More often than not it’s the gap between stories that fuels conflicts, not the needs themselves that parties to conflict have, nor even their different strategies for attending to needs.
For the most part, almost everywhere and every time, I have found conversations across power differences repeatedly unsuccessful.
Mourning is an act of softening. It supports us in softly closing the gap between what we want, envision, or long for, and what actually exists. In the absence of mourning, we are likely to try to do it with some degree of force: either by trying to force ourselves …
In contemporary, patriarchal societies, mothering often leads to mothers giving up on their own needs, because of the lack of a communal context of togetherness and support. One of the results of this is that, as children, we don’t learn about the needs of others as an organic limit we …
“I would like to end this conversation now and focus elsewhere. Is there anything else you want to share before I do that?” This is a simple question, so simple you may wonder why I would start a blog post with it. I chose to start with it, because it …
“There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.” – R. D. Laing
The appearance of the current Coronavirus, and the major disruptions that both the pandemic and the responses to …
A Hassidic story tells of a rabbi Zusha who summons his students on his deathbed and tells them that when he gets to the other side, he won’t be judged for not being a good Moses; he will only be judged for not being a good Zusha.
This story captures, …
“Life is arranged to care for all that lives through an endless interdependent flow of energy and resources.”
After years of thinking, reading, writing, talking, teaching, feeling, and communing, that simple sentence came to me in a session I was leading about money at a nine-day intensive training in Chile. …
Last Saturday, while leading the first day of the Leveraging Your Influence yearlong program, I responded unskillfully to a participant I will call James. What happened points directly to the way that the experience of privilege or lack thereof shapes our lives. How we handled it, and what I have …
One of my favorite forms of teaching is live group coaching, of the kind I’ve been doing recently through the NVC Academy, in a course called “Dialogue with Anyone about Anything”. Usually, I have only the satisfaction of seeing the in-the-moment transformation, when someone realizes they can have an entirely …
What if people — even longtime enemies — could transform conflicts into creative dilemmas they feel motivated to solve together? Check out Miki's new book!
