Are Judgments Wrong?

by Miki Kashtan

This piece was born out of my ongoing confusion about how to talk about the vision of living beyond right and wrong thinking. Two questions repeatedly arise, and I am not always satisfied with my responses to them. As different as they may seem, both, to me, are indicative of the same challenge. One question is some version of: “Are you saying that it’s OK to kill someone?” The other takes the form of: “Aren’t you saying that judgments are wrong?” My one word answer to both of them is simply “no.” So, what, then, am I saying?

Our Words Have Consequences

My rather arbitrary starting place in disentangling the many threads in this knot is to explore the significance of our choice of words. Saying that something is “wrong”, or “right”, or “beautiful”, for that matter, has consequences for the speaker as well as for the person hearing the words. This form of speaking assumes a standard of what these words mean that is external to the speaker and the listener. The speaker is not taking full responsibility for being the one making that judgment. The listener is subtly invited to agree with the speaker rather than to understand the speaker. The ensuing conversation, if one takes place, is less likely to be one of exploration and connection than one of making pronouncements and, in the case of disagreement, debate, possibly acrimony.

If, instead, the speaker speaks of their experience, what they say becomes incontrovertible and invites a different quality of relating. No one can argue with me about whether or not I liked a certain movie. Anyone could argue with me about whether or not this was a bad movie. Speaking of our own experience, our own inner frame of meaning, and taking responsibility for that being my frame instead of some truth that lives outside of me, has different effects.

For myself, based on years of learning, practicing, and teaching, I can say with definite clarity that I prefer the consequences of speaking without judgments to what happens when I use judgment words. The quality of connection and dialogue, and the capacity of people to work together to create something they can both live with, increase with the former. In part, this is because saying things from a personally owned perspective tends to be more vulnerable and therefore, again in my experience, invite a response that is also more vulnerable. In part, this is because when the speaker expresses things in that way, there tends to be more of an explanation of a “why” that the other side can then relate to.

Would You Help Support Our Work?

by Miki Kashtan

In a recent post I mentioned that we have had a serious crisis here at Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (BayNVC), the organization I co-founded ten years ago. I expect some people who read this blog have not heard about this crisis, as I have not previously written about it here. The organization is recovering extraordinarily well: we have restructured our operations to operate within our means and, thanks to an amazing response to our fundraising efforts, have already retired about 60% of our debt.

But we still have a ways to go and I realize that some who read my posts might like to support either my writing and work specifically or the work of BayNVC in general. We have set up a way for you to give regularly -- even as little as a few dollars a month on a regular basis would be a huge help, both for retiring our debt and for creating the new ways we want to bring Nonviolent Communication to the world.

My own writing and work: Although some people do make income from blogging, this has not been true for me. If you like what you’re reading here I’d love you to consider giving a regular monthly amount. I’m also deeply involved in writing books: I have just fully come to terms in the last week with the realization that the book I wrote last year, Reweaving Our Human Fabric, is actually four books, as I prepared volumes two through four for a publisher who is considering the first one. There are six more books on other topics in the pipeline! More and more, I am called to writing as a way to reach many more people than I can reach through teaching.

All At Once

by Miki Kashtan

On my post this past week I wrote about my desire "to enjoy in full and mindfully the good times, and to accept and savor the bad times." I was delighted to see that in his comment a reader, Ron Greenstein, included the lyrics to a song he had composed, "For Each Hill", about accepting the good times and bad times, the sane times and mad times. In response I want to offer this poem of mine, which I have never before shared publicly.

All At Once

 

Across centuries and continents

the web of life is holding us

unknown to each and all.

We are never all asleep

or all awake.

Someone is always carving a face

in a stone, from the Earth.

Someone is always selling a face

to another.

Someone is always smiling

someone is crying.

Endless rows of cars flow incessantly

while a million nimble hands are

creating toys

cooking

caring for those who cannot.

All at once.

Bombs fall and

babies are born

birds and animals wither away

covered with spilled oil

never able to know why

and some awaken to life

and understand for the first time.

All at once.

One kills

and one tends to the wounds.

All at once.

The ocean rises up and 10000 are wiped out

and grace visits others.

All at once.

All at once.

The scream in me

explodes and reverberates

echoes from mountain tops

descends into the rivers

floats into the ocean

which still cannot quiet it down.

So loud that

the music of the gods

comes in barely audible.

I cannot remember the time

before the scream but

I know the smell

of the freedom beyond it.

Miki Kashtan, Oakland, July 27, 1996

The Global Art Project: The Dragonfly

by Miki Kashtan

For years I've been quoting Sharif Abdullah (at left) and referring people to his book Creating a World that Works for All. 

He recently posted a blog entry in which he describes a fictional global cooperation project that touched me so much that I want to share it with those who read my blog and may not know of his. 

Here are the first few paragraphs:

The Global Art Project:  The Dragonfly  

[Most of the time, my topics are deadly serious.  However, that’s not the only kind of writing I do.  I’d like to share a piece I wrote awhile ago, the seriousness hidden inside the humor.  It’s actually based on a dream!  It was nice waking with a smile on my face, having dreamt this!]  


THE DRAGONFLY   

Imagine a delicate dragonfly, with glass wings, a metal body and spindly metal legs.  It’s thin, outstretched wings shimmer iridescence in the sunlight.

Now, imagine this dragonfly 100 miles long and 75 miles wide.  You see it above you in the sky, because it’s in low Earth orbit.  The first global work of art.

What did it take to create the dragonfly?

All it took total human cooperation.  All of the nations of the Earth had to come to consensus.  It took most of the productive output of humanity for 50 years.  For decades, all the people of the Earth had to work on Project Dragonfly.

All of the money, every penny of it, that was spent on killing and oppressing other humans was diverted to Project Dragonfly.  (This provided more than enough money for several dragonflies.)

Read the rest here.

The Demon of Doing Well

by Miki Kashtan

Some time in May, it became clear to all of us at BayNVC, the organization I co-founded in 2002, that we were in such financial difficulty, that even after laying off three of four remaining administrative employees, including the executive director, we were facing a significant debt, much of which was to me or in my name (you can read more about what happened, and how we are responding to this crisis, here). This came at a time when I was very depleted and in need of a break from responsibility. The level of crisis I felt was acute, sharp, visceral. It affected me physically with unprecedented intensity of stress. One of the more challenging aspects of my experience was the utter sense of helplessness, seeing no way in which I could make any choice that would attend to the magnitude of the crisis and still attend to my longing for balance, for a way to care for myself.

Taking on responsibility for the whole is part of how I respond to crisis, personal or otherwise, so it’s no surprise to me that it took four weeks to envision a different path forward, one I could embrace with integrity, which took me towards releasing myself from responsibility. It took another four weeks, and much inner work, both conscious and unconscious, to regain my sense of freedom, to see a way that I could focus on what was most important to me with far less cost. Meanwhile, the most immediate initial ripples of the crisis were subsiding. Fundraising efforts and other ingenious ideas were beginning to bear fruit. The group of collaborative trainers working with BayNVC coalesced into a sweet community forging a way forward together, making decisions that made sustainability possible. Some conflicts that emerged during the transition were dissolving, and new opportunities began to emerge.

Then, one morning, I woke up feeling good. The sense of crisis was gone. I felt back in my life, full of energy and a sense of possibility. Challenge was still there, and it didn’t detract from this fundamental sense of well-being. Then, immediately in the wake of this lovely feeling, I was filled with dread about the next bad thing that was going to happen. This experience filled me with sadness, even though I understand the many experiences in life that created this expectation within me. The sadness is not because I have any illusion that there could ever be good times that would just last forever. Rather, I was sad because I wanted to be able to enjoy my well-being while it lasted instead of losing it right away because of the fear of losing it later.

Expanding the Circle of Care

by Miki Kashtan

Q: What is the ultimate in codependence? A: You’re drowning, and somebody else’s life is flashing in front of you. So runs a joke that captures something fundamental about so many people’s difficulties in putting their own life, needs, and well-being at the center of their attention.

At some point in my life in the early nineties, someone suggested to me that I might want to consider the possibility that I was codependent myself. Because some people very close to me were getting tremendous benefit from other 12-step programs, I decided to check it out. Knowing that I was likely to be skeptical and not see benefit, I decided, before even attending the first meeting, that, regardless of how I felt about it, I would attend one weekly meeting for two months straight before evaluating. At the end of the two months, I left the group. The choice to dedicate these weeks to that group was nonetheless hugely beneficial to my learning. What I learned on the very personal level was that I didn’t see myself sharing many behavioral patterns with the members of the group. I could see their shared experiences, and they were different enough from mine that I didn’t see that I would benefit from staying. “Codependence” was simply not my issue. I appreciated the freedom I got through that.

I also came to understand, through being in that group, something about the power of 12-step programs to bring about miraculous change in people’s lives. From my own small experience then, as well as what I’ve heard from others over the years, I now see at least three factors that combine in that: a community that people can truly feel at home in; a degree of acceptance of human fallibility that makes room for everyone, regardless of where they are on their path; and a commitment to honesty and deep sharing that supports truth and learning. I was and am in awe of what these groups can offer people who are isolated and in deep need of transformation.

Eliminating Feedback Loops at Our Peril

by Miki Kashtan

Long as my recent entry about interdependence was, at one point it was even longer, because it included an entire additional section I had written about the role of feedback loops in supporting the interdependent web of life that we are part of, and about how modern life has been eliminating and masking feedback loops. The irony of cutting out a piece that was about eliminating feedback loops is only now becoming apparent to me.

The word feedback, which originated in 1920 in the field of electronics, has expanded its meaning widely to refer to almost any mechanism by which information about the effect of an activity or process is returned and thereby can affect the activity or process. Such feedback loops are built into the way that natural systems work, and they affect all life forms at all levels. Natural selection, as one example, is based on continual feedback in the form of which individual organisms make it long enough to reproduce. Whole populations of species grow and diminish based on such feedback loops. As food sources dwindle, a population dies out and as predators are removed from an ecosystem, a population of animals can increase. In places where predators don’t exist, a species can literally take over, as has happened with several introductions of non-local species that are destroying previously existing balances.

Our own human species, in relation to nature, has systematically endeavored to control nature with the desired effect of exactly those two outcomes: eliminating all of our predators, from large mammals to microbes, and expanding our food supply through the practice of agriculture and factory farming of animals. The result has, indeed, been a massive explosion of the human population to the point of threatening the continued existence of our civilization as we know it.