What Is an Appreciation Circle? A Ceremony of Honoring Someone While They Are Still Here

Why do we wait until someone dies to say everything we appreciated about them?

I have been asking myself this question since I received an Appreciation Circle, a practice I learned in medicine circle work. This year I turned fifty, and my mother turned seventy nine, and we combined our birthdays into one celebration. I gave her an Appreciation Circle as her gift. I honored her first, and in honoring her, I was honoring my own life too, the life she gave me. Then I sat in the same seat and received one myself.

An Appreciation Circle is simple in structure and profound in what it moves through a room. The person being honored sits in front of everyone else. Everyone else stays quiet. One at a time, each person speaks directly to the person receiving, not about them to the group, but to their face. They share what they appreciate about who that person is, about their life, about the years you have shared together, the qualities that stand out as precious, the moments that mattered. No one interrupts. No one responds. The person receiving does the hardest part of all, which is simply to sit there and let it land.

We say beautiful things about people at their funerals. We stand up and tell stories about how much someone meant to us, how they shaped us, what we will never forget about them, and the person we are speaking about is not there to hear a word of it. An Appreciation Circle asks a different question. What if we said all of that now? What if the person got to feel, in their body, in real time, exactly how loved and how seen they are, while they are still here to receive it?

Milestone ages tend to be the most powerful moments to hold one. Fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, these are natural touchstones, thresholds where a person is crossing from one chapter of life into another. But you do not need a landmark birthday to hold one. Sometimes a person needs to be honored in a hard season, a transition, a loss, a becoming. An Appreciation Circle can meet any of those moments.

Watching my mother receive hers was something I will carry for a long time. And then to sit in that same chair myself, at fifty, and let the people who love me tell me what they see in me, without deflecting it, without making a joke to break the tension, without turning it back on them first, that changed something in me too. Receiving appreciation, really receiving it, is its own kind of spiritual work.

Not every mother and daughter relationship is easy to sit in front of and honor this way, and if yours carries more complexity than mine did in that moment, I have also written about the mother wound and what it takes to heal that particular relationship.

The same is true if it is your relationship with your father that carries the weight, or the one that is still waiting to be honored. I write about that particular healing in How Do You Heal the Father Wound?

If you have someone in your life who deserves to hear, out loud and to their face, everything you and the people who love them have been carrying in your hearts, I would love to help you hold this for them. Book your free soul aligned call, and let us talk about creating an Appreciation Circle for the person in your life who is ready to receive it.