My list of feelings and needs

Inbal Kashtan http://baynvc.org/

I've been studying Nonviolent Communication (NVC) for a couple of years now. It has revolutionized my self awareness and the way I relate to others, to happy effect. Great tools! Simple and deep, with endless possibilities and variations.

I practice with others weekly, and a couple of fellow students recently asked me about my list of feelings and needs, a standard aid in practicing NVC, so I wrote up some notes to go with the list. The 'Newt' below is my excellent teacher Newt Bailey, whose Communication Dojo website and workshops I highly recommend.

Here's what I told my partners, when I shared the list: "I don't mind if you give this to others, but please retain the attribution, so that I remain responsible for its contents, OK?" 

• The List. The needs and feelings list that is often handed out in NVC classes made me very afraid when I first saw it! I think I had vertigo as I looked at the list of needs receding away from me as my head shrank back from that side of the page! No way do I have those needs! After some time, I realized that in order to make progress in recognizing, accepting and making requests about my needs and feelings, I would have to make the list mine. I chose to literally re-type the lists, adding my favorite words, under headings that pleased me, and probably dropping some that I just don't use. So, this is my idiosyncratic list, and not quite the same list handed out by, for instance, BayNVC. Just so you know. I would love to hear that you've made your own!
• Waystation feelings: This is my term for faux feelings, feeling words that contain so much judgment about others that they need translation. I felt the term faux--false--was itself a judgment that did not need to be propagated, so I came up with my own language. The sense is, when a waystation term occurs naturally to you, you take the time to translate into your own feelings and needs, without the assumptions about what others might mean or intend. Thus, the name waystation: a stopover on a longer journey to one's own feelings and needs. I don't think anyone else uses this term; why I'm explaining.
• Non-NVC Options: This, I believe, was Newt's concatenation of conversational or communication choices that are perfectly fine, and intended to meet our needs, but that are not NVC. So, while none of these strategies are 'wrong,' you want to be mindful that you are departing from NVC when you choose them. Helpful for Newt to cite during his practice sessions when he wanted to bring people back to our purpose for gathering in his home. I have added a few of my own activities to his original lists, so it has no single author now. 
• Sensations: I added this list, borrowed and edited, which is not NVC canon, as I have received it. I don't always know right away what I am feeling, as distinct from what my sensations happen to be. It's enough work to perceive and describe my sensations sometimes! I wanted to have a tool that would help me move from my actual sensations toward my feelings, when necessary. Also, the feeling words are often metaphorical (if I feel buoyant or radiant, I'm not actually floating or giving off light, except metaphorically), so sticking to sensations, as metaphorical as some of those words are, too, can keep me from staying in my head more than is useful. Not necessary in NVC, and borrowed from my work in Hakomi (a flavor of psychotherapy I'm studying, and loving!), but helpful for me.
• Values & Qualities: This is also not NVC canon! So, beware. I added this section, also borrowed and edited, following the many times I needed to characterize what I was feeling about my, or someone else's, actions or intentions. So, this is linked to the Needs list, under Meaning: Connection to Values. The sense is, someone else's act of kindness or sacrifice may meet my need for hope, peace, or whatever, but it may also just resonate with my own will to kindness, or willingness to sacrifice for some greater good. So, another's kindness may meet my need to connect to my value of being kind. This list thus helps me to identify the values and qualities important to me, as I recognize them in myself, or in others.
• How I use the lists: These are all long lists, and I have not yet connected to each and every need, feeling, sensation or value. Not in a hurry, either! However, as I've begun the study and practice of shamanism, I have come to appreciate the utility, ubiquity and antiquity of divination, of gaining knowledge that is ordinarily hidden, from sources of which we may not be aware. I happen to suppose, unlike many shamanic practitioners, most of this 'knowledge' comes from my unconscious or subconscious minds--rather than from divinities, occult entities, or the future--as they pare down my senses and sensibilities before presenting my conscious mind with a workable result. Thus, I consider it perfectly legitimate divination to interrogate myself by simply glancing at the lists, and seeing what pops out, 'making no decision,' rather than always 'making a decision' about what I feel, etc. I feel that 'making a decision about what I am feeling' can too often be a kind of compromise, also stemming from unconscious processes, that only wants to present safe, acceptable, socially approved, non-disruptive feelings and needs! So, glancing at the list, and being honest about what grabs my eye, seems like a better way to get at what's really going on, without the censor cleaning up my act for public display. Your mileage may vary.

Best of luck exploring NVC! I welcome feedback and questions.

The visually impaired persons, and the elephant

http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html

I've been fascinated lately with the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which I am charmed to find has instances from many cultures, some linked from the address crediting the illustration.

Nutshell: they all grab a different part, and assume they've grasped the whole, and know the elephant only from their limited perspective. So far, so good. The parable's lesson depends on us knowing that there is an elephant, and from our superior perspective, these silly blind men are clearly making an elementary mistake, a sort of synecdotal fallacy, the part not merely standing for the whole, but mistaken for the whole.

Good lesson for kids, and those still completing various chores of intellectual development. Careful, you may not have seen the big picture.

But I'm coming to think this is just the rez-de-chaussée of the parable, the ground floor, and that there may be many floors above. How's this for the premier étage? What if we—scientists, shamans, seekers of many stripes—come upon something in the wild, something new? Or, equally, what if we are striving to find something old, that has been lost, and needs recovering? Is there an elephant, after all? Maybe no one living can see the whole. We can only know what we perceive, at best, or what we've been told to look for. When we want to infer, to reify, a never-seen whole, from many fragments of observation, do we ever know that there is a whole to be inferred? Or, shall we just go ahead and crowd-source that iffy reification, like the visually impaired persons of legend, call it pachyderm, and muddle through?

What am I talking about? At last Spring's excellent MAPS Conference in Oakland, many of the sessions spoke to, or danced around the question of psychedelic psychotherapy and what it might entail, and how to train—or entrain—the doughty healers who will risk life and livelihood to support something good happening with sacred medicines. But, who is an effective guide, and what do they do, and what do they know? 

Is there an elephant here, and if so, of what parts is it composed? Leo Zeff, the late pioneering therapist, whose story is told in a delightful book The Secret Chief: Revealed, expressed the ideal of doing nothing beyond holding a safe space in which the client (the seeker, the voyager, the psychonaut...) can just be and do what they need to, to unfold as the unique spirit they are. Love and acceptance may be all that is required of either party.

A couple of the presenters assumed that the ideal guide would be a psychologist or psychiatrist, specializing in this psychological treatment modality, and sufficiently experienced with the medicines of choice to conduct psychotherapy in this unusual manner. They made many convincing arguments about the knowledge and personal development required for a therapist to be effective. Large barriers to entry, in other words; years of work for the right few, to treat the ordinary psychological problems of ordinary subjects of late capital in the industrialized west.

Another presenter from a large hospital study laid out the protocol for their crash course in training doctors to administer Schedule One substances, an earnest attempt to prepare white smocks for hazardous duty. Might fly, but what a contrast with the psychiatrists who made it seem one must always be preparing—and might never be quite ready—for this work, personally or professionally.

Yet another presenter laid out a blend of indigenous wisdom and archetypal psychology that also bore the scent of a stern, patriarchal, religious worldview. The expansive, feminine medicine needs the constriction of masculine structure to be effective. You need to be saved as much as healed. Hard to see how this model can be generalized beyond the specific cultural context from which it arises. But, can any model?

I was also privileged to hear from a third generation ayahuasquero, whose family has been brewing yagé since long before the norteamericanos y europeanos started trampling the undergrowth in search of... a lot of things.* This cultural matrix starts to prepare their members early, to gradually use the medicine regularly, as part of their society's jungle-sourced, organic healthcare system, if you will. No science, but a lot of successful treatments, to hear this wise, kindly and unassuming man tell it. More generations on the way...

Many perspectives, many visions of the work. Do they add up to an elephant, or will there be merely various chimeras of recent provenance, or revenants of the old ways, wandering in search of their blind men?

* my list would include improved health, wisdom, cures for the incurable, spiritual enlightenment, bragging rights, psychological insight, purification, business opportunities, novelty, initiation, religious experience, recipes, social community, cultural perspective, teachers, inspiration, professional training, lovers, friends, shelter from the storm, home...