Dre Bendewald: Women Circling

Dre Bendewald is the founder of the Art of Circling. Dre is a dear friend—and powerful to behold, particularly when she’s in action, holding space for other women. She holds circles, where women—strangers and friends alike—gather to tell the truth about their lives. To be witnessed. To be heard. Admittedly, I was nervous before I joined my first circle, but Dre builds a safe and grounded container in which to alchemize your emotions, and bring your stories out of the shadows in a type of communal confessional. What’s most profound is when you hear your story—something you thought had only ever happened to you—come out of another’s woman’s mouth. Ultimately, Dre is also a teacher intent on spreading this sacred and ages-old activity across the globe: Women have always gathered to share wisdom and story—it’s only recently that we’ve been torn apart. In our conversation today, she explains how to do it, whether you choose to circle with your own friends, or join her. Meanwhile, I’m thrilled to announce that she’s holding circles for On Our Best Behavior, which anyone can join: You can go to her website, theartofcircling.com to learn more. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Take us back to sort of the beginning in terms of this, I mean, you can take us back to the beginning of your life if you want as well, but just the beginning of circling and how this showed up in your life?

DRE BENDEWALD: Yes, I was born and raised in New York City, in the city, in the West Village. And I studied to be an actress, went to high school of the performing arts and went to college for theater. Moved out to LA to be an actress, to pursue acting. And, my best friend was living out here and I knew a couple of other people, but I moved away from home and landed in Laurel Canyon amongst a group of incredible artists and directors, producers, you name it. A lot of actors too. They were just beginning to explore this thing called a goddess circle, right as I landed, and you know, coming from New York, I was a very tough New Yorker. The joke is, or not the joke, the truth is I was like, leather jacket chain, smoking, coffee, drinking, you could not, You know, fuck with me, let's say, and because I grew up in New York and it was kind of rough, but also because of childhood trauma, let's say. So I was very guarded, very protected, very scared. I was an actress, so I appeared to have it all together On the outside. I appeared to be very self-assured, but on the inside I was like a total disaster. And I sat in my first circle, and this is fun because my best friends like to claim who brought me to my first circle. So there's three of them, Jen, Chris, and Lee, like the, like the triple goddesses that all get credit for taking me to my first circle.

And it was in that first circle that I felt something that I had never felt before. And that was, I felt safe, I felt seen, I felt awake, and it was like, it's like I'm feeling a little trembling now. It was like something was happening. Something happened to me in that first, first circle, and I just recently found the journal entry about it. So I actually know that I'm telling the, the correct version of this. And what I think happened was I was connected to something the divine, what was created in that container with these other women. And I felt a connection to these other women who, who on entry, I had them above me. They were more successful, they were more beautiful. They were more together. They were more, more, more, more, more. I was nothing, who am I? But it was in that beautiful container, just women sitting in a circle. Nothing crazy going on except women sitting in a circle facing one another with a little bit of intention. They were newbies. They were exploring this as well, but I heard or felt like a voice come through me that I had never heard before. I believe it was my authentic self. I believe it was the voice that I had never been given permission to access. And, and this is all like, you know, I was a walking, functioning human on the planet. But that voice I experienced was different I was immediately hooked. I was 24, and the reason I was hooked is because, you know, we pass a talking piece around, could be, you know, like a stick, a feather, a shell, whatever. We pass a talking stick around and as soon as I heard from every woman in the circle that they all were going through something. And I was like, oh, I'm not alone. Oh, that woman over there who I thought is like this whatever, big fancy producer who has it all together, oh, she's struggling with her phase in life right now. Might be different from mine, but I was just given this beautiful opportunity. To not only see other women, but to learn from other women, to recognize myself in other women. And I was instantly hooked and I was like, why aren't we doing this all the time? So this group of friends, we started to explore it more and more and more. I went to other circles, and then around 15 years ago, I started leading circles. I got a teepee in my backyard. That's a whole other chapter, but I got a teepee in my backyard because I wanted a spiritual gathering place for community, and I felt really drawn to lead circles and share what I had experienced way back then and kept experiencing and still do experience, I wanted to provide that space for more women to just experience their authentic voices. You know, experience themselves and to learn from one another.

That was the other big thing in our twenties, thirties. We were looking for love. We were career women. We were wanting to partner. We were eventually wanting to get married, have babies, we were not getting the information we were seeking from the outside world, from culture, advertising, movies. You know, capitalism, I was like, I wanna hear from women about women's issues, journeys. I wanna learn from you who's married, what this is all about. I wanna learn from you who's had a baby? What's it like to have a baby? I wanna learn from you what it's like to go through divorce. I wanna learn from you what it's like to start a career. And that's why I was so drawn to being in circles with women. I wanna learn from women because that's where the, the real stuff was. Where the real information was. And then I could go on and on about, as I was growing up and younger generations were coming into the circle, I was learning from them too. So circling with other generations, it was blowing my mind. I wanna hear from the elders. I wanna learn from my contemporaries and I wanna listen to the young people too, because what they're bringing in with them, I have chills. What they're bringing in with them is different than what I know.

So I became wildly interested not only in leading circles, but encouraging and teaching and sharing with other women how to late circles because it's not that hard. I'm slightly obsessed with it and think everybody should be doing it. It's not for everyone, but there are so many women out there that are looking for what it is you are writing about in your book, what it is I'm doing in circles, and, we all feel this like we're missing something. And what we're missing is, Sharing and communing and being together in this, in this more conscious and beneficial way. I'll pause there.

ELISE: So I want you to take us through the structure of a circle. I mean, my mom and maybe they were called consciousness raising groups or when I was a kid, my mom was part of a women's group and my dad was part of a men's group and they still meet today. To this day they still sort of celebrate birthdays and gather, and I never had that. So I also felt like something like that was missing a reason to gather and start talking. But when I've circled with you, it's primarily been with strangers and I know you've experienced both sort of circling with women, you know, intimately and also with people you've never met and will never see again, I would imagine. Is there an energetic difference between the two. Do you have a preference? I mean, I'm sure it's with your friends. I'm kidding. But, do you have a preference?

DRE: No, actually, sometimes it's harder to circle with my friends. I don't have a preference because I learned so much and there's so much value in each and every circle. So I've been mainly leading circles virtually since the pandemic. And so it's been with women from all over the United States, other countries, and that's been really eye-opening and affirming that women anywhere, everywhere are going through similar journeys.

DRE: So, I love the expansiveness of circling with people that I don't know in my inner circle, circling with friends. And we do celebration circles and we do, mostly it's celebration circles now, and that just feels amazing because we're each other's witness and we get to really, you know, just honor everything that we've gone through or we are currently going through. So, I think both are different and both have value and the structure is really simple.

ELISE: What's the structure? And sort of take us through the rules too, because I think that, you know, circling with you, what I love is the safety that you provide, and the boundary, the, the container. It's very important to have a container, and particularly as people are opening up, like you kind of have to know how to help people suture themselves after a moment of vulnerable sharing. So take us through the, the science and the art of it.

DRE: So these are guidelines that I've cultivated over the years. So they're not rules, but I like to think of them as gifts that we give one another. As we're co-creating the container together. So each person in this circle is the most important part. I'm the facilitator. I offer these guidelines. I can't mandate them. I can't guarantee that everybody's gonna abide by them. But if we all go into agreement like, Hey, these guidelines feel good, then we really have an opportunity to create a space that is filled with connection and filled with love and filled with, dare I say, magic cause I've seen it happen time and time again.

So, because I've been doing this for almost 30 years and facilitating for 15, I actually have the data that these guidelines really, really work and I'm constantly like fine tuning them. So, and we can do it virtually or we can do it in person, the same guidelines apply, but really think of them as gifts. So I'm gonna give you the gift of hanging on your every word and listening to the person that's sharing and one person shares at a time. We use a talking piece where that signals to the rest of the group that that person has our undivided attention. And something really cool happens just with those two guidelines. We're so used to interrupting, we're so used to chiming in. We're so used to like, let me show you what I know, but we're rarely taught how to just hold space and just be a witness and just kind of chillax and let that person drop in and share. And if a group of us are doing this together, just those two guidelines creates a different atmosphere.

If I'm holding a, if I'm holding a talking piece, I'm actually accessing a different part of my way of being with myself and with you. And also, it's great for women, it's great for men too, but for women to be given the permission to just like, it's okay to just listen, sit back and listen, sit back and hold space. So those two, another guideline is that, What's shared in the circle, stays in the circle, and that means that if you share something, Elise, that I think is amazing and great and wonderful, it's your share. It's gonna, I'm gonna hold it sacred in the circle. I'm not gonna use it outside of the circle for my, for my own exchange of, I don't know, some type of currency that might make me look good, feel good, whatever. And I hear incredible things in circles, and I wanna share all the time. But I'll be very mindful that this guideline helps us co-create a brave space for us to be together. So if we all go into this agreement, what's shared in the circle, stays in a circle, well then I have like one more bit of, you know, opportunity to just act, to just be more truthful with myself and be more truthful with you. Another guideline is that you don't have to share if you don't want to. So then everybody relaxes cause everybody's like, I don't wanna be vulnerable. I don't wanna share stuff that I don't wanna be forced to share. Great. Don't share. Don't share if you don't want to, you can sit and hold space for other women to share. You think, oh man, you, you get to listen to your intuition in a circle and go, oh, I'm gonna share. I'm gonna share that story about that time. And then this other voice will come in and be like, who do you think you are? Don't share that. No one's gonna like you. You're gonna be judged. It's a stupid story. Don't share that. And so I talk about that in circles and I say, you know, start to listen to that kinder voice, that intuition, because that's coming from somewhere that that story wants to be shared. And it might not be for you, it might be for someone else in a circle. So you're invited to, one of the guidelines is, is start to listen to your intuition and that kind voice more than the negative voice. Another guideline is keep circle talk in the circle. So even though you and I are friends and after a circle, I might wanna go up to you and go, oh my God, Elise, that thing you shared, holy shit. Brutal. I can't believe that happened to you. Well, I've noticed that sometimes things are shared in a circle that are only meant for that circle. Maybe this is the first time you're sharing that. Maybe this is the only time you're sharing that. Maybe it's just. For the circle to hold that truth. Maybe that share was for somebody else in the circle. And so I brought that guideline into play because I saw it happen where someone would bring something up outside of a circle and that woman would recoil or shut down or not wanna share again. So all these practices, like I said, these gifts we're giving one another so that we can have this deeper experience with ourselves and with one another. Another guideline is that we practice self-care, that we take care of ourselves first and foremost in the circle. That we don't just try to be good and you know, hold on. If we have to go to the bathroom or check our phone or do whatever that we actually. Really practice taking care of ourselves, which you'd be surprised how many of us will sit and not do that.

So I like to front load all of these guidelines before every circle. I think my favorite guideline is that tears are welcome. I always bring tissues to a circle because in all the circles I've led up, until now, it's starting to change. I would hear these exact words. I'm sorry, I'm crying. I don't know why I'm crying. I'm sorry I'm crying. And I felt after learning how to cry in a circle myself, I felt like we need to address this. We need to talk about this. We need to actually highlight and welcome authentic selves. So tears are welcome. And just covers everything. Your most authentic self, all of your feelings are welcome. Your rage is welcome. Your anger is welcome. Your disappointment is welcome. Your joy is welcome. Your celebration is welcome. You've got good news to share. Share the good news. We need to hear it. I mean, really what we do in circles, circles are the antidote for all the seven deadly sins. Every single one of them. You know, we, we practice self-care. We practice celebrating one another, supporting one another, actively supporting one another. Actively, we practice celebrating ourselves. You know, I'm really, I'm really proud of what I just went through. I just wanna share it with everybody, like, I just got this job. I just did this thing. I just had this baby. Like I'm really proud we get to practice celebrating ourselves, self-acceptance, loving our bodies, accomplishments or even big dreams. How many times women, me included, would share something like, I really wanna do this thing. Like, I'm kind of scared, but I really wanna share circling with more people. I remember whispering it in a circle. I really wanna share this with more women. Someone going, I really wanna like start this business. I really wanna go back to school. I really wanna, so we actually practiced like dreaming big. I used to do manifestation circles, full moon manifesting circles for years, and women were allowing themselves to dream big in circles. We talk about like not only loving our bodies, but our sexuality, our sensuality, our what's working, what's not working, menopause, childbirth. I learned about motherhood and childbirth from other women in circles cause I was away from my support system, that were in other states cause I had moved away.

So anyway, back to tears are welcome. In the circle, women have, I've seen it, you know, women have been circling with me for a long time, I watched them go from completely cut off from every emotion, but they're kind of together. They're kind of functioning. They're kind of happy. But as soon as they start to unleash and uncoil and untether and excavate and have an emotion, tears, let's say, and the world doesn't stop spinning and they're actually okay, they start to blossom and they start to expand and and their voice changes. You start to hear a different sound, a different quality come through them. So tears are welcome. I joke like every guideline is my favorite, but it's my favorite because I had to learn how to cry and I learned how to cry in circles, and now I love my tears. I've learned so much from my tears from, but it was witnessing other women, witnessing other women own own their entirety, own their tears, own their joy, own their rage. Own their stories, own themselves, what is the other guidelines that wanna be spoken? I have probably like 15 or 20, because I keep fine tuning them.

ELISE: What I've experienced with you too, I wrote a newsletter recently about this idea of empathy or this and this Buddhist saying, don't just do something, stand there. But from what I recall, you know this, you know, you can make a gesture, you can hold your hands over your heart. You can, sort of acknowledge, physically acknowledge someone share, but, but you are not to respond, offer advice, even overt sympathy, right? It's just a recognition of what was said so that people don't feel like, I mean, it's our instinct, right? To help, to fix, repair, nurture. And that's also very powerful because it keeps a circle. You don't end up on sort of long tangents where you're offering sort of un pedigree group therapy to someone. It's really just an act of one way expression. Although it also felt like in people sharing, as you said, like listen to the voice because it might be for someone else, in the same way that we sort of carry signs to other people, the amount of resonance that was created, I think in the, the online circle that I was in with you, we were talking about loneliness maybe, or I don't even know if there was a theme, but people started just resonating intensely with this idea of Oh, me too, which, you know, having just written a book that, like trying to hit that chord, that Carl Rogers chord of the personal is universal, that so much of what we experience, it might look slightly different and then be in a different order, but that we are effectively not the same person, but many of us are hitting the same strings of experience. And to move that from, oh, I thought that was only me, to, oh my God, so many, so many of us I think is a deeply healing movement into a shared experience from a personal or individual suffering.

DRE: Well, it's the idea of separation that's killing us. That we're so separate. We're so different. And the power of circling and women gathering is that we instantly feel the connection. We're instantly, even with women, we don't know, even the theme loneliness that emerged from the circle we sat in, it's, that's what was, let's say the oversold of that circle. Each circle has its own personality identity, and I could start a circle saying, we're gonna talk about self-care. And the theme that emerges is something completely different. I have led circles in elementary schools at my kids' charter school and you know, I would, in a second grade class, I would start, okay, let's talk about, you know, share what's your favorite ice cream as an opener and we'd go around the circle and by the time it came back to me, we were talking about gun violence. Why? Because that's what needed to be shared in that circle, because there had been some, there was a lot of gun violence that was in that collective. So the circle also dictates itself of what wants to come through. And with women, what wants to come through is the healing of all the themes that are in your book. So when I started leading circles or found circling all those years ago, it was a collective swell that was happening and it's continuing to happen. It's like women wanting to move out of the, the experiences that we've been stuck in. We undo these conditions or these fears or these feelings of separation that are just antithetical, it's not who we are. So when we're given the permission to be vulnerable in a safe place to connect, to support one another, and back to what you said. But when we're given the permission, then we're like, oh, this is amazing. Where has this been all my life? This is so much better than walking into a room and feeling less than, and competitive and separate. And we're like done with that. So hopefully we're evolving out of that.

But back to what you said about one of the guidelines is the way I like to lead a circle is that, yeah, we don't offer advice. There's no crosstalk. We do gestures or we say yes and, to let the woman know that what you're saying resonates with me. Or we do a sign that shows we just got goosebumps. Like, your truth is my truth. Your pain is my pain. Your story does resonate with my story. So that even though we're not saying, oh my God, yeah, me too. The woman can feel, the one who's sharing can feel that what she's saying is connecting with all the other women in the circle. And I do sometimes offer a support round, which is you ask permission, would you like support? Yes, I'd love support. And then you use that woman's share to support her where she's at. You don't say, you know what I think you should do? You don't offer advice, but you say, I really wanna support you where you're at. And then you just reflect back to them what they said. So powerful the to feel, to feel seen and heard and witnessed. And that's all you're saying is like, I see you, I feel you. I got you. I support you in what you're going through or about to go through. And then the other thing is that we offer our experience rather than advice. Advice is great but just for this particular practice, let's say a woman's getting married and the women that are married in the circle wanna offer advice, they can offer it in the form of experience. You know, when I was starting out and I first lose a newlywed or whatever, and then they share a story and then that woman gets to carry that story with her or not. But she'll always remember the story. That was shared more so than I think, than she'll remember the advice.

ELISE: Yeah. So interesting. You know, I was thinking about how everything stays in the circle, et cetera, and how transactional we can all be in the way that we exchange information or we're sort of like mag pies looking for anecdotes, right, to sprinkle across our conversation, I think it's a very human impulse, but even just to sort of have that guideline of this is not for retention, this is for energetic vibration because I'm thinking of the circle that we went to and I don't recall any of the details of what was shared. Just the feeling. And so that's really stripping away the content too, to just get at whatever that resonance field is. I think is a very powerful equalizer, it's like beyond the mental, it sort of takes the mental out of it. You're not trying to remember or like code a story.

DRE: This is why practice has been so powerful for me and other women, is that where else do we take ourselves together to the sacred, or do we bring this sacred into our exchange? So circling is a sacred practice. The the guidelines make it sacred. The guidelines, make it a ritual and to make it sacred, you know, light a candle, use the guidelines, meditate, pray, call in whatever your degree of sacredness wants to be. But just the guidelines make it sacred and amongst women, that’s profound. So that guideline of what's shared in the circle says in the circle is a sacred agreement that we're making with one another. It's like, I'm almost vowing to you that I'm not gonna use your truth as an exchange. And I believe Carrissa has said this, that we can, we can extract the moral of the story without repeating the story. I can share, I heard this incredible story of courage in a circle. I'm just not gonna share the details of the names and the precious privacy of it. But I can take the moral of the story and I can embody that and I can share that. And this was, something that came up this last year in circles that I was witnessing is that, you know when we do this profound listening, like hanging on the woman's every word, if I'm really hanging on your every word and I'm taking in your story by not thinking about myself and up in my ego, and what am I gonna say next? That's another guideline is you try not to rehearse when someone else is sharing about what you're gonna say, but you really hang on that woman's every word. If I really allow your story to enter me, and I hold it, and then from there I'm gonna share a story that's coming to me and so on and so forth, that we're weaving our stories together. We're strengthening our fiber as women who share stories like your book is because you share so much of your own personal story, and then you share so much of the collective wisdom that you have gathered. And now women are getting to access their own stories, but in circles, as they share their stories, our stories become one story.

DRE: We connect our stories, and then that becomes the strengthening fiber of women's narrative. That's how we're changing the story by sharing our stories. But it's not just like, I'm gonna share it one way because we have a lot of that with social media, with even, even reading books. It's like, I read a book, it's one way, but then what do I do with it? So if we bring it into a circle and we all keep sharing our stories in this sacred way, well then our stories connect. And then we're weaving a new story together. That's what I find so valuable about circling, is that I carry all of these stories with me now, like they are my stories too.

ELISE: Yeah. I have a question about equalizing power. I was just recently talking to Austin Channing Brown, and she was talking about sort of white woman reaching for power instead of leading with vulnerability. And you know, within our culture we have so many layers of power and you and I both know like very powerful women. And we were even talking about this in the context of circling around the book or like how that would work. And I was saying, I shouldn't be present because I don't wanna inhibit how people talk about the book and or make people feel like they're performing or something in front of me. But how do you, and maybe it's just a function of where we live, how do you equalize a circle if there's someone that people recognize or like, oh, that person has more power than I do, does that just go away? Or is there sort of, because I've, in my experience of it, it's always this sort of like need to be seen by people with more power and that changes the sharing. Have you experienced that or how do you experience that?

DRE: So I believe that the guidelines really do help as a great equalizer. So I have sat in these type of circles you're talking about where there's an experience of somebody being like, very successful and then someone who you would say is not as successful. I don't know. But what's so amazing about circles is that all that kind of persona is left outside because we're really just doing soul work in there. So I have sat in circles where, you know, the really well known person is equal in the circle because of the format, because of the, because of the guidelines. And they feel actual relief that they don't have to hold that space for everybody, but they can just be themselves and they could just experience the circle as as well. So then everybody else gets to work on their stuff too, about. What comes up for you when you're around somebody that you're perceiving as more or less than you, and it is a practice of equality and it's a practice of connection, and it's a practice of disconnecting from your ego. I had one, I had one group a long time ago where we had been circling for quite a few months. It was once a month and. And then they threw me a gratitude party for sponsoring all these circles. And one of the women looked at the other women. She was like, what do you do for a living? Like, we had been in these circles for so long but we didn't know like where we lived or what kind of car we drove or what we really did for a living, because that's not what was being discussed or a accessed in the circle. It was like the opposite of status. It was, it was spirit, it was soul. It was, it was beyond that.

ELISE: So powerful, because as you were saying, it's like it's hard in any, any social structure when we're in our comparison led society to not be rating ourselves against each other. And so you think about the antidote and it's like, oh, is everyone sort of on a blacked out computer screen and anonymized?And the idea of even allowing it to be present and then equalizing against it and to notice how it shows up is very powerful, I think. I don't know, just something I'm interested in, and I've observed so much of being present to that and also like the pressure of that and not, not directed at me, but how we sort of, in a culture where there are so many situations around achievement, wealth, obviously gender, class, visibility, how we can start stripping all of those things away to get to the basic humanness. And to be conscious of all of those factors, those overlapping Venn diagrams at the same time I think is also very helpful and beautiful. So it's like in one way I wanna take it all away. And then the other, it's like, no, let it be present so we can actually understand it.

DRE: Yes. If you wanna discover where your imbalances are, go sit in a circle.

ELISE: Yeah.

DRE: Go face and be still and see what comes and see what comes up. I'm never surprised and I'm always surprised that really powerful women,  how insecure they are, how much they don't want you to see they're real and they're successful and they're amazing, but they're afraid of their own vulnerability or they don't wanna be seen in that way, or it's hard for them because they're, they're kind of used to spinning enough plates to, to keep it all going that sitting in a circle does not feel comfortable, until they do it a few times and then, and then they're like, oh, oh, I get it. Oh, this makes sense. This feels right. You know, we're all gonna keep learning and we're all gonna keep growing and evolving and, and a lot of women don't know what is, what imbalance they have until they sit in a circle and they have big realizations because they see themselves in other women and they're like, ah, that's me. Oh my, I had no idea. So circling can be very personal, meaning you have your own awareness. It's not like, you know, you come to a circle and everybody sees you and they know everything about you and now you're outed. No, it's, you can have an experience where you see yourself in everybody in the circle. You have an inner awakening that leads you down a spiritual path of getting to know yourself in a way that you had no idea. I see it happen all the time where a woman will say, I've never shared this before. I don't know why I'm sharing, but it was something that so and so said, and I feel like I need to share it. And that share will be part of the whole circle that will then be a ripple effect that will then inspire somebody else to share. And then you have this whole circle of women having these epiphanies about themselves for themselves. Nobody's forcing them to do anything, but it's simply just from women sharing their stories.

ELISE: Hmm. It’s so beautiful. People say like, oh, I wanna join a book club, or I wanna book club the book. And some women are doing it amongst their friends. But I also just wanted to write something that could be circled where you didn't even have to read the book in order to access that emotion. And so I'm sending people to you, and so how, I know you lead circles and then you're teaching women to lead circles. What's your dream? Do you know?

DRE: That's a really good question. Yeah, I'm in a beautiful sacred pause right now, so I've been leading circles nonstop and I just, I just took this pause to answer that question and my dream is around sharing the art of circling with more and more women, and I'm like allowing Spirit to move through me right now to give me the next big inspiration because it's all been inspired. None of this was, I didn't seek any of this out. It just all kind of came through me. But to write about it, to empower more women through circling, yeah, just to keep sharing it. That's the dream, to keep sharing it and having it grow and serve and, you know, just to join the movement that's already happening. Yeah, I don't really have like a specific, like I could articulate it exactly right now, and I'm, and I'm actually o okay with it for the first time. I used to think like, God, I gotta, I have to know exactly what I want and, and I wanna keep circling, that's for sure. Even though I've taken this pause, because it's, it's been my main, you know, I've been on a path and committed to my own healing for so long, and it's been the main spiritual practice of mine that has provided me with the most healing in addition to many other things, but it's really been my main focus.

ELISE: Well thinking about Carissa again, as she said, exploration, not expectation. And it's interesting, I feel like as a relative outsider looking at this one, it requires no special tools, no special training in the sense of its ability to sort of scale or spread, and so to birth it and let it go and I think most of us recognize in that process, like, oh, this is what we're built to do. Like this is what we have done historically. We’re severed from it, or many of us have been severed from it, but gathering together to share information, it's found foundationally human and definitely part of the feminine, so to think about trying to sort of constrain it or codify it or program it or determine exactly what it should be, is probably futile and limiting where it's a limitless, expansive idea. I mean, the idea of women creating spaces, following guidelines to keep people in a container where they feel safe, but letting it sort of go is quite a beautiful idea.

DRE: Yeah, I was, when I was thinking about talking to you today, you know, I have a lot of books and I just reached for this one book, cause it was the book that really ignited that my desire to lead circles and to keep leading them and, and really there's been so many different versions of circles, you know, you could just be sitting at your dinner table and pick up a talking piece and throw out a prompt and deepen your connection with your family. And I've had women write me saying, oh my God, I did a circle at my dinner table last night and we learned things about each other that we never knew. So as simple as that, you know, bringing, circling to your dinner table or your family gathering, or your kids' classroom or the boardroom, Or the retreat or the women's group or the book club. Like it's really endless and I picked this up, it was one of those first books that you read that are just life-changing? And so this book is Circle of Stones by Judith Dirk, Woman's Journey to Herself and it's very poetic, but this was the portion that really ignited something in me that was like, oh, this is why. This is why I will always circle and always lead circles. Can I read it to you? Can I read the quote?

ELISE: Yeah, please.

DRE: It says, “how might your life have been different if there had been a place for you, a place for you to go, a place of women to help you learn the ways of women? A place where you were nurtured from an ancient flow, sustaining you and studying you as you sought to become yourself. A place of women to help you find and trust the ancient flow already there within yourself, waiting to be released, a place of women. How might your life be different?”

ELISE: Mm. Beautiful.

DRE: And it was when, you know, my life felt different when I started circling and I just, I just love that I get to sit and share it with other women who feel the same way, who have the same experience. Where I had a woman write to me and she said, I had no idea that this was possible amongst women. And it was a modern woman. It was a modern working woman, who said I had no idea that women could be this way with other women. Isn't that just amazing? And then, and, and all it is, like you said, it's like, and all it is is like this simple form that where we're given permission to be who we are, to share, to support, to explore, to undo, to rewrite. How about that? We do a lot of, I was looking at the different themes that I circled about last year and, you know, I would come up with these themes based on all of the circles that I had been leading, and a lot of it is about rewriting our stories. Like whose story am I living? Where'd that come from, and how can I now live a more authentic version of the actual story I want to be living? Yeah, we circled around female friendships and those complexities.

ELISE: That was great. Thank you, Dre.

Sitting in a circle with Dre is so powerful. She has this energy this grounding presence about her that’s so deeply rooted, connected, empathic, it really is an alchemical process.We have been talking about On Our Best Behavior, and she’s offered to create circles around it. So if you go to her website, The Art of Circling, I think she is doing a circle for every sin. And it’s really incredible, it might seem like a vulnerability bath to do this with women you don’t know, but it’s not identifying. In some was you are sharing the most personal parts about yourself without actually sharing any identifying details. It is the opposite of how we operate in culture today. I highly recommend it and I think once you experience it, you will want to do it with people you know and don’t know, people you love and don’t yet love. Alright, I’ll see you next week.