Contents

• Feature: Feelings: The Golden Road, by Peggy Smith, CNVC certified NVC trainer
• Suggestions for Practice
• Book Review: The Surprising Purpose of Anger
• Poetry Corner: Here, by Danna Faulds
• Celebrations
• Crossword
• Announcements

The second detour that keeps me from authentically experiencing my feelings is taken when I use words that assign judgments of myself or someone else and then call the judgment a feeling. This group of judging words is sometimes called "false-feelings" or "faux- feelings."

This group includes words such as: manipulated, abused, over-powered, rejected, ignored, misunderstood, taken-for-granted, stupid. (see more examples at left)

These are important labels because they signal that I am having a strong and unpleasant reaction. Recognizing this is one step toward my connection to an experiential feeling.

To promote needs-based consciousness, I want to uncover the vulnerable experience underneath these judgments. I do this most effectively by inviting myself to explore this question:

"Peggy, when you tell yourself that you are (insert false feeling word), how do you feel?

I ask this question of myself with a gentle, kind inquiring mind. If I ask myself with a stern "teacher" attitude, my inner experience will usually hide even deeper and become less available to me.

For example, let’s imagine I find myself thinking, "In this friendship I feel taken for granted."

My internal monitor alerts me I am using a judgment and calling it a feeling. So I invite myself to sit quietly. I take a few quiet breaths to calm myself. I make an intention to be open to whatever awareness comes out of my inquiry.

Then I ask myself with a kind loving tone, "Peggy, when you tell yourself you are taken for granted, how do you feel?"

My attention is focused on my body. I scan for sensations. When I become aware of whatever is happening (one sensation or several) I continue to sit quietly for a few moments, letting the sensations happen. I am not trying to soothe the sensation; I want to experience it fully. Then I ask the sensation, "If you had words, what would you call yourself?" I might answer myself, "sad and frightened."

Sometimes I find I substitute a different false-feeling word for the original one. In this example, I might tell myself "I am feeling ignored." When that happens, I keep accompanying myself by asking the same question with the new word in it. I keep asking until I find the experiential feeling underneath.

Here

Danna Faulds

It’s always here, the silent
Underpinning, the foundation
Beneath the foundation. When
I reach deep enough into darkness.
Inside fear, self-doubt, aversion or
Despair, there’s something so intact
I almost miss it in my focus on
Brokenness. It’s always here, this
Ground of being. Like the water in
Which fish swim, it’s easy to overlook
The eloquence of truth. It’s here, this
Guiding presence, this calm, abiding
Stillness. It’s here when I don’t try
To make life any more or less than
What it is, when I stop trying to be
Right. It’s here when I unclench my
Fists and breathe, when I let go of the
Demand to make life smooth or easy.
It’s here, the oneness underlying
Multiplicity, the exquisite "is-ness"
of everything. I could shout it from
The rooftops, but it’s true no matter
What I say, and I know you’ll find
It in your own time, your own way.
That precious moment when you
Choose to meet life exactly as it is.

from One Soul: More Poems From the Heart of Yoga

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Book Review:
The Surprising Purpose of Anger
Beyond Anger Management
Finding the Gift
by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.

reviewed by Kristi Kirkham

If you read this short thought provoking book, I predict that your paradigm about anger both in your life and in the world will shift. So often in my life anger is an emotion to stifle or be numb about. But occasionally, usually in the kitchen with my husband, I feel the spontaneous combustion that clouds my judgment and makes me want to maim or kill him. I usually go no further than a quick surreptitious gesture with my middle finger or cursing under my breath like the truck driver I once was.

The last incident I can remember was as follows:

Me: Should I put these vegetables in this pan where your meat is warming up for dinner?
Him: (In a loud, angry tone of voice.) Of course that’s where the vegetables should go. Where else would you put them?
Me: (Furious) (to myself) How can we live together if I can’t even ask such a simple question? What a jerk he is!

This is about as far as I got after including the above-mentioned gesture and under -the-breath cursing. According to Marshall, I had just launched myself down a path that is highly unlikely to be constructive. So what would Marshall do? He would recommend going through 3 steps before getting to standard OFNR.

1. I need to state what my husband did without mixing in any evaluation. Hmmm. Well, I guess I would have to say that he answered my questions by saying, "Yes, that is where they should go. Where else would you put them?"
2. I need to become conscious that what he said is not the cause of my anger, it is my evaluation of what has been done that is the cause of my anger. Marshall recommends Using the phrase, "I am telling myself. . . " In this case I was telling myself, my husband is a jerk who over reacts angrily when I try to ask him a simple question.
3. Realizing that the above thought is a diversion, I must come down from my head and look into my heart for the needs that have been stimulated in me when he answered me in that way. I find that I was feeling sad and disappointed because of my beautiful needs for consideration and to be seen for my true intentions.

The above three steps are done internally to prepare me for my honest expression. Let’s try it.

Observation: Honey, last month in the kitchen when we were warming up leftovers for supper, I asked you if I should put your vegetables in with your meat and you said yes, that’s where the vegetables should go, Where else would you put them?
Feelings: I felt confused and disappointed
Need: because of the need for consideration and to be seen for my true intentions.
Request: Would you be willing to tell me back what you heard me say?

Phew, that is a step in the right direction, but I could increase my chances for building connection even further…… by offering empathy to him before I make my expression.

So this is one thing I learned from this deceptively small book. Another insight I gained was, for me, akin to learning that there is no Santa Claus. Marshall stated that almost everyone he works with is attempting to establish this flow of communication with someone who is not ever likely to come to workshops. He has designed NVC to work in exactly these situations. For some reason this hit me like a ton of bricks. You mean I can’t just wait until my husband and everyone else that I interact with gets an NVC clue so that everything in the world will be better? Wow! This is really big.

The Surprising Purpose of Anger is a short book packed with many examples and participants’ questions. Marshall is very honest about his own violent judgments and his struggles to translate them. He does use the language of needs met and unmet, which many of us have been replacing with the phrase the beautiful needs stimulated in me. See Newsletter 2 for more about this differentiation.

Rosenberg makes a number of controversial and intriguing statements in this book.
For example:

• There is nothing another person can do to us to make us angry.
• Killing people is superficial.
• Anger tells me I’m thinking in ways almost always guaranteed not to get my needs met.

Check out this simple straightforward book to find out his reasoning behind these statements and to consider the possibility of your anger as a gift that can be transformed to bring connection and understanding to your life.

If you would like to purchase The Surprising Purpose of Anger, please consider supporting your local bookstore, or you can order it online here

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