These days, people living in the heart-broken society with many desperate
accidents want to reconnect to one's spirituality. To be specific, people want
their mind and body to be stable and peaceful, and to recharge inner power to
deal with tensions and conflicts in the outer world. For that purpose, Parker
Palmer created a retreat program called “Circles of Trust” which have been held
in 'Courage to Teach retreats', and given chances to connect to spirituality, and
to have deeply supportive relationships as well. This study is a qualitative case
study on Parker Palmer's Circles of Trust exploring its spirituality and impacts
on participant‘s experiences related to human relationships. For that,
participant’s experiences of two retreat programs were analyzed: one is Courage
to Teach(CTT) Retreat in U.S.A,, and the other is Gardening Peoples' Heart
Retreat in Korea which is a sister program of CTT. Palmer's “Circles of Trust“
are based on two beliefs: first, each person has inner teacher, and second,
community is necessary to connect to one's inner teacher. With the beliefs,
Circles of Trust have core principles and factors that work for participant's
reconnection to spirituality. Some key factors found by this study are; the
approach of invitation, the Touchstones of Circles of Trust, the metaphor of
seasons and the third things, silence, and the Clearness Committee using honest
open questions. And it is also found that participants experienced some changes
in their relationships on intrapersonal level, interpersonal level, and whole
human relationship level. Participants experienced deep listening to the other
person's inner voice, deep trust and respect on other person, and broad
extension of relationship similar to the connection of the hidden wholeness.
Through those experiences, participants can become open to the potentials to
have respectful and hospitable human relationship in the tragic gap of many
tensions and conflicts even in the heart-broken society.