Nonviolent Communication toward World Peace

I am making a decision, right now, to study Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC). I have passionately but gingerly tipped my toes into this subject for decades, yet admittedly, not dived with full immersion into the depths of its core. It’s time. I need this. The world needs this.

I’m realizing my communication skills are saturated with what Gandhi would call ‘passive violence’. I have concocted stories, over the years, that a few of my neighbors + family members are not good people (to some degree) because they have hurt my feelings. Because of this storyline- without fully recognizing or admitting to it - I’ve been communicating in non-compassionate ways, with or about them. Just as insidious, I’ve been sending silent, negative juju into the energetic field. It’s time I look at this pattern and stop it. I want to live a peaceful existence. I want to help create a peaceful planet. I am not helping create peace when my thoughts and words are violent. Mahatma Gandhi said that unless we “become the change we wish to see in the world” no change will take place. I WANT CHANGE. So… ima learn to be the change I wish to see in the world.

Arun Gandhi (Mahatma’s grandson) wrote (in the Foreword of Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life) that, at age 13, his grandfather assisted him to understand how “passive violence fuels the fire of physical violence” and led him to ask: how can we extinguish a fire if we don’t first cut off the fuel that ignites the inferno?

Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is based on the principles of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolence. Nonviolence is defined as: the natural state of compassion when no violence is present in the heart. NVC assumes that people are compassionate by nature - that we inherently feel good when we authentically connect with ourselves and others from the heart; that we all share the same, basic human needs - for autonomy, integrity, celebration, interdependence, play, physical nurturance, and spiritual communion; and that all actions are a strategy to meet one or more of these needs - every minute of every day.

The Center for Nonviolent Communication trains people, worldwide, in NVC. It (CNVC) emerged out of the work Rosenberg was doing with USA civil rights activists in the early 1960's - while mediating between rioting students and college administrators, and working to peacefully desegregate public schools in long-segregated regions.

The Center teaches that through NVC’s “emphasis on deep listening—to ourselves as well as others” we “discover the depth of our own compassion”. This sounds to me like a simple first step to changing the world. Ima dive into Giving from the Heart - the first chapter of Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. You are invited to join.