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“Nonviolence” is not just a political tactic. It is a “soul force”. It is the force of love meeting and transforming what appears to not be love. It is speaking and listening with courage, compassion, and an open heart and mind and rooted in our truth in a way that bridges understanding. And doing so without demand nor trying to convince -- all in the face of any anger, fear, oppression, inequality, violence or disagreement.

Being self-responsible is about empowerment — via noticing what is potentially in our locus of control, getting to know ourselves better, looking at our own role in how we experience life, and making conscious choices to act within our own power. This requires us to be mindful in relating our stories to our needs. Read on for more on this, and the various pifalls within thinking about self responsibility.

Trainer tip: Empathy can offer profound learning opportunities to children, expand their feelings and needs vocabulary, and teach them the positive results of valuing everyone’s needs. Read on for a story that illustrates this.

Jim and Jori discuss sharing power through exploring our experience of having and not having power, how we make choices about our power and examining our relationship to power itself.

Trainer Tip: The very process of giving someone space to talk about their issue without our judgment, to be truly understood by us, and to be deeply heard is very healing, enough so that most people will organically find their own creative ways to resolve their issues. Rely on this process and you will lose all desire to fix people’s problems. Try this out today.

Trainer Tip: Next time you prepare for a challenging conversation, solidly connect with your own feelings and needs before entering into meeting. Then attend the meeting open to creating results that work for everyone. This is likely to give increase chances that the conversation will come to a mutually satisfying conclusion.

We can get stuck in our heads. All kinds of thoughts float into our minds. We then get thoughts about those thoughts, they might even make you feel a certain way or change a behaviour. But what happens when we connect our feelings with the physical sensations in our bodies? As part of our teaching at NVC we have incorporated movement work to help us connect with where we hold emotions and how we can process them effectively.

Miki responds to a participant’s question concerning fear of consequences when speaking with a manager at work. In this excerpt, she delves into the topic of choosing to inhabit nonviolence in the workplace, affirming that fear and nonviolence are incompatible, and that nonviolence is a powerful alternative to our habitual Fight, Flight, Freeze responses.

Trainer tip: Judging others can affect our ability to communicate effectively with that person, or enjoy the relationship. Translating the static judgments (enemy images) we have of others into our own and others' feelings and needs can help us move into greater understanding, healing, and relief -- which can foster compassion and connection. Read on for more.

Conflict is normal and natural and yet we are still often surprised by it and unprepared to deal with it. You will come away from this session with the tools for creating simple agreements with your group about what to do when conflict arises.