Wisdom Circles | Stories

On Earth Day, twenty-two people gather in a circle in a backyard near wooded hills. As the talking stick is passed around, they speak to the question: how are you consciously participating in the destruction of the environment? There's obvious pain as they tell stories of being stuck in traffic jams, wasting enormous amounts of paper at work, and discarding repairable appliances because no service is available. In the second round, each person tells a tale about what they're doing to reverse the process of degradation. At the closing ritual, a poem by ecologist John Seed is read which ends with the words: "Fill us with a sense of immense time so that our brief, flickering lives may truly reflect the work of vast ages past and also the millions of years of evolution whose potential lies in our trembling hands."

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Members of a United Church of Christ congregation meet throughout the fall in a series of small dinner gatherings, each followed by a wisdom circle. Over one third of the congregation participate and address the question: In what ways do you express gratitude for the divine abundance in your life? "Having these circles where people can listen and speak from the heart with each other has had a profoundly bonding effect on all of us," says the minister. "For me, this is what spirituality is about."

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Sixteen veteran AIDS caregivers spend a January weekend passing the talking stick and telling their best caregiving stories, and their worst nightmares. In the circle they gradually discover how to care for themselves, how to unearth the grief buried beneath the hundreds of deaths they've witnessed, how to consolidate their wisdom and how to carry on. No one else can guide them. They are their own experts, yet they have had no time to stop, breathe and reflect.

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In an ongoing wisdom circle begun one New Year's Eve, five people address the question: What act of courage could you take right now in order to live your values more fully? One person struggles to say she needs help with alcoholism, another needs the courage to leave a successful job for the the work she passionately wants to be doing, another wants to learn how to live more fully with a life-threatening illness. Each member acknowledges how much they count on this monthly gathering for strength and vision.

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The following story is a response to the question: Tell us something you're proud of. It may be something you received major recognition for or something no one but you knows about:

We were living in an apartment in Manhattan and I was a teacher in a middle school. There was a boy named Benji, who was about eight years old, in our building. He was having a hard time learning to read and his parents weren't able to help him. So a couple of times a week, he and I would meet and read books together. This went on for a couple of years; then his family moved and we lost touch. About ten years later I was startled to see this eighteen-year-old man walk into my classroom on the last day of school. It was Benji. He said, "Mrs. Glickman, I just graduated from high school today. I wanted to thank you for what you did. If you hadn't helped me learn to read I know I would've dropped out of school and never finished. I wanted you to know how much I appreciated that." I never saw him again.

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This story is drawn from a circle whose focus was ethnic and racial diversity:

   Designated Circle Maker: I've chosen an opening ritual that will set our intentions in a larger context. I'd like each one of us to call upon a quality of life that we bring to the circle. It could be compassion, clarity, humor--some quality that you know you've worked on in your life. What can we count on from you? As you begin the invocation, please light a small candle in front of you.

I call the Beauty of the Earth into this circle. May it surround us, and may I bring it into the lives of all those that I touch.

I invite Compassion into our circle tonight.   I give gratitude for my work with those who are terminally ill, and the ways it is teaching me to expand my capacity to feel and express compassion.

I call Playfulness into this circle.   Help us forgo our seriousness for a bit, lighten up, and have a good time.

I call on the spirit of Integrity into tonight's gathering. Help me bring my actions and behavior into alignment with what I value so that my life can be made more whole.

I call in the children. May we become that village that takes responsibility for all its children.

This story came in response to "Tell us a healing story."

During my internship as a surgeon I saw an older woman who'd been diagnosed with a large malignant tumour in her throat. My colleagues and I tried to convince her that surgery was her only hope. She refused and said her faith in God would cure it. After trying several times to get her to change her mind, we gave up in frustration and wrote her off as being uneducated and misguided. Three months later she returned for a checkup. A first-year resident came to tell me there was no sign of cancer. I didn't believe him, checked her myself, and it was true. Maybe I was the one who was uneducated and misguided.

The following is a segment from an essay written by a junior high school student whose teacher introduced her class to the wisdom circle:

I used to think that the circle was some stupid hippie thing. Then last week, just before vacation, we did a circle where the question was: who are you sad that you can't be with at Christmas. Someone lit the flame of truth in the middle. I started to cry when Barbara talked about her father being dead. I didn't know that and I thought we were good friends. I learned that circle is a place where you can say anything and know that the other kids won't laugh at you. You can cry and it won't matter. For 45 minutes we can bring our thoughts and dreams into a circle of kids. It doesn't mater what color you are, your age, your sex, or your background, we are all equal and the circle tells me that we can live in a never ending circle of love, happiness and peace.

Here is a story from Wisdom Circles co-founder Sedonia Cahill:

My women's lodge has been meeting for over fifteen years and we've talked about many topics, including aging and death, our own deaths. We spent several meetings telling our sexual history from beginning to end. With that otpic we were all able to laugh and cry together as we discovered that the telling of these stories wasn't hard to do. Then we decided to talk about money. In the first evening it was amazing to find that this group of very competent women had so much shame and embarrassment talking about it. We had no difficulty in our meetings about sex, or death. But money was hard to talk about.

There were tears as we told stories revealing how mystifying money was to each of us. Somehow we hadn't been raised to understand it. We had mismanaged our own money, lost money, and almost never asked for the amount of money we deserved for our work. There was guilt about having money, guilt about not having money. For middle-class women of our generation, talking about money had been a family taboo. We stayed with this subject for several meetings because it was so potent, and each time I dreaded going to the circle, thinking, "I really don't want to face this." After that, each woman in the group took various steps to get a handle on the issue. I know I did. Those circles changed our lives.

If you have experience stories of being in a Wisdom Circle, contact us about submitting them to be included in the Wisdom Circles website.