Transformational Connection

Skillfully coming into contact Slowing down, paying gentle attention to what’s here and now. We practice meeting in the delicate truth within us and between us from each moment to the next. This can be honed to micro-precision. We track and share the subtleties of our experience as we open to the nuances of the continually changing flavour of the connection with the other. Black and white slowly turns to colour, 2D to 3D, 3D to 4D. 

The timeless depth of the other starts to light up, the bread crumb trail of their unique continuum of pure and gritty life experience is culminating here and now. It was hidden in plain sight all along. The pathways to their vulnerable heart become transparent. No other has walked that path.

 Then comes the mirror. Unarguable plain-as-daylight or hall of mirrors like reflection opens up the source code of our personality - the boundaries we didn’t know we needed, lost children within, parts missed by words, hidden chasms of joy and bliss, kinks in our integrity, remembrances of innocence, dark parts, and keys to our gifts and deepest sense of meaning.

Liberating Perspectives

Seeing everything we experience in relation to others as generated in our own experience - this can be a liberation. It’s our perception and meaning-making that generates the shame, the self-judgment, the rejection. But many of these response habits are not fixed and are actually based on old logics. In moments of cognizance, we may be able to let go of the perception, or at least these habits of our being get some air around them and different pathways start to feel possible. When we open in this way, triggers that really feel about the other person, can return to us, and extend our Self into wholeness.

Perhaps on an ultimate level we are choosing our struggles and the ‘secondary gains’ may begin to show themselves. This absolute perspective can easily be used to judge ourselves with- which again gives us the opportunity to explore how we are creating that meaning. This kind of identification process can loop and loop until there is an emergent dis-identification and releasing into spaciousness. 

Seeing everything we experience in ourselves as interconnected with the experience of others - this can also be a liberation. We don’t necessarily need to know the ‘why’ behind our feeling. Maybe my fear is because they’re feeling fear- the complexity of what’s happening inside of us can easily be beyond us. If we can sense we are part of something bigger we can find the courage to ‘bring forth what lies within us’ and perhaps then things will gradually get pieced together.

Raw aliveness

We learn to trust and come home to the full range of aliveness and wisdom in our bodies. We strive for a pure connection with our sexual energy, primal nature and wildness as sources of our vitality and creativity. We don’t need to act these energies out or pursue a fixed goal with them but we allow them to flow and use precision and skill to integrate and live them. 

Embracing every impulse, our range expands ever further. We empty out, align and ground deeper. Our bodies open as vessels of aliveness - spirit in the body, essence, soul.

 We access the killer, the hatred, the revenge within us and we responsibly taste its flow and movement. We let parts like this inform us of our past, our fears, our needs, desires and boundaries. As we do this, more space is forged for love. It’s become obvious not to act such forces out yet we give them full space and find their integration. Sometimes we only realise after that fact- then we humbly look our misgivings square in the eye and tenderly allow ourselves to be accountable. 

 We start to sense the body-mind, with its top down and bottom up relationship. We enjoy being mindful but dare to step in and as the body- listening, unfolding, committing, living.

 Releasing further into contact

As we open more to see the real unfiltered experiences of others, the very way that we construct reality blurs into sight and the doors of our perception expand wider into ecstasis. 

Paying precise care to the contours of our individuation and experience, higher dimensions envelop the veils. We touch the pulse of life and the love that we are. We allow these experiences to guide our lives as we dance between the personal and transpersonal.

The autopilot identification we have with survival strategies start to unravel. These are the parts of our personality we needed to get where we are - the ways we close and perceive that no longer fit the environment in front of us. We meet these kinks in our life energy with a deep compassion. We trust enough to step further and further into the abundance of presence, safety and love that is unfamiliar to us. We risk this. We know how much we need others to mirror, call out and meet us in these depths. We step out again, heart beating, fear pulsing, willing and uncomfortable. 

Every person gives us a unique way to feel our Self, to recognise more corners of the vividity of what life can be and to open ourselves further. Taking care, we accept each dance. As we find the courage to love still deeper, light pierces the cracks and contractions of our naked humanity leaving us together in tender poinianacy, sacred union or playful simplicity. The beauty and love become blinding, the grief of lost life overwhelming.

A life well lived

Following the surrender experiment we encounter the archetypes underpinning our reality, get tested to our limits and know ever more spaciousness. Things make more and less sense. We journey through light and dark, teased by the unknown, savouring what we can, forgiving and holding our struggles, resting in solitude. Life and death lead us by the hand.

With grace we land in awe-filled gratitude. We celebrate human intimacy previously unfathomed and seek to serve others as we can. We aspire to the sacred in what lies beyond, between and within and we let our beings shatter as longing and love.

This is article was written by John Thompson, co-founder of Circling Europe