This seems really unrelated to Owen, but because I saw this, I’d flag I also went to a circling retreat in Oxford around that time, it might have been the same one.
I found to be personally fairly uninteresting, and got weird vibes from the instructor. In a discussion that Friday (the first day), he mentioned a lot of metamodernism stuff including a lot of stuff by Ken Wiber. Spirituality vibes similar to what I know of some communities in the Bay.
I did some online searching that evening, and found some reports of sexual harassment and similar around the upper parts of Circling Europe.
My general impression is something like, “Issues of sexual harassment and similar are just endemic in alternative communities.”
I know lots of other people I respect have gotten valuable things from circling and similar circling retreats. I’ve also done a bit of circling without the official mediators and found it to be mostly fine.
I just attended on the first day, and decided not to join for the next two. (That said, in fairness, I find incredibly few activities better than my best non-retreat activities, so this itself isn’t saying much).
At the one I was at, maybe 20% of the group seemed like it was EAs, I don’t remember specifically.
For what it’s worth, my model is that anything with intense emotional openness and big potential emotional shifts (like circling, like some parts of EA) are both high potential reward (self-improvement, self-knowledge, cool and intense experiences) and higher risk (destabilization, being vulnerable to others’ narratives). I believe Anna Salamon talked about this as a mistake when she discussed CFAR doing a lot of circling without being attendant to the power dynamics between people in the circle.
This seems really unrelated to Owen, but because I saw this, I’d flag I also went to a circling retreat in Oxford around that time, it might have been the same one.
I found to be personally fairly uninteresting, and got weird vibes from the instructor. In a discussion that Friday (the first day), he mentioned a lot of metamodernism stuff including a lot of stuff by Ken Wiber. Spirituality vibes similar to what I know of some communities in the Bay.
I did some online searching that evening, and found some reports of sexual harassment and similar around the upper parts of Circling Europe.
My general impression is something like, “Issues of sexual harassment and similar are just endemic in alternative communities.”
I know lots of other people I respect have gotten valuable things from circling and similar circling retreats. I’ve also done a bit of circling without the official mediators and found it to be mostly fine.
I just attended on the first day, and decided not to join for the next two. (That said, in fairness, I find incredibly few activities better than my best non-retreat activities, so this itself isn’t saying much).
At the one I was at, maybe 20% of the group seemed like it was EAs, I don’t remember specifically.
For what it’s worth, my model is that anything with intense emotional openness and big potential emotional shifts (like circling, like some parts of EA) are both high potential reward (self-improvement, self-knowledge, cool and intense experiences) and higher risk (destabilization, being vulnerable to others’ narratives). I believe Anna Salamon talked about this as a mistake when she discussed CFAR doing a lot of circling without being attendant to the power dynamics between people in the circle.
yeah this was mostly in the spirit of “are there broader cultural issues we need to work on/ how to we prevent people falling into the same traps”