Circling and Awakening Interbeing

Suddenly, We were aware — it wasn’t just me over here, and her, over there — there was a third, alive and awake between us — our connection had woken up, and we both experienced it that way — something was alive, not separate from either of us, but not coming from either one of us alone. We were aware, and we were aware that we were aware. In that moment, it was clear, immediate and obvious that what we were experiencing was a fundamental human potential, and something that could become a new baseline for human society and consciousness.

I had this experience in my late 20s, practicing in a cohort for my Master’s degree, and it set me on the path that I’m still on today. I ended up doing two years of research on what was known then as We Space, and what I now prefer to call Awakened Interbeing, and wrote my thesis on it. I studied different approaches, trained in a few, and over the past decade plus, have experimented in various ways with various groups to help bring experiences like this about.

I believe there’s a trajectory here, a direction human consciousness is taking, and a story to tell about a different way to be together, a story rooted in what has always been core to our selves and experiences — the intimacy of relationship, which forms the basis for all of what we are.

Rather than only being individuals in relationship, we can to orient as the relationship itself, paying attention not only to my experience, or to your’s, but to what happens in-between us, what happens within us in connection. We can embrace our currently normal ways of being with each other in a kind of mutual inter-penetration of selves, opening potentials for healing, and becoming much more effective and impactful together. We can reach further to a kind of openness of being, a sensitivity to what is happening and an ability to be a deep relationship to what is happening, and even further still to a realization of what has always been alive and awake between us, to be able to operate as a collective from this kind of realization in the world. This is the trajectory I see and feel.

I believe that any groups of people that are able to harness this, and to avoid the many pitfalls of doing so, are going to catch fire in the world — we’ll steal fire for the second time. This is not inevitable, nor is it something that will happen overnight — there’s a long, treacherous path from here to there. At the same time it’s here, already, just waiting for us.

The practice of all of this, I’m calling WeKiDo, which is a play on words using AiKiDo, the Japanese marital art founded by Morihei Ueshiba in the mid 20th century. His “The Way of Peace” was a very influential read for me in my early 20s. The Ai, in aikido means harmonizing, or unifying, the ki means spirit, or energy, and the do means the way or path, so AiKiDo in Japanese means something like The way of harmonizing energy, or the way of unifying spirit. WeKiDo then means something like “The Way of the Spirit of We” or “The Way of the Energy of We.” I enjoy the Tantric ambiguity of Spirit and Energy in that translation.

WeKiDo consists of four, progressive layers. In the first two, we Circle together and Jam, learning how to show up authentically as me in relationship to you and us, practicing a kind of relational skillfulness, and learning how to embody trans-personality, and to move as a collective; then we can deepen in Awakening Interbeing, the third layer. The fourth layer involves learning how, as a collective, to be this Awakened Interbeing as an Agent in the world - to operate as this kind of mind and consciousness economically, politically, structurally.

You can watch some more about the particular Layers in the other videos on my website, and if you’re interested in practicing and learning all of this, you can sign up for a free session, come to a weekend, or just reach out and contact me.