Embracing Longing

I first learned NVC in 1999, training with Bridget Belgrave and then with Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of the process.

In the following year, living in London and thus close to Oxford where Bridget was offering her work, I attended just about every training that she gave. I was totally hooked.

I had been pretty much obsessed since my teens with figuring out how I ticked. Throughout my twenties I was very solitary, often living alone, still trying to figure myself out by reading all kinds of philosophy and spirituality.

Much of it was inspiring, but little of it did much to enable me to get a handle on myself, to change my emotional state, or understand myself better. By my early thirties, just before I got into NVC, I was very isolated. The month before I went on my first training I remember scrawling in my journal: “I want connection, connection, connection”.

And that’s what NVC gave me: connection with myself, connection with others and connection to Life itself.

That last one was a suprise. On the surface NVC looked like a communication tool, emerging from the realm of psychology rather than spirituality. But it gave me a way of experiencing my desires and deepest longings as the presence of universal, divine energy inside me. This visceral sense of the sacred, moving through my whole being and animating everything I do, even the really mundane stuff, is still one of the most precious gifts I have gained from NVC.

In that first year of learning NVC, my life was a bit of a mess. Most of my grand ambitions had come to very little and I found myself living back in the same neighbourhood in London that I had grown up in, just down the road from my parents, single and deflated. Every morning I would make it my practice to sit and write in my journal, using the NVC process of self empathy that I had learned. This was the foundation of my NVC practice, and it is still something I return to when life gets tough. It certainly got me through that tough year and from that moment on I trusted that whatever happens to me, I can always turn it around using self empathy.

So, for most of that time I was using NVC as an internal practice. I occasionally used it with friends, but not often. However, after a couple of years I got together with Stella, who is now my wife, and moved to the Findhorn Community in Scotland.

This was the beginning for me of using NVC in relationship, and I was continually amazed at how it deepened my intimate relationships, with Stella, with close friends, enabling me to say difficult things skillfully, in a way that brought us closer rather than created more conflict; it gave me a language for expressing love and appreciation; it supported me to learn that giving up on my own authenticity is not the way to create genuine intimacy, and gave me the skills to navigate what felt like pretty uncharted waters: how to be honest and stay connected at the same time!

When I moved up to Findhorn I joined a peer group that ran for over six years. This became a laboratory of learning for me. In the early days, we did “exercises” together, role plays and the like, as a way of getting to grips with the NVC process. But the group eventually evolved to the point where the most alive and interesting enquiry we could be making was into our present moment relationships. The here and now became the learning ground, rather than the abstracted situations from our lives that would animate our role plays. This was a challenging shift for many of the group, but for me it marked a deeper level of living the NVC process. A new level of authenticity, intimacy and community opened up.

The friendships that I have made along the way have continued to show me what is possible when we bring our full selves to a friendship with a commitment to honesty, transparency and cameraderie. This journey feels like it has only just begun.

Beginning in 2003 I began offering trainings. Since that time I have given introductory and intermediate trainings for the public as well as in the public and private sector, as well as ongoing evening groups. I’m now a certified trainer with international Centre for Nonviolent Communication.

I’m interested in living in such a way that Love (the energy that animates the whole universe) is present in my awareness more and more of the time; that I am in touch with this Love, aware of how it is motivating everything I do, so that life becomes both increasingly pleasurable and full of the meaning that comes from contributing to others, and to a better world.

Offering NVC trainings is for me a way of contributing to others, so that they can learn this amazing process too. It is also another way of keeping on exploring all its ramifications, and doing so together, in the new way of relating that NVC facilitates. Finally, it is another way of creating and growing community, by meeting others, supporting them to meet one another, and spreading this good stuff around.

I also work as a storyteller and have a couple of sites, with over a hundred stories to download and listen to:

My kids site is called The Palace of Stories (due to launch later this year) and my adult site is called Stories of the Journey Home.

Thanks for reading my bio, and if you’ve any feedback, or questions, you can email me via the contact page.