Nonviolent Communication Skills

NVC offers practical, concrete skills for manifesting the purpose of creating connections of compassionate giving and receiving based in a consciousness of interdependence and power with others. These skills include:

1. Differentiating observation from evaluation, being able to carefully observe what is happening free of evaluation, and to specify behaviors and conditions that are affecting us;
2. Differentiating feeling from thinking, being able to identify and express internal feeling states in a way that does not imply judgment, criticism, or blame/punishment;
3. Connecting with the universal human needs/values (e.g. sustenance, trust, understanding) in us that are being met or not met in relation to what is happening and how we are feeling; and
4. Requesting what we would like in a way that clearly and specifically states what we do want (rather than what we don’t want), and that is truly a request and not a demand (i.e. attempting to motivate, however subtly, out of fear, guilt, shame, obligation, etc. rather than out of willingness and compassionate giving).

Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.

The first thing I want to say is you can enter the ISBN number of this book into google books and get a sampling of pages to read. Here's an instruction for it: Please make sure to remove all dashes and spaces from your ISBNs. At this time, we can only accept titles with valid ISBNs that are 10 or 13 characters long. For this book the number is: 9781892005038 The first time, I actually messed up the instructions and it worked fine anyway.

A dear and incredibly loving and kind mentor just recommended this book to me, actually gave me a brand new copy. I have only begun to look at it, but I can say already that this might be one of the most important books that I have read. You know how it goes, epiphany after epiphany, you wish everyone you know, everyone you've had an issue with, was reading it with you, and you could start every discussion over that ended unpleasantly, or, in some cases started unpleasantly.

Describing it better than I could say, here's a link directly to the back page:

I will try to express myself here regarding some of the more contentious issues slinging themselves among the usual suspects of Forums. From the bottom of my heart, I would love engagement on any issue in the Forums or out, and particularly in a kind of work/study on this book.

Welcome Home! (as I heard was posted at Burning Man)