[Video] post-month of circling in Europe update

 


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The shadow of owning your experience

Owning your experience is one of Circling Europe's Five Principles of Circling . To me, owning my experience is a way that I can continuously practice recognizing that my experiences are a projection of my own mind. While this is just one lens we can use to interpret the world, it can often result in less suffering than the lens of blaming others or putting responsibility onto them. However, like any other principle, when "owning your experience" is taken as absolute dogma, we can start to more clearly notice its shadow. (cf. Alexandre Dumas: "All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.") The ugly part of ownership that I've observed in myself and many others is that in trying to own our experience, we inadvertently end up reinforcing our own ideas of who we are, as well as a sense of being separate from and invulnerable to others. The shape of this pattern is similar to how, in practicing equanimity, we can accidentally suppress or repress our feeling
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