Does Anyone Deserve Anything?

by Miki Kashtan

Although Nonviolent Communication (NVC) has the word “communication” as part of its title, I agree with Kit Miller, friend and fellow on the path, who says that “NVC is an awareness discipline masquerading as a communication process.” On the path of transformation, both personal and societal, that I envision, I see a two-way street between our words and our consciousness. In one direction, it’s clear to me that we cannot truly change how we communicate unless we think differently. In the other direction, making a conscious choice about which words I do or don’t use, when and how, has had the astonishing effect of restructuring my thinking. In that way, language has become a primary spiritual path for me, continually bringing into greater and greater alignment my values and my way of being in the world.

The direction of change is always the same for me: moving towards a needs-based approach to inner process, interpersonal relationships, organizational structures, and social institutions. The practice itself has often seemed almost nit-picky. For example, I have been almost entirely successful in eliminating the phrase “I have to” from my speech, replacing it, instead, with explicit clarity about what needs I am focusing on attempting to meet by choosing to do what I might otherwise tell myself I have to do. This has been a liberating practice, in that I literally feel freer as a result, more aware of being an agent and owner of my life instead of driven by circumstances, obligations, and others’ expectations. I have similarly attended to “I don’t have time,” “I can’t,” “This makes me feel…” and the proliferation of terms that make something external to me the standard for evaluation (even something as innocuous as saying “She is generous,” which implies a standard of generosity external to me), with extraordinary results – more aliveness in me, more capacity to maintain calm and presence in difficult situations, more capacity to reach across differences and divides. I am confident I will come back to these examples and practices in some future piece.

Resilience when Working for Change

by Miki Kashtan

I have often wondered why it is that there is so much strife and conflict in so many of the communities and movements I know of. This has been especially challenging to grasp when the groups I am talking about are generally committed to a vision of a peaceful world and the individuals in them aspire to personal integrity and compassion in their relationships.

I am very well aware I am not the only one wondering about this, and many have had things to say about it already. Some think of it as inevitable, part of human nature. Some think of communities as going through pre-determined phases. I find my heart sinking at these thoughts, because of my own deep sense of human dignity, and because I have so much faith in our capacity to transcend any static notion of who we are or how things must unfold.

Some others invoke centuries or millennia of practices of domination which have been passed from generation to generation through our education, through wars, through our governance and economic systems, and through the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be human and how things should be. In this view, each of us is brought into this world and becomes part of these dynamics regardless of what, if anything, is our essential human nature. Tragic as this view is, I find it more palatable, more consistent with my own heart longings, because it leaves room for the possibility both that as individuals we can overcome our personal habits, and that as a species we might learn collectively how to create new systems, structures, and practices that will support us in interdependently engaging with others to create a world that works for all of us and the rest of the natural world.

Why We Want to Create Change
I don’t know why it took me so many years to ask the simple question I discovered today: why it is that any of us would work for change - either as personal growth or as our contribution to social transformation. Since I think of most everything through the lens of human needs, a part of the answer became immediately obvious to me: we work for change because our needs, on balance, are not met in how the world operates or in how our individual lives unfold. Anyone whose needs are mostly met is less likely to want to create change.

With this clarity came another: if our needs, on balance, are not met, that’s likely to mean that we have less resilience. Resilience, in the online English learners’ dictionary, is defined as “the ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens.” As a colleague once remarked, when our needs are often not met, any one experience of unmet needs can become unbearable, whereas if our needs are overall met, any one experience of unmet needs is much less significant.

The implication of this simple insight were unsettling. Could it really be that those of us who work for change are, in some ways at least, less resilient because our needs are less often met? If so, wouldn’t that be a reason why more things would appear to us as attacks, people slacking off, or the like; why more of the time we would feel afraid to say what’s on our mind because the weight of potentially not being received can be more debilitating; or why we would get angry easily when conflicts arise?

Young Haitian Soccer Players after Earthquake

Sources of Resilience
If, indeed, our lack of individual resilience is a contributing factor to the many challenges of working with others and trying to collaborate, then if we want to work for change we need to find sources of strength, activities, relationships, or other strategies that nourish our sense of well-being so that we can face situations with more presence. The possibilities are almost endless, and I would love to see a focused discussion in many circles about what can add to our resilience. To get started, here are some sources of resilience that I know have worked for me and others.

Solidarity: The experience of being in community with others who are experiencing the same hardship can be a source of immense support. Bell Hooks, among others, describes how segregation in many ways helped African Americans develop pride and resilience, because they developed an entire parallel society with many successful role models of business people, teachers etc., while integration has sapped both for many. Much would need to be explored about what conditions make this kind of togetherness supportive, and when the very issues of strife and conflict can interfere with the added resilience.

Gratitude: I have already written about how a practice of gratitude can provide immense fuel for life. After a year of consistent and daily gratitude practice, I find that I can now have immediate access to gratitude even in tough moments, and literally feel the increased resilience that arises spontaneously from tapping into gratitude.

Faith: As someone who lives without a god or higher power of any kind, I am well aware that people of faith often have much more capacity to withstand challenges and difficulties. God, or any other source of faith, is something to lean on, some profound heart assurance that a force exists that will bring about a longed-for outcome. For just one example, I imagine that for Martin Luther King, Jr. to say that the arc of history bends towards justice required faith. In the absence of a transcendent source of faith, my own relies on human dignity, on our ability to transcend circumstances, on the grandeur of our spirit. I aim to cultivate and deepen my faith, so I can lean on it more in times of great challenge, especially when I feel helpless and in despair in the face of the immensity of human cruelty or lack of care that I so often perceive in the world.

Spiritual Practice: If conflict involves temporary or longer-term loss of empathy, compassion, generosity, or care for self or others, this means that those capacities get most “tested” in those times when others (or ourselves in many cases) act in ways that don’t work for us. This has led me to recognize that we can increase our resilience by embracing a consistent spiritual practice that strengthens our ability to withstand unmet needs, so can access choice in how to respond to those difficult moments.

Vision: I wish so much that we lived, already, in the world of my dreams, a world without coercion, based on willingness and generosity, trust and sufficiency; where enough needs are met for everyone that violence becomes a thing of the past. For now, that vision in itself becomes a source of strength for me. I have found, repeatedly, that clarity of vision sustains my energy even in difficult circumstances. As I am reminded of possibility, my passion rekindles, and I find more capacity to accept the obstacles along the way.

Yom Kippur beyond Right and Wrong

by Miki Kashtan

When I was a young girl in Israel, in the early 60s, one of my favorite days of the year was Yom Kippur. For a full 25 hours a great silence descended on the Jewish parts of Israel. No traffic, radio, or commercial activity of any kind took place. For many families, including mine, this was the one time a year we went to synagogue. In the silence I could hear everyone’s footsteps echoing in the empty streets. That silence was my young idea of the sacred.
 
 

Even within my ambivalent-at-best relationship with the legacy of Jewish observance Yom Kippur continues to be meaningful to me. I love being part of a tradition that sets aside regular time every year for self-reflection, consideration of one’s actions, and re-dedication to a life of meaning and value. Secular as I am, I still find beauty and peace in the clear notion that God can only forgive transgressions towards God, and transgressions involving other people can only be forgiven and transcended with the other person.

My immersion in Nonviolent Communication (NVC), starting in 1994, has been an ongoing invitation to reexamine everything: all my belief systems, all my relationships, all my activities. Why this reflection? Because the practice of NVC has at its core an ongoing invitation to shift out of notions of right and wrong, the very foundation of the world I was raised into. Yom Kippur was no exception. How could I reconcile the notions of “sin” and “repentance” so central to the traditional meaning of Yom Kippur with the expansive spirit of nonduality captured so precisely in Rumi’s oft-quoted poem?

          Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,

there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase

each other

doesn't make any sense.

In my life transcending ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing has been an act of immense faith in human beings: in our capacity for care and consciousness, in our ability to learn and grow, and in our fundamental interest in our own and others’ well-being. As part of this journey I have found it meaningful and enriching to reframe the meaning of Yom Kippur in a way that speaks to that faith.

In a world without God, the only available yardstick is internal. “Sin,” a word I am quite reluctant to use, could only mean acting in a way that is not aligned with a source of life that is deep inside me. Indeed, the root for the Hebrew word for “sin” is the same as that of “missing the mark.” Sin in Hebrew could be seen as being distant from the core, which is more compatible with a nondual perspective like Rumi’s or the practice of NVC. “Repentance,” equally problematic for me, then means coming closer to the deeper truth of who I am, to the flow of life in me. Again, the word for “repentance” in Hebrew shares a root with the word for “coming back.”

In the NVC framework the deep internal place that is the source of life in each of us shows up in the form of shared human needs, aspirations, and values. If everything we do is an attempt to meet a need, becoming ever more conscious of what needs I am attempting to meet with each and every action and choice I make brings me closer and closer to life, to connection, to flow.

No right and no wrong. When I find myself “sinning,” meaning acting in ways that don’t align with my deepest values, I don’t judge my actions. Instead, I “repent” in the form of opening my heart wider and wider to all of myself. I mourn and grieve the needs of mine that I didn’t meet in taking the action, and I bring compassion for myself by finding the needs I was trying to meet. No matter how far from life the outcome of an action is, I trust I will find life in the form of the human need that gave rise to the action. More connection, and I am more likely to find strategies that speak to more needs.

Trusting life and the human heart, I don’t see a reason for “should” thinking to keep us from chaos, and I am not afraid of utter chaos in the absence of enforceable notions of right and wrong. I am aching to let go of coercive structures to keep us in place. As Mary Oliver says, “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Still, the hard work remains of sorting things out with others. We are interdependent, relational beings. Confronted with the other’s suffering I open myself even more deeply to life. My secular, nondual reframing reaffirms what the old sages said: if others are involved in the results of my actions no amount of inner work is a substitute for the magic of reconciliation. In full reconciliation I don’t make myself wrong, and I don’t justify or defend to avoid being wrong. Instead, I offer my empathic presence and authentic mourning to whomever was harmed. As my heart expands and heals, too, I can show my own humanity, thereby deepening the healing further. In our relatedness, the other person’s ultimate healing and my full coming back to life are intertwined.

(Yom Kippur is observed this year starting at sundown on Friday, Sep 17, 2010)

A Slice of Heaven

 Dante & Beatrice gaze upon the heavens.

by Miki Kashtan

Being someone very deeply immersed in this world, my notions and images of heaven are also about the here and now, not about some other world or some mythical time. Heaven for me is about dissolution of what I see as culturally-imposed barriers between people, and between any of us and the experience of being fully and glowingly alive. I never expect heaven to be pain-free, or even conflict-free. I only hope for the possibility of facing and using all pain and conflict as doors into the vast space of the human spirit, and into our capacity for love that surrounds and encompasses all that is human.

One of the reasons why I so treasure the work that I do is that it allows me, time and again, to experience snapshots of this kind of heaven. I just returned from one such experience, and I have a burning desire to invite all of you, my known and anonymous readers, to dip into this experience with me. My hope, almost invariably, is for this dip to inspire you into attempting to create such islands of love in your surroundings.

All this happened during the Living Undefendedly women’s retreat that I just came back from on Wednesday. There were eighteen of us. All of us wanted more freedom in our lives. One by one we each took a turn to expose, open, share, delve into, and transform the places in us that block us from flowing fully with life. The level of commitment and dedication I discovered as we opened our circle was to begin was beyond my expectation. This willingness, the trust and the hunger that it signified, then served as the foundation for all the learning and surprises that came as the days unfolded.

We got to see and feel the depth of how debilitating shame can be, and how much it interferes with living fully, openly, and authentically. We noticed how shame even interferes with loving and presence when we begin to think that what we have to offer is not enough or not the right kind of support. For some years now I have had the goal of becoming 100% shameless, so I can experience freedom beyond measure, the freedom to show up with the fullness of my love, power, and longings.

And so, one by one, we opened up and exposed the truth of our being. For some this meant revealing painful secrets, sometimes things that had never been shared with anyone else before. As each bit was revealed, a tapestry of love and respect was being woven together. We discovered we are not alone, and not the only ones. Others allowed themselves to express feelings they had previously been ashamed to show. The similarities and connections between different pieces of work became palpable. So much so that at times a piece of work began, or continued, during someone else’s turn rather than one’s own. At other times many in the group mobilized their empathic presence beyond the already long hours we were keeping to support someone’s work. The unifying theme behind it all was finding the core human needs that gave rise to everything. We discovered, for example, the depth of care towards self and others that was motivating some painful behavior for one participant, and the longing for authentically including all parts of herself that another behavior was signifying for another. Those moments, when we could all connect with the beauty at the root of what had been so hidden and despised inside, nourished all of our faith in ourselves, each other, and people more generally.

And so it was that the biggest surprise was ultimately not surprising at all: the love we created, which deepened and deepened as our time proceeded. We did this work over the course of six days. The quality of presence and attention and empathy that were necessary to support each of us on her way were summoned up from within each of us. Even as some of the time some of us became a trigger for each other, we didn’t shy away from facing the difficulties, and in the end those, too, were rewoven into the fabric of our magic. As we grasped all that we brought forth, all the anguish that led us to adopt our defenses and protections, and all the life underneath, we became luminously beautiful to each other. There is no doubt in my heart and mind that this is what it ultimately means to be human.