Living Nonviolent Communication

The kind of spirituality I value is one in which you get great joy out of contributing to life, not just sitting and meditating, although meditation is certainly valuable. But, from the meditation, from the resulting consciousness, I would like to see people in action, creating the world they want to live in.

We have a need for information, and so we make a request for feedback from the person whose life we are trying to enrich. We want to know, “Is my intention being fulfilled by my action? Was my attempt to contribute successful?”
In our culture, that request gets distorted into our thinking that we have a need for the other person to love us for what we’ve done, to appreciate what we’ve done, to approve of us for what we’ve done. And that distorts and screws up the beauty of the whole process. It wasn’t the other person’s approval that we needed. Our very intent was to use our energy to enrich life. But we need the feedback.

The cause of our feelings is our needs, not other people’s behavior.