The term ‘circulation’ appears across the depth-psychology corpus in registers that are at once cosmological, physiological, alchemical, and psychological — testifying to its persistent function as a master-metaphor for psychic vitality and transformation. The most concentrated and technically developed usage belongs to the Taoist tradition mediated through Wilhelm’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower, where ‘circulation of the light’ names the central meditative practice by which yang and yin energies are returned to their primal unity, producing what the text calls the ‘spirit-fire’ and ultimately the diamond body. Jung receives this formulation and transposes it into his vocabulary of the self and the individuation process, finding in the circling movement of the mandala and in the spontaneous rotational imagery of his patients’ dreams an exact psychic counterpart to the Eastern practice. Hillman pushes toward a more somatic and world-directed account, tracking how the circulation of desire, sulfur, and thymos in the heart risks both illumination and exile from the soul. Welwood, drawing on somatic and contemplative frameworks, treats free-flowing circulation as the elementary criterion of organismic and psychological health, understanding blockage as the root condition addressed by therapy. Plato’s Timaeus supplies the archaic substrate: the irrigation of the body by blood, and the celestial revolutions understood as movements of the World Soul, establish circulation as the structural metaphor linking microcosm to macrocosm. Across these positions, circulation names not merely movement but a self-returning movement — the condition of wholeness rather than dispersal.
When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth, of the light and the dark, are crystallized. That is what is termed seed-like thinking, or purification of the energy
This passage defines ‘circulation of the light’ as the foundational alchemical-meditative practice through which opposed cosmic energies are unified and crystallized into spirit.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931thesis
Confirmatory Experiences During the Circulation of the Light … if, when there is quiet, the spirit has continuously and uninterruptedly a sense of great joy as if intoxicated or freshly bathed, it is a sign that the light-principle is harmonious in the whole body
The text presents the subjective phenomenology of successful light-circulation practice — a continuous joy — as the confirmatory sign that the yang principle has been restored to systemic harmony.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931thesis
Therefore the Master teaches the circulation of the light so that the true human nature may be reached. The true human nature is the primal spirit.
Circulation of light is posited as the direct method for recovering primal spirit and thereby reuniting the divided faculties of human nature and life.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931thesis
The health of living organisms is maintained through the freeflowing circulation of energy. We see this in the endless cycles and flow of water, the cradle of life, which purifies itself through circulating
Welwood advances free-flowing circulation as the universal criterion of biological and psychological health, situating therapeutic work within this cosmological principle.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing, Diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life … the canal through which the vital fluids flow out.
The Hui Ming Ching frames circulation negatively through ‘cessation of outflowing’ — the arrest of dispersal is the prerequisite for completing the diamond body.
, The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, 1931supporting
For the continuous and unending circulation of each soul out into the temporal order and back to being, see Props. 199 and 206.
Abrams cites Proclus to show that Neoplatonic theology formalises circulation as the soul’s perpetual emanation into time and return to being, supplying the metaphysical template later adopted by Romantic and depth-psychological thought.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
in order for there to be movement, exchange, there had to be things that were kept out of exchange, stable points around which the rest — humans, goods, services — might revolve and circulate
Seaford, drawing on Godelier, argues that economic circulation requires a stable, non-circulating sacred centre, mapping the structure of monetary exchange onto archaic religious organisation.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
how they influence the circulation of energy in spaces and in people, and how new media and innovative interactions among existing media improve practice
McNiff extends the concept of circulation from physiological to aesthetic and group-energetic registers, treating the movement of expressive energy through studio space as a therapeutic principle.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
CRF reaches cells in the anterior pituitary, where it then stimulates the synthesis of ACTH and the endogenous opioid beta endorphin. Pituitary cells then secrete these neuropeptides into the general circulation
Schore maps the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis as a literal circulatory feedback system, grounding affect regulation in the neurobiological circulation of stress hormones.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting
The whole body is nourished by the blood; blood is formed out of food in the belly … how does the blood rise to the head and get distributed all over the body?
Plato’s Timaeus poses bodily circulation as a hydraulic problem of distribution, establishing the earliest systematic account of internal fluid-circulation as the basis of organic nourishment.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
they made throughout the body itself a system of conduits, cut like runnels in a garden, so that it might be, as it were, watered by an incoming stream
The Timaeus uses the metaphor of garden irrigation to describe the vascular system, framing bodily circulation as a divinely engineered hydraulic network.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
The contraction of the intestines, circulation of fluids, biochemical changes, the movements of breathing, or the movements of muscles, ligaments, or bones all cause inner-body sensations.
Ogden situates fluid circulation among the primary generators of interoceptive sensation, connecting internal physiological movement to the body’s capacity for self-awareness in somatic psychotherapy.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting
The purifiers, priests or kings, made a circuit round the group of people or the building which was to be purified, always proceeding towards the right. Thus the purification occasioned a circumambulation
Benveniste traces the Latin lustrare to its root in ritual circumambulation, demonstrating that purification and circulation are etymologically and functionally fused in ancient ceremonial practice.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973supporting
The very circularity of things as they really are, rather than as the left hemisphere conceives them, might be a reason for hope. Linear progression versus circular
McGilchrist contrasts the right hemisphere’s experience of circularity with the left hemisphere’s linear processing, suggesting that circular movement is characteristic of the right-hemispheric apprehension of reality.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside
the revolutions of the heaven are regarded as the motions of the soul
Plato equates celestial revolutions with the motions of the World Soul, establishing cosmic circulation as the outer expression of psychic movement.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside
it again sheds everything and retreats to the state of fruitlessness, and makes itself back into a root, only in order again to ascend … all of visible nature appears unable to attain settledness and seems to transmute tirelessly in a similar circle
McGilchrist invokes botanical and cosmic cycles to argue that visible nature is constituted by an incessant circular self-renewal that resists all final settledness.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside