NVC is language, thoughts, communication skills and means of influence that serve my desire to do three things: 1) to liberate myself from cultural learning that is in conflict with how I want to live my life. 2) to empower myself to connect with myself and others in a way that makes compassionate giving natural. 3) to empower myself to create structures that support compassionate giving.

Most of us live in a Jackal world where we take turns using the other person as a waste basket for our words.

Whether I praise or criticize someone's action, I imply that I am their judge, that I'm engaged in rating them or what they have done.

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.

Clinical training in psychoanalysis has a deficit. It teaches how to sit and think about what a person is saying and how to interpret it intellectually, but not how to be fully present to this person.

I have tried to integrate the spirituality into the training in a way that meets my need not to destroy the beauty of it through abstract philosophizing.

Power-Over leads to punishment and violence. Power-With leads to compassion and understanding, and to learning motivated by reverence for life rather than fear, guilt, shame, or anger.