worked out really well and other ways not so well. And I would say that like through years and years and years and years of kind of witnessing it, right. Um, I started, I started to get an inkling of the underlying pattern that was happening underneath the process. And, and then when I started to see that, and then I started to like bring names to it, right. Which is, was the beginning of what it came out to be the seven

stages of circling, or that I would, you could also say the seven facets of circling. And once that happened, then I was like, okay, like making something implicit explicit, right? Took a long time. It's really difficult to do that. Um, but once it started to become explicated, then I was like, okay, now I think we can not just apprentice people in this, right? Not just transmit it, right. But actually teach it. Um, and that's when the, the official art of circling started, right. Where, where I was like, okay, this is something where this is an actual modality, right. That's teachable. And, and it took a while to really kind of pour all of that in, but like that afforded us to be able to break things down into smaller chunks and actually explicitly take, so you could

say each, each stage where it's each facet of circling, um, hones in on a particular internal, it draws on internal qualities and virtues of being, but also manifests this particular skill sets of communication and kind of listening and paying attention. And so you could say each, each, each stage and the way the artist circling works is, is, is that each weekend, and I think there's like seven or eight weekends over the course, like 10 months is focused on a particular facet. Right.

And so what you're doing is you're really developing, you know, those qualities, those internal qualities of being and your, and the external practices of communication, right? Through different things about communication, different practices that you do in which you, you experienced, you know, at the, at the thing I led, I led for it off at, um, fit for service. You could say that those, those exercises are taking components of circling, right. And then making them into a practice so that you can really, really dive deep into that and work that particular muscle. Right. Um, and you could say that each stage right is just a deepening and a practicing of that and then and then the the six weeks in between you're like you're watching more videos about

the following stage coming up and you're also practicing in your cohorts right some people do like some some people do it every day you, other people just like pick one cohort once a week and go, you can go as deep as you want, um, or as little as you want on that. And then we go into the, then we go into the next weekend and we dive really, really, really, really deep right into that particular facet of circling. Right. And then rinse and repeat all the way through the year with the same group of people. I love it, brother.

I'm super stoked. Where can people find out more online and where can people follow you? Yeah, so circlinginstitute.com. Phenomenal, brother. I'll link to that in the show notes. You're not on social media at all? Oh, yeah. I have, let's see, Circling Institute on Facebook.

And then I have a Twitter account, GuySangStock. You can just look me up. Awesome. We'll link to all those in the show notes. Brother, it's been an absolute pleasure having you back on the podcast. And I'm quite excited.

I'm lit on fire to get in with you and spend the year with you. Awesome. Thank you so much the year with you. Awesome. Thank you so much, man. Absolutely, brother.