Circle & Telos
It's easy to feel shame when old patterns we thought we healed come back. But what if we have the wrong image for progress? What if repetition isn't a bad sign?
You’ve done some serious spiritual and psychological work. You continue to read helpful books; you journal, you find ways to contemplate your mind and patterns. Maybe you meet regularly with a counselor, or have years of meditation practice under your belt. You’re committed to self-realization or, at the very least: to self-awareness and personal growth. And then it re-emerges: that “thing” you thought you had nipped-in-the-bud with all that psycho-spiritual know-how. The depression comes back, or you experience an anxiety re-run. Or maybe, once again, you’re captured by those familiar cravings, or find yourself feeling just as lost as five years ago. Somehow, you wonder, “am I really back here?” “Haven’t I made any progress!?!”
A year ago, just after my fortieth birthday, I had a powerful dream that has helped me contextualize repetitive events. I saw a giant spiral with an arrow on the end of it. Then, a deep, booming voice announced: “CIRCLE AND TELOS.” As an avid dream-journaler who jots down dreams at all hours of the night and morning, I captured the image as best as I could:
“Circle and telos.” Dream image June 2025.
A Circle with Direction is a Spiral
Sometimes, we understand a dream image immediately, even while still dreaming, as if the message is fast-tracked from our unconscious to our conscious minds. Upon seeing the spiral symbol and hearing the voice, I understood the spiral to be a symbol for the path of self-realization (you can call this “individuation,” “waking up,” “finding your true home,” whatever phrase suits you.) We could even simplify things to say that the spiral is the symbol of life itself. The process of your life is not a linear trajectory of uninterrupted progress marked by dissimilar events. No, not at all. A good deal of experience is cyclical, and it would be hard to deny the repetition of habits, seasons, experiences, moods, talents, and even growth opportunities.
And yet, at the same time, the dream spiral had an “arrow tip,” as if to say: your life path may come with circular repetition but it also has direction. “CIRCLE AND TELOS” the dream-voice boomed. Telos is a Greek word that means “fulfillment” in the sense of something’s ultimate purpose or direction. Although the path of self-realization can feel cyclical on the level of happenings, it simultaneously carries the potential for moving us directionally towards ever-greater depth, clarity, and insight. We have the potential to move towards wisdom, no matter how repetitive life seems. In fact, sometimes the repetition is precisely what gives us another bite at the depth-apple.
If you over-emphasize life’s circularity and pay too little heed to the depth and direction of life’s teleological arrow, life can become rote, meaningless, or even Sisyphean. You can feel disempowered in the art of riding a healthy sense of direction or purpose in life. And yet if you overemphasize telos, you might mistakenly believe that progress looks linear and become discouraged by old wounds resurfacing. You might also become an experience hunter — thinking that the goal is acquiring something, some special experience, or becoming someone else — and thereby failing to see that the path is really about circumambulating what you already are with greater and greater depth. The spiral insists on a middle way. After all, repetition and ever greater wisdom are not mutually exclusive.
My dream ended up being the perfect image for understanding the circumambulations I was about to trek. AND HOLY SH-PIRAL, did I do some circle-surfing this past year. Shortly following this dream, after being together for nine years, my significant other and I broke things off. But then, after lovingly and diligently working things out over nine months, we got back together. The year also found me moving multiple times: first out of state to Oregon, then moving back to California (to the same city I had just moved from) and then once more to a quieter house down the road. I ended up just a few blocks from the original California residence I had moved from (and yes, for those of you counting, I moved 3 times in 4 months). And the icing on my circular cake: just a few weeks before turning 41 (i.e., a year after this dream) I accepted a new position at a place I worked at three years ago. I’m in the same office, serving the same community, seeing the same old friends and colleagues. Along the way, familiar emotions surfaced and resurfaced: grief, gratitude, grief, gratitude, and also episodic punctuations of restlessness, sadness, and exuberance. Perhaps the most difficult to (re)accommodate was the (re)emergence of my old friend anxiety. All things told, considering my reunification with my beloved, a return to the same city and workplace, and the cyclical appearance of emotions — not to MENTION the deja vu choreography of packing and unpacking: if I had measured awakening on the level of the outer events, I might have felt like I was regressing! But in reality, this has been one of the most spiritually and psychologically profound years of my life.
Discomfort Is a Sign You Are Living Both Circle & Telos
Life’s teleological (directional) pull, when related to consciously, offers a fresh relationship with seemingly-similar happenings. My recent re-runs of place, romantic relationship, work, and even anxiety all feel strangely fresh and interesting because I am relating to them differently (I hope!) … namely, with greater intimacy, curiosity, discovery, and acceptance. The fresh-interestingness can arise even when both the recurrence and my new relationship to the recurrence is uncomfortable. (And my goodness, psycho-spiritual development can be full of tension, disorientation, uncertainty, and just a general awfulness sometimes!!) Holding the tension of old patterns resurfacing on the one hand, and the uncertainty of a new path forward on the other, can be an emotional and existential double-whammy.
And yet, discomfort can be so fruitful. For depth psychologists, inner conflict held consciously is the fertilizer of greater self-realization. Carl Jung believed it was those who were willing to engage in an “endless inner trial” that were able to circle ever-closer to their authentic, individuated relationship with the cosmos. So, when we feel humbled by the recurring _____ (fill in the blank — the depression, the anxiety, the disorientation, the fear), we can remember that not-feeling-great is often part and parcel of living a life of Circle & Telos: that is, living a life of depth.
In my experience, this fruitful discomfort is most acute when the re-runs we are grappling with are those of the inner world i.e., those patterns of unease that frighten us, that are harder to approach and understand. I’m thinking about my anxiety returning recently. The Circle-reality has me remember: yes, moods and tensions come and go as part of being human. This cyclical reality of life has me accept anxiety with some degree of matter-of-factness, and it’s not infrequent that I find myself saying, “so be it.”
Yet the Telos-reality begs inquiry, discovery, and newness through greater depth into anxiety. As I once again bend around the circle of recurring anxiety, the psyche’s teleological nature supplies dreams, visions, insights, synchronicities — in a way entirely unorchestrated by the ego. When the irrational is received with reverence by the ego, and integrated in daily life as best as possible, the result is often a surprisingly fresh vista of an old psychic landscape. I often experience this freshness as a deepening of my practice with the re-emerging pattern. In my case with anxiety, working with my dreams, visualizations, and insights on the meditation cushion has resulted in a new appreciation for my nervous system’s courageous history - one that is personal as well as ancestral. The anxious feelings are still quite uncomfortable, but I know it is precisely these feelings that grant me a deeper relationship with the Self.
It’s All “Nyam”
Student 1: “Rinpoche, I often have surges of bliss going up my spine, and then I see bright colors…. is that okay?”
Rinpoche: “Yes, no big deal. It’s just nyam.”
Student 2: “Rinpoche, there are times I feel incredible tenderness in my chest and start crying and moaning. When that happens, what should I do?”
Rinpoche: “Let it come; let it be; let it go. It’s just nyam.”
I can’t tell you how many meditation retreats I have been to where the spiritual teacher is asked about countless variations of human experience, and softly, patiently (and repeatedly) replies, “It’s just nyam.” Nyam is the Tibetan word for experience, and in many nondual traditions, Tibetan Buddhism included, there is an incredibly refreshing casualness with regard to the unfathomable array of variegated experiences that can arise in our lives. How to relate to life is considered much more important than how that life looks at any given moment. As a result, contemplative and meditative practices are not about cultivating any particular experience, but on discovering the nature of reality undergirding all experiences. The key to that discovery has to do with accepting life’s cyclical and spontaneous display of arisings with ever greater friendliness. If we think life is a linear line (telos only), we’ll try to cultivate imagined experiential markers of progress. And yet if we think it’s just a meaningless circle of endless repetitions, we’ll miss the possibility of relating to reality in a way that reveals its profound nature.
This can be important to remember for spiritual seekers who feel understandably dismayed by the return of difficult experiences. But if the point is not to cultivate the absence or existence of any particular experience, but rather to discover our fundamental okayness within the panoply of differentiated experiences — the return of a challenging experience can actually be a tremendous opportunity to see the underlying sameness of reality. “It’s all just nyam” then, becomes a helpful mantra: encouraging us to enjoy the show by treating all actors that come and go on the stage with openness and generosity.
One of the reasons for the appropriate casualness spiritual teachers have towards varied experiences is that we are not particularly in control of the exhaustion of any given pattern. The sun will rise and fall in the sky until our favorite star goes through its dying phases. A puddle outside will disappear when enough heat vaporizes the liquid. An emotional pattern will no longer appear when its energy has exhausted.
We often want to take all the responsibility for what extinguishes inner patterns, but — because these often have existed well before our birth and also in impersonal (collective) ways — their lifespan is most often a mystery. Truly: there’s nothing wrong with you for experiencing a repeat nyam. But feelings of being discouraged are also part of the repetitive path, so that’s understandable too! When we’re ready, it can help to adopt the casualness of “it’s all just nyam” to foster the courage to swim the spiral. It can be meaningful to relate to repetition with ever greater acceptance and inquisitiveness. It can open doors to deeper teleological currents.
And when none of that is possible, because it’s just too hard: best to forgive oneself, and let that too simply come and go. Neither the circle nor the telos will give up because they are just the way life force moves. Life will render repetition, and it will pull on you to discover a deeper level — again and again and again. In the words of the great Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Just keep going.”