What It Was Like to Go Through It with Strangers

Eight people, a private home, a large clean living room with mats and blankets. The facilitator had converted the space well. We had an opening circle where everyone shared a brief intention. I almost checked out mentally when it started — too ritual, too exposed — then stayed with it because everyone else was being genuinely vulnerable.

The experience itself: I spent most of the first three hours in my own interior world, not particularly aware of the others. Music moved through me. I cried twice — small, clean moments. I had a long, wordless meditation on the concept of waste — specifically all the energy I'd spent managing how I appear to people.

Around hour four I became aware of the room again. Someone nearby was breathing through something difficult. The facilitator was with them. I felt a quality of care in the room I rarely feel in groups: not performed care, not social care, but actual attentiveness to each other's wellbeing.

In the closing circle, everyone shared briefly. The range of what had happened for eight different people in the same room — grief, joy, terror, humor — was staggering. We were strangers with nothing in common except having gone through something together.

I've kept in touch with two people from that group. Something formed that night that I don't have a word for. Shared depth, maybe.