Y mis noches las llenaste de besos fugitivos, donde solo los testigos eran pequeñas luces aferradas a nuestro cielo.
-Nvc.
Y mis noches las llenaste de besos fugitivos, donde solo los testigos eran pequeñas luces aferradas a nuestro cielo.
-Nvc.
Y si aún nuestros labios no pueden estar juntos, nuestras almas arderán para volver al día donde permanecían unidas.
-Nvc.
First of all, if we look at the definition of NVC; It describes the state of self-compassion that comes from the heart. That is to say, we are all compassionate by our nature, but there may be some behaviors that are taught or supported by the society we live in and the relevant culture. People who can apply the NVC have been able to establish a more authentic, more understanding, and deepening connection in their communication and resolve conflicts. that is, to observe without judging, labeling, evaluating. The aim of observation is to find a common factual point. Other steps are emotions, needs and demands. Our feelings are signs leading to needs. Needs are the step for the person to realize. Supply and demand are used to find a way to meet the needs of both parties. In addition, NVC plays an important role in conflicts, customer relations, daily life or meetings. There are several ways to do this. We are in a mutual conflict; First of all, we must clearly define our own needs and present this clearly to the other party. Then we should focus on the needs, away from analysis and judgment. It is also necessary to make sure that mutual needs are understood. It is important to have mutual empathy for understanding the feelings. Finally, it is important to find a way to meet the needs of both parties and to develop strategies. If you are in the role of mediator of a place of mutual conflict, you should consider these starting steps separately for both people. I mean, connecting is the most essential and essential thing. When these cannot be achieved, when mutual common goals are not pursued, conflicts will recur when a framework of respect is not established. And it can lead to worse consequences. So NVC is an effective and practical way.
Nonviolent communication communication is about taking responsibility for your own happiness. If you are no happy in your relationship, work or family, you can do something about that. Learn more about NVC to change your life.
My latest challenge is to learn how to keep my voice gentle and low even when I’m talking about something I’m passionate about.
I don’t want to be loud, I want to be intense and move people by my words, not the sound of my voice.
The first step is becoming more aware of my voice. And naturally without much effort, when I’m in a passionate discussion my consciousness is aware of my voice and keeps it low.
It’s a working progress…
And 34 Sub-Commitments
Relating to Myself
Orienting towards Others
Interacting with Others
Relating to Life
Engaging with the World
The vision of NGL live-in community is of a network of NGL Communities, creating nourishing “home”, and enabling mutual learning and ease of movement for people who are actively working in service to realising the NGL purpose:
“To integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation”
This vision has been emerging in a more tangible way since August 2018 when the idea came through in the NGL California retreat. Since then, it has been manifesting in various ways in the form of experiments living NGL principles in temporary communities. The learning from each iteration is harvested and integrated into the overall “Communities Document”. An example of one such individual experiment, pre-integration is of Emma, Miki, and Erin’s time together in the Desert and can be seen here.
More recently, a team is emerging within NGL to to steward the communities network project towards our above vision. Within this, there will be a “wiki” where those interested in taking up the invitation to become or create NGL live-in community will find support, guidance, companionship. The guidance itself will be an integration of previous tangible experience; all that is offered will be tried and tested by people living it, not on aspirational ideas of what we would love to be possible or think should be.
The communities network project is made up of various sub-teams holding different elements. One such element is holding seeding NGL communities. This blog is a live and personal as-we-go documentation of this process. Started a little later than the start as I only found space and inspiration to make this blog 3 weeks in. And I will do my best to document what has come before, starting here :)
Once NVC was a popular framework and buzzword in nonprofit and liberal circles. This blog is dedicated to analyzing the harmful effects of “Non-violent Communication”.
This has been a tough year for me. I started off my 28th trip around the sun in a deep depression. But since coming out of it I’ve developed and deepened my senses of humility, gratitude, and love. I’m enamored with the world again and knowing how gentle I must be to stay that way only makes me love it all even more.
CRL
“I believe that divisive speech is one of the most destructive forces in the world. Divisive speech destroys harmony in relationships, in families; it breaks apart communities and nations. Divisive speech destroys the Sangha and contributes to the early demise of the lineage teachers. Divisive speech creates a negative force Tibetans call, ‘mikkha,’ which is extremely destructive, even deadly because it destroys ‘lung-ta’ - positive energy - and lowers immunity towards misfortune. As a result, mikkha - caused by divisive speech - is the background to much misfortune, bad luck, freak accidents, and unexplained tragedies… Those who succumb to divisive talk - using blaming language, insults and name-calling, whether politically or personally motivated - by taking a position and denigrating others, and then trying to get others to agree with you - are only contributing to the creation of negative, divisive forces that will only destroy. Divisive speech is against the Buddha-Dharma, which teaches how to cultivate peace, harmony and equanimity. There can be no peace or equanimity in the presence of divisive speech. Learn how to express your views using non-violent communication skills.”
Kunzang Dechen Chodron
Here’s a question to consider (not answer).
Let’s say that a person in your life has something to share with you that might be irritating. Maybe they are attempting to point out inconsiderate behavior, poor choices you’ve made or maybe just some kind of blind spot that you don’t see (as far as they can tell).
On a scale of 1 to 10, how careful do they have to be for you to not get defensive or oppositional in any way?
“1” would be they could say whatever they want directly to your face with no couching or sensitivity to your reaction. Here’s what a 1 might look like.
“John, you’re being an asshole right now”
“Trish you’re a workaholic and heavy caffeine addict”
“Bob, you need to make your family more of a priority”
Keep in mind, this is something you DON’T want to see about yourself, and they may or may not be right, this doesn’t have to do with their accuracy.
A “10” would be they have consulted a panel of communication experts, they understand your insecurities and current situation completely and have deliberated for days constructing a hand-crafted, perfectly vulnerable share that is sandwiched between two hearty appreciations.
What’s your number?
Btw, I’m not interested in you answering it publicly, so please do not comment below. I just want us to consider the question.
The communities I’m a part of tend to focus a lot on communication delivery, and perfecting the art of not triggering people, but what about the skill of receiving less-than-perfect communication? While the former is absolutely important, so is the latter, and it seems to me as though it’s a less developed muscle.
As Byron Katie so brilliantly said — “defense is the first act of war”.
The first.
Not the second, not the justified reaction to something, the first. When we get defensive, we are choosing war.
But what about self-defense? You might ask.
Here’s a good way to test if something is self-defense or not. If you didn’t respond to the incoming threat with defense or opposition, would the threat escalate or fall away?
If it wouldn’t escalate, it’s not self-defense.
Most of the time, our perception is we’re defending ourselves from incoming attacks, but we’re really just triggered and indirectly showing the other person what we’re insecure about.
Sam Harris said something on his podcast I’ve been thinking about today, he said (and I’m paraphrasing) that the only hope we have of pulling ourselves back together as a society is conversation.
We need good conversations, and currently the minimum we require of other people is far too high. We can’t expect people to be Marshall Rosenberg (inventor of NVC), because sloppy communication is just part of being human. Language itself is inherently flawed, so we’re already working with a few thousand words to try and represent a universe of experience.
There is so much power in realizing this.
If I get defensive, it’s my choice, and I can adjust my perspective.
If you get defensive, it may be your choice but I can choose to come at things from a different angle.
Either way, I’m at choice, and I have agency, which allows me to take part in conversations with people who might disagree with me, not share my values or even hate me.
I’m grateful for that power.
-Dave Booda
Nonviolent Communication, the philosophy invented by Marshall Rosenberg, isn’t easy. Not everyone does it well, but bad NVC isn’t the same as a failure of NVC itself.
The NVC structure is not the same as the spirit of NVC. Sticking to the structure religiously is bad NVC, and misses the spirit. Some people use NVC as a substitute for instinctual emotional intelligence; good NVC however should guide you into harmonizing your instincts with your mind.
So far I’m finding that if I try and have half of my communication (in challenging conversations) stick to the structure, that’s enough to put things on a more wholesome track.
I’m writing this because I’m seeing a lot of Social Justice people making cases against NVC, particularly in opinion articles.
I feel quite passionate about these, because I feel they misinterpret NVC, or take bad practice of NVC to be representative of the philosophy as a whole.
Further I think this is possibly disingenuous – a strawman argument. I suspect the real reason many people don’t like NVC is because they’re invested in the social structures that make others wrong, which condemn and seek to punish. These things can be gratifying but I believe the healing of the world lies elsewhere.
I feel so passionate, sometimes angry, sometimes frustrated, because I feel that Social Justice could be so much more effective at ending oppression. If it were gentler and more empathic, requesting and not demanding, it wouldn’t provoke such an emotional pushback. Of course we can keep on saying the pushback is wrong, but that doesn’t help those we’re trying to protect.
It also makes me angry and scared in a personal sense, when I know at any moment in the Social Justice scene I could be called names or told off. I don’t need that in order to hear feedback. In fact it makes it difficult to hear feedback, as I need to divert resources to managing the pain it stirs up in me. I don’t have a lot of emotional resources – and there we could talk about structures of privilege if we wanted.
I find the approach of social punishment for misdeeds also strangely disproportionate and contradictory: probably more than half of social justice people eat meat, but no one “calls them out” for it. Killing animals in my opinion is a much greater violence than, for example, doing drum circles (which has been the subject of call outs in the past). We obsess about dreadlocks in Berlin even though Syrian refugees bear the brunt of the racism here. And so on.
With NVC I’ve found something that I believe holds a key to improving our activism. I’m not great at it. Communication is a skill, one that we might work to improve all our lives. But perhaps that’s the key point. NVC means *working* on communication. Social Justice theory, in and of itself, is academic, and expects others to simply hear your theories, no matter how you communicate them. It’s not based on the reality of the matter: we’re emotive and social beings, not just computational brains on legs.
I feel so strongly about all this I sometimes exhibit an awful irony: I get aggressive and argumentative when talking about NVC. This was my attempt to walk my talk: to communicate as effectively as I can, and not just vent.
So I have the following requests. Please read or watch Marshall Rosenberg himself when forming your ideas about NVC. Please reference Rosenberg himself if you argue against NVC, as I feel other sources are often misrepresentative.
Please be gentle and respectful in “call out” type conversations and consider alternative social justice methods such as “call ins”. And please consider NVC as a practical philosophy for ending oppression.
Finally I’d just like NVC to get a better rap in the Social Justice scene. I feel that there are a lot of fashions and unspoken rules in the scene. Things that are considered “the done thing” or beyond the pale. Fear of social backlash influences how we think and act, and not always for the better. I’m doing my best to do my part in a proactive transformation of the scene by being outspoken. If you feel similar, I’d like to encourage you to join me in this.
Observation/Feeling/Need/Request:
Observation: so far in Social Justice circles online, the outspoken opinions I’ve seen re: NVC have been strongly negative
Feeling: passionate, sometimes angry
Need: effective activism so we can end oppression together; and more personally, a safe feeling social environment
Request: please consider NVC.
Meta-Hieroglyph scripture:
19 MUCIZESI “Bu yıl Kadir gecesi, 19 Mayis Ataturk’u anma, Genclik ve Spor Bayramina denk geldi” HURRIYET
Pandemix ± “Somebody’s Playing a Fucking Game Here”.
INVASION FROM WITHIN “I am the Laser Kid, dark but very sweet: Divination: 9.”
A SINGULAR TEMPTATION ± The Rule of 9
Do you know the difference between a movie and a film?
Let alone, the reality?
“Laser Kid Vs. Image Reality”
No se trata de cuantos “Me gusta” tengan tus escritos, si no de con cuánta gente puedas llegar a conectar y a ayudar.