How I Changed My Relationship to Time

by Miki Kashtan

The beginning of this transformation was innocuous enough. I was leading the morning session of a Nonviolent Communication Leadership Program retreat. A significant and unexpected conversation happened in the group, and I wanted to bring our attention back to the planned topic. Just then, someone had one more thing to say and asked to be heard, to be given empathy for what she was expressing. In response, I said something familiar such as: “I would love to be present with you now, and I feel too anxious about time.”

Before I managed to choose what to ask of her to see how to resolve the dilemma, someone else jumped in, rather agitated, saying something like: “I am tired of everything always being about time. Time this and time that. Enough. Time…  time…  time... I can’t stand it any more.” The ferocity of his reaction took me entirely by surprise, and then didn’t. If Nonviolent Communication is about the human needs, then attributing any choice to “time” was exiting the awareness of needs as motivating every action. My awkwardness and confusion turned into serious curiosity. I told him I was eager to explore it deeply and would get back to him. We somehow worked out the agitation of the moment, the decisions about what we would give our attention to were made, and the morning ended.

Time and Needs

Later that afternoon, I sat with some of my colleagues and began my exploration. All I had to guide me was a question I derived from the morning’s insight: if time is not part of the needs consciousness I was cultivating in me and sharing with others, then what does it mean to make all choices based on needs and not on time? I understood rather quickly that the first thing it meant was that I would want to find a way to articulate my choice that was based on needs, not on a concept such as time.

Who Gets to Decide?

by Miki Kashtan

When my nephew Yannai was very young, he confidently walked up to a parent who was giving strong instructions to another little one. “But he gets to decide, right?” he said, completely confident that all other households were run in the same way that his was. It never occurred to him at that time that the overwhelming majority of children in the world grow up constantly being told what to do or not do.

An Executive Director of a non-profit with a large staff presented herself to me as “the one that says ‘no’ to everyone,” accepting that others would not like her because of that. She didn’t conceive of her role as the one making things possible for everyone. I didn’t see any evidence in our conversation that she could envision a collaborative relationship with the staff, where they decide together what makes sense and is doable within the budget.

During an in-service for teachers in a school, I asked the teachers to name the needs that their students were bringing with them to school and which they saw themselves as wanting to attend to. They named learning, safety, care, even meaning. The one glaring omission was the need for autonomy or choice. Teachers in this middle school did not see their students as having this need, or didn’t see it as part of their job as teachers  to support this need. I don’t know which it was. What I do know is that when I brought up this point, talked about how huge children’s need for autonomy is, and made some suggestion about having students be involved in decisions that affect them, one of the teachers responded with great vehemence. What she said has stayed with me for the last nine years. “Oh, no,” she started. “What you are talking about is democracy in the classroom. My classroom is not a democracy. I am the dictator. I am a benevolent dictator, but I am the dictator.” There was no shred of doubt in my mind that this particular teacher was deeply committed to and cared about the well-being of the students in her classroom. 

Basic Pitfalls of Using NVC

by Miki Kashtan

When many people first learn NVC, they become so enthusiastic about the possibilities they see unfolding, that they immediately try to put it to use everywhere. Often enough, the results can be disastrous, such that other people become deeply suspicious of NVC. Here is a sample of what people often hear from others in such circumstances:

• “It’s like I’ve got a complete stranger staying in my house.”
• “Don’t use this NVC thing on me.” 
• “What happened to you? Can’t you speak normal?”
• “You sound so clinical.”
• “Why can’t you just be honest with me and tell me what’s really going on with you?”

The fundamental issue happening here, as I see it, is that people fall in love with what NVC can bring to their lives and to the world, while attributing that miracle to the language used rather than to the consciousness shift that precedes the choice of words. As a result, they use the language in their interactions with others instead of seeing it as a practice tool designed to support integration of principles and to facilitate navigation of difficult moments with mutual consent. Because of how challenging that distinction between the language and the underlying consciousness is, I want to carefully unpack this paradox.

It’s Not So Easy to Be Rich

by Miki Kashtan

I had my first true inkling that being rich might have its own challenges in the mid ‘80s, when I was in a relationship with a millionaire. At the time I was living in a tiny apartment on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, which was still in the early phase of massive gentrification. More than once, I remember him standing at my window looking at the people walking up and down the street, and saying: “They all want to be where I am.” More than the words, it was the unmistakable tone of melancholy that I heard in his voice that affected me. Nothing in his demeanor resembled happiness. I also remember another phrase he often said: “What comes after success?”

One of the mythologies of our culture is that having money is the single most important factor in the choices we make, the most reliable path to a life of happiness, and the ticket to feeling good about ourselves. In some significant ways, money indeed provides access to more resources, such as material goods of any kind as well as services that may not be available to all. Having enough money means a certain kind of immediate ease with all manner of decisions. I don’t intend to minimize the significance of such material benefit.

And still... The more I have come to know the lives of people with significant access to resources, the more struck I am with how many challenges and hardships they experience. Given how easily and often the rich are maligned (a challenge in and of itself), I wanted to offer my intuitive and learned understanding of the plight of the rich. If you happen to have access to money, you will likely recognize some of these dilemmas. If not, I hope you can imagine it. My goal, here as often, is to support our collective movement toward a world that works for all, the currently rich and the currently poor, by reducing the veil that hides our humanity from each other.

Dialogue, Power, and Nonviolent Resistance

by Miki Kashtan

It is not non-violence if we merely love those that love us. It is non-violence only when we love those that hate us. -- Gandhi

Painting these watercolor portraits of Gandhi helped
Malekeh Nayiny find an inner path toward healing.
From the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.

I have been thinking, for years now, about Gandhi’s invitation to be nonviolent in thought, word, and action. It’s only this past week that it finally dawned on me that in many instances, nonviolence in action is easier than nonviolence in word, which in turn is easier than nonviolence in thought. Many more groups and individuals worldwide, for example, have refrained from physical violence when engaging in social change action while at the same time harboring hatred of those in positions of power. For an extreme example, most people don’t kill anyone even though it’s known that many people entertain fantasies of killing. Our habitual thoughts are deeply ingrained, and require ongoing active and conscious practice to transform. I am not surprised to discover that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, in different ways, wanted their biggest legacy to be how they lived much more than their external achievements.

As I think about what it means to live in a nonviolent way, I keep coming back to the clear insight I’ve had that all of us can be nonviolent when everyone does exactly what we want them to do. The test of our nonviolence is precisely when people do things we don’t like. Whether individuals in our personal life, co-workers, people we supervise, or bosses at work, or those with significant economic, social, or political power - the challenge is the same. Something profoundly changes when we take on loving everyone. This love is of a unique kind. It isn’t about wanting to be everyone’s friend. It’s not even about liking what people do. For me, it’s about two core bottom commitments. One is to maintain complete awareness of that person’s humanity, and therefore uphold their dignity in all our choices about how to respond. The other is to continually aim for solutions that attend to that person’s needs, as best we understand them. Both of these are internal matters, and they tell us nothing about the specific kinds of actions to take in response to what we don’t like. At the same time, those intentions completely affect how we might choose to respond in those times when someone else’s actions are at odds with our own human needs. 

More about Bullying

by Miki Kashtan

“There are people in this world who can show their wounds only by inflicting them.” 

-- Aurora Levins-Morales, Medicine Stories

I have been deeply touched by the many responses to my recent post about bullying. So many questions and topics have come up, that rather than responding to specific comments, I thought I would collect them and respond in one post. I see the entire question of bullying as deeply significant, capturing in it so much of what I want to transform in how we overall relate to each other in the world, and to our children in particular. I imagine that every child learns deep lessons from the prevalence of bullying and from seeing how bullying is handled. I want those lessons to be ones that will support them in trusting the possibility of workable systems and human relations, and in their own capacity to make a positive difference in life around them. If even a few parents or teachers are inspired to shift the environment within which bullying happens, it would give me the satisfaction of having made a difference myself. My hope and vision are far bigger, which if you read this blog regularly you already know anyway…

My Own Path
I was asked how I was able to transcend what happened to me and come to a place of being open and vulnerable. I am not surprised this question is coming up. I have pondered some version of this question for years. It seems big and huge to me. While it seems pretty commonly accepted these days that people who act violently toward others were themselves previously traumatized and often abused, it is equally clear that not all those who are abused pass the violence on to others. If I understood fully what made it never appealing for me to inflict harm on others, not even in my fantasies, perhaps I could use this understanding in supporting others. Why is it that what was most painful for me was my inability to understand why anyone would treat me, or anyone else, the way I was treated? Much more painful than the actual experience of leaning against a tree all night and shivering. The more I am able to understand, the more calm there is in my heart.

My friend Aurora Levins-Morales, poet and writer extraordinaire, wrote in her book Medicine Stories about having been tortured as a child, and knowing that her only way to remain human was to resist the temptation to hate her torturers. She understood, even while it was happening, that hating them was the first step toward becoming like them. I feel fortunate never to have hated those who tormented me.

Embracing Nonviolence

by Miki Kashtan

When I discovered Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in 1993, I had no concept of the rich world that would open up to me over time. My intellectual and moral lenses were transformed beyond recognition through this encounter with NVC. When I thought of what to write my Ph.D. dissertation about, NVC informed me every step of the way as I critiqued, then offered alternatives to, theories of human nature that we have been handed down through millennia of Western Civilization. I found satisfying ways of articulating a perspective rooted in NVC, which transcended and integrated the age old dichotomy of reason and emotion and offered a theory of human nature grounded in human needs. Unlike just about anyone I ever met, I loved writing my dissertation and was sad to be done. It’s only in the last couple of years, ten years after completing my dissertation, that I have come back to writing. 

Immersing myself in NVC also became my calling. Many people don’t know that I used to be a computer programmer in a software house in NY, working on IBM mainframes. I was still doing part-time computer consulting when I stumbled on NVC. Two years later, when I had a deep visceral experience of the transformative power of NVC-based empathy, I decided on the spot to focus my life energy on bringing this gift to others. NVC is my livelihood, it grounds my vision for how the world could be, and affects every thought and interaction that I am conscious of. 

At the heart of these massive changes was the transformation of my own thought process, understanding, and style of interacting with others. Early on I took on what I now name the path of vulnerability, my main access to inner and outer transformation. Fewer and fewer things get me off balance as I continue on this path. I can meet more and more people and situations with presence, clear choice, and tenderness. I can open my heart to almost everyone in almost every circumstance, even if not immediately. I can accept almost everything that happens to me (not yet in the world at large). Life hasn’t become less painful, because the gap between vision and reality remains big, both personally and globally, and because I continue to feel lonely despite everything. With, through, and despite the pain I am more at peace, more open to life and to myself, more available. I like who I have become.  

For many of these years, even though I was conscious of the name, I was conspicuously ignorant of the tradition of nonviolence from which NVC emerged. For a long time I was one of the people who thought that “nonviolent” was a negation and wished for a different name. I don’t remember exactly how all this shifted, how my world exploded and expanded. Three milestones were Michael Nagler’s  Is There No Other Way, Walter Wink’s The Powers That Be, and the movie A Force More Powerful (a book by the same title also exists). Some bottom fell from under me, and I found myself in a much bigger ocean of meaning and possibility. What it means to be human became larger. Nonviolence became bigger than communication. Gandhi’s notion that nonviolence extended to our thought, word, and action began to make sense. Especially understanding how much our thoughts were implicated in our words and our actions. 

This exploration has been so rich, that I still make new discoveries just about any time I teach any part of this work, most of the times when I write, and even when I interact meaningfully with others about any of the deep questions that fuel my quest. Whereas I used to be concerned about the “Nonviolent” part of NVC, nowadays I am in love with that word, and my concern has shifted to the “Communication” part of NVC. I no longer think of NVC as primarily about communication. I think of it as a deep and endlessly concrete practice of nonviolence with applications in most areas of human life, such as our spiritual life, our moral codes, how we interact and collaborate with ourselves and each other, and how we can create organizations and even larger systems that are designed to support human needs. This is not nearly an exhaustive list. 

And what is nonviolence, then? For me, nonviolence is the coming together of love, truth, and courage in a fierce commitment to what my tradition of birth, Judaism, calls Tikkun Olam: the healing and repair of the world. In small or large measure, nonviolence for me is about finding the courage and love to bring truth in times when what is happening is violating our values and interfering with our own or others’ human needs. It’s the willingness to stand up for what’s of value to us while remaining open-hearted towards those who see things differently. It’s the antidote to the consciousness of separation, scarcity, and powerlessness that leads almost all of us almost all the time to go along with systems and practices we know don’t serve life. 

I am excited, after all this extensive exploration and study over years, to offer a first course (a four session telecourse starting this Thursday at 4pm Pacific Time, open to anyone, through NVCA) that explores the relationship between NVC and nonviolence. I am imagining it as an opportunity for nonviolence enthusiasts to learn about NVC as a practice that can enhance their path, for NVC enthusiasts to learn about the tradition and context that can give a new layer of meaning to their practice, and for both to learn from each other. It matters to me, because the only way I can imagine to reach a livable future for all is based on nonviolent means.