Wherever we look, there have been circles… informally when people gather at one another’s homes, back into prehistory around the fire or at the well, in indigenous cultures worldwide. Around the turn of the 20th century, middle-class suffragette groups often grew out of sewing circles, while the consciousness-raising movements of the 1960s and 70s also ‘circled up.’
Out of this rich fermentation grew greater awareness of circle as evolutionary process as well as guidelines for that process. We are aware of several lineages of contemporary circle practice and there are undoubtedly more. 
Below please find below what we have written about circle awareness in the Guide to Heart Knowing, pp. 54-59, followed by recommended resources that have been important input along our path


Guidelines for a Heart-Knowing Circle Conversation

Arrange yourselves in a circle so that you can glance around easily and see everyone’s eyes. (One circle description suggests that your hearts be at approximately the same level for best alignment.) There are four main steps to follow in circle protocol:

1.Begin by doing a centering or attunement. This can be a prayer or a poem or any sacred text that helps everyone settle comfortably into her seat and feel the spaciousness and safety. Attunement (tuning into our wholeness) is an important aspect of any circle because it brings the group together in resonance. This is a key word for harmony and being in alignment.

2. Next each person offers a check-in. This provides a perfect occasion to let go of extraneous thoughts and tensions in order to be truly present. Unguarded descriptions of recent personal experiences can help each person ‘arrive,’ but more essentially, the check-in allows space for what is in your heart to be expressed, while others simply offer an unconditional listening space. Keep the check-ins between 1-3 minutes. Using a timer can be helpful.

Try to stay away from telling stories here. Check-ins are intended to help people move into authenticity, receptivity, gratitude, and transparency (openness to being seen). Honesty is important. Sacred listening is the gift we give to each other in mutual exchange.

3. After check-ins, the group shifts its focus to the main purpose… what brings everyone together and your responses to that purpose, e.g., reviewing significant moments in the film The Heart to Lead. Please continue to practice deep listening within and to each other throughout the conversation. This honoring and listening practice is like training for a marathon because you accrue a new kind of stamina by being still, yet conversant and deeply honest. (See more about Circle Etiquette in the section below titled The Experience of Circle).

4. Finally, when it’s time to close the circle, do so consciously reaffirming connections by expressing appreciation. It is like giving thanks at the end of a meal! Expressing gratitude for specific phrases or insights gives momentum toward your next gathering. But remember that everything shared in circle is confidential. Do not discuss people’s lives outside the group.

 Miscellaneous Hints: Allow between 1-2 hours for the group gathering. Having a bell close at hand provides a gentle tool to use kindly, with discretion. It can redirect a fragmented conversation or one that is drifting. Anyone can pick up the bell and ring it when necessary; this is a way to ask for a pause and a moment of silence, no questions asked.

 

The experience of circle

            There are at least 3 aspects to our awareness in circle: Speaker, listener and witness. They correspond to taking the perspectives of oneself, another person, and the whole of the collective. These 3 perspectives are capacities within us that we can develop and expand.

*Speaker: We bring our authentic and unique points of view forward. We speak from our own lived experience and knowing, rather than from our pre-conceived ideas. This is a practice in deep listening within ourselves, expressing what is on our hearts, what feels right to speak in the moment. Circle Etiquette: Move your attention inward, maintain focus on your inner voice, say exactly what you want to say without judgment or censorship and stop speaking when you are complete.

*Listener: We listen deeply to others with an open heart and open mind. We encourage ourselves to listen and be ‘in-formed’ by the experiences of others. This is more practice in deep listening, as we do our best to fully receive the energy and words of another person. Our listening and receiving acts as an invitation to the speaker to express fully and become more aware in the process. Circle Etiquette: Focus on the speaker; maintain loving, accepting energy toward her; listen without judgment or interruption or talking-over the end of a person’s sentence. Relinquish personal agenda and refrain from mere politeness or courteous responses. Move slowly into a speaker role only when the previous speaker is clearly finished.

*Witness: We expand our awareness to the whole, everyone a contributor. We initiate this by placing something beautiful and/or significant at the center and speaking our common intention. When we focus together on a common center, we are conscious of the whole circle and the interconnected living beings that we are.

This capacity is a practice in paying a soft-focus attention to the whole circle and taking responsibility for its life-affirming and loving quality. Circle Etiquette: Become aware of the energy in the circle as a whole, a sort of peripheral awareness, like peripheral vision. Notice, not only what the mainstream speaker is conveying, but also other feeling states or concerns that arise. Be slow, but brave to share with the group your discomfort and/or upliftment. This is a fine discernment between ego and authenticity, as we cultivate our responsibility to the whole.

If you are in a life phase of self-development, circle process may demand a certain relaxation from your habitual self-presentation. If you are engaged in other-oriented activities, you may feel natural in circle, but need to move further toward the center of your own experience.  All of us have developed ways in which we ‘see’ ourselves that will need to be ‘seen through’ in order to reach our deepest authenticity. When we pause, take a breath, and courageously intend our truth, we can learn an immense amount about ourselves in circle, as well as gain a deep compassion for one another.

 

A practice for becoming whole

Sitting in circle cultivates a ‘whole system’ point of view. It invites the many perspectives we have as individuals to come together in a better understanding of the complex world we live in. And it fosters each person’s potential, as well as the capacity to work together for shared goals, to take everyone’s gifts and viewpoints into account, and to make better decisions.

Even more precisely, a circle conversation is a practice that encourages wholeness at every level, including the level of self. This is not the traditional idea of stand-alone wholeness. Instead, it is actual wholeness, like our cells live embedded in our body, playing their full roles as themselves AND as part of the greater body. We, too, are learning to be whole as ourselves in service to something greater.

When we follow circle guidelines, we remain open to the transfer of energy that is true learning. We recognize ourselves both as a whole being, sharing who we are, and also as part of a greater collective and understanding. We do not feel lessened in any way by someone else’s beauty or wisdom. Instead, we feel the fullness that they offer to the whole system, and we, too, feel the more of That. 

We also recommend:

 

Conversation: an exchange of energy and information that evokes change.

Living Conversation: the exchange of meaningful experiences and feelings in women that activate and evolve the Mother Heart;

a mode of conversation invoked in Councils or Circles or Core Groups.

GOD*Mother Field: a resonant field of caring cocreated when women engage in Living Conversation;

a spacious context of conscious relationship that nurtures Self-realization.

 

“A conscious relationship is one that calls forth who you really are… Regarding relationship as a vehicle or path that can help two [or more] people access the powerful qualities of their true nature, provides the new vision our age so urgently needs.”

—John Welwood, Love and Awakening: Discovering the Sacred Path of Intimate Relationship (HarperPerennial, 1996, p.8).

 

The Art of Living Conversation
Click the image to hear Jeanie (with a cameo by Bonnie via computer) share their invitation to learn and practice ‘The Art of Living Conversation.’ Click  HERE  to begin an online course of study along the GOD*Mother Path.

 

Living Conversation Emerging Worldwide

From our experiences and observations, we feel confident to report that there is a course of intimate Self-study and Self-actualization happening in small groups (or circles) of women worldwide.  The classroom is the gathering of two or more, and the teaching is revealed through conversations that call forth the Mother Heart of each woman. In circles, on Zoom and Skype calls, on Facebook and private forums, women are expressing authentically, listening deeply and learning from one another.

This is not ordinary conversation where people are politely superficial, or pronounce their opinions, argue and react. Nor is this deep conversation that intends a much needed outcome in the external world (though it can be).

Instead, Living Conversation‘ is speaking, listening and witnessing that which emerges from the quickening depths of a person’s experience. In women it is an exchange that emanates from and activates, evolves and substantiates the Mother Heart. As we participate in Living Conversation, we learn how to recognize what is genuine in ourselves and in others. We find ourselves invited to become more authentically who we are, to develop Source-based conscious relationships of trust and mutuality, and to generate powerful evolutionary fields of intention and caring.

 

The Field-Generating Power of Living Conversation

Click the photo to watch Bonnie and Jeanie in Living Conversation. The text embedded in the YouTube video points to the energy exchanges and growth we experienced in our conversation.

Having engaged in Living Conversation for over 20 years, we can also report that the field-generating power of Living Conversation is evident as the shared feeling-states evoked by the practice. We remember, as the Santa Barbara Conscious Evolution community was forming at the turn of the millenium, remarking to each other that the resonant field around us was ‘palpable.’ We could almost touch its substance, and easily came to experience its energy as a deep sense of loving purposeful community.

As we stepped into the stream of women ‘gathering,’ Gather the Women,  Evolutionary Women , Millionth Circle, Standing Women, United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and World Conferences on Women, it became clear that our community experience was widespread, happening also wherever women shared from the heart and intended the greater good. The ‘core group’ principles we had practiced in community were emerging as ‘circle’ principles from widely different arenas, all inviting authenticity, respect and deep listening, all producing fields of ever-growing trust and mutuality.

As we continue the practice of Living Conversation in person and online today, as we continue to exchange from our Mother Hearts, the fields we cocreate and maintain give us deep respite from this crazy world of crises and violence. Although fear and anxiety may be shared, they are also witnessed and not long-lasting. Instead, there is a loving atmosphere of acceptance and expansion that supports each one and all of us to stay Present and in equanimity with whatever is happening within and around us. Together, we seem to be generating a local*global GOD*Mother field*culture that invites each of us to be precisely and uniquely ourselves, for our own sake and the sake of the world.

 

GOD*Mother Fields for the Sake of the Earth

Because of their field effects, we intuit that women’s Living Conversations rest on qualities innate within us that are also evolutionary opportunities – not only for each woman and her relationships, but also for the entirety of humanity and the Earth.

Together within a Living Conversation, each one centered in the Mother Heart, we cocreate a field of mutual nurturance for each other. These fields of intention contrast (and thus, reveal) the old energy patterns of our cultures which largely deny the Feminine altogether. They invite each and all to ‘see’ beyond that denial to our true nature. 

As we enter (or re-enter) the process of Self-realization in Living Conversation, we begin to guide one another into an authentic relational Flow, each one listening deeply to Source Within and to each other, simultaneously cocreating a Source-based GOD*Mother Field. The field, in turn, invites us to continue the conversation into an ever deepening personal, yet interconnected Flow of Knowing.

 Over time, we come to recognize the fluid nature of the relational Self that is a woman’s life lived from the true Mother Heart. Every Living Conversation and every GOD*Mother Field is woven within us, to simultaneously address our personal growth, foster true relationship and nurture humanity toward a positive future. All we need do is intend it be so!

Within the local*global GOD*Mother Fields emerging through Living Conversation, we are learning to be*hold our world, beyond its apparent divisiveness, as a realm of differentiated unity

 

Experience a Living Conversation at the Clothes Line

Julie Heyman

JULIE, speaking her Mother Heart experience

    “I was hanging out wash on the sunny patio, when a tangible wave moved through me. I began to feel ‘All Women’ doing this simple task – be they our mothers, grandmothers, women on the prairies a hundred years ago, or women throughout the ages. Our hands would have moved similarly; we would have adjusted the wet items similarly… and this chore might even have been one of the easiest in a burdened day –  affording a few moments of quiet with the sun, the breezes and the fresh smells of nature. I felt connected to all the women – I felt it emanating from my Knowing, my God Mother Heart.”

JEANIE, listening from the Mother Heart

“As she shared her experience with me, I felt what Julie was expressing; I could easily envision the countless women doing this task. For a sweet moment, we were communicating from a deep Knowing that went beyond words. And then, in this resonant space I thought of my mother.

One of the first chores my mother gave me, even before I was quite tall enough to reach the clothes line, was hanging up and taking down her washed clothes. An inner quality of my ‘self growing up’ moved through me as a felt sense of reaching for that clothes line.

Later, I cherished that feeling of ‘growing up,’ and felt the clothes line memory nuance my general memory of a childhood burdened with chores. Now, even later as I write, something more is arising in me… a kind of solidity to my life as one of service to others, not in any way demeaning, rather sort of grand. I am intimately joined to a wave of women who care!”

WITNESSING THE EXCHANGE: As the energy of Julie’s Oneness experience is received by Jeanie, it evokes a personal memory. Both women experience an expansion of awareness and connectedness (Julie was called to draft our shared experience for the website). Julie’s universal experience is now nuanced with the story of a personal relationship and its larger meaning; Jeanie’s personal experience is now sweetened and expanded by the universal. Their collective relational field is deepened and made more intimate by the sharing, while the reality of all women together is substantiated by their awareness.

THE EXCHANGE IS LIVING CONVERSATION, sharing through energetic resonance as well as words, cocreating and co-inhabiting a field of awareness. This is the depth to which it can go and the value it can have for all participants. No topic is too ‘small’ to be a catalyst for opening the heart and creating a resonant field that is caring, compassionate, cathartic, re-membering and even healing.

Has something moved in you from reading this exchange? SOMETHING MORE become visible?  PLEASE SHARE HERE

NOW IS THE TIME

We are poised at a moment in human history when every awareness is critical. Your participation has never mattered more. Our collective precision may be essential for the well-being of future generations.

TO BECOME AWARE

What do you know about the Path?

What do you sense within?

What is being called into form?

 

We hear the call to step forward and make ourselves more visible and more of a force for good in our world… and we are answering.

-Kathie Murtey via Doris Davis, September 2019 GOD*Mother  Gathering

 

 

We begin to define the GOD*Mother Path with the Ten Awarenesses below. They are accompanied by the ten original chapters of the film The Heart to Lead that first pointed us toward the Mystery of women together. (See the links Mother Heart and Living Conversation for more about the film and our journey.)

Notice the four parts of the Path: The Big Picture, The Mother Heart, The Call, and GOD*Mothering. These are directions that we hope will guide your exploration, as they have guided us. Click the button under each direction to view corresponding segments of the film plus text and questions to consider. 

Whether you are on your own now, or walking with a circle of women, please also share your experience in the GOD*Mother Forum as you ‘scroll’ down the Path. In this way, what we are learning becomes a library of experiential wisdom.

Notice especially the caring that arises in you, as you listen within and to each other. This is the GOD*Mother Field that we are cocreating naturally as we become aware of our feminine aspects. This is our hope rising for the future of humanity and the Earth.

A Brief Timeline                                                                                                                                                                                          A Mystical Overview

The Big Picture

 Awareness #1  

Underlying the apparent separations between people, there is a field of Oneness that connects us all.

 Awareness #2  

When we communicate authentically, both speaker and listeners can experience this field of Oneness as Living Conversation.

 Awareness #3   

Women sharing Living Conversation can bring more balance into a world dominated by self-interest.

 

  Watch the film and explore ‘The Big Picture’  

  Share on ‘The Big Picture’ forum

The Mother Heart

 Awareness #4   

Women possess a ‘Mother Heart,’ a way of ‘seeing and responding’ to others that is innately intuitive, holistic and caring.

 Awareness #5    

The knowing of the Mother Heart is fundamental to our very existence and a natural bridge of understanding between women, yet largely unnoticed in modern culture.

 

      Watch the film and explore ‘The Mother Heart‘ 

       Share on ‘The Mother Heart‘ forum

The Call Within

 Awareness #6     

By quieting our minds and listening deeply, women are learning to recognize and value the inner knowing at the center of the Mother Heart.

 

 Awareness #7      

In circles and councils around the world, an ancient sisterhood of inner knowing is being revitalized as women sense the needs of our global family.

 

 Awareness #8       

Through ‘Living Conversations,’ our collective field of inner knowing is growing in power and wisdom, inviting more awareness within each woman.

 

Watch the film and explore ‘The Call’

Share on ‘The Call’ forum

GOD*Mothering

 Awareness #9  

As we ‘see’ and embrace all aspects of ourselves, we enter a process of sovereignty over our inner territory, and reconciliation with each other.

 Awareness #10 

As we reflect and confirm one another in wholeness, we evolve our Mother Heart(s) toward ‘One GOD*Mother Heart,’ a unitive field of loving intention for humanity and the Earth.

 

Watch the film and explore ‘GOD*Mothering’

Share on the ‘GOD*Mothering’ forum 

Co-creation for the greater good is rising

with the evolving Mother Heart

 

 

The GOD*Mother Project

Promoting Living Conversation to Evolve the Mother Heart and GOD*Mother the Earth


MISSION:

To activate, articulate and engage the Feminine through Mother Hearts in Living Conversation toward a culture of caring.

VISION:

We envision women everywhere evolving their Mother Hearts and cocreating resonant fields, GOD*Mother Fields of caring, in conversations, relationships and projects. We see these GOD*Mother Fields evolving into One Global Intentional Field of Caring and vitally contributing to the well-being of future generations.

Update from Jeanie and Bonnie

August 1, 2019


The GOD*Mother Project is unfolding itself as a search for words to describe what’s happening with women today, on the inside. In our small groups we are exploring the sense we have that women’s Mother Hearts (the nurturing impulses of the Feminine in each of us) are being called into service to nurture humanity as a whole.

To evolve this function women are being invited into full realization of the Feminine Within us. We are moving toward awareness of our whole Selves, not only as the persons we are, but also as our relational Selves and ultimately, as the One Mother Heart of humanity… a whole unified topography of Self within.

We believe women are already half-way there by nature (deeply held back by cultural mores), and that we help one another expand our awareness in every Living Conversation. And we’re sensing that with every woman’s expansion in awareness, women are growing the capacity to generate larger and larger GOD*Mother Fields of loving nurturance for the Earth.

*****

As more and more women share their inner process, we intuit that the story will become more precise, more substantial, more real, more impactful for life on Earth. As we stand ready for change, we also offer you a more formal presentation of the GOD*Mother Projects goals, objectives and founders below…

 

 

 

 

OBJECTIVES:

  • To share the intention that every conversation can be a ‘Living Conversation,’ a spiritual practice alive with Self-awareness.
  • To demonstrate Living Conversation through the film, The Heart to Lead: Women as Allies for the Greater Good.
  • To facilitate learning the core practice of Living Conversation: witnessing our inner experiences, evolving our Mother Hearts and our own networks of relationships.
  • To build a framework of understanding around the process of Living Conversation, so that our minds can become aligned with the practice.
  • To realize in each one a ‘personal Oneness in body-mind-spirit’ that can transmit life-affirming wholeness, truth and love throughout the world.
  • To consciously be-hold with other women a global GOD*Mother Field for the Earth and all its children.

 

STRATEGIC PLAN:

To unfold the vision, we see women participating in Living Conversations, becoming aware of the GOD*Mother Heart through soul to soul relationships, and by our own evolution anchoring a field of caring that can hold, evoke and nurture a more loving humanity.

  1. Distribute the GOD*Mother Pledge on our email lists and social media, that women become alert to the possibility of nurturing Oneness in themselves, in one another and in the culture as a whole.
  2. Extend an invitation to use the film The Heart to Lead, and the Guide to Heart Knowing  in circle conversations that build personal and community awareness.
  3. Offer video conferencing as a means of experiencing Living Conversation.
  4. Invite active participation in telling the story of ‘Mother Hearts evolving’ through forums and other means of receiving information.
  5. Co-create and distribute regular blogs, vlogs, TV programming, etc. designed to feedback the emerging story of Mother Hearts evolving for the sake of the Earth.
  6. Develop systems for information flow and exchange that promote a unified field of intention and support collaborative possibilities between conscious projects.

 

 

CO-FACILITATORS (Official bios for this official ‘About’ page):

Bonnie Kelley:

Bonnie Kelley has lived her life highlighting the importance of real relationship as a foundational element in human growth and evolution.  Through her writing, films, and in every moment, she opens to receive the Living Essence of each person she greets, reflecting back to them their own divinity.  As a true networker of consciousness, she is an author, a founding member of the Santa Barbara Conscious Evolution community, has co-founded and gathered Evolutionary Women, and co-created and directed the film, ‘The Heart to Lead: Women as Allies for the Greater Good.’ With Jeanie DeRousseau, she is now offering the film as a model and transmission of Source-based conversations in the GOD*Mother Project.

 

Jeanie DeRousseau:

Jeanie DeRousseau’s attention to the details of life unfolding on earth, personal and societal, is a transmission of love and precision.  From her years of teaching and researching evolution as a professor of anthropology, she draws upon a love of data and pattern to reflect and confirm the new reality that is emerging through each person who opens to Source Within.  She is a founding member of the Santa Barbara Conscious Evolution community, has been a convener for Gather the Women Global Matrix, co-founded the LightPages Connectory online, and networked women’s circles at the United Nations.  With Bonnie Kelley, she is now promoting and writing about Source-based conversations in the GOD*Mother Project.

 

 Button 

MISSION

To activate, articulate and engage the Feminine through Mother Hearts in Living Conversation toward a culture of caring.

VISION  

We envision women everywhere evolving their Mother Hearts and cocreating resonant fields, GOD*Mother Fields of caring, in  conversations, relationships and projects. We see these GOD*Mother Fields vitally contributing to a global field of caring and the well-being of future generations.

 

GLOSSARY FOR THIS WEBSITE

The Feminine : A many-faceted relational way of Being, realized differently in women and men.

Mother Heart: The nurturing impulse of the Feminine in women.

Living Conversation: The exchange of meaningful experiences and feelings in women that can activate and evolve the Mother Heart.

GOD*Mother Field: A resonant field of caring cocreated when women engage in Living Conversation from the Mother Heart.

The GOD*Mother Path: Experiencing and realizing the Feminine nature of Self in resonant fields of caring; choosing to offer that Awareness into a growing unified field of caring for the benefit of humanity and the Earth.

Bonnie and Jeanie In costume as the anthropologist and the GODMother

From Jeanie and Bonnie

With awareness, familiar roles we play invite us onto the GOD*Mother Path.

 

AN INVITATION: To apply our deepest wisdom to our lives and for the world NOW

When you think about the world, or the future, do you feel a kind of urgency? With the direction of world events, do you share our deep concern for the generations to come? The urgency is real! We are being moved faster and faster into an unknown future.

To meet this unknown with grace and ease, there is an incredible opportunity before humanity now… to be spiritually mature and collectively powerful. While both men and women are called to the task, we focus here on a unique evolutionary path for women, already in process worldwide, inviting only our awareness to realize its influence on modern civilization at every level. 

Please join us as we explore aspects of the Feminine in women which, hidden in plain sight, are poised ready to evolve and tip humanity toward the good. It is more than time to reveal and actualize our deepest potentials for our own sake and the sake of all the Earth’s children. 

The GOD*Mother Path

We call this evolutionary opportunity the GOD*Mother Path for its intention: to elevate the human mothering instinct into a higher consciousness capable of nurturance for all. We’ve done our best to imbue this online space with the energy of that intention.

The GOD*Mother Path is a journey toward Self-knowing and caring for life that is just as natural as traveling along a path in the forest to reach a destination with our loved ones. Can you feel the field? Can you take a deep breath and feel the quality of ‘all-rightness?’

The GOD*Mother Path

                               Through the individual Mother Heart

Toward a culture of caring for the world

            (See more… An outline)

                         Stepping forward, each and together,

                                          Aligning our intention and commitment…

The GOD*Mother Intent

From my growing awareness

that I am part of a rising tide of Oneness on Earth,

women, men, children, all life and all that is here now,

I intend, to the best of my ability,

to be a true Sister-Mirror for other women,

nurturing the Oneness within them

by noticing and reflecting their wholeness,

nurturing the Oneness within me

by committing to my own growth and evolution,

nurturing the Oneness of all creation

by aligning all that I think and do with the greater good.

 

 

See more about the wisdom of the Mother Heart

See more about the GOD*Mother Fields cocreated by Living Conversation

Go directly to the Ten Awarenesses of the GOD*Mother Path