I finished a major revision of my training booklet. That's the big news!

Feel free to download and print copies for yourself, your family, friends and colleagues. It is a gift!

What is Compassionate Communication?

The beauty of Compassionate Communication, in my mind, is its universality and its great simplicity. Though at first it appears to be a technique, through practice you'll discover it brings about a fundamental shift in consciousness.

 Compassionate Communication addresses our universality and our shared humanity. At the same time, it is very simple.

In developing the practice of Compassionate Communication, we learn to understand and hone our perception of four keys aspects of communication: observations, feelings, needs and requests. Becoming clear about these elements brings an inexorable shift in our awareness of self and other.

Compassionate Communication is also commonly known as Nonviolent Communication and was developed by Marshall Rosenberg. Both terms reveal an essential quality. This communication practice is nonviolent in that it supports us in seeing each other in our fullness, our wholeness and our process of becoming. Inasmuch as we continue to see each other in terms of right/wrong, normal/abnormal or deserving/undeserving, we fail see the holistic developing gesture in the other and our self. In so doing, we do violence to the human within. It is compassionate in that it fosters understanding. To be understood as one would like to be understood, and to be understood in one’s developmental striving, is to experience compassion. It recognizes that we are human and that each of us is doing the very best that we can moment by moment in our lives, if only we were understood in our striving to become. When we are able to see each other and ourselves in that light, we begin to live the radical consciousness of compassion.

Compassionate Communication is about...

• Meeting one another in a new way.
• Giving and receiving real understanding.
• Fostering the quality of connection that enables everyone's needs to get met through natural giving.
• Recognizing the universal humanity in every human being, whether family or strangers.
• Creating a new social impulse based on the practice of empathy.
• Realizing the potential for social beauty within our communities.

Compassionate Communication reveals itself on several different levels:

• A communication model based on four key elements--observations, feelings, needs and requests--that invites us to develop greater awareness of how we speak and listen.
• An inner practice based on the development of empathy and self-empathy, organs of perception that are latent and emerging in our time.
• A shift in consciousness enabling us to develop the capacity to see and speak to the developing human in his/her living process.

The way that I understand and articulate Compassionate Communication flows out of the confluence of two streams in my life: Nonviolent Communication, the work of Marshall Rosenberg, and Anthroposophy, the spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner and essential wellspring for Waldorf education.

One purpose of this site is to suggest ways that these two streams flow into the other & in doing so, enrich the contributions of the other.

There are over four hundred certified trainers in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) throughout the world spreading the work of Marshall Rosenberg. After working intensively with Marshall in the summer of 1999, he invited me to become a trainer. Each of us stamps how we individualize NVC with our life experience. Having spent a quarter century studying Rudolf Steiner, practicing Anthroposophy, and serving within the Waldorf school movement, that background informs how I articulate the activity and essence of Nonviolent Communication. The essence of Compassionate Communication is a confluence of these two streams. That's where I stand, though more interactive than standing. Perhaps it's where I swim.

We meet. We converse. We seek connection and understanding. When we meet, each of us is in the process of becoming. Each of us is doing the best that we can do, in that moment, based on our life experience, our presence of mind and whatever may be alive for us in that moment. Each of us longs to be understood on that basis and on the basis of our striving and intentions. When we are understood on that basis, we are understood as we would like to be understood.

Compassionate Communication is about how we can re-forge how we speak, listen and perceive so as to foster this understanding. The matrix of judging, blaming, labeling, comparing and diagnosing--the languaging matrix within which most of us live--renders real understanding rare, if not impossible. This is the threshold we can cross by unfolding our latent awareness of universal human needs, which is the language of human becoming.

That's it. That's what Compassionate Communication is about. That's what this site is about.

We meet. We are in the process of becoming. We're human. We have universal human needs--understanding, meaning, consideration, integrity, contribution, fairness and so forth—our birthright in being human. That's what's common and universal in each of us.  It is an expression of our spiritual reality. We are utterly equal at that level.

Compassionate Communication is about re-languaging that reality, languaging the life of the heart.