“Street Giraffes” is a free, monthly telepractice group that is rooted in NonviolentCommunication (yet branches out towards other modalities as well: IRF, IPNB, MYL etc.) and most often meets on the second Sunday of each month at 7 pm/ET.
Learn how to become a part of our sangha here and please set a revolving monthly calendar reminder to remember to join in!
"The sangha is devoted to the practice of mindfulness, concentration & insight, & while everyone in the sangha profits from his or her own mindfulness, they can also take refuge in the collective energy of mindfulness, concentration & insight of the sangha"https://t.co/YZDSzPCNLm
— Street Giraffes: An NVC Sangha/Blog (@streetgiraffes) August 7, 2023
Praise for The Ongo Book (& NVC as a mindfulness practice):
“I once asked Marshall Rosenberg, creator of Nonviolent Communication, what it would take for me to ‘really learn this stuff’. His answer: ‘Practice, practice, practice.’” (continues)
– Lucy Leu, author of Nonviolent Communication Companion Workbook
We experiment with a varied toolkit, including: self-connection exercises (e.g. journaling, guided meditations, etc.), dyad practices/role-plays and other group processes towards more skillfully navigating interpersonal conversations (by striking a dialogic balance between empathic understanding and authentic self-expression).
As mentioned above we most often meet on the second Sunday of each month at 7 pm/ET (a.k.a. NYC time or 4 pm/PT) however there is also a countdown clock on this blog’s home page which offers a reminder as to when the next scheduled telepractice will take place. You’re welcome to email us at streetgiraffes@gmail.com for more details.
We come together — as a kind of NVC sangha — to collaboratively support one another’s communicative learning edges, utilizing conscious communication mindfulness practices in the spirit of NVC as a kind of working hypothesis in a “dialogue lab” (skill-building) experimentation, e.g. iGiraffe, etc.
While gathered at our watering hole, we’ll experiment with practical skills to:
Align your intention, words, and conduct with your deepest values.
Develop somatic awareness while strengthening your empathic presence, both towards inner conflicts (within oneself) and while navigating differences with others.
Nurture the capacity for a quality of intimate connection and cultivate community.
Identify universal human needs and balance them with those of others.
Calibrate your capacity for responding, instead of merely reacting, in stressful times in ways that support connection.
Overcomee fear of entering into and navigating challenging dialogues
Re-center and remain connected to the values at stake when in the midst of conflict
Trainer Tip: “When there is conflict, the chances are good that people are arguing over a particular strategy. When we focus on our needs, the opportunities for peaceful resolution that values everyone’s needs are much greater. This can also build trust.” (via NVC Resources on Conflict Resolution)
This call grew out of a Naturalizing NVC course, then being offered by NVC Academy, and taught by Miki Kashtan (in 2011). I invited my fellow classmates — a.k.a. ‘street giraffe’ practitioners — to first meet on the fourth of July as a kind of study group (for additional time to experiment with some of the exercises from our course) and then later that same year opted to more deliberately facilitate a telepractice-group, ongoingly (eventually incorporating this blog, as a kind of learning adjunct/annex).
It’s worth mentioning that while the content of the call/blog has morphed to include more than the original ‘naturalizing’ focus, the group has remained constant in its intent to experiment with dialogic skill-building.
“In any given moment, there will be some of your needs that are being met and there were always some needs that are not being met. The goal is not to be attached to them being met. The goal is to be in alignment with the wisdom that is moving through your system.” —Yvette Erasmus
“Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, founder of NVC, used to say that conflicts cannot happen at the level of needs (because we all have the same needs), and that they only happen at the level of strategies. This is why separating the needs from the strategies is so valuable. Once we can distinguish the two we might find multiple strategies that could meet the same set of needs.” (via NVC Mediation – PuddleDancer Press)
Content by PuddleDancer Press. Use of content okay with attribution. Please visit www.nonviolentcommunication.com to learn more about Nonviolent Communication.
To join our call please send us an email (for connection’s sake, include a bit about your NVC/giraffe path, if you’d please), and then you’ll receive the password to access our teleconference’s meeting wall — with subsequent options/instructions — and/or intermittent email reminders.
Praise for The Ongo Book (& NVC as a mindfulness practice):
“This book brims with useful advice. You will be encouraged to prioritize the values of meditative life, like compassion and clarity, in the midst of your ordinary situation.”
One of the most frequent questions I hear when I talk about Nonviolent Communication is “Why Nonviolent?” People feel uneasy. They hear the word nonviolent as a combination of two words, as a negation of violence. They don’t think of themselves as violent, and find it hard to embrace the name. For some time I felt similarly… Like others, I was unaware of the long-standing tradition of nonviolence to which Nonviolent Communication (NVC) traces its origins. Then I learned more about Gandhi. I became more acquainted with the story of the Civil Rights movement. Then I fell in love with the name Marshall Rosenberg gave to this practice, and more so over the years. Here’s why… (continues)
Matt O’Brien: In the first executive meeting after Nadella took over from his predecessor, Steve Ballmer, in 2014, Nadella brought a copy of a book about nonviolent communication for everyone in the room.
Ike Lasater, co-founder of Mediate Your Life (at about the 7 minute mark, beneath): “And, of course, you can use these skills in your day to day life…We use mediation as the metaphor, but this is really about mediatingyourlife: how to go from the conflicts within your head, to conflicts with other people, to supporting — by lending your skills — to people who are in conflict.”
“To be a human being is to regularly be in conflict with oneself and others. Since we are biological beings, we are not able to be inside another person’s experience, which means that each of us has our unique frame of reference on the world…” (continues)
Excerpt: One of Nadella’s first acts after becoming CEO, in February 2014, was to ask the company’s top executives to read Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication, a treatise on empathic collaboration…
“NVC is an awareness discipline masquerading as a communication process.”
Excerpt (via John Kinyon, co-founder of Mediate Your Life): “Three chairs can change your life. In the world of professional dispute resolution, the three chairs represent two disputants and a mediator. In our Mediate Your Life training, you learn to ‘take the third chair.’ From this perspective, you perceive a different reality. You become more centered and effective in responding to life’s challenges and conflicts… Seeing the situation from the third chair can be very difficult. Although obvious and simple at one level, the shift in perspective is a radical one that goes deeper and deeper. I have at times found it quite challenging — and also extremely valuable — to live this out in my own life…” (continues)
The vision of the 3Chairs Project is a critical mass of people around the world working together to respond to the challenges we face, and creating a peaceful, healthy, and sustainable world.
The mission of the project is people having difficult and important conversations — personal, work, political — using a “3 chairs” structure and process that brings mindful awareness, compassion and collaboration to these conversations. It’s about hearing and understanding each other in our differences and our pain, without needing to agree, and connecting at the level of our shared humanity to contribute to one another’s well being. It’s about having conversations that change us, that create the life and relationships we want, and that move us toward the world we envision… (continues)
TIME 100: One of the first books Satya Nadella recommended to his staff after taking the top job at Microsoft was Nonviolent Communication, an unconventional choice for a company where aggressive communicators thrived. Bill Gates famously upbraided staff with the phrase, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” plus one expletive unprintable in a family publication. His successor Steve Ballmer was one of the few executives who could give it right back to Microsoft’s formidable founder, according to co-founder Paul Allen, who offered a frank account of the pair’s nose-to-nose shouting matches in his autobiography… (continues)
Disclaimer: This blog is a type of back-of-napkin, “structuredprocrastination,” & free-associative scribbling; please forgive its hodgepodge, quasi-curated content — in advance — if its methodical madness befuddles or bemuses.
Thank you.
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. in each it is the performance of a dedicated set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes the shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some areas an athlete of God.~ Martha Graham
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org A zoo with giraffes, tigers, and a peacock. (CC:4.0)
By Andrew Nusca:Excerpt ~ “There are two types of conversations you’d have at Microsoft when you’d explain things,” Irving says. “One type of person waited for a break in the argument to argue back. The other listened to learn. That was Satya.” Well before he was named CEO, Nadella “could suspend his disbelief and opinion to listen to you thoughtfully. The slight difference between listening to argue and listening to learn is not subtle. It’s huge. Satya is soft-spoken but energetic, which is a weird combination.” … In his first month as CEO, Nadella gave each member of his management team a book called Nonviolent Communication.
“Yeah, first of all I think that empathy is everything. If you think about it, even in the business context for us, our job is to meet the unmet, unarticulated needs of customers. That’s where innovation comes from; there’s no way we could innovate without having the deeper sense of empathy.”
~ Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
Cards with universal basic human needs. In the picture: A giraffe, that symbolic animal of Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
“…So, being kind to language is one of these—is one of these lessons that seems easy. It just means read, think and try to express your views, whether they’re for or against, in your own words, because my very strong sense is that if we have pluralism of expression, we’re going to be fostering pluralism of thought, and that if people can clarify why it is that they’re opposing this or that, they’re going to be more likely to be persuasive. And at a minimum, in the worst case, if you have your own way of expressing yourself, you at least clutter up the daily memes. You at least put a barrier in the way of the daily tropes. You at least form a force field around yourself and maybe the people who are closest to you, where it’s possible to think and have a little peace.”
Last but not least ~ If you’ve made it all the way down to the bottom of this page (whew!), then I’d also like to invite you to offer me, Pamela, any feedback on this site that might be helpful (whether it be broken links, content suggestions, etc.). I’d welcome having the alternate perspective!
Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, “I developed NVC as a way to train my attention—to shine the light of consciousness on places that have the potential to yield what I am seeking. What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving of the heart.”
"Never question the beauty of what you are saying because someone reacts with pain, judgment, criticism. It just means they have not heard you." ~ Marshall Rosenberg
NVC is a tool, in our toolbox (akin to a paintbrush); how it is expressed, on the canvas of our lived existence, may be as varied as the fruits of each painter's artistic choices & creative risks.
Toolbox – Tools for Call
e.g.
Recommended: Free NVC/MYLApp (as a composting/'posthersal' if/then)
NVC handout from 1980s (note "dreams" - perhaps inspired by MLK)
"From his work with civil rights activists in the '60s, Rosenberg came up with the precise language of Nonviolent Communication, designed to minimize defensive reactions and maximize cooperation." Katy Butler
When once asked about why he, Marshall Rosenberg, opted to shift from "dreams" (1.0) to "universal human needs" (2.0) he offered it was quicker, it simply took less time.
"If I could teach people only one tool for training in presence it would be to pause. The space of one pause can make a world of difference." p. 45 of Oren Jay Sofer's Say What You Mean
"When we are able to include our own needs in the equation fully, alongside, not instead of, others’ needs, we are more likely to experience the possibility of stepping beyond the either/or paradigm, and finding care for everyone." ~ Miki Kashtan
"There are two things that distinguish truly nonviolent actions from violent actions. First, there is no enemy in the nonviolent point of view. You don’t see an enemy. Your thinking is clearly focused on protecting your needs. Second, your intention is not to make the other side suffer." ~ Marshall Rosenberg
"The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another." ~ Maria Popova
On Listening
“A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.” William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost
"Anger is a signal that you’re distracted by judgmental or punitive thinking, and that some precious need of yours is being ignored." ~ Marshall Rosenberg
"When we are depressed, our thinking blocks us from being aware of our needs, and then being able to take action to meet our needs." ~ Marshall Rosenberg
"I wouldn’t expect someone who’s been injured to hear my side until they felt that I had fully understood the depth of their pain." ~ Marshall Rosenberg
"True forgiveness is not about condoning or forgetting; it's about releasing ourselves from the burden of resentment and finding peace within." ~ Marshall Rosenberg
This blog/call grew out of a "Naturalizing NVC" class I took with Miki Kashtan through NVC Academy in 2011 during which I made a request of my fellow classmates that we might practice together outside of the call. It was mostly just about my wanting to gain "street giraffe" fluency by way of practice and then also cataloguing the seeds of my learning. As I say here, it's likely been sustained by way of "structured procrastination" and lots of tinkering while multi-tasking. As Peggy Smith once put it, NVC is but one fruit amidst a more plentiful fruit bowl offering of the healing powers of resonant language, which animates the arc of my life's journey and is something I hope to write about eventually. Bottom line, I'm merely a fellow practitioner/traveler yet invite any inquiries that this blog may have sparked for you.
What is Conscious Communication? (a.k.a. Nonviolent Communication or NVC)
The Chopra Center: Conscious Communication is the ability to clearly communicate what you want in life, which directly relates to your emotional well-being. The key principles of conscious communication can help you do just that… (continues)
(See also OFNR: Observation, Feelings, Needs & Requests.)
Speak Peace in a World of Conflict
New to NVC?
“If I had just one book to recommend about interpersonal communication, it would be this one.” ~ Rick Hanson
"As NVC replaces our old patterns of defending, withdrawing or attacking in the face of judgment and criticism. We come to perceive ourselves and others, as well as our intentions and relationships, in a new light. Resistance, defensiveness, and violent reactions are minimized." ~ Marshall Rosenberg
"I would like us to create peace at three levels and have each of us to know how to do it. First, within ourselves. That is to know how we can be peaceful with ourselves when we’re less than perfect, for example. How we can learn from our limitations without blaming and punishing our self. If we can’t do that, I’m not too optimistic how we’re going to relate peacefully out in the world. Second, between people. Nonviolent Communication training shows people how to create peace within themselves and at the same time how to create connections with other people that allows compassionate giving to take place naturally. And third, in our social systems. To look out at the structures that we’ve created, the governmental structures and other structures, and to look at whether they support peaceful connections between us and if not, to transform those structures." ~ Marshall Rosenberg
By Vincent van Gogh – The Yorck Project:
François Barraud – La Tailleuse de Soupe
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I am lnterested
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