In seeking to bring nonviolent communication (“NVC”) to Silver City in 2022, we at Lotus Center were on a mission.
“Over a period of something like two years, Seamus Berkeley [another Lotus employee] and I had been talking about starting an NVC practice group in Silver City,” recalls Lotus’ executive director, Jeff Goin. “The sticking point was finding a qualified NVC trainer to show us how it’s done. In order for us to be able to offer a gathering that we bill as ‘NVC,’ the organizers of the gathering have to have gone through a training led by a certified NVC trainer. There aren’t any certified trainers in Silver, so we couldn’t get trained, so we couldn’t start a practice group.”
Nonviolent communication, developed by Marshall Rosenberg (1934 — 2015), is a practice through which one can learn to hear their own deeper needs and those of others. By emphasizing deep listening – to ourselves as well as others – NVC helps us discover our own capacity for great compassion. This language reveals the awareness that all human beings are only trying to honor universal values and needs, every minute, every day. NVC can be seen as both a spiritual practice that helps us see our common humanity, using our power in a way that honors everyone’s needs, and a concrete set of skills which help us create life-serving families and communities.
Through creative perseverance, we learned that there were exactly two certified NVC trainers in New Mexico; one of them, Karen Starz, is based in Truth or Consequences.
Through our very first conversation, we sensed that Karen would be a great fit with our community, and we were right. To wit: In 2022 and 2023 Lotus Center partnered with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Silver City, and the Silver City Food Co-op, respectively, to provide NVC weekend trainings. 35 people attended each training. An outgrowth of those trainings is a bi-monthly, ongoing NVC “Practice Group” which is currently offered at Lotus Center by donation with no one ever being turned away for lack of funds.
Now more than ever, our community (and our world) needs Nonviolent Communication.
Your donation to Lotus Center via Give Grandly will support our ongoing training in, and practice of NVC.
To support Lotus Center and all of our community service programs, please visit:
https://www.givegrandly.org/organizations/the-lotus-center
Thank you for supporting our nonprofit, community-owned Lotus Center!