To practice NVC, it's critical for me to be able to slow down, take my time, to come from an energy I choose, the one I believe that we were meant to come from, not the one I was programmed into.

NVC suggests behind every action, however ineffective, tragic, violent, or abhorrent to us, is an attempt to meet a need.

The Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu stated that true empathy requires listening with the whole being: The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind.

I don't think you can have an authentic connection when one person is diagnosing the other.

What bores the listener bores the speaker too.

Never question the beauty of what you are saying because someone reacts with pain, judgment, criticism. It just means they have not heard you.

My ultimate goal is to spend as many of my moments in life as I can in that world that the poet Rumi talks about, 'a place beyond rightness and wrongness.