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History and context

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Guest circle member journey

Circle facilitation & flow

Pre-recording guidance

Reciprocity

About Anna-Marie & contact

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<aside> <img src="/icons/feather_green.svg" alt="/icons/feather_green.svg" width="40px" /> MY INTENTIONS AND COMMITMENTS

All Ecological Us circles are currently organised and facilitated by me. As an Ecological Us guest circle member, you can hold me to the following intentions and commitments:

  1. To hold each circle member as unique, whole, complex, and of equal worth.
  2. To balance holding guest circle members, the social field, and the intention of Ecological Us in my awareness, as much as possible.
  3. To hold my roles as Ecological Us’ host and producer in a way that doesn’t reduce guest circle members’ humanity (i.e. where guest circle members are reduced to being a means to an end.)
  4. To keep the group focused on ecological enquiry if the group becomes too analytical, wanders off from personal and collective enquiry into practical tools or other people’s teachings, stays in the details as opposed to diving deep into what’s most alive, or stays at a surface level.
  5. To help us explore and, if needed, disrupt stories, biases, blindspots, and worldviews by facilitating self- and shared-reflection.
  6. To be reasonably available before the recording, to support guest members in feeling equipped to be an Ecological Us guest circle member, and after, to support completion. </aside>

<aside> <img src="/icons/water_green.svg" alt="/icons/water_green.svg" width="40px" /> THE FLOW OF AN ECOLOGICAL ENQUIRY CIRCLE

In an ecological enquiry circle, we ‘investigate’ our lived experiences, ideas, worldviews, and blindspots so that we can start to discover just how much we are informed by each other, place, social constructs, relationship, interbeing, social systems, the natural world, the more-than-human, current events, histories, ancestral lines, and possible futures (and more!).

Through this discovery, we can start to know just how deeply relational and complex we are as individuals, groups, communities, and organisations. This knowing can help us better understand ourselves and each other, while also igniting a desire to live our lives with more sensitivity and response-ability as members of this multispecies, multigenerational world.

Note: we book 2 hours but we don’t focus on filling the time: we stay in the room because it feels alive and when our enquiry feels complete, I’ll check in and we can bring it to a close.

The way that I facilitate an Ecological Us circle mostly unfurls like:

  1. Introductions and check-ins: I’ll ask us to share our name, our pronouns, our location, and I’ll share a check-in prompt.

  2. Revisiting our agreements: I’ll share our co-created agreements in the Zoom chat and ask someone us to read them aloud.

  3. Guiding us into ecological enquiry: I’ll guide us into a short lived experience of ecological enquiry so that we have a feel for how we’ll explore our theme together.

  4. I open up the enquiry circle: I’ll ask who has a lived experience they would like us to investigate together? with the lived experience being something that they are at the centre of or that matters to them or they’re lacking insight into.

    For example: ‘I have a worldview that troubles me and I don’t understand where it comes from’. Or, ‘I was in a meeting the other day and I was really confused about what happened and why I behaved the way I did’. Or, ‘I don’t have a clear ancestral heritage and I wonder how this affects my sense of who I am and my place in the world’.

    Depending on how many of us have something alive we’d love to have the group help us investigate, we’ll either take one experience or find space for a couple.

  5. We start: When in a circle with members that haven’t practiced ecological enquiry before, which is most Ecological Us circles, I ****will ask the group to hold space and pay attention while I facilitate the start of the process, as though the other person and I were in a 1:1 session. I’ll also talk through what I’m doing and why.

    I’ll start by opening up the situation: ‘Could you tell me more about this aspect?’, or ‘That sentence you just said there, let’s dive into that more. What did you mean by … ?’, or ‘It sounds like there’s an underlying story there about how the world works. Are you happy to explore that more with me?’

    I might also start to share what’s alive in me: ‘As I was listening to you, I noticed that a memory came up for me …’ , or ‘I notice my own lack of clear ancestral heritage and how I hold questions about what it means for me to be a so-called white, middle class woman in the UK…’.

  6. We open up the space to shared enquiry: I’ll invite the circle members to bring themselves in to enquiry with us, inviting them to ask questions if they need more information to help ‘investigate’ the lived experience, as well as inviting them to start voicing what they notice is alive in them.

    Throughout, I’ll be facilitating through a process of teaching, guiding, and being an active participant.

  7. Following where we go: I view enquiry like a river; it meanders where it needs to, perhaps going left, then right, then widening, then narrowing. The same is true for ecological enquiry. **The attention therefore doesn’t need to stay on the lived experience we started with but as the facilitator I’ll keep the container active by bringing us back to our theme if we move away too far.

  8. Checking for completeness: When I notice that we seem to be complete in our enquiry, I’ll ask if there’s anything that feels important to share before we head into check-outs.

  9. Check outs: I’ll share a check-out prompt. </aside>

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