The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams. 50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity. In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring. The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams. 50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity. In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring. The original small-press edition of Calling the Circle has become one of the key resources for the rapidly-growing "circle" movement. This newly revised edition brings Christina Baldwin's groundbreaking work to an even broader audience ranging from women's spirituality groups to corporate development teams. 50,000 years ago, women and men gathered around campfires to decide the key issues in their lives. Today, groups everywhere are discovering a new form of this ancient ritual for communication, mutual support, teamwork, and social change. Now, in a book as consciousness-changing as Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Christina Baldwin offers this powerful new tool to everyone who longs for a community based on honesty, equality, and spiritual integrity. In this simple, profound practice, participants sit in a circle, pass a talking piece from person to person, and speak and listen from the heart. Christina Baldwin gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers inspiring examples of circles in action: a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike and a work project team that accesses a new level of creativity and caring. Christina Baldwin is the author of Calling the Circle , Seven Whispers , and most recently Storycatcher , which won a 2006 Books for a Better Life Award. She teaches and lectures extensively through her educational company, PeerSpirit. She lives outside Seattle, Washington, on Whidbey Island. CHAPTER 1       Awakening—Where We Are Now   I come from the middle. I grew up in Indiana and Minnesota, in the matrix of two families: descended from my mother’s line of Scandinavian farmers and my father’s line of Scotch-Irish-English tinkers, beekeepers, and preachers. I spent the first twenty years of my adult life living in the middle of the country, in the middle of the middle class. This sense of personal placement is important because it is the rootedness of middle ground I bring to my own awakening—and to the work of the circle I present in this book.   On the suburban edge of Minneapolis, where I lived most of four decades, the air is still brea