Acquired Spontaneity

Thoughts and practices for personal and social transformation.
by Miki Kashtan, Ph.D.

Is Nonviolent Communication Practical?

One of the most common critiques I hear of Nonviolent Communication is that it’s simply not practical. “It would be great if this can work,” the line often goes. Read More

Bullying through a Compassionate Lens

For most of my years in school, I was ostracized, teased, and tormented by others. More often than not I wasn't invited to participate in anything social, be it play or, later, parties. This went on for years, with two periods that stand out in particular. Read More

Why Does It Take so Long?

My last post was set up as a response to the frequent critiques of NVC that come my way, sometimes even from long-time NVC enthusiasts. In this post I want to address this critique from a different angle. Read More

Vulnerability, Difference, and Belonging

Any of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while or know me otherwise have heard me talk countless times about how vitally important the path of vulnerability has been for me. I’ve been walking this path for twelve years now, about as long as I’ve been using and sharing Nonviolent Communication in the world. Read More

Leadership, Empowerment, and Interdependence

For some years now, I've been learning through ongoing experimentation what collaborative leadership means. It's not been easy, because our either/or lens on reality renders the space between coercive leadership and no leadership elusive, almost invisible. Read More

When We Want People to Change

Recently I heard from one of my friends about the challenge of dealing with a 15-year old who was using curse words at the rate of two a sentence. It was evident to me right away that if the same behavior came from her partner, she would have responded differently.What varies, I realized, is the nature of the relationship, not the effect of the behavior itself. Read More

Some Thoughts on Good and Evil

Seriously, don't you wonder if anything can be written about this topic that hasn't already been said many times over? I did, too, until I encountered Nonviolent Communication while I was in graduate school pursuing a doctoral degree in sociology. Read More

Discovering New Frontiers on My Path

In the past few weeks, I was exposed to quite a number of statements about me that took some effort to digest. For the most part, I felt enormous tenderness toward the person who expressed these statements. Except for this one paragraph that kept spinning inside me. Every time I thought of it, I felt an inner cringe. Read More

Resilience When Working for Change

I have often wondered why it is that there is so much strife and conflict in so many of the communities and movements I know of. This has been especially challenging to grasp when the groups I am talking about are generally committed to a vision of a peaceful world and the individuals in them aspire to personal integrity and compassion in their relationships. Read More

The Two Faces of Convenience

The absence of resources and infrastructure in India is painfully obvious. At the same time, I didn’t see any evidence in India of the crushing isolation so many here experience. I didn’t see people afraid of discomfort. Convenience, the easy access to external resources, makes life comfortable. Yet comfort becomes addictive when we can’t imagine life without it. Read More

Starting the Future Today

I know very well about waiting, because it’s one of my coping mechanisms I acquired as a child. What would it mean to shift that habit completely and bring the future into the present? Sometimes living the way I want the future to be means taking enormous risks in relationships. Sometimes it means being willing to take material risks. Read More

Why Victory Wouldn't Be Enough: Notes about the Occupy Movement, Nov 11th

Prioritizing social transformation without attending to the ways in which all of us have internalized what we aim to transform runs the risk of re-creating these systems and habits. A commitment to inner work without a focus on social transformation runs the risk of being adaptive to the ways of the world. What are some aspects of inner work that are important? Read More

Does Nonviolence Work? Notes from Occupy Oakland October 24th

People choose nonviolence either because it works, or because of deep values they have. In the case of the OccupyWallSt movement, the only chance that nonviolence will be adopted as a clear strategy is if people believe that it works. This requires understanding the fierce and active nature of deep nonviolence. Read More

Beyond the Limits of Empathy

David Brooks, in his recent article "The Limits of Empathy," suggests that empathy is no guarantee that caring action will take place. Nazi executors early in the war wept while killing Jews. And yet those strong feelings didn't stop them. Why does this happen? Read More

Bringing the Salt March to Wall Street

In a few days the Occupy Wall Street movement arrives in my town, Oakland, and I am thinking a lot about what I want to do. I feel quite uplifted and so, so relieved. For months I was watching with growing discomfort the absence of action in the US while nonviolent resistance was spreading like wildfire to more and more countries. Read More

Musings on Choice and Children

The experience of having no choice and no say in our lives is acutely painful and traumatic. Children, like the rest of us human beings, want to be able to participate in decisions that affect them. How can any parent in our society find enough inner capacity to navigate it all and in addition learn how to do it in partnership with children? Read More

Expressing Our Pain without Blame

When someone else’s actions don’t line up with what we most want, we tend to hold that person accountable for our pain. They become defensive in response to our blame, and we effectively ensure they can’t hear us. If we can resist the temptation to go into right/wrong thinking about the pain others are more likely to open up to hearing us. Read More

From Mistrust to Collaboration

Many managers who try to embrace a collaborative approach to management run into a persistent challenge in doing so. Their own residual habits; unrealistic expectations from employees; and fear and disempowerment - all combine to make collaboration difficult to achieve. With specific practices and persistence, the shift can happen over time. Read More

Transcending Norms of Separation

One of the things I do in life is talk to strangers whenever I have any inkling of a possible human connection, however momentary. These acts feel precious and a little subversive. Yesterday I experienced two in a row that were so meaningful I decided to risk the embarrassment for the hope of inspiring others to join me. Read More

Holding Tough Dilemmas Together – Part 2

In my previous post I shared two examples of how a conflict can be transformed by being held together with another as a shared dilemma: what can we do here to respond to both of our needs? Today I want to illustrate with a third example between father and teenage daughter. Read More

Holding Tough Dilemmas Together

No matter what we do and where we are, life always presents us with an unending succession of things to work out with other people. We create conflict when we polarize and separate from the other person, because we don’t know how to hold what’s important to us alongside what’s important to the person with whom we have the differences. Read More

Musings on Empathy

An astonishing paradox I witness regularly is how, time and again, we long for others’ presence when we are suffering, and yet when others are suffering we do not bring our presence. How can we meet those moments with more presence and be in empathic connection with the other person? Read More

Telling the Truth to Create Intimacy

Instead of believing that we have to sort things out on our own, we can bring our incomplete process to each other and be together in the uncertainty of life. Navigating what comes up may take some skill and a willingness to experience discomfort and step into unknown territory. This is probably why so many of us avoid it so much of the time. Read More

What Is Acquired Spontaneity?

In order to embrace a consciousness of love, authenticity, compassion, and generosity, we need to practice, again and again, in a variety of ways, until we are able to liberate ourselves fully and have a sense of flow in our actions and speech that is aligned with who we want to be. This is what I call acquired spontaneity. Read More

Miki Kashtan, Ph.D., is a co-founder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication and serves as its lead facilitator and trainer.

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