I thought I’d give you a walk through of a Creating Circles Drop In Session – although they are all different (depending on what people bring), they have a similar rhythm.
It’s November 2024 at the time of writing . . .
The Winter provides a perfect time for reflection, a point to consider what to let go of and what to invite in and as we are nearing the end of 2024 think about what we would like to take forwards into 2025 (it still feels a little premature saying that because the sun is shining here today).
And so the theme for this session was Reflections and Value Compass.
First a check in – How are you? How is your circle world? Is there anything you would like to bring to the session?
Then – this sometimes leads to an hour and a half of discussion, sometimes we move to an activity, depending on what people bring.
Today’s invitation was reflection – with the option of an oracle card to springboard the reflection, here’s mine: Shark – Instinct from the Animal Kin Oracle deck.
This card has come up for me in quite a few pulls recently and is a hard relate. This year has been really tricky. We started with uncertainty surrounding my husband’s health and then risk of redundancy in my role as a tutor. I found that the emotions that were surfacing in these areas of my life were spilling into my other work – it was hard to trust my gut, about what I SHOULD be focusing on as I felt scared for the future. I think it’s hard to listen to yourself when you don’t feel safe (fear is noisy isn’t it?!). I just held on to the mantra ‘what if things turned out better than you imagined?’ As that was what happened when I sold our beloved campervan (accidentally to my new cousin who said I could borrow it back whenever I wanted – what a win!)
And so my written reflection was all about letting go of ‘worry’, I free wrote into the circle of ‘letting go for 2024’.
I then thought about what I would like to invite in and wrote this in the centre of a circle titled ‘inviting in – moving into 2025’
I recognise that my things to invite in centred strongly on fun and playfulness/ being myself and I had this nagging voice in my head that it ‘should’ be something more wholesome – inclusion, fairness, empathy, compassion – especially when the others in the group appeared to have more wholesome values! This was the place I wanted to explore this morning and so I stayed here.
The next step of the session was an adapted version of Pooja Lakshmin’s Inner Compass (check that out here), I invited the group to explore their values and create a compass.
In the inner circle – WHAT – naming the values
Middle circle – HOW – What will you do? Say yes to? Say no to? What will this look like?
Outer circle – WHY – Why is this important to you?
I confess, at this point I got confused and flipped my How and Why circles, but it didn’t really matter, the thinking behind them remained the same.
Here are some of the Value Compasses that were created in the group…
We closed with an invitation to share what we had done (although this is not necessary), it does help generate reflections for others in the group and can be useful to hear from each other.
I hope this has been interesting – perhaps an activity for you to try if you couldn’t make it to the drop in session, please let me know how it goes for you.
I’d love to hear from you
If you have any questions or would like to find out more about the Creating Circles course, I’d love to hear from you.
You can email me at mail@sallygolightly.co.uk