• Be the Change
  The vision of NVC: to get everybody’s needs met nonviolently. An impossible task? The only thing that gives meaning to our lives? If we’d like to see this change in the world, NVC enourages us to embody it in ourselves. As Gandhi said, we can “be the change we wish to see”.
• Getting in Touch with Your Needs
  Shantigarbha explores how to get in touch with the basic human needs. These are the heart of the process of going for connection and letting go of the outcome.
• How to Enjoy it When You Screw Up
  Nonviolent Communication (NVC) talks about needs as basic and common to all. Needs aren’t exclusive to humans: trees have needs for water, air, light, support (from soil etc) and protection. To help clarify what are basic needs, NVC distinguishes between ‘needs’ and ‘strategies’, the particular ways beings choose to try to meet their needs.
• Feelings are Beautiful
  According to Nonviolent Communication (NVC), feelings are beautiful because they guide us to what is important to us — what we need to make our lives whole.

• You Never Listen to Me!
  One of the ways I use Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is to mediate in conflicts between two people.
• Beyond Right and Wrong
  When people are in conflict, my experience as a mediator tells me that they are usually thinking and expressing themselves in terms of what is good, what is bad, what is right, and what is wrong. NVC offers the clarity that this type of thinking actually fuels conflict, and increases the likelihood of violence.
• This Being Human
  Using another poem by Rumi, The Guest House, to illustrate how we might apply the insights of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to our inner dialogue.
• Four Ways of Listening
  Are you fed up with hearing blame and criticism? Here’s an exercise I use to remind me that there are four ways of listening, and that I need never hear blame and criticism again!
• The Healing Power of Empathy
  Next time you find yourself facing a person you assess to be ‘angry’, or with whom you find yourself in disagreement, consider taking the steps in this article.
• Empathy Cribsheet
  Linking a guess to what another person might be needing at the moment, putting that in the positive, rather than guessing what they might be trying to avoid.
• Conflict is inevitable, Violence Isn’t
  This distinction helps me to be present when I’m in conflict with the people around me, and when I’m mediating between people who are in conflict.
• Teaching NVC in a US prison
  I’d come to share Nonviolent Communication (NVC) with a group of inmates, to create the kind of connection that would lead to get everybody’s ‘needs’ being met.

All articles written by Shantigarbha, originally appearing in raw food magazine Funky Raw. They have been lightly edited for context.