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Similarly to all other aspects of life that NVC is exploring, self-empathy/self-connection is also, for me at least, an ongoing research, an ongoing journey of discovery. It stretches from very practical questions of how to do it, when to do it, how to know whether I am self-connected, to very existential ones of what self is at all, who is connecting to what, what it all actually is in its essence…

Key points about self-connection I have learned so far:

Self-connection is a holistic, embodied process. It is not an intellectual activity in which I am browsing through the list of feelings and needs, identifying them with my mind: “yes, I guess I feel sad because I need, let me see, well, I need love and trust.”

It actually fully involves my body and sensations that flow through it. Not only that, it furthermore taps into the amorphousness of my being, into the ever-evolving creation of “myself” in the moment. It stretches into the very essence of who and what is it that I identify as “myself”. So, yes, it is about embodied fullness of experiencing.

Self-connection is about staying with what is alive now. It is about being with the reality of the present moment. It is not so much about remembering the past experiences, feelings, needs…, but about being with what is manifesting through me right now, despite temptations of my mind to react to it by analyzing the past and planning the future. It is about being attentive and present with how life is manifesting itself right now. It is about relaxing into the mystery of life unfolding in the present moment. As simple as that.

Self-connection is about embracing the flow of life. It is about going beyond the distinctions between the “positive” and the “negative” experiences, beyond trying to change my feelings, pacify them, fix myself, turn myself form sad to happy… To me it is really about meeting my own being at that famous field of Rumi – beyond ideas of right and wrong. Beyond even the concept that I am not OK now as I am in pain, and then me trying to heal myself so I will be OK again, meaning happy, enlightened. It is about saying yes, with the fullness of my being, to the miracle of life as I am experiencing it. It is about easing into the flow of life, about resting in it, about embracing it in its wholeness. Or, in other words, it is about letting myself be fully embraced by the flow of life.

Why self-connection sometimes doesn’t seem to work

While the above may sound quite abstract, it perhaps gets a bit clearer and more grounded when I remember how my mind is conditioned to operate.

For instance, when trying to connect with the flow of life in me, or, in other words, when trying to self-connect, there will very often be strong tendencies within my mind to put it all into a conceptual box: “Well, of course A happened because of B, and so I now feel X. This is how life is. This is how things go…”

Well, can my mind really grasp how life actually is? Or does it just keep creating a very simplified and mono-dimensional image of it, which then becomes the framework for a rather limited experience of life?

Or I act out of the concept that some feelings are good and some not, and then I try to pacify the not-good-ones and maintain the good-ones. Or I try to suppress it all. Or change myself into something I believe I should be. Etc, etc…

Similar thing often happens when I try to be with another person that is going through something emotional; the tendency to “help” this person, to heal them, to somehow change them into the image that I have about how they should be: happy, fulfilled, peaceful… This is where all the classical empathy blockers seem to be coming from: educating, comforting, telling stories, giving advice…

The purpose of dyads

The dyad work started in 1960’ in the US, originated by Charles Berner that both Robert Gonzales and myself learned from directly. The general idea was to combine intensive self-connecting meditations, inspired by the work on Koans in Zen Buddhism, with the power of pure human connection, devoid of the social conditioned interacting patterns.

The way we use dyad work within NVC and primarily at the Awakening to Life Intensives is to dive deeply into self-connection, with the help of questions that the mind cannot answer and that rather invite us into holistic experiencing. Opening up to the life in us in the moment, embracing what is, experiencing the breath of aliveness, this all helps us to activate the process of deep self-connection that soon guides us beyond the known self, beyond our mental concepts, beyond the pre-set categories in our mind, beyond the distinction between myself and the otherness. We learn, moment by moment, to be fully present, to embrace the flow of life, and, yes, to awaken to the mystery of life.

At the same time we can, while being in a role of a witness in a dyad, learn to get back into the innocence of marveling at the mystery of life that is revealing itself through this human being who sits across from us. To just witness and wonder at the manifestation of the flow of life, without trying to fix it, change it, even name it, identify it.

In other words, we can learn to be fully alive, to be fully present to the life as it flows through us as well as through others. If there is any difference between the two at all, that is.

The purpose of the Awakening to Life Intensive

There is a certain difference between doing dyads once a week, or once a day, or even a few times a day at workshops, and between doing them from early mornings to late evenings for a full week straight. Especially, if it is done within a dedicated community of people, with questions that follow a certain deepening direction.

While working for one full year on finetuning the structure of the Awakening to Life Intensive, both Robert Gonzales and myself were putting together all the experiences from our lives of attending intensive retreats of this nature, like Enlightenment Intensives, Vipassana retreats, Zen Seshins…, combining it with the compassionate and free atmosphere of Nonviolent Communication. Finally we put together a retreat that seems more like a one-week sacred ceremony of gently inviting our hearts, our souls, our very core nature, the flow of life that streams through us, into this world.

We don’t come to the retreat in order to learn, train, heal…, we come to invite ourselves into fully awakened presence to Life. We come to be with life as it shows through us and through others, arising in the moment. As this is the only thing we seem to have anyway; our direct connection with the mystery of life in the moment of now, into which we are anchored with the portals of our bodies.

For many participants it feels like waking up fully to this life. And, along the way, increasing our capacity to stay awake, fully present, in the wholeness of it.

The ultimate promise of self-connection

For me this is the very essence of self-empathy; the ultimate wholeness, the ultimate embrace of life. In order to fully be, to fully meet life, to fully engage and to, last but not least, fully enjoy this mystery of existence.

When there is no more two – me self-connecting with myself -, when the somewhat schizophrenic experience of having 15 different feelings and 7 different needs inside of me transforms into a peaceful stream of life, when the apparent compartmentalization of the experience of life turns into oneness in the present moment, when the me and you and them melts back into the wholeness – then, I finally experience true self-connection.

I stopped and was staring at her for a few seconds; what is going on here? What could be such a secret that she not only needs to get out of the bed while I sleep, but actually out of the house and on to the terrace? What is happening behind my back?

Now immediately fully awake I stepped on to the terrace. Quickly she turned towards me, with a finger over her smiling lips, signalling me to be quiet. I stopped, starring in her smiling face and big, excited eyes:

“I am recording birds… Isn’t it crazy?”

Only then I heard them. Hundreds of them in the trees all around and from the whole valley, singing on the top of their voices. Perhaps greeting the sun that was just about to rise. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. My sweetheart had heard them while still in bed and went to capture this beauty.

I smiled and went to the bathroom, embarrassed and in a disbelief. Realizing that in the seconds when I was looking at her standing on the terrace with the phone in her hand, my mind offered only one possible explanation. Not at least two, or three. Only one: something fishy happening behind my back.

Of course I can track this pattern of thinking back to my childhood and the family I was surrounded with: so many secrets, half-truths, manipulations, lies… And so little authenticity, transparency.

Yet, it is sad to see how these old patterns are, silently in the background, dominating construction of my reality, despite the fact that in my relationship with Noa I have been experiencing nothing but sheer authenticity, honesty and togetherness. And so, regardless of so many other possibilities, my mind was offering me one only, the one from so long ago. And thus my world, in that moment, was limited only to what my mind was capable of grasping.

This process of inference, of reaching conclusions and adding meaning, is so easy to observe on others, and so hard to catch within ourselves, is it not? Yes, we do it in every single second of our lives – automatically adding meaning to what our senses capture.

For instance, say I have been sharing something personal with you for ten minutes and in a certain moment I see you yawning. Though in the last ten minutes so many other observations were captured by my senses, this one second of you yawning immediately overrides the 600 seconds of me seeing you looking at me attentively, nodding, reflecting back empathically.

Next, I automatically add meaning to what I saw: you are yawning because you find my sharing boring. That is it, I don’t question this assumptions, I don’t explore other possibilities, like perhaps you did not sleep much because you were tortured by a severe migraine. Or your child was crying through the night because of nightmares. Or you just had a really big lunch and now the digestion is using up much of your energy.

Still within the same moment, I generalize my assumption: you don’t enjoy being with me and you don’t really care about me. This fits well into my personal belief system that I already formed long time ago, based on many of similar interpretations: people don’t care about me. Because people just don’t care, they are all so self-centred. Or, that I am a boring person, not good enough, not interesting, not worthy of attention, not enjoyable to be with.

Not only will my next choice be based on this inner belief of mine – like will I continue speaking, will I keep openly sharing my heart, will I keep in authentic connection -, but I will also seek data that will confirm and keep confirming my belief. I will scan the environment in order to, again and again, see another person yawning, another person glancing at their wristwatch, another person not returning my call, another person not listening to the end; see, I knew it, I am not interesting enough and nobody cares about me.

I will keep, and I do so from one second to another, confirming and polishing this little world of mine, this little cosy and well-known place. Narrowing my experience of life into some sort of a tunnel.

But what then is the reality? What is true?

What I know for sure is that the bigger reality is outside of reach of my mind. That it is far beyond my mind’s models, pictures, beliefs, illusions.

And while it might not be the easiest thing in the world to just simply step out of all of that, it definitely is possible to slowly, step by step, moment by moment, find my way back into the vulnerable innocence, back into the continuous wondering at life, back into meeting life with curious eyes and an open heart.

Because as long as I keep the awareness that I don’t know, I will be curious and eager to learn. Once I start believing that I figured the world out and that I know, I am not listening to life any longer, but just to the echoes of my mind.

I was deeply touched by all the support I was receiving during these days from friends in our alternative village – they were bringing me food, they were checking with me every morning about how the night had been, every day somebody from the neighborhood would come over and stay for an hour or two in the morning and another friend in the afternoon, so I could stretch, take a shower, feed myself in peace… And there were people driving back and forth between the hospital and our home, bringing milk that Noa kept pumping from her breasts for me to feed Dorian. All this support was so profoundly loving and touching for me.

And, somehow and in a quite surprising way, I noticed again and again that I was being seen and admired as a hero. Because I spent three days “alone” with a two-week-old baby. Now, there are hundreds of millions of women, I guess, that are alone with their newborns. Many without much support at all. Many actually in very, very difficult circumstances. Not for three days, but for weeks, months, years. After their bodies and whole inner systems had gone through incredible transformations and challenges that we, men, can hardly even understand.

Yet, this seems to be so normal, does it not? They don’t tend to be seen as heroines all that much. While a man, being three days with his two-week old child, supported by the whole village, is a hero.

Speaking of privilege.

Not many, but there are still a few things I remember from my Psychology study. One of them is a research that I read about (of course I don’t remember who did it, how, when…) and that showed that it was more difficult for women to quit smoking, than it was for men. The study showed that the reason for this difference was that for a man a cigarette was just a cigarette, while for a woman it was an alibi for a break. As it is just much more difficult for women, generally speaking, to take a break, because the social pressure is much harder on them to be “on duty” all the time and make sure that everybody is being served. And for women a cigarette tends to be a way to get out to the balcony, with less guilt, and get these 10 minutes every now and then: “I have to have a cigarette.”

I don’t know to what extent the above research is still relevant, as societies do change with generations. Yet I do believe that none of us sees this world as it is. We see it as our minds have been conditioned to see it, through a long process of socialization. We live in pre-conditioned bubbles of our own interpretations of reality.

Therefore, I want to keep my mind and my heart open to what I have been unaware of and to keep learning about the invisible, in order to be able to, in the best way I can, contribute to the flow of life within me and around me, from one moment to another.

Now, first thing: isn’t the above a rather negative statement in itself? You know, labeling other people as negative and then trying to get rid of them… So, should I now label a person that just made this statement as negative and try to get rid of them. And then they will do the same to me… What a wonderful world this will be.

But putting this paradox aside, I wonder who are the individuals being labeled as negative, energy sucking entities… As much as I know about life, I would say they are human beings with wounds, pain, scars, fears, traumas… Pretty much like everybody else among us. They have been hurt, disappointed, frightened, conditioned and now they are doing their best to cope with the complexity of their lives.

Instead of labeling them as negative (or whatever else, for that matter), I would prefer to see them in their humanness, in their wounded and innocent hearts, in their attempts to meet their needs and lick their wounds in the best way they can. If I don’t see them in their innocence, then I might end up having difficulties to also embrace my own innocence, as our nature in essence really is the same. Or, as Ramana Maharshi put it clearly: “There are no others.”

Of course, I also want to learn how to walk through life so that I care for my own heart, for my own aliveness. I want to learn to say no, with clarity and compassion, in order to care for my needs for peace, ease, silence, quietness, mutuality, balance…

Yes, balance! It seems that it all boils down to finding balance, does it not? Caring for, nurturing, embracing and fully surrendering to the flow of life in a balanced way, that will nourish this flow even further.

Instead of cutting out all aspects of life that I happen to not agree with, to not like.

Only to dive straight into the next spiritual cult group, where the story continued with very similar patterns, with another spiritual leader, even more charismatics. This time I got out a bit faster, yet still with a sad heart, as I had learned and experienced so much in that group.

Afterwards I was working as a psychotherapist for 12 years and somehow became very popular amongst survivors of various cult groups, gurus, abusive therapists… Working with them all gave me an incredible insight into the phenomenon.

And still nowadays, when collaborating with various trainers and facilitators around the globe, I keep noticing behaviors that could be labeled as abusive, at least slightly. Not treating students as equals, using charisma to charm younger female students, hiding and twisting the truth…

After all these decades of observations and experiences it seems to me that I found one of the key denominators, if not the very main one; loneliness.

Yes, deep loneliness of the abusive trainer, teacher, guru.

It seems to me that the abusive, self-absorbed trainers all feel pretty lonely deep down in their hearts. Surrounded by admiring students and devotees, but not having genuine friends. Friends, who would give them a honest, authentic feedback. Friends, who would not take any games and spiritual nonsense, but would grab them by their ears when necessary. Because they love them enough, they care for them and they have an intimate relationship with them that is based on trust and equality. And empathy.

A few years back I worked, in a couple of large projects, with a fellow trainer who brought NVC to her country and did, in ten years or so, a heroic job of spreading it across many levels of society… And she, through our conversation, suddenly went silent in shock, realizing that she has not had an experience of being received with empathy for many, many years. She was teaching it, she was receiving others with empathy, but not experiencing it herself..

How can you ever heal yourself from your own wounds and scars and traumas, if you don’t receive empathy as well as honesty. If you don’t engage with people on the level of sheer nakedness, companionship, real meeting. I can, yet again, quote Rollo May, who said that every healing starts with empathy, and every growth with honesty.

I wish for all trainers, teachers, gurus to find their own intimate communities of empathy, to have their friends who will occasionally smack them, lovingly, or pull them by their ears… So that they will not be using their work and their positions in order to meet their needs for acknowledgement, appreciation, acceptance, but will instead find other ways for their own deep healing and transformation, while doing their work primarily in order to contribute.

I will forever remember words of wisdom I heard from one of my many mentors, quite at the beginning of my work as a trainer. She said to me: “For me it is very suspicious to learn, after a workshop that I gave, that people are talking about me. What a great trainer I am, what a great teacher… If this happens then I know I failed, as I had been drawing their attention to me, using the workshop as a stage for my own little self-appreciative show. What I wish after a workshop is for people to forget my name, but really have their focus on themselves and their lives, their experiences of existence. The more they forget about me, the more I celebrate my work.”

Yes, truly, the only purpose my work as a trainer seems to have is to support participants in deeply self-connecting. And if I notice that I have been using my trainings and workshops primarily for my own needs for appreciation, acknowledgement, well, then it is perhaps time for me to pause and look into my own existential loneliness.

Consequentially I was completely knocked-out in illness twice a year for a week, of course always during national holidays, when there was time for such things. I never cancelled a training because of my illness. Once my then-wife drove me to the training in the morning and came to pick me up in the evening, as I was unable to drive myself. On another occasion I collapsed of exhaustion in the morning at the venue, just before starting a training, and they called the ambulance to take me to the hospital. In which I convinced everybody that I was perfectly fine, only to start my next training a couple of days later.

And the key thing here is that I felt really good about myself. What could possibly be a better way to live than to be slowly dying of work exhaustion, right? Greeting my friends with these survivalist expressions felt like acknowledging my own worth: “I am dead-tired. Wiped out. Completely drained. My head is falling off. I don’t know which way is up anymore. I am falling apart. My head is spinning. I am bone-tired…”

This tyranny of worshiping hard work apparently started with the agricultural revolution ten thousand or so years in history. From hunters and gatherers that were following the movements of the nature and living on the abundance it was providing, the farmers started to try to master the nature, which proved to be lots of work. And the paradigm emerged that you can only have things if you work and suffer a lot. No pain, no gain.

Now, we have all heard, I imagine, that apparently nobody ever regretted, on their deathbed, why they did not work even harder in life. Why they did not spend more time in office, in front of the computer. It seems that hard work is not something that necessarily brings meaning to our lives.

In the last year or so I have been living a very relaxed life, in a semi-sabbatical style, taking it really easy most of the time, and, oh boy, does my experience of it feel different. Full of inner spaciousness, ease, rest and consequentially time to meet life, to really meet it. Which brings more clarity into the question what would I like to celebrate on my death bed.

I would like to celebrate the sunsets I have melted in. The sunrises I have woken up to. The naked meetings I have had with other souls. The loving, heart melting moments of pure, innocent love. The conversations with stars. The moments of gratitude for the beauty of life. The times of wondering at this ever-emerging creation…

Yes, the stars are smiling at me all the time. Do I see this and do I take time to smile back?

And, when thinking of the urgency of a radical transformation of a paradigm that we humans have been operating within for thousands of years, I often feel sad and even disheartened, witnessing the very pioneers of change themselves using the same vocabulary and mindset that seem to have gotten us here: us vs them. The same paradigm of us, who are right and them, who are wrong, Us, who know, and them, who don’t. Us, who are innocent victim of them, who are to blame. Of us who need to change them, make them understand, perhaps even punish them, because they don’t deserve better.

I don’t believe we are really changing anything, when operating within this old mindset. Even more, we might be just happily reinforcing the old disconnecting paradigm even deeper. Now, of course we want to care for people in need, and for the environment, and for the whole planet, yet if we do it without compassion for the humanness in everybody and for everybody’s wounds and scars and fears and longings, we might not be really dismantling the weapons that got us here, if I paraphrase Joana Macy.

In my understanding it is really not about the good winning over the bad, nor about the ones who are right winning over those who are wrong, but about healing all of us. All of us. It is about transforming the way we meet ourselves, each other and the world. It might be about radically reinventing ourselves, so that we can embrace each other in compassion, while standing tall with all the fierceness we can gather to protect Life.

Yes, fierceness and compassion, both together. One without the other may not be enough for the shift to happen.

After what seemed like an eternity, the door opened and there was this little and very old woman, with long white hair, wide-open blue eyes and a smiling face: “Well good evening to you, stranger. What can I do for you?” The traveler responded: “I lost my way, completely, and need help. Can I come in?” The old lady responded, with a heart opening smile: “Well, my dear friend, I cannot invite you in as this cabin is big enough for one person only, yet I trust that someday you will have your own cabin too. And I cannot come with you and show you the way, as each person needs to find their own way. Yet, there is one thing I can do to help you, namely, I can give you a light to carry with you, and it will help you find and follow your way. Just give me a moment to find it.”

She closed the door and disappeared for what seemed an eternity, in search of the light to give him – which is quite remarkable given the size of the tiny cabin. Anyway, she opened the door again and offered him, with a joyful smile on her face, a tiny little lantern. The traveler responded in disbelief: “Lady, are you serious? This lantern throws light but a step or so. How will I ever find my way with this crap?” The old lady responded, with sparks in her old yet very alive eyes: “Oooooh, young man, but this is all you need, you see… This lantern will light one step in front of you, and once you cover this one step, you will see another step in front of you, and this way you will, step by step, cover great distances and eventually find your way and your happiness.”

I often get reminded of this story when I find myself facilitating group meetings, mediating in conflicts or when I myself get entrapped in a difficult and disconnected place with my partner. Everything seems dark, no solution anywhere near the sight. This story reminds me of a key ingredient that ensures evolution in such moments, an ingredient that I am still learning to fully integrate into my life: trusting the field.

Namely, from the place of disconnection, from the realm of a problem, of stuckness, I cannot see the solution and in most cases not even a step forward. In fact this goes for everybody involved. We are all caught within the framework of our limited minds and we have exhausted all there was to exhaust in this room. So the frustration and stuckness grows, and nothing new can enter…

But if I choose to trust the field enough to leave the cozy little safe world of “me” and start listening, with all my heart, to the longing that sits in your heart and you have been trying to, to the best of your momentary capacity, express to me, and if I start listening, in all my honesty, to what is the longing in my own heart that is behind all the thoughts I have been having, I will start hearing the deeper meaning that wants to emerge through us. In fact, we all will. And if we start, in all our humble authenticity, letting this new meaning express itself through us, the realm of possibilities will start opening up in this field of ours and slowly, step by step, begin revealing itself to us. Then we will see what we cannot see now, and this new depth will be including all the partial aspects, and transcending them all into a new, truly integrated possibilities.

So, all there is for me to do, in the above situations as well as actually in every moment of my life, is to listen compassionately to your beautiful hearts and express my own, in sheer and humble honesty, and thus keep our field pure and open. And to trust this field in a sense that I keep listening to it attentively in order to hear what wants to be revealed. Then we will integrate it, learn from it, listen to it, and yet another step will be revealed. And so, step by step, moment by moment, revelation by revelation, we keep journeying through this mystery of life.

Not that I am a big fan of Margaret Thatcher, but I do like this quote of hers: “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you are not.” My understanding is that trying to cover one’s vulnerability by putting on the mask of being cool, being right, being a master of life… actually points at some deep wounds in our hearts.

And it is not only puzzling to look around and see how disturbingly deeply wounded most of us seem to be, but it is also heartbreaking to be aware of this deeply wounded human civilization of ours as a whole. Reminds me of Gabor Mate who said that we will probably not find a non-traumatized person on the planet anymore, apart from perhaps a few in well-hidden indigenous cultures. A civilization of beings walking around with deep wounds and scars from our childhoods, doing our best to pretend to be what we think we should be in order to be worthy of love and acceptance. Doing all this in order to hopefully matter. Someday.

I so hope we will heal ourselves a bit and then wound the next generation a bit less, and perhaps one day end up in a society in which there will be so much acceptance, respect, love, care… that we will all, spontaneously, be able to meet each other in our openness, innocence, vulnerability, nakedness… And there will be no need for masks, protective mechanism, hiding our hearts underneath some thick personas.

And until then, I am clear that the idea of connecting with people who are right, who know it all, who are cool, who figured it all out, is really not an exciting one to me. What I am really looking for is a companionship with people who, like me, don’t know… A community of people that are exploring the mystery of life with humility and innocent curiosity, staring in awe into the mystery of life revealing itself in front of our eyes. Yes, I seek the company of not-knowers, the company of curious and humble explorers of the unknown, waling attentively, step by step, from one moment of this mystery on to the next one.

It hit me that if we keep visiting retreats on personal evolution and spirituality and we don’t, every single time after the retreat is over, make bold steps in our lives, even radical changes if needed, in order to align our lives much better with the deeper reality we have just experienced, then we are influencing our experience of human existence in at least two life-alienating and discouraging ways.

Firstly, we are just prolonging the time in which we don’t live our lives to the fullest, in which we don’t reach for what we have been longing for in our hearts, in which we don’t serve our hearts entirely. We keep hanging on in life that is only semi-fulfilling, waiting for some sort of a big bang to happen that will magically change it all… So we may end up spending most of our lives in a way that will cause much mourning and regret once we will be lying on our death bed. Like they say: “…if you keep thinking very long before making a step, you may end up spending most of your life standing on one leg…” You know, like a heron.

And furthermore we seem to be doing something that may be even more painful. On these retreats we keep experiencing heart opening, meaning, depth, connection, beauty, fullness and while this may be immensely fulfilling at the retreat itself, there is this aspect to it of self-inflicting pain. Namely, it seems like, again and again, reminding ourselves of what is possible and then not reaching for it. Opening the wound again and again, and then not healing it.

It becomes a bit like a pendulum of drug addiction. When life becomes unbearably painful and stressful and lonely, I don’t take a shot of heroin to forget it all for some time and find some pleasure, but I go to a retreat. Well, to forget it all and to find some pleasure.

How about taking our lives in our hands, with full responsibility, and making them into such an incredible experiences of flow and meaning and love, that we will never need a retreat from them?

As this human life time is a rather short affair, I encourage us all to take every minute of it with the all attentiveness and care we have.