This woman Annie is into something that I’ve needed my whole life. But I can’t stand it when other people try to give it to me. I don’t trust them. But I have total trust in this woman. I have no image of her that she is the least bit “guruish” or phony or superficial. I see no ego in this woman whatsoever, whatsoever. And I have no doubt that she is tuned into things more remarkable than I’ll ever be.
The fact that I could in any way be of assistance to such a person is—I’ll have to grant—is a hard thing to accept. I have a tendency to—at least I did much more so before I met her—to see that I don’t value what people think about my work until I get the evidence of it. I never felt the spiritual power until I could see that an individual got such power and saw the spiritual power. I needed to see it reflected from her to really see it. Other people have said to me, “you can’t really see the spiritual base of it,” but I never, never got even a glimmer of that until I could see it reflected through Annie.
This whole model has always been for me what is love about? What is compassion? How do you do it? I get bored with abstractions unless I can taste it and feel it. And this whole quest for me has been to try to get clear the question “if this is what we are about as human beings, how do we do it?” I don’t want to talk about it. I would like to know how to do it for me, and if I can figure it out, how to make it for others.
Up until recently I have been content to represent the model as “this way of getting what you want from me, so you won’t be sorry for it.” Nonviolence. There are many terms, but that is the obvious one. There’s never been a doubt in my mind what it’s about. Whatever powers be in the universe, they’re smart, and I knew it was smart to be compassionate. That’s where it’s at. Millions of people through the centuries can’t be all wrong. There must be something to it. So I’d like to give it a shot, at least figure it out. Best I can. So the model has been my attempt all along to try to figure it out and stay tuned into this point. In fact, it works so well for so many people I know, that I must have gotten a little bit of that truth clear, and communicated it to people.
So I tell people that I have been into some very powerful spiritual things. I remember telling you about some of the stories when I got back from Peoria one time, and I broke into tears when I realized the power that I had. So I’ve known all along that it’s been there, but I never looked at that, didn’t want to look at it. If I looked at it, it might go away. Better to taste it, and feel it, and just keep working and giving it to people, so they can get excited and turned on, knowing from that that there’s bound to be something very powerful out there. But Annie has helped me to see it in a broader way, a richer way. It requires a certain kind of surrender, and it’s almost like all of a sudden I’m letting go to do that, to enter into that realm and look at it.
It is not like the issue of the spiritual base of the model first came along with the folks in California. It has always been there. I’ve always known that the model is my attempt to live my religion. I have always known that it had the spiritual base, but I’ve never used the word “spiritual” probably until about a year ago. I would have said that it really is my religion. But I never said that out loud to very many people because when a lot of people hear the word “religion,” they want to do a Joan Rivers1 routine. And the only word that I know that is equally bad in its negative impact on people is spirituality. So it is not an improvement. It’s just a change.
But it is a very important level to me. I wouldn’t be fooling with the model just to teach the communication skills. That might be nice, but it is only because I have experienced the communication skills help me connect with a powerful power—something big, something more vast than just communication itself. I have always felt that and known that. And these people are helping me to try to learn that.
Lately I have been more openly using these poorly defined terms, like “compassion” and “the energy” that exists around us at all times. Compassionate energy that it is always possible to tune into. When I get down to talking about criticism and appreciation I relate it to this concept of compassion.
I maintain that if compassion is our game, we need 100% response from 100% of the people that we offer something to in order to know whether we got what we were after, i.e., compassion, or if not, how well we could improve our compassionate game. Let’s call the first appreciation. We need to know whether the person appreciated what we did because it nurtured them, and its compassionate purpose was realized. So we need to know when our compassionate purpose is realized, and what tells us that is when we get genuine appreciation—appreciation which comes from that person’s having been fulfilled in some way. But if compassion is our game, we also need to know 100% of the time when our offering, instead of being nurturing, was noxious in some way. How else can we ever improve? Now if you were educated as I was to think of approval, it bothers me to think I want approval back to 100% of what I do. But if I think of compassion as my game, of course I do need to get feedback 100% of the time back from 100% of my environment where people are in relationship to me.
I’m trying to use much more of this imagery of how the skills help us relate moment by moment in harmony with the energy of compassion. Shortly after I met with you last time, I started to get very serious about the imagery of dance. I am feeling much better about how it is helping me deal with the spiritual side. The model was designed to keep us in a dance with other people. A dance in which the whole purpose is to let what happens between us, happen according to a rhythm of compassion. Where the only energies that are going on between us are ones in which we nurture one another and are nurtured by each other, and that if we catch ourselves getting out of that dance, the model is our way of helping us get back in. To engage in that dance with people is what the model is all about.
I am wanting people to get away from thinking of the model as communication skills, because there are ways that the model can be of great value to us in being in that dance that do not involve saying anything.
There’s a dance which possibly goes on in the universe between people, and it can never be done with just one person. It takes energy to be there. And it takes people to know how to connect with it. So what Marshall Rosenberg has done, given his thuggish mentality, is to try to figure out how you could teach a thug to connect with this wondrous energy. You have to be very concrete with a thug. You can’t use words like spirituality. You have to say, “Thug, identify observable behavior. Identify feeling. Identify reason for feeling. Identify wants. Put that out. Make sure other person connects with it. And thug, you’ll know a miracle starts to happen after a bit. You’ll notice a transformation, even though you’re too thuggish to understand that whole thing. You’ll see as you do it, that some wonderful things will start to happen.” You see the thug2 has come up with some ways to teach himself how to make these wondrous connections. And lo and behold, if a thug can do it, anybody in the world can.
So yes, I am very proud of my contribution. I’ve found a way that works for some people. But the real inevitability is not the skills of course, but that there seems to be a way for many people—thank goodness and it’s real exciting—of connecting with that other power. To use the jargon of my friends out on the west coast, of creating heaven on earth. The idea is that you are living your compassion right now.
One of my real worries about what the folks in California have to say concerns how to maintain that nice, loving focus when there are people starving to death. It always bothers me about people who meditate when other people are starving and they claim that that is perhaps the best way to help the world. To make sure our own energies are at least calm, and we get our own selves together first makes enormous sense to me, until I am working with people in the ghetto.
I remember Mary Griswold’s reaction to a conference we were at which brought together real street people working at the organizing (she was working with welfare mothers) and a lot of very humanistically-oriented people, giving messages and meditation. These groups literally divided themselves up in this conference into two camps and they met on different hills, and they both sat bad-mouthing the other camp. I knew that because I was one of three people at this conference, there were about 80 people, who was in connection with both camps. I would walk from one camp to the other and I felt like I was going to war in Beirut.
And as I was sitting up in the Mary Griswold camp, Mary just about bust a gasket3 because she saw some people down there giving a group massage. And she is screaming, “Those goddamned motherfuckers! The women I work with don’t know where their next fucking meal is coming from and these people are learning to give goddamned massages!” She was enraged because she thought she was coming to this conference to talk about things people could do to give oppressed people some things they could do to get unoppressed real quick. Then I’d be in the other camp, and they would be using words like ”fascist” to describe Mary Griswold and her followers.
I really believe both intellectually and emotionally, that there is no conflict between these two approaches. If we could get both factions to really stay vulnerable and present where they are coming from, not only is there no conflict, but both groups desperately need to learn the other side’s truth because as we get those two points synthesized, everybody will be happier, because I am convinced that the people who have it together get more done. I think when I talk to someone like Mary, after I hear the rage and so forth, that that is one of the things I want to say in response. There are people I really think who spend a lot of time in spiritual matters, and other things like taking care of themselves, whom nobody can challenge on how much they get done. King and Gandhi spent a lot of time in prayer, but that gave them energy and clarity when they did need to go out and be in the streets, and they were in the streets for the right reasons. And more happened as a result of that. Because they could be sure their political efforts were coming from the kind of energy that could create the results they were after. So I see no conflict in the two groups. Likewise I think that the humanistic group—instead of calling this other group “fascists”—needs to look at their own pain. They’re they are usually very worried, because they are very often sequestered away from realities, and they haven’t come to some hard grips, like do they want to do more than just meditate about world crises?
Almost any time you get social activists together, these same poles exist. Not maybe as severely as they were in that conference I had mentioned. But there is not a conference that I go to, of people who are change agents, that you see what many of these people put into their conference. You see that one half is wanting to talk about a whether we should we be arming ourselves and learning how to fire weapons and the other side just wants to talk about new forms of tantric yoga! (laughs)
This is the end of the autobiographic interview materials. In the next chapter Dr. Witty moves to a deeper discussion of these interview materials, viewed in the light of her dissertation research.
Next: Discussion (by Marjorie Witty)
- Joan Alexandra Molinsky[2] (June 8, 1933 – September 4, 2014), known professionally as Joan Rivers, was an American comedian, actress, writer, producer, and television host. She was noted for her often controversial comedic persona—heavily self-deprecating and acerbic, especially towards celebrities and politicians. She is considered a pioneer of women in comedy by many critics. ↩︎
- You can refer to a violent person or criminal as a thug. ↩︎
- Slang: to become enraged ↩︎