About

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

The essence of NVC is beautifully summarised the above quote by the Sufi poet Rumi.

I was educated in a system where I and my behaviours were evaluated as good, bad, right and wrong. Everything around me was organised to reinforce these notions. If I was good, I would be rewarded. If I was bad, I would get punished. I became fascinated with how to find out what was right and what was wrong. I so longed to be right and good. So much so, that I chose to study philosophy, and my favourite subject was ethics. I became more and more convinced about my own definitions of right and wrong, and became an increasingly harsher judge of other people when they didn’t live up to these. For example: “one should not hurt someone else’s feelings”.

Until, one day, through no will of my own, I did not live up to my own ideas of “right” and “wrong”. This really threw me, and I became tormented with feelings of guilt, confusion and very harsh self-judgment. It was very painful.

I began searching for answers. I read books of all kinds, and tried a whole array of different therapies and methodologies. With most of what I came across, I received a message that reinforced the idea that something was wrong with me, which needed fixing. The messages that I received were, for the most part, reinforcing in me the same right/wrong thinking that stimulated my pain in the first place.

What was missing, and what I most longed for, was the experience of being met and seen in my present moment experience, without any judgment, evaluation, interpretation, diagnosis, or attempt at changing me.

Eventually, some years later, I found NVC. It was like a balm to my soul. Finally, I realised that life does not need to be experienced through this moralistic lens that I couldn’t live up to. I do no not have to be a harsh judge of myself or other people in order to live in integrity. Quite on the contrary. And I was amazed to find how simple it was.

I learned that at the core of every judgment there is a need, longing to be met. I learned that needs are universally shared among humans, and that all needs are beautiful. And I learned that I could listen to my feelings and needs and those of others without judging them. I could acknowledge and express my truth, without placing a label on it. And I learned concrete, practical tools to do this. I wished I had been taught this at school.

And so, it has become a life’s work to undo this deep conditioning that I was born into. Again and again, I fall into my old patterns of thinking, and act from a place that is not as life serving as I long for it to be. And at the same time, I am inspired, again and again, by the magic and beauty that I experience when I witness the depth of connection that is possible from this place beyond right and wrong.

This is the work that I wish to share with others, the work that brings me deep meaning, and from which I believe we can reach a greater sense of inner and outer coherence, both personally and collectively, for a world that simply makes more sense to me.