by Christina Baldwin

"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."

-Excerpt from http://www.amazon.com

This book was, and still is, a real inspiration to me. It is a field book, a highly practical and insightful book around group process: The art of meeting in Circle, which is what the native peoples have been doing for eons, and which is now making its way into mainstream situations and contexts.

Christina Balwin’s book takes some of the wisdom from the native traditions and how they gathered in council, and places it in a simple structure and method for people to learn from and take and use in different contexts. She has worked with circle for years, and her book is full of examples of how it has been used in corporate settings, feminist group meetings, spiritual gatherings and many more. It is a book that speaks to everything that Pioneers of Change is about, as it is not just a methodology book, but a book about a practice which holds inherent in its method an attempt to bring community and a sense of the sacred back into our lives.

“We need a revolution in the West: not violent overthrow, but a willingness to take responsibility for the course of history being set forth in our names. We need a revolution determined to activate broad, inclusive social change. We need to insist that our homes, schools, neighborhoods, places of work, cities, states, and nations dialogue with us about the values set in place for this next millennium.”

And this is in part what the circle can help us do.

“And by now I knew: A circle is not just a meeting with the chairs rearranged. A circle is a way of doing things differently than we have become accustomed to. The circle is a return to our original form of community as well as a leap forward to create a new form of community.”

The basic experiment in working with circling is to invite groups of people to become self-facilitating. Not one person directing things, but the group itself. The three principles of circle are rotating leadership, sharing responsibility, and relying on spirit, or some people would prefer to think of it in terms of flow: relying on flow. It relates to being present, to speak from the heart with intention, and to listen to each other with attention.

What I have seen circle do, and what this book shares and teaches, is to bring people together in deeper ways than we are used to in our rushed societies. It teaches us the art of trusting each other to connect and to self-organise a shared endeavour.

Can groups self-organise? Many of us are trying it out, and here is one method that seems to bring a valuable contribution to the effort. The book taught me much about why it might be that local groups of pioneers aren’t always working as well as an initial vision for them had hoped for, as well as what might change it.

For more specific details on the methods and principles of Circle, and how it could be applied to Pioneers of Change, based on excerpts from this book, see the Community section.

It is a short, easy read, the language is captivating, its insights engaging.

For anyone working with, or wanting to work with, bringing people together in meaningful conversation, project work, or community, I would offer this as a Must Read.

• Reviewed by Marianne Knuth

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