When people spend time together in circle, I sometimes experience a quality of connection that feels different from a series of individual conversations. I use words such as resonance and entrainment to describe that felt experience. I also believe our longing for community has deep roots. In this recording, I explore those ideas through my own history of facilitating groups.
Discovering This in My Own Circles
I first encountered this kind of group energy properly back in 2006, when I began facilitating my own circles rather than running front-of-room seminars. At that time I went through a shift in how I worked. Instead of taking people through a fixed structure, I started opening circles up and following what was alive in the room. On one five-day retreat, something happened that I still think about. In the early days, people worked on personal and relational material in fairly ordinary ways. But as the retreat went on, as people went deeper into their own shadow work and claimed more of themselves, the group became more and more connected. By day three, the resonance between people was so strong that when the next person took space, it no longer felt like one individual working on their own issue. It felt like something wanted to move through the group as a whole.
When the Group Becomes One Body
I remember it feeling as though each person in the circle had become a different organ of a single body, and that body was taking its turn to speak through whoever had space. The work stayed embodied and personal, it never stopped being real for the individual, but there was also this sense of a larger process moving through all of us together. At times it felt almost like being a puppet pulled by something bigger, which can sound unsettling, but in the room it felt sacred. It met a need in me that I struggled to put words to, something that felt tribal, ancient, like a way of being together that our culture has largely lost touch with.
I understand this as a rediscovery of a human capacity for shared presence. What I can speak to directly is my experience in the circles I have facilitated.
Why the Personal Work Still Matters
The collective, transpersonal experience isn't a shortcut around the personal and relational work, it depends on it. The times I've seen this unity consciousness show up most powerfully were the times when people had done real inner work first, claimed their emotional range, taken responsibility for their patterns. When that groundwork wasn't there, the group energy could turn into performance, people saying the right words and doing the right stillness without the felt sense of something moving through the field. Personal work and relational work create the fertile ground. The transpersonal experience grows out of that ground, not instead of it.
A Different Kind of Intelligence
When a group is genuinely in resonance, everything becomes amplified. We feel more of ourselves and more of each other, our defences, our triggers, our openings. As people surrender into that shared field, something like a group mind becomes available, a kind of collective intelligence or intuition that goes further than any one of us could reach alone. I've experienced moments in circle where information or a sense of what's about to happen arrived that I have no ordinary explanation for. I don't offer that as proof of anything, only as an honest account of what these fields have felt like to me over many years of facilitating them.
This is the part of the work that has always meant the most to me personally. I felt these kinds of energies as a child, long before I had any language or context for them. Finding a way of working where that part of me had a home, where connection to self, to relationship and to something larger could all be held together, changed how I understood community. It's genuinely difficult to describe in words. It's something closer to being felt than explained, which is part of why circle work continues to be at the centre of what I teach.
How Christian Describes Group Entrainment Building
- Individuals do personal and relational inner work
- Trust grows and people experience a stronger sense of connection.
- Individual sharing gives way to a felt collective process
- Christian describes moments of shared awareness as unity consciousness.
