“It is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell
the story of my experiments with truth...as my life consists of nothing
but those experiments.”
– Gandhi, Introduction to The Story of My Experiments with Truth
- Do you long to see NVC make a visible dent in the world?
- Do you want to participate in some form in making that happen?
- Could you use some support in identifying what your steps could be to learn how to apply what you have learned and integrated from NVC within and beyond your personal life?
- Are you curious to know what we might mean by experiments with truth and what NVC has to do with Gandhi?
The first experiment with truth relevant to NVC is… NVC itself!
Marshall Rosenberg put together what he eventually called Nonviolent Communication from years and years of experimentation and formal and informal research.
His key question was: What makes it possible for some people to have the capacity to engage and connect even across differences while others don’t, and is there anything we can do to support people in growing this capacity?
Marshall worked with children who had learning challenges, with teachers who wanted support with working with them, and with communities that wanted to learn how to desegregate schools peacefully. He participated in forming communities that engaged in educational experiments and also experimented with how to live amongst themselves in ways that didn’t mimic the way the world functions. He also traveled the world engaging in multiple attempts to support the transformation of large-scale conflicts.
It was through all this experimentation that he distilled the principles and practices of inner and outer communication that are now taught in hundreds of workshops around the world. Although it’s hard to know the numbers, there are likely several million people whose lives have been affected by NVC globally.
Marshall’s dream was to change the systems that shape the lives of billions of us on the planet, well beyond supporting well-being and a better life for a few million people. He died in 2015 without seeing what he longed for.
It’s now our turn, those of us still alive and committed to NVC,
to take the next leap in bringing this dream a bit closer to reality.
All of us who are bringing this course to you are part of the Nonviolent Global Liberation community (NGL), whose purpose is to integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation. Experimenting with truth is what we do all the time.
This is what we believe Marshall was doing, and this is what we are planning to experiment with, together, in this course.
We take the term “experiment” seriously, which means that we don’t know what the results will be. We know what we envision, we know what we are offering and what questions we are asking, and we know what we are asking of you. The rest, we will discover together if you join us.
Examples of experiments with truth we have engaged with:
- Is it possible to bring NVC and other approaches for integrative decision-making, needs-based resource flows, and collaborative leadership into existing organizations and pull them towards vision?
- How far can we go in building relationships of deep intimacy with people who persist in living within a worldview of separation?
- What structures of support can make it possible to walk towards liberation from male training or female training within a context in which patriarchal conditioning persists everywhere?
Our wildest dream
- All of you who participate wholeheartedly will have a deeper understanding of the vision of a world that works for all; why we are, collectively, where we are; and what it means to do what is ours to do.
- All of you will take in that when we live life as an experiment with truth we can never fail because the purpose is always to learn something, and we always will!
- Many of you will take a quantum leap in moving from the “learn then share NVC in a workshop” path to a “live and apply NVC everywhere you are” path.
- Some of you will come together with others, including us, to engage in deeper exploration and commitment to radical experimentation with truth based on collective capacity.
- Our own capacity to engage in experimentation and to invite others into it will deepen.
What we are offering
- Six sessions packed with dense content from all we have learned, starting with the exploration and experimentation that Miki has been doing since 1995, and the rest of us have joined in more recent years.
- In most sessions, we plan to have a full interactive presentation with slides from Miki.
- In some of the sessions, we plan to also have briefer presentations from NVC certification candidates within NGL about their active areas of experimentation. Our hope through this is to give you practical grounding in what we mean by applying NVC in the world through experiments with truth.
- Each session is designed to have an opportunity to be in a breakout room to integrate and to envision what experiments each of you may want to take on.
- A learning packet exists to accompany the course: “Introduction to Applying NVC in the World”, which is available for download without a paywall. Many other packets are recommended for different areas.
- We intend to offer those who want to go deeper with exploring and experimenting in each of the areas a list of several learning packets with much more content to enrich what we do within the sessions.
- We plan to give you a template for designing an experiment with truth based on your actual capacity, including what you are investigating, what structures you want to have to support you, and how you will document the results.
- For those who want to, we plan to support self-organized opportunities to meet with others outside session time who share an interest with you in areas of experimentation for mutual support and collective capacity.
What we are asking of you…
- We are designing this as a collaborative, co-creative space that we hold and lead. We invite you to come ready to participate actively during our weekly 2-hour session, at least in the breakout group.
- We are designing this to be a place where we all stretch beyond our comfort zone. We invite you to come with the openness to discovering something new about yourself and about life even if it’s not easy.
- We are designing this to be infused with humility; we don’t pretend to know very much, though we take our knowledge and intuition seriously and we are ever willing to learn and change. We invite you to join us in this commitment.
More than anything, we invite you to join us in the deep surrender
to life’s mystery that experimentation entails.
Not sure if this course is for you? Attend the first session for free!
Session 1, July 28 – Introduction to Experiments with Truth
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Session 2, August 4 – Restoring Choice: Socialization, Liberation, and Integration
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Session 3, August 11 – Restoring Togetherness: Interdependence, Dialogue, and Collaboration
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Session 4, August 18 – Restoring Flow: Nonviolence, Systemic Change, the Commons, and the Gift Economy
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Session 5, August 25 – Living from Care for the Whole
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Session 6, September 1 – Full Mobilization in Service to Life
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