New Resource Highlight: Creating Online Bohmian Dialogue Spaces with Zoom's Immersive View

Ben Levi, a Bohmian Dialogue practitioner since the 1980s and founder of Zoom-based dialogue circles before COVID-19, developed a method to use Zoom’s Immersive View for virtual circles of up to 25 people. The method includes a Sentence Completion exercise where participants add words one at a time, continuing the flow of meaning in circle order. The emerging sentence is recorded in Meeting Chat until natural completion, followed by silence and 90-180 minutes of dialogue. This resource demonstrates how practitioners can adapt digital platforms to honor specific spatial and relational requirements of dialogue traditions, offering concrete examples of creatively utilizing platform features to create environments supporting depth of conversation and collective meaning-making, rather than accepting default video conference layouts that may undermine relational dynamics essential for transformative dialogue.

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Ben Levi, who has been practicing Bohmian Dialogue since the 1980s as part of a multi-year monthly dialogue group in the Colorado Front Range and fostering Zoom-based dialogue circles since before COVID-19, has developed a method for utilizing Zoom's Immersive View to create virtual circles of up to 25 people for Bohmian-style dialogue. The approach uses a custom background—a black field with a candle in the middle—to visually recreate the circle formation central to Bohmian Dialogue practice, with all meeting participants seeing the same configuration as the host arranges them in a circle around the candle image. This technical adaptation addresses a persistent challenge in online dialogue: how to create virtual environments that support the relational and spatial dimensions of in-person circle practice essential for the "flow of meaning" that Bohmian Dialogue is designed to foster.

The process begins with enabling Immersive View in Zoom account settings, then during any meeting selecting Immersive View, uploading an appropriate background (such as the black background with candle available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-P0_XbfLAi-guaXXyk1BdPgxufs9b8_K/view?usp=sharing), and arranging participants in a circle around the central candle image. Levi offers a specific exercise called Sentence Completion designed to create meaningful phrases emerging from the group one word at a time, with participants adding words that continue the flow of meaning in circle order (clockwise or counter-clockwise), using the Meeting Chat to record the emerging sentence for all to see. When the sentence reaches natural completion requiring punctuation, the next person in the circle starts a new sentence, continuing until the process feels complete, at which point the host reads back what was said, sounds a chime signaling 30 seconds of silence, and the Dialogue begins.

The complete session typically runs 90-180 minutes, with the original Sentence Completion phrase repeated back to the group prior to check-out, providing bookends that frame the dialogue experience. This method demonstrates how practitioners can adapt digital platforms to honor the specific spatial and relational requirements of particular dialogue traditions, recognizing that Bohmian Dialogue's emphasis on collective meaning-making and suspension of assumptions benefits from visual configurations that mirror in-person circle practice. For dialogue facilitators working online, Levi's approach offers a concrete example of how platform features can be creatively utilized to create environments supporting depth of conversation rather than accepting default video conference layouts that may undermine the relational dynamics essential for transformative dialogue.