#nvc Tumblr posts

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.

El sentimiento que no se deja salir, es el que más pesa.

-Nvc.

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

Miki Kashtan

Relating to Myself

1. Openness to Myself: Even when I act in ways I really don’t like, I aim to keep my heart open to myself. If I find myself in self-judgment and unable to connect with needs, I aim to seek support to reconnect with myself and hold with compassion the needs motivating my actions.
2. Openness to the Full Emotional Range: Even when my feelings are uncomfortable for me, I aim to stay present with myself and keep my heart open to the fullness of my emotional experience. If I find myself contracting away from my experience, numb, or shut down, I aim to seek support to release defendedness, bring tenderness to past experiences that may have created my reaction, and open to what is.
3. Risking my Significance: Even when I am full of doubt, I aim to offer myself in full to the world. If I find myself thinking that I am not important or that my actions are of no significance, I aim to seek support to bring my presence and gifts to life and choose to engage in a co-creative manner.
4. Responsibility: Even when overwhelmed with obstacles or difficult emotions, I aim to take full responsibility, within an interdependent context, for my feelings, my thoughts, my needs, my actions, and my life. If I find myself giving my power away to other people, larger forces, habits, or analytic categories such as my past or any labels I put on myself, I aim to seek support to find the core source of choice within me, to attend consistently to my needs and my goals, and to ask for what I want along the way.
5. Care for My Life: Even when I am stressed, overwhelmed, or in disconnection, I aim to maintain my commitments to my well-being, and to take actions that nourish my life in community with others. If I find myself letting go of strategies that I know contribute to my life, or retreating from connection to attend to my needs, I aim to seek support to ground myself in the preciousness of including my own life in my interdependent circle of care.
6. Tenderness towards Limits: Even when I am drawn to overstretching myself (including towards any of these commitments), I aim to remain attentive to the limits of my capacity in any given moment. If I find myself pushing beyond my capacity, I aim to seek support to honor the natural wisdom of my organism and to stretch only within my current limits as I grow my capacity over time.

Orienting towards Others

1. Loving No Matter What: Even when my needs are seriously unmet, I aim to keep my heart open. If I find myself beset with judgments, anger, or other strong reactions, I aim to seek support to learn from and transform my judgments and meet others with love.
2. Assumption of Innocence: Even when others’ actions or words make no sense to me, frighten me, or have a harmful impact, I aim to assume a need-based human intention behind them. If I find myself attributing ulterior motives, assigning labels, or analyzing others’ actions, I aim to seek support to ground myself in the premise that regardless of how far from serving life someone’s action appears to be, and even if I choose to use force for protection, ultimately their action is an attempt to meet needs no different from my own.
3. Empathic Presence: Even when others are in pain, disconnected from themselves, expressing intensity, or in judgment, I aim to maintain a relaxed presence with their experience. If I find myself attempting to fix, offering unsolicited advice, listening or speaking without heart connection, or turning my attention elsewhere, I aim to seek support to regain my faith in the transformative power and the gift of just being with another.
4. Generosity: Even when I am afraid or low-resourced, I aim to keep reaching out to offer myself to others and to respond to requests to share resources on the basis of needs. If I find myself contracting in fear or unwilling to give, I aim to seek support to release any thoughts of scarcity and embrace opportunities to participate in the flow of resources to where they are most needed.
5. Receptivity: Even when I am disconnected from my needs, I aim to make myself available to receive unconditionally what others and life offer me. If I find myself believing that I am less than or don’t deserve to have resources given to me, or resisting receiving in some other way, I aim to seek support to open to the flow of resources attending to my needs without expecting myself to give anything back.
6. Discernment and Courage: Even when I am aware of a potential cost of my actions, I aim to make my choices based on the strongest possible alignment with my purpose and values within a clear assessment of available data, resources, and information about short and long term effects, rather than based on fear. If I find myself hiding, justifying non-action, protecting myself based on habit, or rebelling without discernment, I aim to seek support to restore my capacity to live in integrity, persist in moving towards purpose, and accept the full range of results that then emerges.

Interacting with Others

1. Authenticity and Vulnerability: Even when I feel scared and unsure of myself, I aim to share the truth that lives in me with others while maintaining care and compassion for all. If I find myself hiding or protecting, I aim to seek support to embrace the opportunity to expand my sense of self and engage even if I may still experience shame or fear.
2. Availability for Feedback: Even when I want to be accepted and seen for my intentions, I aim to make myself available to receive feedback from others about the impact of my choices in order to learn and grow. If I find myself defensive or slipping into self-judgments, I aim to seek support to find the beauty and gift in what is being shared with me.
3. Offering Feedback: Even when I am afraid of potential conflict, I aim to create opportunities to offer honest, purposeful, and caring feedback to others as information to consider about the impact of their actions on me, others, and life. If I find myself withholding information that might benefit a relationship or a shared purpose, I aim to seek support to ground myself in the power of mindful feedback to increase capacity and connection.
4. Openness to Dialogue: Even when I am very attached to a particular outcome, I aim to remain open to shifting through dialogue. If I find myself defending a position or arguing someone else out of their position, I aim to seek support to release the attachment, connect with my needs and the needs of others, and reach for mutually beneficial strategies to emerge out of connection with needs.
5. Engaging with Conflict: Even when I have inner or outer obstacles to connecting with someone, I aim to move towards working out issues between us with assistance from others when needed and in a manner that cares for everyone’s physical and emotional well-being. If I find myself retreating from engagement, I aim to seek support to restore my willingness to seek healing, reconciliation, or learning through facing conflict, using the full range of available strategies, including mourning the current limits of any relationship.
6. Using Force with Care: Even when pathways of dialogue are closed and I come to believe that the only option for preventing imminent harm or damage is using force, I aim to remain steadfast with the choice to use the least amount of force possible with the most amount of love possible and to mourn the impossibility of a fully nonviolent response within a violent culture. If I find myself wishing to hurt or harm or closing my heart while using force, I aim to seek support to bring my intention back to maintaining love and care for the humanity and dignity of everyone and using force only for the purpose of protecting life and finding solutions that work for all.

Relating to Life

1. Interdependence: Even when I experience separation or deep isolation, I aim to open my heart to the fullness of the interconnectedness of all life and to my place within it. If I find myself retreating into self-sufficiency, separation, or mistrust in my own gifts or those of others, I aim to seek support to remember the beauty and relief of resting in interdependence, including the many ways each of our lives depends on and is affected by the entire web of life, including the gifts, actions, and efforts of others.
2. Natural Abundance: Even when in the grip of fear of scarcity, I aim to reach towards life to take what I need, no less and no more, in support of regeneration and sufficiency for all now and into the future. If I find myself accumulating or denying myself the basics, I aim to seek support to trust the ancient wisdom that life flows when we share the fruits of nature and our labor based on needs.
3. Integration: Even when facing significant challenges, I aim to integrate seeming opposites such as process and results, autonomy and interdependence, or power and love, into paradoxical tension rather than experiencing them as opposed to each other. If I find myself thinking in binary ways or identifying with one side of such a pair or framing things as tradeoffs, I aim to seek support to go beyond either/or to realign myself with the wholeness of life and embody multiple sides of any seeming opposition.
4. Accepting What Is: Even when things fall apart, people don’t come through, or calamities take place in the world, I aim to remain open to life without having to like it. If I find myself contracting away from life, drawn to ideas about what should happen, or wishing to control other people’s behavior, I aim to seek support to face reality, mourn, find a sense of peace with unmet needs, and choose responses and actions from clarity about how I want to interact with life.
5. Celebrating Life: Even when I am faced with major difficulties (personal, interpersonal, or global), I aim to maintain an attitude of appreciation and gratitude for what life brings me. If I find myself becoming cynical or experiencing only pain and despair, I aim to seek support to connect my heart with the beauty and wonder that exist in life even in the most dire circumstances.
6. Mourning: Even when it might be easier to turn away from the gap between my vision and the reality around me, I aim to sustain the practice of mourning, including in community, to learn and to regenerate my capacity to creatively respond with integrity to difficult situations. If I find myself acting against something rather than towards vision or shutting down altogether, I aim to seek support to remember the precious gift of tears to fill the gap with mourning, softening the tendency to either suppress my wanting or force the world to conform, and reducing the chances I’ll resort to violence in thought, word, or action.
7. Humility: Even when I have vast experience and knowledge, I aim to stay present to how little I truly know and how much I am simply part of the unfolding of life. If I find myself trying to control a situation or relying on my authority to avoid engaging with differences, I aim to seek support to release attachment to outcome, embrace complexity and uncertainty, listen to multiple perspectives, and surrender to the awe and mystery of life in its capacity to adapt, transform, and regenerate.

Engaging with the World

1. Leadership: Even when I have no formal authority, when attached to outcome, when others are polarizing, or when I don’t fully trust my own power to influence outcomes, I aim to take responsibility to unilaterally choose to care for the whole in interdependent relationships with others. If I find myself choosing a narrower focus or acting without full agency, I aim to seek support to remember that, regardless of others’ choices, I am free to act fully in line with my biggest vision and highest values.
2. Vision: Even when consumed with horror about the way things are, I aim to generate the most detailed vision that my imagination can conjure of how things can be, at all levels, based on principles of care for all life, needs-based resource flow, and contributions based on willingness. If I find myself joining with others in acting from anger at what’s not working without clear vision of what we would do if we happen to succeed, I aim to seek support to ground myself in the inspiring power of vision to mobilize action based on love of the possible.
3. Multilevel Perspective: Even when an individual, interpersonal, or systemic lens appears compelling on its own, I aim to maintain my capacity to view and engage with reality from all three perspectives for full choice about contributing to change and attending to more needs. If I find myself consistently overlooking any of these layers, I aim to seek support to refocus my attention on the interconnection of all aspects of life to discern how to respond in each moment.
4. Social Self-Reflection: Even when I don’t see how the larger social circumstances into which I was born shape my behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs, I aim to seek to understand the patterned differences that arise between those socialized into different social locations, and to choose to act with others across power differences to make it possible for all to partake in shaping our collective future. If I find myself defending, blaming, sinking into shame, giving up my power, or otherwise retreating from engagement, I aim to seek support to act with care for self and others based on compassionate understanding of the social context of our individual choices.
5. Transparency: Even when I feel protective of information or concerned about potential misinterpretations, I aim to transparently reveal to others decisions, including ones I regret, and the circumstances and reasoning that led to those decisions, financial data, and other information relevant to personal and organizational function. If I find myself safeguarding information, I aim to seek support to recognize the extraordinary power of open communication to restore trust and increase wisdom within a system.
6. Collaboration: Even when pressed for time or when trust is low, I aim for engaging with others in mutual influencing to find solutions that work for everyone. If I find myself exercising power over others or abdicating my own power to participate, I aim to seek support to restore my capacity to open to the wisdom, creativity, and renewed energy that are unleashed when power is used effectively with others with the intent of attending to needs, relationships, and shared purpose.
7. Collective Capacity: Even when groups I am part of are beset with challenges and divisions, I aim to continue to engage with others to co-create systems that increase our capacity to work towards our shared purpose, in line with our values, and in service to our collective well-being, including mindful use of resources and discerning limits to engagement. If I find myself imposing systems or reluctant to set them up, I aim to seek support to recommit to making conscious agreements, grounded in the vision and values of what we want to create, about who makes which decisions, how resources are generated and shared, how information flows amongst us, how we will provide, receive, and attend to feedback, how we engage with conflict, and how we support each other to maintain our commitments.
8. Appealing to Others’ Humanity: Even when seeking to create high-stakes change across significant gaps between preferred strategies, I aim to support others to find their creativity, generosity, and integrity rather than attempting to coerce a solution that attends to what’s important to me. If I find myself losing faith or patience, I aim to seek support to restore my capacity to act with integrity and to offer loving action as a way to generate shifts in strategies and perspectives.
9. Collective Action and Strategy: Even when there is potential cost to me, I aim to participate in nonviolent collective efforts that are either exposing and interfering with the functioning of the dominant culture or creating alternatives to it, so as to transform social structures in service to a world that embraces the needs of all life. If I find myself retreating into the comfort of my personal life, succumbing to hopelessness, or developing hatred towards those whose actions I want to influence, I aim to seek support to bring my intention back to the transformative power of a focused minority working for change while grounded in love and care for the humanity and dignity of everyone.

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

Perdóname, me cansé.

-Nvc.

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

I know I’m ready to give feedback when…

Me provocas cansancio mental y lo peor es que no me dejas dormir.

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.