Hi Friend,

I love that in our Circular Time session participants - amazing people like yourself - keep telling me how much they get out of it. And I love the thing itself: in each session - which are small and highly participatory - a tender, open-hearted, beautiful space emerges and much wisdom is shared. Holding each other's reflections about our time on this spiraling planet is a sacred act. An act of pattern sensing and deep acknowledgement.

In my last email, I talked about 'so what is circular time, anyways?' Circular Time is a reflective tool for your year-turning season; it is about coming into deeper relationship to your ecologies; it is about sensing patterns, acknowledging your journey, changing unhelpful stories, and seeing more clearly what is and (recently) has been. Over time, this process can help you change your relationship to time itself.

Amidst a year that has been, in so many ways for so many people, quite heavy, these sessions remind us how much spiritual development individuals and collectives have experienced. It is inspiring to hear about your profound insights and the ways you are experiencing support. So many ways of you are, day by day, engaging with and caring for your own tender-heartedness. There are so many moments when I am in so much awe of everyday life.

I've been offering specific sessions for couples (including a couples-specific worksheet) which has been quite special: one couple recently remarked on how rare it is for them to sit back and reflect together on key aspects of their relationship, and how engaging in this process deepened their sense of intimacy.

As so much has happened politically/economically in 2025 that I've been working on an additional doc (a google doc) to help me think through major/relevant events, trends, and implications for our larger work. Let me know if it would be helpful for you to look at that document as part of your own reflection process.

We have three more sessions offered in January. If you've been thinking about joining us for our annual Circular Time, this is a Really Good Time to go ahead and SIGN UP!!!!

These past few weeks, as we've been embarking on these small groups sessions, here are some variations of what I've heard people say about participating in this process:

"This process has helped me see better where I am and where I am not getting closer to my own essence, and how we can move into the bigger sphere of dialogue."

"This process is helping me make the transition back into being in nature. I have been so out of touch with nature, and I am seeing so many ways that I can re-align my life with Earth."

"This is helping me trust things that are happening in my relationship with nature and the more-than-human world that I have been wanting to trust but have not been articulating or really letting myself deepen into (due to social conditioning)."

"I was telling myself the story that I wasn't doing much this year, but wow, I really have done a lot!"

"This is my fourth or fifth year doing this, and I have many iterations of what my calendars look like; some are more ornate than others. I now find that my mind is shifting how I see things; I can more easily track and integrate across categories and with the seasons over the course of the year. I can now say that, through doing this over many years, we actually are re-working the way our brains work with time. And I'm now one of the more time-relaxed people I know. I didn't used to be this way. This is such an amazing way of changing our relationship to time, and I keep encouraging my friends, who are so stressed out about time, to do this workshop with Sara Jolena."

"I love this so much. There is so much potential for learning about my own rhythm. There is such expansiveness that's possible here. I'm looking forward to spending more time on this in the next few weeks."

"Spending this time with this group (of other circular time participants) has been so inspiring. I didn't know any of you when we started, but I am going to remember the things you've said today for a long time to come."

"This is granting me permission to frame the questions I am wanting to ask but have not yet been asking."

"It's so easy for me to skip over grieving and loss, and I'm now thinking of ways I can work with grief differently in this next cycle."

😀

Sending you many blessings in this season of turning -

-Sara Jolena