Street Giraffes Telepractice
“Street Giraffes” is a free, monthly telepractice group that is rooted in Nonviolent Communication (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.
Our Toolbox
Learn how to become a part of our sangha here and please set a revolving monthly calendar reminder to remember to join in!
Email: streetgiraffes@gmail.com
Follow via @streetgiraffes/social-media here
Yvette Erasmus, PsyD –YouTube – Conversations from the Heart (join-now)
Find out more about Nonviolent Communication’s underlying ethos (here), NVC consciousness (here), and additional approaches to NVC (here).
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.
Learn more about NVC skills here.
2 Keys to Enjoying People as They Are – Yvette Erasmus PsyD
See also/FYI: 1) Nonviolent Communication in the News (Facebook page); 2) linktr.ee/streetgiraffes (links as to joining call, including the password protected meeting-wall with relevant contact information, etc.); 3) campsite.bio/streetgiraffe (cheat-sheet/links referencing NVC resources more broadly); 4) campsite.bio/mediateoneslife referencing intra/interpersonal conflict; & 5) linktr.ee/streetgiraffe re: Pamela Beck (facilitator)
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
- Attune to our intention/needs-consciousness (e.g. Zero-Step, “Wanting Fully Without Attachment”).
- Bring awareness of choice/choice-points, whilst in the moment.
- Cultivate the capacity to embody nonviolent/NVC-consciousness
- Develop fluidity with naturalized NVC language (a.k.a. streetify)
- Re-center and remain connected to the values at stake when in the midst of conflict
Kindle-Hart Communication Flow Chart
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).
(More as to “street giraffe” [jackal/giraffe] origin story here)
Access this blog’s password protected meeting wall, by way of the home page, for all the relevant contact information as to joining our sangha.
“This means prioritizing the consciousness over the form…”
~ Miki Kashtan
@MediateOnesLife (Twitter)
MediateYourLifeApp.comcom
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.
MediateYourLifeApp.com/resources:
courtesy of johnkinyon.com
Meeting periodically on Sundays
(most often the 2nd Sunday of each month):
7 pm/ET (6 pm/CT, 5 pm/MT, 4 pm/PT) until 8:30 pm/ET
“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
Yvette Erasmus on Building Healthy Relationships with Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
Oren Jay Sofer’s “Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication”
FYI — For the foreseeable future, we’ll mostly be working with mindfulness exercises from Oren Jay Sofer’s book, Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication.
Here’s another sample:
When to Speak and When to Listen – Oren Jay Sofer (via Tricycle: The Buddhist Review)
Marshall Rosenberg (photo credit Etan J. Tal)
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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.
 Additional questions as to joining the call?
And/or connect via social media:
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Shifting to Universal Human Needs/Values Consciousness
The No Fault Zone
Two alternative processes similar to above: 1) Mediate Your Life‘s Mourn, Celebrate, Learn (MCL) &/or 2) Joanna Macy‘s Spiral of the Work That Reconnects (WRC)
NVC (& NVC Mediation) in the News
Marshall Rosenberg (courtesy of Oren Jay Sofer)
Four Mediate One’s Life contexts:
- Internal/intrapersonal. The conflict is within, between aspects of oneself.
- Self-other/interpersonal. The conflict is between oneself and another.
- Informal. Opting to lend one’s mediation skills to a conflict in our midst (without being explicitly asked to do so).
- Formal. One mediates a conflict, intentionally, and at the request or with the express agreement of others.
Learn more about NVC Mediation
Courtesy of MediateYourLife.com
Presence Journal (Vol. 24)
#NVCpractices via Facebook, Instagram & Twitter
(Courtesy of Marianne Van Dijk – Cup of Empathy/YouTube Channel)
Top 3 ways of annoying people with your NVC + how to prevent them
See also:
Handcrafted Journals by KateRaffin.com
Miki Kashtan’s “Principle-Based Teaching” Materials
Streetify & Naturalizing & Phrasing Need
ZENVC’s Mindfulness & NVC guidebook
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
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
~ Mohandas Gandhi
Graffiti: MLK, Gandhi & Mandela
Courtesy of Cjp24 via Wikimedia Commons
What is “Nonviolent” about Nonviolent Communication?
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)
For more as to NVC & Social Change Agency:
Politics & NVC
Street Giraffe“This means prioritizing the consciousness over the form…” [OFNR]~ Miki Kashtan |
More on “street giraffe” (a synonym for naturalizing NVC) here
FYI ~ NVC in the News
A more specific example regarding NVC’s utilitarian efficacy…CEO Satya Nadella aims to make Microsoft mighty – & mindful
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Credit: Bhuston via Wikimedia Commons
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 mediating your life: 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)
~ Ike Lasater [More About Mediate Your Life]
Drawing by Jules Pascin
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
We’ll be role-playing (a kind of musical chairs)…
Disclaimer: This blog is a type of back-of-napkin, “structured procrastination,” & free-associative scribbling; please forgive its hodgepodge, quasi-curated content — in advance — if its methodical madness befuddles or bemuses.Thank you.
All inquiries/feedback welcome! (Really)
Other NVC Learning Venues
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yvetteerasmus.com/conversations-from-the-heart-join-now
Satya Nadella Rewrites Microsoft’s Code – The future of business
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.”
~ Kit Miller of the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence
By Gebrüder Thonet via Wikimedia Commons
The 5 Chairs
[Giraffe-Inspired] TEDx Talk: Own Your Behaviours, Master Your Communication
Louise Evans, Coach, Corporate Trainer, Author of 5 Chairs 5 Choices
By Vincent van Gogh – The Yorck Project:
10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei.
Public Domain, Link
John Kinyon, “Three chairs can change your life…”
François Barraud – La Tailleuse de Soupe
Taking the Third Chair – Mediate Your Life
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)
[PDF] The Three Chair Model – words that work
Credit: Three Chairs From Hampton Court, Hardwick, and Knole
John Kinyon’s
3Chairs Project for Difficult Conversations That Change Our World
Vision & Mission
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)
FYI ~ Chapter One of Marshall Rosenberg’s book (CNVC Media)
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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
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Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
A zoo with giraffes, tigers, and a peacock. (CC:4.0)
‘An NVC practice as dustpan & brush…’
– Kit Miller
(We’ll work with lived experience, as composting, on the call.)
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” ― Archilochos
ZENVC – Communication-Flow-Chart
“iGiraffe“
“Dialogue is a conversation … the outcome of which is unknown.”
~ Martin Buber
Our Toolbox
(Minnesota State Capitol Woodworkers Toolbox Historical Society)
Pathways to Liberation – Matrix
Download:
Pathways to Liberation Self Assessment Matrix v1 2.pdf
Pathways to Liberation Self Assessment Matrix v1 2 large.pdf
Hart’s Communication Flow Chart
Newt Bailey – Communication Dojo
Satya Nadella: The Man Who Is Transforming Microsoft – Fortune
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.
Red, Yellow, Green – Mindful
“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
Courtesy of Andreas Bohnenstengelarchiv
(via Wikimedia Commons)
Interview w/ Nadella, “…look, let us make sure we are empathetic to each other’s needs, because it requires that.”
Robert Gonzales on the Beauty Of Needs
Self-Connection in the Midst of Difficulty
(Breath, Body, Need – Practice)
What is NVC Mediation? & Mediators/Referrals
John Kinyon’s list of
Feelings & Needs
Mediate Your Life Handouts
See also: NVC_cheat_sheet – Kent Bye
Basic Pitfalls of Using NVC | The Fearless Heart
Naturalizing NVC w/ Miki Kashtan
Miki Kashtan & The Fearless Heart | Facebook
“In a separated world, I can attend to my needs or to your needs, not to both.
In a chosen interdependent world, I can embrace both.” ~ Miki Kashtan
The Little Book of Courageous Living
Arthur Streeton – Hoddle Street, 10 pm
Streetify
“Pluralism of expression”“…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.” ~ Timothy Snyder, Yale Historian |
(More on my idiosyncratic take on ‘streetifying’)
Miki’s Writings
NVC & Inner Peace Part 2 – Body exercise
NVC & Inner Peace – Commitment to Freedom – Part 4
TEDxTriangleNC – Catherine Cadden – Direct Action in Love
Who We Are – ZENVC: The Way With and Without Words
(iGiraffe courtesy of Catherine Cadden & Jesse Wiens)
Our Street Giraffe | Drawing Board welcomes feedback!
Stop, Wait, Go
Mediating One’s Life
Inquiries regarding NVC Mediation?
Contact us for a free consult, referrals
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!
Facebook/streetgiraffe & @streetgiraffe
Fruit Dish on a Garden Chair
by Paul Gaugin
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I am lnterested
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