How A Resonance Circle Can Help You
How A Resonance Circle Can Help You
Stuckness dissolves under the laser beam of shared attention.
“When we have this very high energy of coherence, it might bring us beyond just being a group that could solve social problems. Possibly it could make a new change in the individual and a change in relation to the cosmic.” — David Bohm, On Dialogue.1
Resonant World #30
On Thursday, eight people showered me with gifts. The offerings included: An internal emergency lift designed to shift my attention from my overheating mind down into my heart and gut; space to be heard; long walks by myself in warm summer rain; tenderness; playfulness; and — my favourite — a notebook that would only accept words sourced directly from my bleeding wounds.
It was quite a haul — each one bestowed upon me in the closing round of an online Resonance Circle. The term, coined by my friend Claude Terosier, describes a process where one person is given 10 minutes to speak about a challenge they’re facing, and then the seven or eight other participants share the thoughts, feelings or sensations — the “resonance” — that arose as they listened.
I want to emphasise: Although Claude developed the approach from her experience of receiving coaching as start-up founder, Resonance Circles bear no relation to the kind of excruciating feedback exercises used to enforce power-over dynamics in authoritarian corporate environments. Quite the contrary: This is an opportunity to voice your raw confusion, frustration, anger, stuckness and grief — certain you won’t be evaluated or judged. The spirit of a Resonance Circle is captured in Claude’s opening invitation to “listen with your soul.”
Getting Unstuck
Although I had attended several of Claude’s Resonance Circles, I’d not been the focus until last week. Hearing what came up for people in response to my unfiltered, rapid-fire account of how creatively blocked I’ve felt, and the despair and envy this can engender, was like having eight therapy sessions distilled into less than two hours. Each contribution offered me an entirely new perspective — serving as a reminder that there are infinite perspectives on any given phenomenon. More than that: Each new contribution complemented the others, creating an orchestra-like effect of ever subtler layers of texture, meaning and depth.
The 105-minute encounter left me feeling like something inside me had been cleansed. I could feel energy moving in my body for hours afterwards. My previously two-dimensional perspective on my “stuckness” had unfolded into a hologram. I perceived for the first time that this sense of stuckness was intimately connected with my creativity. Rather than fighting my stuckness, I needed to mine its depths. It was time to “get curious about the fog”( Resonant World #13). (And it wasn’t just me who benefited: The people giving the feedback reported receiving energy and insights in a similar way).
Claude’s Explanation
I asked Claude, a Paris-based entrepreneur and facilitator, to say something about how she had developed the approach, and she responded via voicenote while travelling through Lausanne railway station:
“For six years after I’d founded my company Magic Makers (which teaches young people to code), I took part in an organisation that worked with company leaders. We would get together for four seminars a year, where we would spend a day-and-a-half in a group with seven executives and a coach. We would each go through the process of sharing and the others would give resonance.
“Many company leaders like me had been relating very much from the mental level, our brains and minds. That was my first experience of being received at a deeper level — and being allowed to be vulnerable. We were sharing what it felt like when we didn’t know how to run things, even though we were supposed to be in charge of our companies.
“This experience of being received by others, without being judged, and seeing that others had the same problems — that’s where I first experienced this sensation of being in a collective field, or collective consciousness.
“When you spend a full day actively listening to others and sharing your own challenges, you feel a very strong connection.
“The other place where I experienced that was the Case Clinic process in Theory U (an approach to systems change developed by Otto Scharmer at MIT). The big difference with that was that you’re invited to give resonance from your physical sensations, emotions, images, even gestures that might come to you. And Case Clinics are self-facilitated by participants.
“I blended these techniques and adapted them into a format lasting just under two hours, with one person sharing, and a trained facilitator, that I call a Resonance Circle.
“I’m exploring what the process requires to work in different contexts — such as companies or other organisations: trained facilitation; the importance of confidentiality; how to set an intention and invite participants into deeper levels of curiosity, responsibility, and presence. My goal is to refine the process so it can become available to more people.
“In my experience, the role of the facilitator is very important. Their job is to embody openness, and stay neutral — stay in that place where you can welcome anything. It’s okay if there are moments when the participants can’t receive something that’s being shared. But if the facilitator gets triggered, the whole group can dissolve. That’s why it’s important to have a facilitator to ensure safety — and that requires certain practices and competencies.
“There is something about belonging to a group where everybody sees you that creates a very powerful sense of coherence — it’s a fundamental need we all have.”
Opening New Channels
I was left with the thought that Resonance Circles are precisely the kinds of practices that can contribute to transforming communities, groups and organisations at every scale — from the family unit to global civilization, and beyond.
That’s a bold claim. But what if we’re on the cusp of a new era? A new era where — just at the moment when AI seems poised to take over the world — we’re waking up to the full potential of our onboard technology: Our human capacity to relate.
In the two-year Timeless Wisdom Training in individual, ancestral and collective trauma, where Claude is a fellow student, I’ve seen time and again how new channels of intelligence and healing open up when we come together in more intentional, attuned and precise ways. We can reach places of understanding, alignment and creativity we’d never be able to access alone — or even working one-on-one with a therapist or coach. (Such work can certainly have enormous value — but what happens in collective spaces has a radically different quality).
The grace in all this is that these practices aren’t all that hard. For sure, as Claude points out above, we need skilled facilitators. We also need to practice listening with our whole bodies; and develop the capacity to observe our habitual impulses to rescue, people please, project, or offer advice. But when we take time to cleanse our perceptual lenses in this way, we can come together to generate an intense field of presence. A vortex opens in the fabric of everyday reality — and a deeper quality of intelligence pours through.
Fractal Agency
As I was writing this edition of Resonant World, I received a new paper by the social scientist Karen O’Brien that seemed to synchronistically confirm in formal academic language what my gut feeling about Resonance Circles had been trying to say.
The paper explores how fractal approaches could be used to deliver the kind of systemic change needed to address the twin crisis of species extinction and climate breakdown — for which our existing approaches have proved painfully inadequate.
O’Brien and her co-authors write:
“Fractal approaches shift the focus from scaling through “things” (e.g., technologies, behaviors, projects) to scaling through a quality of agency based on values that apply to all.”
It struck me that Resonance Circles are one type of engine for generating the quality of agency that O’Brien describes. By helping us gain greater awareness of our power to change our relationship with our most difficult personal challenges, we — by extension — see new pathways to driving change at larger scales.
Resonance Circles could thus be seen as a form of what O’Brien and her colleagues call “fractal agency” — an approach to change-making that recognises that thoughts, ideas, words, metaphors, decisions, conversations, actions, and agency all combine to generate entangled patterns that scale.2
The paper continued:
“Rather than reserving strategic action for those at the top of political, business, or organizational hierarchies, fractal agency describes a capacity that all people can access and implement, independent of position, degree, role, experience, or authority.3 This is an empowering approach to scaling that transforms disempowering relationships.”
Reading this, I felt I was receiving elements of a theoretical framework that could explain how the work of healing individual, ancestral and collective trauma could have far-reaching ripple effects, of potential global consequence.
Archipelagos of Coherence
In Resonant World # 13, I floated the idea that there may soon come a time when finding ways to invoke collective intelligence will be considered as basic a prerequisite for healthy societies as modern plumbing.
By creating small groups such as Resonance Circles, and larger online and in-person gatherings (such as those we convene in the Timeless Wisdom Training, the Pocket Project, and many others besides), we can establish what I think of as “archipelagos of coherence” — chains of shared consciousness that can exert an influence far beyond their direct participants.4
I think that future generations will marvel at how we spent so long fixated on technology — and only investigated the potential of human relationality as an afterthought. Now might be a good time to reclaim this primordial power.
Further Resources
I highly recommend Claude’s newsletter, where she writes moving accounts of her own personal exploration of individual, ancestral and collective trauma. If you want to commission her to run a Resonance Circle, you can find Claude on LinkedIn.
I also invite you to consider reading this essay on the physicist and philosopher David Bohm’s approach to “Dialogos” by my friend Jacob Kishere, which is very pertinent.
Tarot Readings
In my decades of browsing New Age bookshops, I’d never paid much attention to the Tarot section. To tell the truth, I’d always imagined Tarot to be something slightly sinister, and even potentially dangerous.
In the past couple of years, that’s all changed. I’ve felt a deep calling to Tarot practice, and now offer my services as a reader. I was delighted to raise more than £2,000 to support a family in Afghanistan during the Tarothon I launched last year, with people in the United States, Europe and UK contributing in return for readings.
The fundraiser is now over, but if you’d like to book a reading with me (online or in-person, if you’re in London), then drop me a line. The suggest contribution is £70 for a 90-minute session, but I’m open to offers of more or less, depending on your circumstances.
Few things give me more pleasure than opening up “oracular space” (to borrow astrologer and Tarotist’s Matthew Stelzner’s term) and I love seeing the shifts that unfold for people as the cards illuminate their path.
I write Resonant World in my spare time from my editing role at DeSmog, a nonprofit news service focused on investigating the vested interests blocking action on climate change. Support from readers is a huge boost — and that includes reading, sharing, or commenting in response to my posts. Any variety of coffee gratefully received! Thank you.
O’Brien, K. 2021. You matter more than you think: Quantum social change for a thriving world. Oslo: cCHANGE Press.
Sharma, M. 2017. Radical transformational leadership: Strategic action for change agents. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Mapping the geography of these emerging archipelagos, and investigating their impact, would be a central task of the quantum newsrooms of the future. (Resonant World #8.)