Imperfect and Whole — On Circles, Compassion, and the Right to Be Heard and to Exist

This podcast was created and is hosted by Anastasia Priyamvada Charitidou, an experiential educator, facilitator, researcher, theatre pedagogue, and founder of Olotites.

Summary

In the first episode of the Olotites podcast, Anastasia Charitidou explores the relationship between attention, listening, compassion, and the different ways through which we come to know and make sense of the world.

Drawing on personal stories, experiential examples, and insights from experiential learning, psychology, and well-being research, the episode explores questions such as:

• How do early life experiences shape the way we express ourselves and take up space?
• What can the body, emotions, imagination, and intuition teach us?
• Is there only one “right” way to learn, grow, or understand our experience?
• How can circles, communities, and compassion support deeper forms of learning, connection, and human development?

An episode for anyone interested in experiential learning, psychology, creativity, compassion, human development, and the ongoing exploration of what it means to remain fully human in a complex world.

This podcast was created and is hosted by Anastasia Priyamvada Charitidou, an experiential educator, facilitator, researcher, theatre pedagogue, and founder of Olotites. Through her work, she explores compassion, experiential learning, creativity, well-being, and the human search for meaning, connection, and wholeness.

Transcript

You are listening to Olotites.

Conversations around self-compassion, experiential learning, creativity, and what it means to remain human in complex times.

I am Anastasia Priyamvada Charitidou.

And this episode is called:

Imperfect and Whole — On Circles, Compassion, and the Right to Be Heard and to Exist

I was in a group, listening to a woman I had just met who was sharing a long and, honestly, painfully boring story. I felt no particular resonance. Neither with her story nor, to be honest, especially with her.

And yet, instead of becoming irritated or distancing myself, I found myself captivated.

More precisely: captivated by her relationship with other people’s attention.

The ease she had with speaking and being listened to.

Without rushing.

Without awkwardness.

Without the anxiety that someone might interrupt her.

She wasn’t taking up space because she had “earned” it, but because it apparently had never crossed her mind that she shouldn’t, or that it didn’t belong to her. She wasn’t afraid of being cut off halfway through. She simply assumed she would be heard.

As if there were room for every detail and every description.

And I remember thinking:

Is this what it is like to have always been listened to?

Or perhaps simply not to have been interrupted enough times to stop believing you deserve it?

That you deserve to be listened to attentively and without interruption?

Later, I confirmed part of her story with a mutual friend and—let’s be honest—I realised that we came from very different childhoods, or very different childhood wounds.

Or, to be more precise: from very different experiences of being seen and heard as children.

Sometimes, childhood is a period in which adults’ attention is given conditionally; it depends on behaviour, achievement, or compliance with rules, expectations, and standards of conduct.

And of course that leaves a mark.

It shapes the way we take up space later in life. The way we speak. The way we apologise while speaking. The way we speed up in order to “manage” to finish a thought before someone interrupts us or loses interest.

I have caught myself so many times sharing something deeply important—events that changed my life, personal discoveries, experiences that shifted something inside me—and yet it is so rare for me not to feel a sense of hurry, anxiety, or awareness of time.

As if I were stealing someone else’s time in order to speak.

Or as if I were about to be interrupted halfway through a sentence.

And of course this has happened many times—perhaps not as many times as I myself have interrupted others.

It is something I often notice or find myself wondering about: how many people carry this constant inner hurry within them without even realising it?

A hurry to explain themselves better.

To become more interesting.

Not to become boring.

Not to be perceived as excessive.

Not to “take up too much space.”

And how many people have already given up, in advance, on any attempt to be interesting or ultimately to share, to connect, to be heard?

And perhaps, if you are listening right now, you might also pause and wonder:

What is your own relationship with attention?

What is it like for you to speak when you know everyone is listening?

Does it feel natural?

Uncomfortable?

Dangerous?

Rare?

Do you ever feel that you have to deserve the space you occupy, because otherwise it might be taken away from you?

Or that you constantly have to offer something—knowledge, humour, interest, care, insight—in order to justify your presence?

There is, of course, a whole spectrum of relationships with attention and sharing: from personal relationships and professional environments to public discourse and our shared coexistence.

And perhaps we can notice something that happens especially among people whose lives revolve around care, education, creativity, art, or helping others.

Gradually, you learn that your value is connected to whether you can hold the space. Whether you have something interesting to say. Whether you are useful. Whether you have insight. Whether you can offer an experience, a solution, an answer.

And that is beautiful.

But it is also exhausting.

Because at some point you no longer know whether you are truly present or whether you are performing presence. Whether you have equated presence with the ability to hold, to offer, to inspire, to appear competent.

And I do not necessarily mean that negatively. I think we all perform to some degree. We live in an era in which almost all of us are trained to present ourselves. To be interesting. Visible. Fast. Communicative. “Good” at existing in public.

But not necessarily truthful.

Not necessarily authentic.

And perhaps not always according to our own organic rhythms.

And perhaps that is why, in recent years, one of my favourite places to be has been in a circle—with people, in nature, or almost anywhere—where one person speaks without interruption and everyone else offers the rare gift of full attention.

Sharing circles are not simply group discussions.

They are non-hierarchical, ritualised, and structured spaces of listening and presence, where every voice is honoured without interruption.

And perhaps that sounds simple, but I do not think it is simple at all.

Because most of us are used to performative attention.

“I listen in order to respond.”

“I listen in order to correct.”

“I listen until I can speak again.”

“I listen as long as what you are saying remains interesting enough.”

But there are moments in these circles when something different happens.

Something that is difficult to describe without sounding exaggerated or overly romanticised.

As if the rhythm of the nervous system changes slightly.

As if people begin to speak a little more slowly, or a little more deeply.

Or, conversely, some people begin to speak a little more, because perhaps for the first time they do not need to compress their entire existence into two safe sentences.

And others begin to listen more.

As if, for a moment, the need to prove something falls away.

And many times it is not even what is being said that matters.

It is the experience of being able to complete a thought without being interrupted.

The experience of seeing that a group of people remains present even when you are not particularly impressive, clear, or “right.”

The experience of not needing to earn attention.

I hear you.

You matter.

You do not need to earn my attention.

You are safe—even if you do not make sense… yet.

This kind of presence is sacred.

Not necessarily in a spiritual sense, but in how rare and human it is.

And I think that is why I love these spaces so much.

Perhaps that is why I created Olotites.

Or rather, perhaps that is how the idea of it began to emerge.

Not only as an organisation or a project, but more as a question:

How can we create spaces where people do not need to shrink themselves, cut off parts of who they are, or constantly adapt in order to fit?

Spaces where they can breathe, express themselves, experiment, rest, play, connect, and grow without losing their complexity and vitality.

Olotites was born out of a personal and professional inquiry into learning, creativity, well-being, and the ways in which people meet themselves, one another, and the world around them.

This journey passed through different fields and experiences: theatre, education, facilitation, experiential practices, research on self-compassion and well-being, collective learning processes, contact with nature and animals, European programmes, and community-based initiatives.

Within all of this, one question kept returning again and again:

How can we create spaces where we can fit as whole human beings—and what does it ultimately mean to be whole?

The name Olotites is inspired by the Greek word olos—whole, complete, interconnected—and by the idea that the whole is often something greater than the sum of its parts.

And perhaps that is why you hear me say “in Olotites” rather than speaking of Olotites as though I were referring only to a company, an NGO, or an organisation with a name.

Because, in a way, I am referring to us.

To the many wholenesses that coexist either within a person or within a group, within a community.

To the ways in which people, experiences, relationships, bodies, voices, silences, and different ways of knowing can meet and become something more than isolated parts.

In an era of overstimulation, burnout, and constant adaptation, Olotites seeks to create spaces where learning is not limited to knowledge alone, but is connected to presence, the body, creativity, care, play, and collective experience.

At the heart of this work lies the creation of spaces and relationships.

Spaces for reflection.

Spaces for play.

Spaces for expression.

Spaces for encounter.

Spaces where different ways of knowing, experiencing, and being can coexist without one invalidating the other.

Some of these spaces are temporary.

Others continue to live on through the relationships, experiences, and changes they leave behind.

And I do not think this is only psychological.

I think it is also deeply embodied.

Because the body knows before thought.

It knows whether it is safe to speak.

Whether it will be interrupted.

Whether it needs to hurry.

Whether it must become more “interesting” in order to hold attention.

Whether it has space to exist.

And many times I think our nervous system remembers things that our mind has already tried to explain or forget.

Perhaps that is why such simple practices as sitting quietly in a circle and knowing that you will not be interrupted can be so deeply dysregulating or healing.

Or both at the same time.

And perhaps, if you are listening right now, you might pause and wonder:

Have you ever noticed your body knowing something before your mind managed to explain it?

A contraction.

A relaxation.

A tightening in the chest.

A heaviness in the stomach.

A sudden desire to leave.

Or, on the contrary, a sense that you can finally stay.

Before the words are found, before the narrative is constructed, there is often a bodily knowing that has already begun to speak.

At Olotites we often talk about experiential learning, but for me its essence is not simply more interactive activities.

It is more the idea that there are things we cannot understand through cognition alone.

We understand them through relationship.

Through the body.

Through experience.

Through the way someone looks at us.

Through whether there is enough safety for something true to emerge without being pressured into immediately becoming “correct,” “clear,” or “useful.”

And I think this is also deeply connected to something that helped me organise and understand my own experience differently over the past years: the idea of the different windows of knowing.

It is an idea that, in one sense, begins with Jung, who spoke about different functions of consciousness—thinking, sensation, feeling, and intuition—and is later developed pedagogically by Eligio Stephen Gallegos through the Four Windows of Knowing: thinking, sensation, feeling, and imagination.

When I first encountered this idea, I felt enormous relief.

Relief at the realisation that there is not one single correct way of knowing the world.

I mean, I was already experiencing this, but I liked receiving the cognitive confirmation that cognition itself is not the only valid way.

If you can appreciate the irony there.

That we do not all relate to experience in the same way.

Some people begin with thought.

Others with the body.

Others with feeling.

Others with imagery, imagination, or intuition.

And I think this matters enormously because, many times, even within spaces of personal growth, therapy, or education, there is a silent assumption that there is a “right” way to experience, express yourself, or heal.

But perhaps there is not.

Perhaps some people do not want to share publicly.

Perhaps some people need the body first.

Perhaps some people need images.

Perhaps some people need theory and conceptual maps in order to feel safe enough to surrender to experience.

And that does not mean someone is “less open” or “less aware.”

As, unfortunately, I have occasionally heard suggested—not only by participants, who at least are there to explore, question, and expand their ideas about themselves, but even by facilitators.

It simply means that we inhabit different windows.

For me, for example, thought—or let us say the window of thought—has often been a way of stabilising.

Sometimes I jokingly say that I feed my mind “sweets.” Theories, concepts, maps.

Not because theories are enough, but because sometimes the mind needs something to chew on, something to occupy itself with, so that the rest of the experience can unfold with less resistance.

At certain moments in my life, concepts were as necessary as practices.

My encounter with the work of Corey Keyes, for example, gave words to something I had sensed for a long time: that mental health is not merely the absence of illness, but also the presence of well-being.

That well-being is multidimensional.

It is not only about how we feel in daily life, but also about how we grow, how we create meaning, how we connect, and how we contribute.

The researchers of compassion offered additional maps.

Kristin Neff’s three elements of self-compassion—mindfulness, kindness, and common humanity—and Paul Gilbert’s model of the three emotional regulation systems—threat, drive, and soothing—helped clarify why practices such as visualisation and body awareness can be supportive.

Rather than “fixing” experience, they tend to reduce threat activation and support states associated with safety and regulation.

They also create space for kindness towards ourselves and remind us that struggle is not a personal failure, but part of a shared human condition.

Thought does not replace lived experience, but it can stabilise it.

These theories function as maps that reassure the mind while the body, emotions, and imagination undertake the real journey.

Sometimes that reassurance makes it possible to remain in the process.

At other times, however, thought becomes a trap.

Overanalysis.

Distance from lived experience.

A life that happens continuously “in the head.”

And that is where the body begins to matter.

The window of the body.

Or perhaps, more accurately, the window of sensation.

I remember the first time I did a body scan and found myself thinking, almost irritably:

“Is this it? I sit here and observe my feet? And then what? What am I supposed to feel?”

Mindfulness practices can sometimes seem frustratingly simple and often unexpectedly effective.

Because the body does not always need complicated explanations. Sometimes it simply needs enough space to begin to be noticed.

Body scans train attention to remain with sensation rather than moving away from it.

In that sense, a body scan is not a technique of control but an invitation for the nervous system to pause.

Of course, we do not feel peaceful every time we scan the body.

For people who have survived trauma, focusing on the body can feel unsafe.

For others, lying down simply leads to sleep.

And for most of us there will also be moments of irritation, numbness, or complete emptiness.

Even that—the observation that this is not working today—is awareness.

Even a small, conscious opening to this window—noticing the breath, the warmth, or the weight of the body in the chair—can change the way we meet ourselves.

And perhaps this turns out to be one of the most difficult things in our time for many of us:

To remain slow enough to feel.

Not to immediately turn experience into narrative or knowledge or content.

But to feel.

And this brings me to another window that concerns me deeply: emotion.

Because I think many of us grow up without a real emotional vocabulary.

Just as with the window of the body, our conscious contact with sensation is not always clear.

Sensations are always present, yet all those details are often compressed inside us into a single vague word such as pain.

And yet there are so many forms: stinging, tingling, burning, pulsing, heaviness, pressure, tension.

Similarly, in the emotional realm, we say I’m fine, I’m terrible, I’m anxious, but between those states lies an entire world of experience and endless shades.

And many times we are not “bad at feeling.”

We simply never learned how to recognise what exactly we are feeling.

Without practice in emotional vocabulary, experience can remain undefined, making it harder to meet and easier to push away.

And I constantly see in groups how much a person changes when they begin to acquire a little more space and language for their experience.

Not necessarily through major revelations.

But through small moments.

Someone saying, “I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say,” and for the first time not seeming ashamed of it.

As if the experience itself gradually gains a little more room to exist before immediately being transformed into an explanation, a defence, or a conclusion.

The way emotional meaning shapes our behaviour, our relationships, and our choices.

Another window that moves me deeply is imagination.

And this also has a very personal dimension for me.

I remember a small visualisation book that my father once brought home. My father, a man who was not particularly inclined toward methods or self-help books, had brought it home following the recommendation of a client.

The book was full of visualisation exercises.

One of the exercises simply asked us to visualise a watermelon.

For me, it was obvious and easy.

For my mother, almost impossible.

Her complete inability to do it, and what we interpreted as resistance, became a recurring family joke.

Years later, I would learn the term for it: aphantasia.

That contrast opened a first crack in my understanding: that imagination—and, more broadly, knowing—does not function in the same way for everyone.

For me, imagination was always very vivid.

Perhaps excessively vivid at times.

My inner world was fascinating, sometimes frightening, sometimes playful, always active.

And as I grew older, I realised that imagination can be both refuge and prison.

It can become creativity.

But it can also become a destructive scenario on repeat.

The same capacity that makes it a powerful ally can also make it overwhelming.

Images carry emotional charge, cultural material, and personal history.

In practice, imagination often appears where sensation or emotion needs form.

An image gives shape to experience, something we can relate to rather than simply endure.

And perhaps it is important to remember here that imagination is not necessarily an escape from reality.

It can be a way of knowing through images, symbols, metaphors, and inner experimentation.

That is why practices such as guided visualisations, compassionate imagery, and symbolic artistic creation can be so effective.

They offer a protected, containing, and relational way for inner material to take form.

Working with imagination allows what is inside to move outside: a sensation or emotion becomes a drawing, a collage, a movement, or an object.

This shift creates distance without disconnection.

What was internal and diffuse acquires boundaries.

Once externalised, it can be observed, reflected upon, and transformed.

Imagination, in this sense, becomes a practical bridge between emotion and understanding, between experience and choice.

And somewhere around there, another quieter way of knowing appears.

From an early age I felt there was a quieter way of knowing, sometimes simple, sometimes difficult to discern.

I may not have known its name, but intuition was present.

Compared with imagination, it was subtle, almost imperceptible, easy to overlook amid the noise of everyday life.

I often doubted it, assuming that if something were important it ought to feel more dramatic or more “difficult.”

Over time, through encounters, teachers, practice, and experience, it became clear that knowledge through the mind alone is not enough.

Rational thought can provide a secure foundation, but sensation, emotion, and imagination are what bring us into contact with life.

Here, intuition does not necessarily function as a separate or magical ability, but rather as what becomes available when these windows are already open and in dialogue with one another.

And perhaps here I should say that I am not talking about intuition as some infallible force.

Because many times what we call intuition may be fear, projection, desire, trauma, or simply overstimulation.

But there are also those quieter moments when something within us seems to recognise a direction before we are able to justify it logically.

A sense that something fits.

Or that something doesn’t sit right.

Not always dramatically.

Sometimes almost imperceptibly.

And I think that the more the other windows open—the body, emotion, imagination, thought—the less intuition resembles a mystery and the more it resembles a deeper form of listening.

Sometimes the simplest practice is also the most difficult: silence.

Creating space without a constant influx of stimuli, pausing before reacting, walking without distractions, sitting quietly—all of these remove some of the noise that obscures intuition.

What emerges in that pause is often what was already there, waiting to be noticed.

And perhaps here, after moving through all these windows, you might also ask yourself:

Which window of knowing opens most easily for you?

Where do you go first when you are trying to understand something?

To thought?

To the body?

To emotion?

To imagery?

To imagination?

To the quiet sense that you know something before you can explain it?

And which window feels more difficult, narrower, more distant, or perhaps more dangerous?

And perhaps here we return once again to circles.

Because a circle, at its best, does not only create space for us to speak.

It also creates space for us to listen to what has not yet been articulated.

To notice what the body knows.

What emotion is trying to say.

What form imagination is asking for.

What intuition whispers when the noise quietens for a moment.

Different people rely more easily on different windows of knowing.

Some experience one window as wide open, while others experience it as narrow, blocked, or even tightly shut.

At different moments in life, the same window may feel accessible or inaccessible.

What I gradually came to recognise is that there is something that helps us see more clearly through whichever window is available—and something that supports our capacity, both individually and relationally, to navigate the world of knowing, the world of knowledge.

For me, that something was compassion, towards ourselves and towards others.

Not as a technique or a solution, but as a way of relating to experience.

Compassion allows thought to exist without becoming rigid or harsh, sensations to be perceived without overwhelming us, and emotions to be acknowledged without our over-identifying with them or pushing them away.

It allows imagination to remain alive and creative without becoming an escape from reality and without being crushed by the intensity or harshness of its images.

And it supports intuition without confusing it with impulse, fear, or expectation.

And perhaps, ultimately, that is what I am searching for most through groups, circles, Olotites, and this whole journey.

Not perfect spaces.

I do not think perfect spaces exist.

And perhaps I need to say this clearly here, because it is easy to idealise words such as circle, sharing, community, safety, and compassion.

Circles are not magical in themselves.

Groups can also wound, exclude, manipulate, or reproduce power dynamics.

Sometimes dominant voices take up too much space.

At other times, people share more than they later wish they had.

And sometimes facilitators—even with the best intentions—overlook subtle power dynamics or confuse emotional intensity with depth—and I have flirted with that idea quite a lot myself.

Perhaps that is why a continuous reflective stance matters, together with the awareness that no method or community is automatically healing simply because it uses beautiful words.

Circles can hold transformation.

But they also need to hold… humility.

A few years ago, as I entered a seminar room as a participant, I noticed a small poem written on the glass of a window.

The poem was Invitation to Brave Space by M. S. Jones.

“Together we will create a brave space,

because there is no such thing as a ‘safe space.’

We exist in the real world.

We all carry scars and we all have caused wounds.

In this space we seek to lower the volume of the outside world.

We amplify voices that elsewhere struggle to be heard.

We call each other into more truth and love.

We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.

We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.

We will not be perfect.

It will not always be what we wish it to be.

But it will be our brave space,

together,

and we will work on it side by side.”

Perhaps not at that exact moment, but somewhere in connection with that experience, something shifted inside me.

From wanting and needing safe spaces to appreciating spaces that are safe enough for us to be brave.

And for me that is very different from the promise that nothing difficult will happen.

A safe enough environment does not remove challenge.

It does not remove awkwardness.

It does not remove the possibility of encountering something we do not yet know how to hold.

But it ensures—as much as possible—that the challenge remains manageable, supported, and reversible.

That we can approach something difficult without being pushed into fear.

Because real growth—in education, creative work, collaboration, and relationships—does not happen only inside comfort zones.

But neither does it happen inside fear.

And perhaps, ultimately, this is the thread that connects all of these things for me.

That woman speaking without hurry.

The inner hurry many of us carry to prove that we deserve to be heard.

The sharing circles.

The windows of knowing.

The body that knows before thought.

The imagination that can save us or overwhelm us.

The intuition that requires silence in order to be heard.

Olotites.

And compassion—not as a beautiful idea, but as a way of standing in relationship to our own experience and the experience of others without rushing it into becoming something else.

Perhaps, in the end, what we need is not perfect spaces.

But spaces that are real enough, human enough, and whole enough that we too can exist a little more wholly within them, even if only for a while.

Spaces that may not hold us absolutely and perfectly—because what space ever does?—but that are enough to teach us what we want to seek, ask for, create, and recognise in our lives.

And perhaps, in the end, that is what stayed with me from that woman and her unremarkable story.

Not the story.

But the fact that, for a few minutes, she showed me a different relationship with existence.

A relationship in which attention was not something that constantly had to be earned.

Perhaps she simply had not learned to fear so deeply that she was not worthy of being heard.

And I think that deeply rests people.

To find themselves, even briefly, in a space where they do not constantly have to prove something.

Not perfect people.

Not perfect spaces.

Imperfect wholenesses within wholeness.

So let us create spaces where compassion can take root, grow, and travel—from the place where we begin, into every corner of life that we touch.

About the Author and Project

Anastasia Priyamvada Charitidou is an  experiential educator, theatre pedagogue, and founder of Olotites. She is also a project manager and creator of EU- funded initiatives focused on compassion, wellbeing, and empowerment. With a background in embodiment, compassion- based education, and international youth work, she explores how inner well-being and social change are deeply interconnected. She currently co-leads the Erasmus+ project “comPASSION is sexy” across Greece and France.

About this article:

This article was written in the context of the Erasmus+ KA210- YOU small-scale partnership project “comPASSION is sexy” (Project Code: 2024- 3- FR02- KA210-YOU-000295806), co-funded by the European Union. The project is a collaboration between Les Philentropes (France) and Olotites (Greece), focused on compassion-based approaches to youth empowerment, inclusion, well-being and mental health awareness.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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