Often, heart circles at gatherings can be drawn-out experiences. While this is unavoidable given the number of folks wishing to share, it is often what keeps many from participating at all. This is unfortunate, for it can be the first experience a newbie faerie has of this process, and it creates a bad memory and unwillingness to participate in future circles.
One way of circumventing this is to create a facilitated heart circle that quickens the process of moving a large number of participants through a set of potentially difficult emotions. This would be best suited to a heart circle that is created to explore a single theme that all participating wish to explore, while not taking all day to complete. This can be done by allowing one person to ask a set of questions that have short responses at first, while allowing longer shares later in the circle as the questions move deeper into the subject at hand.
During the Spring Gathering 2008 at Short Mountain, I used this method to facilitate a heart circle about our sex lives. It allowed a group of approximately 30 of us to share deeply on this sensitive matter while taking only two hours to finish. Part of the success of this method is that the talisman is passed relatively quickly around the circle early in the process, allowing each participant to share. The more one shares in a circle, the more one engages deeply in the process.
From past experience in facilitating heart circles about sex at gatherings I found that, with an open (non-facilitated) process, each person would dive into a long soliloquy about their personal sexual history; each share could last 5-10 minutes which causes a drag on the process. The last person in the circle might have to wait over an hour before receiving the talisman. This is when heart circles can become “theaters of cruelty,” and the whole circle does not get beyond simply telling personal stories as attention fades and time runs out. Hearing personal stories can be enriching, but allowing the circle to reflect on itself through several rounds of passing the talisman can have deeper effect.
I devised a series of questions to move the whole circle through a process that felt very successful. Here they are for future use, and/or as a model for this type of facilitated circling:
1. Give us your name (1 word)
2. How do you feel right now? (2 words)
3. How do you feel about your sex life in general? (3 words)
4. If you wanted to, what would you do to change your sex life? (1 sentence)
5. If you needed to, what would you do to change the story about your sex life? (2-3 sentences)
6. How does this story-making about your sex life reflect how you feel about yourself in general? (Open, not restricted time)
