episode 8

“Reclaiming Our Power with Nonviolence” with Miki Kashtan

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“No one would engage in violence if their needs were met.”

Do you understand the power of nonviolence? Discover one earnest change that could prevent violence with Miki Kashtan. She takes us on a journey through the history of nonviolence, demonstrating Gandhi’s lasting influence. We’re in the midst of a climate crisis, and Miki tells us how we can adapt our consumption to our resources.
You’ll also learn about the three pillars of nonviolence and hear a profound account of how we can leverage our sphere of influence to make a difference to those around us. We all need to be a positive force for good in our divided world, and Miki teaches us how.

Watch the episode below:

Highlights

  • Discover the three pillars of nonviolence.
  • Learn about Gandhi’s lasting influence on the world of nonviolence.
  • Understand what flow functions are and how they impact us.
  • Uncover the importance of shifting from incentives to willingness.
  • Miki explains how conflict and our low capacity are deeply affecting the US.
  • Unearth the powerful change that could stop violence.
  • Learn how we can adapt our consumption to our resources.
  • Miki talks about leveraging your sphere of influence.
Miki Kashtan

Miki Kashtan

About this episode’s guest

Miki Kashtan is a practical visionary pursuing a world that works for all, based on principles and practices rooted in feminist nonviolence. Miki is a founding member of the Nonviolent Global Liberation community and has taught and consulted globally. She is the author of  Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working Together to Create a Nonviolent Future and The Highest Common Denominator: Using Convergent Facilitation to Reach Breakthrough Collaborative Decisions, and she blogs at The Fearless Heart.

Guest Resources

The Fearless Heart

Learning Packets

Principles and Practices of Learning about, Integrating, Applying, and Sharing NVC from a Systemic Perspective

These packets are available to anyone on a gift economy basis. They are offered to anyone who wants them, without any expectation or requirement of money coming to us. We are participating, in this way, in re-seeding the flow of generosity in the world instead of continuing to uphold the exchange economy.

Here’s a Selection of Learning Packets: 

Articles

Local to Global Collaboration: An Integrative System to Address Planetary Challenges

A proposal for a global governance system. Submitted to the competition announced by the Global Challenges Foundation in Sweden in September 2017. This proposal was the product of a significant group of people, with input from many, including people from the global south as well as those with an indigenous perspective. The ideas for this proposal emerged from the vision put forth in Reweaving Our Human Fabric.

LGC Institutional principles include:

    • Each circle will be supplied with highly trained facilitators to support participants to hear themselves and each other; to identify together what’s most important and relevant as criteria for the decision at stake; and to find solutions that will attend to all that’s important through mutual influencing.
    • Dissent will be invited and engaged with to integrate all concerns
    • In addition to a commitment to unanimous decisions, all circles are empowered to make decisions rather than recommendations.
    • Each component of the system will engage self-management and have resource independence, allowing for self-responsibility and flexibility.
    • Every step of decision making is to be transparent.
Local-to-global governing circles

​Key:

  1. Local Circles
  2. 2nd layer circles (representatives selected from Local Circles)
  3. 3rd layer circles (representatives selected from 2nd layer circles)
  4. 4th layer circles (representatives selected from 3rd layer circles)
  5. Subcontinental Circles (representatives selected from 4th layer circles)
  6. Continental Circles (representatives selected from Subcontinental Circles)
  7. Global Circle (representatives selected from Continental Circles)

Notes:

    • The diagram is visually simplified to 7 instead of 1D layers and to only 6 in a circle.
    • Representatives to any layer continue to participate in all the previous layers including their Local Circles.

Nonviolent Global Liberation Community

Purpose, Mission, Vision, Values And Theory Of Change

The NGL Community purpose is, “To integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation.” 

Creating pathways for Restoring Flow by putting human needs at the centre

This 2022 grant proposal is an expression of some of the core assumptions, questions, and longings that are alive in the Nonviolent Global Liberation Community.

Nonviolent Global Liberation Community Logo

Books

Find these books from Miki Kashtan (and more) at the Omni-Win Project’s shop at Bookshop.org

Topics Discussed in Episode

Gift Economy

The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy
Edited by Genevieve Vaughan

The idea of a free gift economy has become important in the movement for alternative economics, however the connection with women and especially with mothers has not been widely understood. The conference The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy, held in Rome in 2015, brought together women and men from around the world to discuss this important issue.In a moment when the values of Patriarchy and the market seem to have triumphed, the values of mothering and care are more sorely needed than ever. This book explores many aspects of the gift paradigm from a variety of points of view, taking into account theory and practice, activism and spirituality, as well as the experience of Indigenous societies North and South where maternal values are still at the centre for both women and men. 

Nonviolence

The Women of Rosenstrasse

They Saved 2.000 Jews with a Bold Protest on Berlin’s Rosenstrasse.  They gathered there for more than a week, in spite of repeated commands by the authorities to “clear the streets or we’ll shoot.”

Hitler conceded, temporarily, to the brave women on Rosenstrasse. To protect his claim of popular consensus, Hitler sanctioned a series of exceptions for intermarried German Jews, privileging some who thus did not wear the Jewish Star, and “temporarily” exempting all intermarried Jews – including those who did wear the star – from the genocide.  (Source: gariwo.net)

Read More about the Rosenstrasse Protest

Dr. King’s Fundamental Philosophy Of Nonviolence (The King Center)

PRINCIPLE ONE: Nonviolence Is a Way of Life for Courageous People.
PRINCIPLE TWO: Nonviolence Seeks to Win Friendship and Understanding.
PRINCIPLE THREE: Nonviolence Seeks to Defeat Injustice, or Evil, Not People.
PRINCIPLE FOUR: Nonviolence Holds That Unearned, Voluntary Suffering for a Just Cause Can Educate and Transform People and Societies.
PRINCIPLE FIVE: Nonviolence Chooses Love Instead of Hate.
PRINCIPLE SIX: Nonviolence Believes That the Universe Is on the Side of Justice.

Nonviolent Communication 

List of Universal Human Needs

(c) 2005 by Center for Nonviolent Communication
Website: www.cnvc.org Email: cnvc@cnvc.org
Phone: +1.505-244-4041

CONNECTION
acceptance
affection
appreciation
belonging
cooperation
communication
closeness
community
companionship
compassion
consideration
consistency
empathy
inclusion
intimacy
love
mutuality
nurturing
respect/self-respect

CONNECTION continued
safety
security
stability
support
to know and be known
to see and be seen
to understand and
be understood
trust
warmth

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING
air
food
movement/exercise
rest/sleep
sexual expression
safety
shelter
touch
water

HONESTY
authenticity
integrity
presence

PLAY
joy
humor

PEACE
beauty
communion
ease
equality
harmony
inspiration
order

AUTONOMY
choice
freedom
independence
space
spontaneity

MEANING
awareness
celebration of life
challenge
clarity
competence
consciousness
contribution
creativity
discovery
efficacy
effectiveness
growth
hope
learning
mourning
participation
purpose
self-expression
stimulation
to matter
understanding

Key Assumptions of NVC Practice

Excerpt from NVC Basics learning packet © 2021 Miki Kashtan (expanded from work done with Inbal Kashtan) nvc@baynvc.orgwww.baynvc.org

When we live based on these assumptions, self-connection, and connection with others become increasingly possible and easy.

1. All human beings share the same needs: We all have the same needs, although the strategies we use to meet these needs may differ. Conflict occurs at the level of strategies coupled with interpretations, not at the level of needs.

2. All actions are attempts to meet needs: Our desire to meet needs, whether conscious or unconscious, underlies every action we take.

3. Feelings point to needs being met or unmet: Feelings may be triggered but not caused by others. Our feelings arise directly out of our experience of whether our needs seem to us met or unmet in a given circumstance.

4. The most direct path to peace is through self-connection: Our capacity for peace is not dependent on having our needs met.

5. Choice is internal: Regardless of the circumstances, we can meet our need for autonomy by making conscious choices based on awareness of needs.

6. All human beings have the capacity for compassion: We have an innate capacity for compassion, though not always the knowledge of how to access it.

7. Human beings enjoy giving: We inherently enjoy contributing to others when we have connected with our own and others’ needs and can experience our giving as coming from choice.

8. Human beings meet needs through interdependent relationships: We meet many of our needs through our relationships with other people and with nature, though some needs are met principally through the quality of our relationship with ourselves and for some, with a spiritual dimension to life. When others’ needs are not met, some needs of our own also remain unmet.

9. Our world offers abundant resources for meeting needs: When human beings are committed to valuing everyone’s needs, are able to discern how much they actually need, and have regained their skills for fostering connection and their creativity about sharing resources, we can overcome our current crisis of imagination and find ways to attend to everyone’s basic needs.

10. Human beings change: Both our needs and the strategies we have to meet them change over time. Wherever we find ourselves and each other in the present, individually and collectively, all human beings have the capacity to grow and change.

About The Omni-Win Project

The Omni-Win Project is a multimedia effort to raise awareness of the myriad existing and emergent opportunities to improve our democracy and heal our political culture.

Our mission: facilitating the healing and evolution of our democratic systems and political culture, so that we can co-create a future that works for everyone.

Meet The Host

I am omnipartial: I am biased in favor of the success of everyone and the whole. I believe it is possible to improve systems of communication and interaction in ways that will allow humanity to thrive and evolve through our complexity and diversity.

My purpose in life is to support an omnipartial revolution. How? By helping the world understand the fractal nature of conflict and how we can transform conflict into a positive and inspiring experience. We are all in this together. I firmly believe we can do this complex dance through life with much more grace and beauty.

I am specifically committed to transforming how we work together in teams and organizations and how we experience conflict and collaboration in our democracy.

Fractal Friends

Duncan is also the host of the Fractal Friends podcast. An exploration of our self-similary across our diversity.

Fans of the Omni-Win project podcast will enjoy this collection of episodes: https://www.fractalfriends.us/transforming-politics about Transforming Politics and Healing Democracy

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