As we nurture the spirit of URI, let us renew the power of prayer and positive intention that unites our global community and awakens our hearts and souls. See the full series of posts here.
Sacred Circle
The circle has resided since the dawn of time. As URI grows and evolves, the circle is URI’s blessing, a way to nurture one another, an opening to building a respectful community, a symbol of something more, a place to tend the sacred in our midst.
Excerpt from Margaret Wheatley’s forward to the book, The Circle Way: A Leader in Every Chair, by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea.
We don’t pay nearly as much attention to shape, to the form of the meeting. We spend a great deal of time preparing content, agendas and dealing with politics, but then barely notice the shape of the room in which we are going to work. Circle is an ancient archetype of the human spirit – one that summons people everywhere step into conversation… Circles create co-equal participation and reflective thinking.
Form is the most essential element to consider, predictive of the outcome of the meeting. Then as now, no matter what is taking shape in the exterior world, human beings can get through anything as long as we’re together… May we take these [circle] practices to heart as our path going forward… and come out of the darkness of isolation into the clear seeing that a circle makes possible.
Vision from Black Elk, Oglala Sioux Medicine Man
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
And I saw the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father, and I saw that it was holy.