When agreements are permeable -- living NVC for real

I recently completed a weekend Nonviolent Communication workshop with my work partner, Myra Walden. We led a 2 1/2 day event titled, "Inner Peace, Inner Freedom" in Sedona, Arizona, which was videotaped.

I am excited to be able to share our work more widely by showing people how to use NVC skills to support healing and inner peace, which are skills that I see becoming more vital all the time in our ever-changing and rapidly evolving world.



In any event, this event has been a most interesting experience for me. There were at least 6 people involved in this event in some way, shape or form, ranging from facilitating, promoting, organizing, videotaping and various other logistics.

And as sometimes happens, there was some major miscommunication, and in some cases lack of communication, that contributed to a whole lot of anxiety, stress and confusion throughout.

Here is the gist: what I understood was happening before, during and after the training was different from how other people understood it would be happening. No need to go into the details, but suffice to say that there were a lot of needs on the table.

So how did I respond, both internally and externally? I had a choice to "enforce" certain agreements and refer back to certain conversations, and insist that those agreements be honored.

Frankly, that didn't feel good to me at all, because through connection, I was moved to see needs of other people involved and I genuinely wanted to contribute to their well being. Furthermore, I came to see that certain actions that I took -- or didn't take in some cases -- contributed to the misunderstanding... so even though I could have chosen to point back to certain emails or phone calls, it felt yucky for me to do that.

Essentially, we started from scratch and "renegotiated" the financial and work arrangements from scratch -- and this after Myra and I had flown there, incurred certain expenses and everything was in motion... most notably the workshop had already begun!

This represents a radical change from how I was taught to operate in our world -- iron-clad agreements that must be adhered to, and if there are not, then some form of consternation or punishment would be the consequence... and probably also severed relationships.

I actually see this often in NVC communities -- various people come together to work on a particular project, and through the course of it, they get triggered and are not able to find the resources to work through the situation, or do not have sufficient supplies of empathy, so the people become alienated and the community breaks down.

I am celebrating that all 6 of us had the wherewithal to "stay with" what was present and alive in the moment, without resorting to the static agreements that were made in the past. True, my needs for predictability and security were not well met at times, but I shifted off those needs to ones that had much more life for me -- namely, mutuality, trust and caring for everyone's needs equally.

Celebration!