Authentic Relating, A Map of the Territory: Part 1
Practices, Lineages, and Communities
A note (in case you are getting too many mails from me)
I have re-organized my Substack to make sure you receive articles that are relevant to you. This article is part of a new Substack category AR & Circling. If you are mostly interested in my trademark “confessional-style” posts, you can unsubscribe from the AR & Circling category (this category) without leaving the Substack entirely.
To recap, here are the new categories:
Stories and Ramblings: Personal writing, reflections, and life updates. If you’re here mainly because you like me and/or my writing, this is the category to follow.
AR & Circling: Practical orientation for people new to the field: basically, how to get value from AR.
Monetizing AR: Writing about the business of Authentic Relating: running groups, building programs, applying relational practice to entrepreneurship, and newer approaches like We‑Flow.
Context of this article
In this Part 1 article in the series Authentic Relating, A Map of the Territory, I will try and give you something practically useful: a review article which gives you a “bird’s eye view” of the various Authentic Relating (AR) practices, lineages, and communities. In this Part 1, I share the overall context of the Authentic Relating movement, tell my story, and give you some reasons for engaging. It is all work-in-progress, and the later parts have not yet been written. Read this series if you are intrigued by the potential of AR, but confused about what it is, what you can get from it, and where to start.
In the series I will systematically unpack the major lineages and communities including similarities, differences, culture, and providers (of which there are many). I will also mention a few closely adjacent practices which you may want to know about.
Note that in the upcoming Circling Guide (3rd Edition), currently in crowd-sourcing, there will be a full list of all the Integral We-Space practices. If you are not at all familiar with Circling, I just published the first 3 chapters of the Circling Guide (3rd Edition) to the web. Find it here.
I am keeping this series as tight as possible, but be aware that this is difficult given that Authentic Relating is a large, emergent, open-source, global movement for personal and social transformation under distributed leadership. This alone makes it a unique emergence in human history, as very few personal development organizations are either open-source or under distributed leadership. We are, essentially, doing away with guru/disciple models of transformation and we are also doing away with LGAT-style (Large Group Awareness Training) trainings. LGAT’s and guru/disciple lineages have dominated the personal development landscape forever, and this continues. Tony Robbins’ most popular program, Unleash the Power Within, costs $495 at a virtual event with 10k+participants – and this is the low-end pricing for a Tony Robbins event! By contrast, AR and related Integral We-Space practices are both more cost-effective and long-term impactful because they often include what we call “integration”, through ongoing community support for instance. So if you are here because you are looking to engage with Authentic Relating and have questions, you are in the right place.
The fact that “we” (we in AR and related movements) are initiating a cultural revolution of historic importance cannot be over-stated. I refer to it as “the democratization of transformation”. Non-Violent Communication (or NVC) is a precursor to AR and also meets the above criteria for an effective and credible transformational community. NVC got the ball rolling, and remains ten times the size of AR (roughly 500k people impacted, versus roughly 50k people impacted by AR and Circling). But AR is like NVC on steroids, and also more diversified. If you are looking for a quick comparison of AR and NVC, please read NVC and Circling; how they complement each other from the Circling Guide, 3rd Edition.
My story, in brief
I will tell a very abbreviated version of my story here, not to brag, but to lend credibility to what may sound like some rather inflated claims. Please take everything I say with a grain of salt because I do have a not-so-secret agenda: I want to enroll you in what I call, jokingly, “the one true religion”. In my defense, I am not alone in my enthusiasm for Authentic Relating. Indeed, the longer I practice, the more of an “Authentic Relating evangelist” I become.
As told in the Circling Guide, I encountered Circling at the now-defunct Boulder Integral Center in late 2016. Boulder Integral was at the time the worldwide hub of Circling, and you could circle 6 hours a week and join all their yoga classes and co-working for $75/mth. It’s a great shame it shut down in 2019, otherwise I would probably still be living in their basement 🙂.
I arrived at the Boulder Integral Center after 30 years of seeking, and I immediately “got” the potential of Circling as both a practice and a movement. The following year I moved back east and put in roughly 250 hours on the online Circling platform Relateful.com. I started a small private (or committed) online Circling group, which was amazing for a year and then fell apart. I still believe that private groups are the best way to learn AR, and I will say more about this later. I think of Circling as the “gold-standard” Authentic Relating practice, although not the only one. Whether Circling should be your first point of contact with AR, however, is a difficult question to answer. More about this later.
In that first year (2016) I also wrote the Circling Guide. This got some push-back from some people in the community given I was just a newbie at the time, but the Circling Guide has since become the most popular book on Circling. There are now two very good books on Authentic Relating, by Jason Digges and Ryel Kestano, but in those days that was not the case.
What initially really impressed me about Circling, in addition to the power of it, was its potential applicability to all spheres of life: personal development (of course), but also business and entrepreneurship, family, sexuality, social justice, intentional community and co-living, trauma healing, spirituality, you name it. It is a great joy for me now, to see the enthusiastic community response to the upcoming Circling Guide Anthology (3rd Edition) with expert coverage in each of those areas.
I went on to lead private groups for free for the next 8 years, and started leading professionally in early 2025. I still lead a weekly free men’s group that is now in its 6th year. I tried to start an AR-inspired intentional community in Mexico, which was a spectacular failure. But I did meet my current wife through the movement, Sophie, who is quite a powerful AR leader, better than me actually. I am good at the blah-blah, also known as context-setting which is also important. But she has the wisdom and the presence. We are a very good team, which is exactly the point (“where two or more are united in my name…”).
Bottom-line, my life has been completely transformed in 10 years or so. You could say I have found my tribe, which is huge for me. Furthermore, the transformation is accelerating. It’s very intense for me right now, but also very fulfilling. I write about this in an earlier article.
Authentic Relating or Circling?
[Please refer to the above chart]
Circling is a practice and community inside the larger practice and community of Authentic Relating. Meaning that: Circling is a sub-group of Authentic Relating. AR is, in turn, a sub-group of what’s called “Integral We-Space” modalities and communities.
Please stay tuned for Part 2, where we will talk about what Authentic Relating is and what you can get from it, define the different practices, and help you choose a community and a provider.