May 2026

The giggling, the jokes feel like glass under my fingernails. My body roils with an emphatic No.  My chest is tight, my stomach drops.

The story in my head is that these are bad people. These are spiritual bypassing white hippies having a giggle fest in a yoga studio while the world outside burns.

Except it doesn’t feel like a story at all. My whole body is vibrating with alarm at the 100% immutable truth of this story. It’s not a story at all. It is an overwhelming, blasting message in my whole body. SOMETHING IS WRONG. THESE PEOPLE ARE FULL OF SHIT. THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT SAFE.

I simmer with rage, I want to scream at these people some combination of SHUT UP and WAKE UP.

Instead I sit quietly, eyes often downcast. I can’t look at people because I feel a full-body aversion to them. And I fear that they will see it in my eyes, they will know I am judging them, and then they will attack me or cast me out.

I fume as they talk about crystals, and human design, and consciousness.

I feign taking a rest while they play “energy ball.”

For each of them I am writing a biography. This person is a child of privilege who travels the world going to retreats and festivals in a single-minded pursuit of their own actualization. This person is an egotistical bullshitter who masks their insecurity by cosplaying the class clown, drawing attention to their antics so they can be both seen and completely hidden at the same time. This person is floating on a far away planet of autism, entirely separate from us, entirely immersed in their peculiar fixations, not to be counted on for anything.

And tales I am ashamed to describe. For I know it is not kind or skillful to judge, and yet so much of my system is engaged in judgement every waking minute.

I fantasize about leaving the workshop. I have signed up for two days of “circling,” an authentic relating practice with a maddeningly generic (trademarked!) name.

And then, at long last, we begin to circle. And things begin to shift for me.

One of the core tenets of grief ritual culture is that attention is the healer.

Circling is a group relating practice entirely about attention. Circling participants pay attention to their own experience, to the experience of the person they are relating to, and to “the field” (the group).

The quality of their attention is that of a high energy laser, and they communicate with extreme granularity.

“When you said that, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.”

“I’m feeling a desire to fix this for you.”

“I noticed that while you were talking you were rubbing your hands together.”

“My body feels like it is vibrating and I sense something is about to happen here.”

My desire to leave the event began to dissipate when I was the subject of my first focus circle, (or “birthday circle.”)

A focus circle is what it sounds like—A group focuses their attention on a single participant. Many people find it squirmy and uncomfortable to be the focus of a group’s attention. But often, something shifts, and extraordinary things unfold in these circles.

In my first focus circle, I mostly sat in the discomfort, narrating it to the group. I was deeply hesitant to truthspeak, to tell them how much I was judging them, how much I wanted to leave.

But I wanted to work the edge of authenticity, to take this circle thing for a test drive.

In my second circle, I let them into my experience of mistrust, of judgment…the roiling fight or flight response in my body. The massive amount of energy and brain power I was devoting to scanning for bullshit.

As it happened one of the younger participants joined my circle. She was someone who I was judging harshly, as a fancy-free bliss fairy, a feckless hippie princess.

When I shared how tired I was, how lonely I was from constantly mistrusting everyone, her face dropped into sad empathy.

A felt a jolt in my body of latent grief. It was her mirroring that brought it near the surface, nearly interrupting my deadpan, cerebral accounting of my experience as a traumatized person.

I looked around me and saw five pairs of eyes gazing back at me intently. Their eyes looked concerned, focused, caring.

The ice dam around my heart began to melt.

I admitted I was very very tired. I admitted I wanted to be held, and in the instant of saying that, I could feel them surge toward me. A few of them verbalized that they wanted very much to hold me.

And so I collapsed into the circle and five bodies coalesced around me and held me.

Tears flowed freely, mine and theirs.

And my furious resistance to them melted.

And I was reminded of other times people have paid attention to me. Have attended to me. Have held me.

I was reminded of a few profound encounters at grief rituals. Where, in the deepest well of my grief, I found my core lamentation, which is a complaint I have with God.

Where. Are. You.

And more than once God has spoken back.

I’m right here, dummy.

And me, not getting it, asking, Where?

And God, ever patient, saying, I’m holding you right now.

And I look around me and I see that there are indeed hands holding me, but they are human hands. And when I look around me I see human eyes, shiny with tears and something else. With absolute certainty, my bullshit tester fully satisfied, I know that it is love in their eyes.

I tell this story to my circle and they coo in appreciation. And they hear what I am saying to them.

Yes, attention is the healer. But it’s something else. Attention is also love.

Plenty of wisdom traditions and wise hearts tell us that God is love (or love is God).

So who are you when you really pay attention, when you sit with someone in their pain. Or–What is coming through you, what are you a channel for?

Is it any wonder that more than anything a child longs for the attention of their parents? That under every therapy modality is a quality of benevolent attention?

Is it any wonder that we are falling apart, atomized, distracted, our attention on our screens? That our children are walking into the world shaky, anxious, unsure.

I wish the human world could see what I see. How simple the problem is, and the solution. That the salve is not more services, or more control, or more medications. That the salve is free of charge, pure grace, in each of us.

Coda

Our last circle is a flow circle, a free form, full group event. Anything goes here—full group dialogues, small splinter groups, play, dancing, whatever.

I am transformed. I am silly now, dancing with two young fancy free spirits. And when our dance ends, I rise up, ebullient, wanting to love someone.

And I turn and look, and right next to me is my friend Travis, holding space for a woman who is grieving.

And in my body I feel a fuck yes. As I sit down next to them. And I pay attention to this woman, and with my whole being, I silently ask, how can I be with you in this? How can I love you?

And as I hold her hand, and watch her cry on the floor, a thought creeps into my mind, and I lean over her, and I say, Do you need to be held.’

And she says yes. And I scoop her up. And soon there are five us encircling her, attending to her.

She grieves deeply, her head on my chest. And I have another intuition, which is that I want her to have the experience of being sung to. I want her to hear my voice through my ribcage. Because I sense that I am holding a woman in her 40s and also a child, perhaps a baby.

And I start to sing, and pretty soon we are all singing, and I feel her open to a bigger well of grief.

And I am not afraid, and I have no doubt, and I know we’ve got this, we’ve got her. We are holding her in our attention and our care. And as the song goes, she is not carrying this all alone.

It’s only later that I think back on that moment. On my hands cradling her sweaty, tear-soaked face.

Whose hands were those?

And my two-tone voice, both deep in my chest and soaring for the high melody, whose voice was that?

And the knowing in me, the rock-solid intelligence that knew exactly what to do? Who knew that?

So it is later, as I drive back to Olympia, that tears stream down my face as I realize that if those people are love, if they are God when they hold me…who then am I when I attend, when I care, when I hold?

My heart, usually closed to me, quivers. Can I love what I see in others, when I see it in me? Is it possible?
I feel into the possibility of that. My heart slowly thawing on I-5. I cry not with grief, but with thanks.