Creating space for healing to flow in ‘circle’ has become such an integral part of my work and life in recent years. The connection and sense of community that it evokes is beautiful and feels so necessary in modern day life. Here in the West we are conditioned to see things in a rather linear way - like any "good" story with a clear beginning, middle and an end. For many, our time here on Earth is simply that - we are born, we live and then we pass away – with our beginnings very much separate to our endings. We are encouraged to prove ourselves as individuals, to “stay in our own lane” and keep “moving forward” no matter what happens – to live along these lines. But what if in living so linearly we are forgetting the deeper part of our existence? That life moves in cycles - something we slowly come to remember each time we join in circle…
Through a circle all is connected. There is no isolated ending or beginning, simply a continuous cycle. In a circle there is unity and wholeness. It is a symbol of oneness that is reflected back to us throughout the Universe. The focal points of our skies - the Sun and the Moon in fullness - both appear to us as circles. The spherical Earth spins on its axis in revolutions giving us the cycle of night and day. The orbit of the Earth around the Sun, although technically elliptical is almost a perfect circle, giving rise to a yearly cycle. Even the Earth's electromagnetic field can be seen to move in cycles with waves resonating at 7.83Hz or 7.83 cycles per second. This is often termed the “heartbeat” of the Earth.
Some of our earliest ancestors; the various Shamanic tribes living 50,000 years ago connected to these powerful cycles using the circle as a prompt. Gathering together in circle, they sang and danced to the beat of what developed into a circular drum. By beating the drum 7-8 times per second they synchronised with the frequency of human brainwaves (7-8 cycles per second) in the Theta state, facilitating deep meditation and trance. This beat also synchronised with the Earths resonance or “heartbeat”. They became completely aligned with the rhythm of Earth and with the Spirit plane too – creating a space for spiritual communion and healing for the collective. What incredible, ancient wisdom!
During the Neolithic period towering stone circles such as Stonehenge were built and used to perform ritual, mark potent moments in the cycle of the seasons and to honour the passage of the dead. It is almost as if the creation of a physical circle can help us tune into the circular nature of our earthly existence, (through passage of the seasons), and also our spiritual existence passing through life, death and returning to Spirit.
Hindus and Buddhist mandalas have long mapped the cosmos as circles moving within circles on an ever-increasing scale and Carl Jung noted the mandala as one of the archetypal symbols arising from the collective unconscious. Young children, when asked to meditate silently for a short time and then paint "whatever they saw" mostly created images of concentric circles reminiscent of simple mandalas.
If we feel the system of reincarnation as a truth then our time on this planet can be seen as one more revolution on the "wheel of life”- another golden opportunity to evolve our consciousness and learn through human experiences. Throughout our lives we move in familial and social circles and looking further still, into the human energy body, from the Vedas we understand that our consciousness also moves in circles through seven main chakras or spinning “wheels”. Our energetic reality then becomes reminiscent of the famous song:
"Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel,
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel,
Like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind"
Using the circle as a sacred symbol, as our ancestors have done before us, can help us awaken to a deeper reality. A reality where there are no endings, simply a turning of the wheel and a new phase of the cycle. A reality where we are all divinely connected - to Earth, Spirit and one another. This is the true power of a healing circle – it is a homecoming and a remembering of our connection to All That Is.