Imagining Utopian Anarchist Communities

Having elaborated upon the kind of anarchism that I believe in, the question that immediately then comes up for me is: "How does one move forward with all these big ideas? How does one actually practice all of this stuff?" Okay, maybe that is really two questions, but my answer remains the same: Create new intentional communities.

The Foundation for Intentional Community defines an "intentional community" as being

"a group of people who have chosen to live together or share resources on the basis of common values."

What I would like to see are intentional communities created around the kinds of values that I wrote about in my previous piece. I said a lot of stuff in that piece, so the I part that I'd really want to focus on with this are the "Ten Principles for My Utopian Anarchism". I would summarize these as being:

1) Keep an image in mind of the kind of society that you want.

2) Try to have a comprehensive understanding of all the various systems at play.

3) Keep in mind the goal of it all, "Quadruple-H": "Happy Healthy Harmonious Humans".

4) The mission of "anarchism" here is to elimate all forms of domination and to replace them with voluntary cooperation.

5) Keep in mind the four interconnected "perspectives": the individual, the relational, the structural and the physical.

6) Critiques are valued, but are not the main focus.

7) Heartfelt conversations, holding both the needs of oneself and others, is the basis for it all.

8) All social constructs are impermanent and can be replaced with new ones if necessary.

9) Uniformity is not necessary for sufficient cooperation to be possible.

10) All associations are voluntary. Individuals can choose to leave groups and groups can also kick people out.

In other words, if you have a group of people choosing to live together or share resources on the basis of these ten principles, then you have a utopian anarchist intentional communitiy. It's as simple as that, nothing more is required! Of course, there are infinitely more details to consider...

I would like to put some particular emphasis here on the fifth principle listed, "keep in mind the four interconnected "perspectives": the individual, the relational, the structural and the physical." What this means in practice is that people in this community would be supporting each other with their mental and emotional health, learning and personal development, they would also be putting particular time and energy towards the health of their communication and interpersonal relationships, they would be designing and maintaining social structures that reflect their values and they would also be mindful of the physical environment that they reside in and how that physical environment is affecting everybody as well as how they are affecting it and the nonhuman life that surrounds them.

One of the things that I have learned from the Nonviolent Global Liberation community that I've found to be a valuable insight is that there are five different areas that groups need to consciously design and attend to in order for the group to continue to function in a sustainable and harmonious way. These five areas are: decision-making, resource flow, information flow, feedback loops, and conflict engagement. Here is a set of questions that I found on the old NGL website that I find particularly helpful to consider when designing systems for these five areas:

"Decision Making: Who makes which decisions? Through what process? Who gives input? Who hears about which decisions?

Resource Flow: What resources exist? How are they generated? How are they distributed? What principles are used to decide the flow? Who makes the decisions?

Information Flow: What information is shared with whom? What mechanisms are used for sharing it?

Feedback Loops: Who gives feedback to whom? For what purpose? How? How often? What external feedback mechanisms will support learning about effectiveness in carrying out the mission?

Conflict Engagement: What support is available? What process is used for engaging with conflict? How can anyone initiate it? How is all that made known to people?"

All of these questions would need to be discussed and answered by the various members and participants of each community. I do not feel comfortable answering all these questions here as some detached individual speculating about some future hypothetical community. Rather, the real life people who feel personally invested in creating such communities would need to determine the answers to these questions by talking with each other. Throughout it all there would need to be the common intention of sharing power among everyone involved, maintaining a sense of heartfelt connection between everyone involved, keeping an awareness of everyone's needs, and holding onto the ten guiding principles that I mentioned earlier.

There is then the matter of where these utopian anarchist communities would be located. Would they be rural or urban? Would they own the land or rent it? Would they be inside the United States or outside of it? Could they own multiple properties, or possibly not own anything? My answer to all of these questions and more is: it all depends.

I've come to view intentional communities as basically being all about the people involved, not about the land that they reside on. Don't get me wrong, the land that they reside on is quite important, and the "Physical perspective" in the "Four Perspectives" model I give is all about looking at the various aspects of one's direct physical environment, but still, without the people there is no community. I've come across countless people in my life who own great pieces of land with the intention of creating a community on it, but who have no actual people who want to live there as an intentional community together. It is all about the relationships between people, and the interconnecting web of relationships between people, that form communities. Land by itself doesn't cut it.

That being said, the process of forming these communities should focus primarily on the relationships between people. The emphasis initially should be on people getting to know each other, getting to better understand the wishes and desires of everyone involved, to find the points of agreement and disagreement, to understand what everyone's strengths and weaknesses are, to understand what all of the needs are as well as what resources are available to potentially meet these needs. The physical location of a community can actually be a pretty malleable thing.

Here's how I see it: as long as the people involved in an endeavor to create a utopian anarchist community are on the same page as far as their shared principles and the five areas of how the community structure is functioning, they can be living anywhere. Groups like this could own and live on land out in some rural area, or they could own a house in the suburbs. Groups like this could rent an apartment in a city, or they could be squatting an abandoned building or tract of land. Groups like this could even be homeless and camping in the streets or out in the woods. Groups like this could be mobile and traveling together in a big biodiesel bus, or they could traveling the world on a ship at sea, or they could be criss-crossing the country in large caravans of multiple vehicles. There are no limits to where and how these communities can be located in different places, the key thing is that the relationships for them are in place.

After writing my previous piece, Envisioning a Utopian Anarchism, a few questions emerged through discussions with various people about it. Here are some of the questions that most stand out to me:

1) What would the criteria for membership be for utopian anarchist communities and what are the non-membership options available for people to still be involved with these communities without being members?

2) When we are examining our fundamental human needs together how can we identify when and how the various ideologies that we are immersed in throughout our lives are consciously or unsconsciously influencing the ways in which we are looking at needs?

3) How can we ensure that there will be sufficient space for spontaneity, autonomy and flexibility for people within whatever agreements and structures are created?

4) What processes would be in place for changing the group structures if and when the need to do so arises?

5) Where is the threshold point for disagreement when it is no longer feasible for people to continue living in such a community?

Again, I do not have the answers to these questions. As is the case with a lot of what I've talked about here, the people who would actually be involved with such projects would need to discuss these things and come to common understandings and agreements among themselves about these matters. I just wanted to make sure to "flag" these questions, to make sure that they do not get overlooked and forgotten.

So, where does this all leave us now? What is the next step for forming real life utopian anarchist communities? Well, the next step as I see it is for like-minded people to find each other and start talking with each other. This process can look many different ways, and it can take place both in person and online. And if the like-minded people who find each other are in substantial disagreement on one matter or another, or if they are not compatible with each other for whatever reason, that's okay. Hopefully this whole process of discerning can lead to there being more personal clarity on which areas of agreement and compatibility are essential in terms of what one is looking for, and which areas are not as important.

I have faith that over time, through these different ongoing contacts and conversations, both individual and group clarity can emerge and the beginnings of the relationships can be established that can lead to the creation of these communities. These groups can start out small at first, say "pods" of 5 - 8 people, and then over time organically expand until Dunbar's Number is reached and the community splits into multiple communities. Likewise, I imagine that some degree of cross-over and collaboration between these different utopian anarchist communities will be happening as well.

This all seems quite big to me, like an enormous task, or rather, a series of related enormous tasks, with no guarantee that anything will ever work out. But regardless of that, I do still have a faith that based on all the knowledge, skills and resources that we have in the world today, that people have the ability to weave this all together to make it work. Everything that we need to make this all happen already exists, it is just a matter now of making the right connections, learning the right things, and building up the right relationships. Together we can do this.

Envisioning a Utopian Anarchism

I've noticed a pattern that I have. Every few years I feel the need to publicly re-think and re-clarify what exactly it is that I personally believe regarding anarchism. This usually corresponds with me affixing a new anarchist label to my beliefs and presenting it as being a new and unioque anarchist school of thought. The very first time that I did this I was calling my kind of anarchism "communitarian anarchism" and some friends and I created a short-lived organization related to that, the the Anarchist Communitarian Network, to promote this perspective. Following that, there was compassionate anarchism, then Buddhist anarchism, and most recently humanistic anarchism. Now I am calling my approach "utopian anarchism", and while I have already spoken about this on YouTube as well as in a small informal workshop at the 2022 Online NVC Conference, this is my first time publicly writing about this.

The key thing that sets my current approach apart from my previous ones is that I now view it as being important to place the vision that one has for a radically different world front and center. I know that the world that we live in now is shit, many different anarchist writers have penned many different brilliant critiques of our current society, and the various systems and structures in it that brutalize us all have been analyzed by many anarchist thinkers much smarter than I am. However, I have come to believe that without keeping a vision in our heart of the kind of world that we want to see, that eventually the steady diet of only critique and denunciation eventually leads to things like burnout, cynicism, despair and even misanthropy. How can we create the kind of beautiful world that we would want to live in if the only thing that we can see is shit? How can we have hope and inspiration to move towards a better world if the horrors of our current world is all that we can bear? One needs to hold a vision for a better world and radical imagination is needed for this, as well as analysis and forethought. A breautiful ideal needs to be at the forefront of one's anarchism in order to lead one to a place that one actually wants to go to.

The Four Perspectives on the Ideal Society

The broad outline for my vision of a new society is the same as always: a world without domination or top-down hierarchy where people voluntarily associate as equals, where cooperation, mutual aid and sharing are done without coercion, and where everyone who is affected by a group decision has a voice in the process and collective agreements are based on consent. This vision remains the same, but I now have four different perspectives that I use to look at it. Each perspective is vitally important to keep in mind for the understanding, realization and maintainence of such a society. These four perspectives are the individual, the relational, the structural and the physical.

1) The Individual Perspective

I start with this perspective here because each person goes through life experiencing things as an individual. And since a goal of anarchism is for everyone to be liberated and free, a basic question would then be "does everyone perceive their life as being liberated and free?" The door is opened here for a whole plethora tools and tactics from the areas of psychology, self-help and self-improvement to be utilized for each individual to find their own sense of personal choice and empowerment. People's individual health, their own thinking processes, their relationship with their own emotions and the degree to which they are continually learning all fall within this realm. Ultimately, this area relies upon each individual to take responsibility for themselves and their own personal growth and development. Traditionally individualist anarchism and the Buddhist anarchism that I used to advocate for tends to concern itself almost exclusively with this area.

2) The Relational Perspective

The relational area is the point where individuals come into contact with each other and interact. It includes things such as communication styles, how people deal with conflict, how people make decisions together and nonverbal interactions. This area is often overlooked by the individualists who are looking mainly at their own lives and choices, or by the collectivists who are looking at groups in general or society as a whole, but this area in many ways is "where the rubber hits the road". It is in the relational area where people experience most of their joys or frustrations in a collective endeavor and the lack of sufficient attention to this area can lead to the difference between a project succeeeding or failing. Relationship anarchy and the compassionate anarchism that I used to advocate for tends to focus almost exclusively on this area.

3) The Structural Perspective

This area is focused on large groups of people, as well as groups of groups of people, and how they interact with each other. It is in this area that social insitutions and systems reside. Historically speaking, most of anarchism has focused on this perspective, concerning itself with corporations and capitalism, governments and statecraft, and white supremacy and patriarchy across societies. Within the anarchist milieu, this perspective comes into play when we examine alternative and counter-institutions, anarchist federations and networks, and the anarchist "movement". Anarcho-communism tends to focus primarily on this perspective, as was the "communitarian anarchism" that I used to advocate.

4) The Physical Perspective

And finally the physical perspective is about just what the name suggests - pure physical reality. This includes things such as people's physical health, food, agriculture, architecture, water supply, transportation, clothing, urban planning, ecological matters and nonhuman life. In some sense this perspective is the most straightforward of them all, but any close examination of any particular aspect of physical reality reveals a myriad of complexities therein. The devil is in the details indeed. And since we are still dealing with people here, social structures, interpersonal relationships and people's individual psyches does come into play here as well. Green anarchism tends to focus mainly on this perspective.

Each of the areas that I mentioned here, the individual, the relational, the structural and the physical, each one connects with and affects all of the others. None of them exist independent of the other, rather they work together as a kind of interdepedent system. If someone is having troubles with their individual life and psyche that then affects their interpersonal relationships, the social structures and the environment that they live within. Likewise, one's physical environment affects one's mental health, the way that people relate with other and the ways that social structures function. What I am trying to do here is to examine the whole gestalt of the human experience, and these four ways of looking at it can make clear certain aspects that could more easily be overlooked if one where to only be using just one or two perspectives.

The Four Influences on My Utopian Anarchism

Keeping in mind the radical anarchist ideal, the utopian vision for a new society that it points to, and the four different perspectives through which to look at it, I will move now to elaborating upon my own utopian anarchist vision. Everyone has their own vision for the kind of ideal society that they would like to see, but for me personally I realize that I have four distinct influences that originate from outside the anarchist scene that inform my approach to utopian anarchism. These four influences are: the work of Manfred Max-Neef and his concept of fundamental human needs and his related work with human scale development, Buckminster Fuller and his comprehensive anticipatory design science and design science revolution, utopian socialism and the various utopian communities that came about as a result of it, and Marshall Rosenberg and the framework for Nonviolent Communication that he created.

1) Manfred Max-Neef's fundamental human needs

The basic premise behind this is that everything that human beings do is motivated by a desire to meet a basic human need that everybody has. Needs in this ceonception of them are finite and distinct from "satisfiers" which are the infinite ways that people act to meet needs. Needs can be physical, such as food, water and shelter, or they can be mental, emotional or social in nature as well. Manfred Max-Neef identified nine fundamental needs that people have: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, rest, creation, identity, and autonomy. I like looking at things from this point of view because it opens us up to the possibility of infinite different ways to meet people's needs while still focusing on the key things that people need to have fulfilling lives.

Manfred Max-Neef then took this concept of fundamental human needs and applied this to communities of people living together with his work in community development that he called "human scale development". With this he used a process of bottom-up direct participatory democracy for people to identify their needs and how they are getting met or not within the context of their communities. This approach took the focus away from concepts like "standard of living" and "gross national product" and instead focused on what can be done within the community to help there be more happiness and fulfillment among the people there.

2) Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS)

This is a body of work that primarily operates on the "physical perspective" that I mentioned earlier. It uses very much a systems theory approach of looking at the various systems that influence any given thing, and in turn looks at how that thing influences the larger systems that it resides within. This approach anticipates the various challenges and opportunities that may arise from the various systems that are being utilized and responds by designing other systems that can address these by using a rigorous process grounded in science. This approach is very much a type of engineering mindset that strives to meet the material needs of everyone while avoiding the systemic oversights that lead to the kinds of pollution and ecological devastation that we see in the world today.

3) Utopian Socialism

"Utopian socialism" is an umbrella term that refers to the kinds of socialism that existed before Marxism and anarchism came about that were characterized not by an emphasis on class struggle and revolution but instead on proposing new forms of society based on radically different designs. Some of the proponents and enthusiasts for these radical designs for different kinds of societies came together to create new utopian communities that were based on these designs. The emphasis here was on focusing on what one wants instead of what one doesn't want, articulating a design for that vision, finding like-minded people and then moving to the same place to live and work together to turn that vision into a reality. There is a quote from Buckminster Fuller that I think nicely encapsultes the underlying sentiment behind utopian socialism: "You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete."

4) Nonviolent Communication (NVC)

NVC is something that I have written about recently as well as in the past, but to succinctly summarize what it I would say this: Nonviolent Communication is an approach to communication based on principles of nonviolence, evolved from person-centered therapy, that instrumentally uses Manfred Max-Neef's concept of fundamental human needs that I mentioned above. NVC has been used to assist people in acheiving greater personal psychological self-understanding and self-discovery, it has been used to assist with people's interpersonal relationships and it has been used as a guide for creating new kinds of social structures and institutions. The goal of NVC is to increase people's capacity to acknowledge and value everyone's needs and to meet those needs out of an authentic desire to contribute to everyone's wellbeing.

Ten Principles for My Utopian Anarchism

Diving into the heart of what my approach to utopian anarchism is about, I would frame it with ten distinct principles:

1) Have an idealized positive image for the kind of society that is the end goal. This positive image does not need to be set in stone, nor is it something that I am wanting people to be uptight about or something that is used to judge people over. Rather, it is someething that I would like to be used as a kind of guiding light for all the actions taken towards the end goal. This idealized positive image is intended to be aspirational and inspirational, and not to be used as a kind of "spook" such as what is talked about in the philosophy of Max Stirner.

2) Have a comprehensive general understanding of the systems and structures that are operating behind the scenes that make such a society possible. Usually when people envision an anarchist society the picture is painted in very broad strokes, with little to no elaboration on what is actually happening to have this society function. I would like to take a very different approach than that, and instead I find it useful to continuously be asking "What's going on here exactly?" "How does it work?" "How is it sustained?" "How does it survive the inevitable challenges and hardships that life brings?" Pursuing this line of rigorous inquiry can ultimately deepen one's understanding of the end goal that one is pursuing and can serve to support one in "reverse engineering", so to speak, that vision to better discern action steps to get there.

3) The whole point of such a society is to have happy healthy harmonious humans. Sometimes one might wonder why the hell are we doing all this work and investing all this time in what I am calling "utopian anarchism". My response to that is what I call "Quadruple H" - happy healthy harmonious humans. That's the whole point of it all. That's the reason why.

4) Aims to eliminate all forms of domination and instead meet needs through voluntary cooperation and sharing. This in my view is the whole goal of anarchism in general and I believe that it is important to keep this reason succinctly stated and in the back of one's mind at all times. Think of it as the "anarchist mission statement", if you will.

5) Focuses simultaneously on personal inner work, relationship work, larger group structures and the physical environment. This is a reference to the four perspectives that I talked about earlier. It is good to periodically re-examine how one's collective endeavors are faring through using each one of these four perspectives in order to ensure that nothing important is being overlooked or neglected.

6) Incorporates all of the various different anarchist critiques but focuses primarily on the positive end goal. The majority of anarchist writing out there focuses primarily on critiques of the various aspects of the world we live in that dominate and oppress people. I appreciate these critiques, I find them to be useful in terms of pointing out various things that we need to avoid and keep an eye out for, but in the end these critiques do not tell us where we want to go or how to get there.

7) Open, honest, thoughtful and considerate conversation that includes awareness and expression of one's own needs as well as those of others is the foundation for it all. This is the kind of thing that Nonviolent Communication talks about and advocates for and I believe that ultimately if the people involved in this utopian anarchist endeavor can succeed at practicing this then the project would stand a good chance at weathering the inevitable challenges that it will come across.

8) Recognizes, uses, creates and discards of social constructs and is not bound by them. Human societies everywhere create and abide by social constructs as a way to help the society function smoothly. I don't see social constructs as necessarily being "good" or "bad" per se, but what I do see as being deleterious is belieiving that any particular social constructs are "inevitable" or "necessary". Instead I would like to cultivate a habit of recognizing social constructs for what they are, to not be attached to them and to instead be willing to replace them if a consensus is reached that doing so would be advantageous. I have previously written about the social construct of "ownership" here.

9) Acknowledges that uniformity of vision is not necessary for sufficient cooperation to be possible. I have lots of ideas on, lots of beliefs about and lots of desires for the world at large. And while I have a lot that I can say about my approach to utopian anarchism and the ideal society I envision, I do not want to convey a notion that everyone would need to abide by everything I say about the subject in order for it to be realized. People can cooperate in a variety of different ways, in a variety of different capacities, each for their own reasons. The last thing that I would want to see happen is have some kind of cult created in the name of some anarchist vision. Uniformity is unnecessary.

10) Voluntary associations that people choose to be in. Any involvement with the kinds of utopian anarchist societies/communities/projects that I am envisioning would need to be done voluntarily. I hold this vision dear to my heart, but I would not want anyone to ever be coerced into participating in it. Individual willingness is a key principle necessary for the whole thing to work. I have previously written about this here.

Ten Practices for My Utopian Anarchism

Moving from the abstract to the practical, there already exists a number of different practices that people can engage in now as well as in a future utopian anarchist society. All of these practices are grounded in some way in the principles that I elaborated upon above. A lot of what I mention below are more like groups or clusters of different practices, but nevertheless what I want to emphasize is that there are some real life things that people can do to begin practicing utopian anarchism.

1) Egalitarian income-sharing intentional communities. This is where people live together intentionally, share income and resources, and make decisions together in some kind of democratic way. In the United States the Federation of Egalitarian Communities is a good resource for such communities.

2) Vipassana Meditation practice. With regards to the first perspective that I mentioned in this piece, the individual/personal perspective, Vipassana Meditation practice is a great way for one to better understand oneself and to develop more personal insight, self-discipline and self-control. This website is a good starting place to go learn more about this practice.

3) Empathic listening exchanges. Empathy is an essential part of maintaining healthy interpersonal relationships, and the approach to empathy that I draw from the most comes from Nonviolent Communication. NVC teaches some specific ways to practice empathic listening, and there is one instruction guide for that online here.

4) Restorative / Transformative Justice for addressing harm. People often hurt other people, whether it is done intentionally or unintentionally it is a regular part of life. The approaches to addressing harm that I consider to be the most beneficial for individuals, relationships and communities is Restorative Justice and Transformative Justice. These approaches focus on healing those whom have been hurt, repairing relationships and changing the systemic conditions that have helped to create the situation where harm occured to begin with.

5) Convergent Facilitation for group decision-making. Based on Nonviolent Communication and created by the NVC trainer Miki Kashtan, Convergent Facilitation is a method for facilitating meetings of groups of people to find consensus while also addressing all of the different needs and concerns that the participants have.

6) Decentralized organizational structures. The field of organizational development has produced a lot of work over the years designing ways that people can structure decentralized directly democratic organizations that are efficient and effective at what they are trying to do. Some examples of this are Sociocracy, Holacracy and Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations. There are many practical and valuable insights contained within this work, but since it originates from the corporate world it has largely gone unnoticed by most anarchists.

7) Fundamental human needs assessments. This practice has first been developed by Manfred Max-Neef and the work he did with Human Scale Development in small-scale communities. I'm thinking that a similar practice could be developed for individuals where a person takes the time to sit down with a list of needs and carefully examines whether or to what extent each need is being met in their life and in what ways. This can be a guided process of self-reflection where one gains clarity about the relationship that they have with the various different needs that they have. I'm thinking that a kind of annual ritual could be created for this practice, possibly carried out each year on one's birthday.

8) The Co-Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Based on Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science and organized by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, this is an inventory of various practices that people can do to implement this way of thinking into real life situations. The website for this can be found here.

9) Group Size Based on Dunbar's Number. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has suggested a number of people which is the maximum size that a group can be where everyone who is a part of the group still has meaningful relationships with one another. Anything above that number results in relationships within the group becoming impersonal and abstract. I would like for there to be an agreed upon mechanism within utopian anarchist communities for the group to split into two new communities once that number has been reached. Think of it being like a process of cell division, but for groups of people.

10) Student-centered learning. A number of different educational theorists have discussed student-centered learning, and the one that I resonate with the most is that which was articulated in a book by Carl Rogers. I have also written about this subject previously myself in a blog post here. Briefly stated, the idea behind it is that in situations where learning is being facilitated, the emphasis is to be placed on the learner and wherever their interests and enthusiasm may be and to de-emphasize the importance of curricula, educational standards and schools in general.

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So that about wraps it up for now. I realize that in some sense what I am talking about here is nothing new. Solarpunk is a relatively recent phenomenon that covers a lot of the same ground as utopian anarchism, albeit it is not a specifically anarchist project and is instead more of a generally radical ecologically-oriented one. Going back further in time, utopian socialism also has a number of similarties to utopian anarchism, but like solarpunk it is also not a specifically anarchist project. I would say that both solarpunk and utopian socialism are "siblings" of utopian anarchism, but not twins.

Regarding the "utopian anarchist" label specifically, there are only two people other than myself who have publicly associated themself with that term. There is the author Ruth Kinna who has written about the subject, co-edited a book about it, as well as given talks about it. And the other person is Elon Musk, who has publicly stated that he is a utopian anarchist, but has never elaborated on what that term means to him in any great detail.

For me, I prefer sticking to my own ideas for what an ideal anarchist society would look like and how it would work. And ultimately I think that this is how it will play out for everyone, each person will have their own ideas for what the ideal world would look like, and it is up to us all to find ways to work together to begin moving towards these ideals. My hope is that what I have written here has stirred up some thought to that end.

My Continuing Relationship with Nonviolent Communication

I have a long-standing and complex relationship with Nonviolent Communication. This is something that I have publicly reflected upon and pontificated about in the past. A few years ago I wrote a blog post titled Why I Am Not Into NVC Anymore and more recently I have felt moved to write a follow-up piece here elaborating on where things stand now with regards to my relationship with NVC. Long story short, I am into NVC once again and that blog post was indicative of but a temporary period of time away from NVC. Let me explain...

I believe that what happened was that over time, in a ten-year period between the years of 2008 and 2018, my personal practice of NVC gradually decreased. My participation in things like empathy exchanges, practice groups and other NVC events as well as my personal individual NVC practice, things like self-empathy inquiry and journaling, all of these things became fewer and further between for me. This resulted in my relationship with NVC becoming more of an abstraction to me, more of a mental concept than a lived practice. During this time, the founder/creator of NVC Marshall Rosenberg passed away. This set in motion a chain of events that would substantially affect the global community of NVC enthusiasts. In other words, people needed to figure out where to go next with NVC without the top dog being around anymore. One thing lead to another and eventually the Center for Nonviolent Communication organization launched an initiative to restructure itself along the lines of more of a decentralized bottom-up network. This initiative was called the New Future Process. I had a lot of excitement about this initiative and my big hope was that this could lead to a lot of the different changes that I wanted to see in the global NVC network finally coming about. When work on the New Future Process was suspended that was the "final straw" for me. I was hurt, disappointed, disillusioned and disgusted with the CNVC organization. My faith and trust in both NVC in general and the CNVC organization in particular took a big blow with that. This all resulted in me deciding to take a break from NVC in general and writing that aforementioned blog post, Why I Am Not Into NVC Anymore.

After a couple of years went by, something happened. Inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns and social distancing that was happening all around the world, the international NVC community began to create it's own new decentralized network of NVC practitioners who organized primarily online through various platforms such as WhatsApp, Zoom, Signal, Facebook and the like. I discovered various international online NVC events that were taking place, organized by various different groups around the world such as NVC Rising, NVC Academy, Empathic Way Europe and NVCDayOne. I believe that the ease of access for these events, being able to attend them while staying in the comfort of my own home, lead to me being more open and receptive to exploring NVC again. My previous period of heavy involvement with NVC was predicated on me being both willing and able to travel all across the country to attend various NVC events. Given that my lifestyle no longer enables me to have that same kind of freedom to travel, I think that I unconsciously must have come to the conclusion that that kind of involvement with NVC was no longer possible for me anymore. Through my getting involved with NVC though this decentralized online network I have been able to meet a number of different NVC practitioners from all across the country and around the world, which is something that I am very much grateful for since it has significantly contributed to my life. And in some respects, this decentralized network is the kind of thing that I was wanting to see come about as a result of the New Future Process in the first place!

Because of this process of being re-introduced to NVC through this informal online global network of NVC practitioners, I have resumed having a personal practice of NVC once again. I have beem engaging in empathic listening exchanges with others in addition to self-empathy for myself, as well as having many conversations with other NVC practitioners about their own NVC practice. This resumed personal practice has been of great benefit to me, it has helped me to be both more self-aware and attuned with what's going on within me mentally/emotionally-speaking, and it has helped me to be more aware of the various choices that I have been making and the effects of these choices. This practice has also helped me to get better at empathizing with other people, to view others with more compassion, and it has gradually made me more aware of how various choices I have made has lead to there being more or less connection with others. And thanks to one NVC friend I met through this, I have also been able to come to appreciate how intentionally setting boundaries with others can be supportive to me and my practice of NVC. Throughout all of this I began to dust off my old NVC skills and knowledge and I began to appreciate NVC as a lived practice once again, and not just as a theoretical understanding (although that can be helpful too).

Ultimately I have come to appreciate NVC again as a great tool for increaseing my own self-understanding, for humanizing others and developing more compassion, for getting clear on what exactly my choices and actions are, and for better understanding the complex interplay of emotions and what drives them. I think that I lost a lot of this through neglecting my personal practice of NVC. I certainly do not view NVC as being the only practice or tool that can be useful for people in this realm, nor do I view it as being the "best" one out there per se. But NVC is the one that I have a high degree of comfort and familiarity with and appreciation for, so I believe that I will contunue to stick with it.

This all being said, I also realize that nowadays I have no interest in being an NVC trainer or teacher, nor do I have any interest in marketing or proselytizing NVC to others. If you have an interest in practicing NVC, that's great, come join me in practicing it sometime somewhere. If you have no interest in NVC, that's great too, go do something else then that suits you better. I have no desire to convince or convert others to NVC. I leave it entirely up to other people to determine for themselves what they think about and how they relate with NVC.

Frankly, I recognize that attempting to practice and live NVC is tough work. Our pre-existing social conditioning is extensive and our habitual patterns of thought and behavior are deeply engrained in us. Trying to undue all of that to live in a radically different way is an uphill battle. The standard marketing pitch for NVC is filled with promises of joyful connection and playful contribution, and while those things can occur at times, experiences of emotional pain and difficult conversations are just as likely. And what I said in that blog post, "Why I am Not Into NVC Anymore", about my never having witnessed NVC being used to successfully resolve conflicts, well that still rings true for me. I still haven't seen it happen. It might be happening without me knowing about it, and I hope that it is, but unfortunately I still haven't seen it myself.

So where does this all leave me in my relationship with NVC now? What is my role within the greater NVC community currently? Well, this is still a work-in-progress for me. This is something that I am still trying to figure out. What I would like to be, in addition to being an NVC practitioner, is an NVC supporter. I would like to be someone who helps other people who are trying to learn and practice NVC and who are looking for support with this. Maybe one can call this role a "coach", a "guide", a "faciltiator", I don't know, nor do I particularly care about these labels (although I am fond of the term "flying giraffe"). The key thing is that I would like to work with people who already know NVC to some extent, people who already have some degree of personal committement to NVC and it's principles and practices and who actively want somebody such as myself to help them with whatever it is that they are struggling with. I do not want to impose myself on others who do not want my assistance or involvement with their NVC journey, nor do I want to try to sell NVC to others who are not familiar with NVC. In a number of ways, what I wrote about this subject over ten years ago still applies to me. I do very much appreciate the sense of community and mutual aid that can develop between NVC enthusiasts, and that is something that I would like to partake in and support as well.

Taken altogether, I guess that I will say that I am back in NVC-land now! The landscape has certainly changed, since it is all much more online now and less reliant upon in-person gatherings, the Grand Poobah is dead, as are a few other notable NVC trainers. Some of my friends who were also into NVC in the past have drifted away from it, some of these friends have died, and I now have some new friends who are into NVC, all coming from a variety of different backgrounds and experience levels with NVC. Things arise and pass away, in constant motion and change, and I guess that that is an essential part of life. I am glad that I have something like Nonviolent Communication to accompany me through all of this.