Calling the Circle

Informationen zum Autor Christina Baldwin Klappentext The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams. 50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity. In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring.CHAPTER 1 AwakeningWhere We Are Now I come from the middle. I grew up in Indiana and Minnesota, in the matrix of two families: descended from my mother's line of Scandinavian farmers and my father's line of Scotch-Irish-English tinkers, beekeepers, and preachers. I spent the first twenty years of my adult life living in the middle of the country, in the middle of the middle class. This sense of personal placement is important because it is the rootedness of middle ground I bring to my own awakeningand to the work of the circle I present in this book. On the suburban edge of Minneapolis, where I lived most of four decades, the air is still breathable, trees grow, and children cluster brightly on street corners to wait for the school bus. From this center place, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, I ventured out across the continent to teach but always returned to rest in the lake-studded city with its drastic seasons. Here I was surrounded by the moderate people who collectively represent the American dream of a decent and comfortable life. It teaches us much, this life in the middle, whether in Missouri, Minnesota, or Manitoba; downtown Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Cape Town, or Sydney; farms in Kansas or Sweden, vineyards in Spain or Israel. While taking on the cultural flavors of a thousand different surroundings, the stability of middle-class existence has become the dominant model of modern life worldwide. This is the vision we have been taught to aspire to, the scene that shows up in countless variations on television, in movies, and in books to reinforce the collective fantasy about what is desirable and achievable. It is this fantasy that is falling apart. As we grapple with the awareness that our personal lives cannot be separated from the life of our times, we are forced to reconsider the assumptions, expectations, and values that have guided our lives thus far. One by one by one by one, something happens that shakes us into awareness. When one vision falls, another vision rises. This is not usually a sudden switch, but a long process of the old paradigm fading awaystruggling with itself to let go, subverting new forces, becoming reactionary and rigid exactly because the inevitable is obvious. We are losing our way of life; and we need to lose it, in order not to lose life itself. Our awakenings come in many guisessome surprise life has up its sleeveand bang, we are shifted out of personal or cultural sleep. Trying to describe this phenomenon...

Autorentext

Christina Baldwin

Klappentext

The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams.

50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity.

In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring.

Zusammenfassung
The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams.

50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity.

In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring.

Leseprobe
CHAPTER 1
 
 
 
Awakening—Where We Are Now
 
I come from the middle. I grew up in Indiana and Minnesota, in the matrix of two families: descended from my mother’s line of Scandinavian farmers and my father’s line of Scotch-Irish-English tinkers, beekeepers, and preachers. I spent the first twenty years of my adult life living in the middle of the country, in the middle of the middle class. This sense of personal placement is important because it is the rootedness of middle ground I bring to my own awakening—and to the work of the circle I present in this book.
 
On the suburban edge of Minneapolis, where I lived most of four decades, the air is still breathable, trees grow, and children cluster brightly on street corners to wait for the school bus. From this center place, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, I ventured out across the continent to teach but always returned to rest in the lake-studded city with its drastic seasons. Here I was surrounded by the moderate people who collectively represent the “American dream” of a decent and comfortable life. It teaches us much, this life in the middle, whether in Missouri, Minnesota, or Manitoba; downtown Chicago, London, Fr…