Here are the people who contribute to these pages.
My name is John Gather and at the time of this writing, in 2023, I live in Germany.
Let everybody be free in their pursuit of happiness – free – but with care for others.
Peace must also include freedom. No freedom, no peace.
Peaceful freedom can only be true if we are honest, understanding and caring.
Towards ourselves and others, both.
The way to find peace may include the use of weapons, when another party attacks you with weapons.
The problem of war exists because we differ on who is an attacker and who is a defender.
This was true for Germany under Hitler, where Germans were portrayed as victims of an international Jewish conspiration, active in both the USA and the Sovietunion as well as a bunch of declared inner enemies – traitors.
This is also true in Russia under Putin, where Russians are portrayed as being under attack by the “West”.
And this kind of narrative, where a nation is portrayed as a victim suffering from inside or outside enemies is probably at the root of aggressive action. A narrative like that depends more on belief and a sense of belonging to a group. It is feed by deep needs and hope for meeting them – safety, belonging, dignity are candidates. A commonly held truth becomes secondary, which increase the sense of hopelessness and despair, the sense of deep disconnection.
Sometimee people say “commonly held truth” – sometimes they say “shared reality” – for me it points to same base perception. Community is broken – in the deepest sense.
The interpretation “attack” lead us to attack another country, seeing ourselves acting out of self-defense. And war follows.
And I can see this operational on all levels of human conflict – from small to large.
Trust in the good intentions of another party is broken. It is broken because of painful experiences we made, painful experience which have not been healed, because communication could not be restored.
Fear controls our inner perception, and the reaction of self-defense arises, leading us to one-sided reactions, that are answered by similar one-sided reactions from a so-called enemy.
Communication can only be restored if their honest willingness to restore trust. Trust in what?
When we look deeper, we can discover that each party only wants to trust that their needs matter. Trust is key. Truth is key. And depending on the scope of the tragedy, that can be too much of a stretch.
But you can ask, what gives me trust? Each person, each nation can find an answer to that first step in themselves. It may be words, it may be actions, it may be a combination of words and actions.
Find clarity on what could be helpful to find trust. And – interesting approach – is it always only from the other side that you would need something to rebuild trust – or – can you find a step inside yourself, that gives you the power to trust again?
Sometimes you may need to kill a certain person, in order to support some degree of healing for violence received.
I discovered compassionate communication as proposed by Marshall Rosenberg in 2013. I also like various other terms, such a giraffe language, open-hearted communication and more. I want to use a term that says what this communication is about, rather than a term that says what it is not. In particular I object to using a term like “nonviolent communication” as in my understanding “violent” is a judgment, indicating actions that do not include true consideration for the needs of all parties involved. Blind to consequences, one might also say. Not looking deeply into what is happening for all parties concerned.
Respect for our global human community and the planet with all life on it.
This includes gratitude for the depth of the magic and beauty of life.
And awareness of the temptations offered by greed, sexual desire and ignorance.
I offer communication trainings since 2017. I opted not to join “organized nonviolence”, because I reject external authority when it comes from people, that I have a hard time to respect in their practice.
CNVC has turned into an organization that is far from what I understand as the basic tenet of free and connected communication. People like Miki Kashtan or Stephanie Mattei see themselves as fighters against patriarchy or capitalism and – all of a sudden – I found myself in the experience of being labeled as a “man” or even as a “white privileged man” – and that is not a value-free observation. It is bursting full with plenty of assumptions and non-expressed judgemental views. Do not get fooled by some assertion that they are making requests. These “observations” do not take “No” for an answer. It was a painful path to accept the reality of that deep-seated violence.
And it did not do much to put giraffe ears to these judgmental views. They just say priviledge is a heap of observations put into one word. They generalize and classify. That is not the teaching for Marshall.
That said: I feel deep compassion for the suffering of women today and through the ages. I may have vestiges in myself of violent strategies towards women and I am more than willing to learn when I am acting in ways that contribute to suffering of women. But I reject the notion that I “am” a man, and I mourn the blanket blind and ignorant judgmental view that men are to be blamed for all the suffering in this world. I am not a man. Man is made only of non-male elements.
Politics have arrived in the minds of CNVC people. But these are not giraffe politics, where a giraffe is able to embrace needs – self and other – and keep making requests. These are the politics of identity and cancellation. Too bad. Very sad.
I have started this website as a convenient place to share the publicly available teachings by Marshall B. Rosenberg, PhD. My aim is to create access in one place of the availabe teachings, as far as possible at this time.
Join me
I feel lonely and I need support.
Please write in the comments, if you are willing to support this website by
- checking a translation of the subtitles in your language
- checking the correctness of an original English machine-provided subtitles to a video
- making meaningful excerpts from longer workshop videos (video editing)
Thank you!
Copyrights
Please also write in the comments, if you are a copyright owner. These videos are not provided here for commercial gains and in my understanding a commercial use would be contrary to any intention held dear by Marshall Rosenberg. That said, this is my interpretation and I am willing to engage with you, if the provision of these materials for free on the Internet is contrary to your interests.