Sapphire, before she was famous

This music is almost like a texture to the sacred silence, barely music at all. But it sounds, perhaps, like a forest stream caressing pebbles. 

When you hear birds sing, and can close your eyes and be filled with their perfect joy, you are not far from this place. When you see sunlight on leaves that are swaying in the breeze, and that light seems alive, joyful, loving; 

When seeing the light nourishes the light in your own soul… 

Quiet and real, realer than real… 

When you notice that light has an ethereal substance of its own, subtler than any other thing that exists, like the living ghost of an ocean of love, waves breaking softer than a feather, unheeded, against the leaves… 

Images of buildings, trees, streets and people 

All painted over gold.

What we wouldn't do to rub away the paint 

To see the gold

   behind the stains on our laundry 

   underneath the stack of paperwork in the office 

   in the faces of our neighbours 

   in our own.

What we wouldn't do for a lover

To rub our cheek ever so softly

Funny isn't it

It's the softest touch that best reveals 

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Wrote this in a radical unschooling forum. For context, deschooling is the process where a kid who has previously been raised under an authoritarian paradigm gets used to being able to follow their own impulses around how to spend their time. It's often a process where they indulge in extremes of those things they were previously not allowed to do, though this is temporary. (The older the kid the longer this process takes; so as I started my inner process as an adult, it has been a difficult one).

--

My development with self-deschooling continues...

I feel like I've made deep progress in the last couple months, something that I feel is connected to my participation in this community (perhaps not just that the community has helped, though it has, perhaps also I've gravitated here because of the shift in me).

Let's go back fifteen years. I'm about 20, still full of rage, and I've heard of unschooling and deschooling. I decide to deschool myself. And because I'm now expected to transition from enslavement in school to enslavement in a "normal" job, I decide to call this unjobbing.

I quite successfully manage to avoid having a job with a boss for all but 5 months of these fifteen years, which is -- coincidentally or not (not) -- the amount of time I needed a job to qualify for German state benefits. It's been exactly what I needed, relatively speaking, but it hasn't been *objectively* healthy. My life has been EXTREMELY avoidant. If I am one day to teach people how to deschool / dejob themselves, I don't think I'll be exactly a role model like this, at least not for anyone but the most radical.

Deschooling myself has been a thread in my personal development ever since the concept came up for me, but sometimes it's been more in the foreground and sometimes more in the background. I've always been terrified of what I saw as a vicious cycle of getting a "normal" job and letting the obedience conditioning get stronger in me. 

Two things seem relevant now: my study of Nonviolent Communication, which I've mentioned here before, in many ways the antidote to authoritarianism; and my practice of Alchemy (following Catherine Maccoun's writings). Alchemy I would sum up as a deep trust in the processes of a human soul, and a dedication to working with, and not against those processes. 

If I had wanted to have a very functional life, I might have overridden my desire to avoid any trace of social obedience training. It'd have felt like I was killing myself, though, so I did the alchemy approach; I surrendered to this impulse, and trusted. The soul is wise, often wiser than we think when we look at something and label it "lazy" or even "insane".

A year and a half ago I was rewarded with an awakening experience, of a sort -- not like full on enlightenment or whatever, but enough spiritual energy injected into my life that I now feel I could argue with Eckhart Tolle from a place of authority... and anyway, I transformed a LOT, grew a LOT in my manifesting ability, intuition, spiritual attunement, etc. I identify this moment as the moment I became, in general, happy, as opposed to living a story of strife and suffering.

A lot of the time since then has been a process of integration and embodiment of what I've learnt. This year I've been noticing the spring in nature like never before; and inwardly, I feel like I'm in the spring of my life. Or, if I'm in the morning of my life, to use another metaphor, let's say I'm stretching and getting my morning coffee. I'm slowly, slowly getting in gear. (Whoops, yet another metaphor. Hope you can keep up).

In this process, deschooling is becoming an important thread again. I will never live a life of harsh "discipline" -- that much is clear. So how to live a life of inspired action, gentle action, action that does not come from inner "shoulds", inner threats of punishment?

It seems really important to take the perspective of reparenting my inner child, or inner children. Let's take the example of food. I am trying hard to lose weight (30 kilos/60ish pounds down, ten kilos to go) and I'm not satisfied with the approach of completely letting go and eating *whatever*.

But what I've been realising recently, which seems to have been a big "aha" moment for me, is that completely letting go isn't really parenting myself -- peacefully or otherwise. In terms of what I'm doing with my inner child, it looks more like neglect.

And that's the big mistake people keep making with peaceful parenting, right? They assume that if they are to skip authoritarianism, they need to just kind of check out from parenting altogether, right? (How could I be making this basic mistake, I ask myself? In my defense, I have the thought that it's essentially the *only* mistake, the one deeply rooted mistake all others come from). 

So with the topic of eating, I'm tentatively seeing it this way. My inner child who loves to eat (or who is scared of being controlled around eating, and so eats fast and wild) needs my PRESENCE. 

Sometimes, I might see a certain action as dangerous (for example eating so much I get sick), and will use a certain amount of force to restrain myself -- not punish, without any thoughts of punishment, only gentle loving restraint. 

If my inner parent is panicking about how I eat, I'd like to take a moment to consider when such restraint is healthy and necessary, and then once I have a clear idea of that, I can step back with my inner helicopter parenting. 

Then I need to give my inner child PRESENCE. Be lovingly with the part of me that is scared of not getting the food that feels nourishing. Or with the part of me that eats to feel emotionally safe. Or that just wants to enjoy things with abandon and feel alive. 

Be present while I eat. Even if I'm eating like a pig (so long as I've decided that the situation doesn't call for actual restraining). *Especially* then. My inner child needs love all the time, and doesn't need to be judged with words like "eating like a pig" (whoops -- I did it to myself. Sorry, beloved me). 

I believe that with enough love and presence, my tense, defensive inner child parts can gradually relax. In that relaxation will come the opening to genuinely, enthusiastically consider things like... like salad, for instance :) 

Then it won't feel like self discipline.

Then it will feel like joy and self love.

Then I'll be the role model of freedom and healthy self-relationship I dream of being.

This is worth it.

Nonviolent Communication, the philosophy invented by Marshall Rosenberg, isn't easy. Not everyone does it well, but bad NVC isn't the same as a failure of NVC itself.

The NVC structure is not the same as the spirit of NVC. Sticking to the structure religiously is bad NVC, and misses the spirit. Some people use NVC as a substitute for instinctual emotional intelligence; good NVC however should guide you into harmonizing your instincts with your mind.

So far I'm finding that if I try and have half of my communication (in challenging conversations) stick to the structure, that's enough to put things on a more wholesome track. 

I'm writing this because I'm seeing a lot of Social Justice people making cases against NVC, particularly in opinion articles.

I feel quite passionate about these, because I feel they misinterpret NVC, or take bad practice of NVC to be representative of the philosophy as a whole.

Further I think this is possibly disingenuous -- a strawman argument. I suspect the real reason many people don't like NVC is because they're invested in the social structures that make others wrong, which condemn and seek to punish. These things can be gratifying but I believe the healing of the world lies elsewhere. 

I feel so passionate, sometimes angry, sometimes frustrated, because I feel that Social Justice could be so much more effective at ending oppression. If it were gentler and more empathic, requesting and not demanding, it wouldn't provoke such an emotional pushback. Of course we can keep on saying the pushback is wrong, but that doesn't help those we're trying to protect.

It also makes me angry and scared in a personal sense, when I know at any moment in the Social Justice scene I could be called names or told off. I don't need that in order to hear feedback. In fact it makes it difficult to hear feedback, as I need to divert resources to managing the pain it stirs up in me. I don't have a lot of emotional resources -- and there we could talk about structures of privilege if we wanted.

I find the approach of social punishment for misdeeds also strangely disproportionate and contradictory: probably more than half of social justice people eat meat, but no one "calls them out" for it. Killing animals in my opinion is a much greater violence than, for example, doing drum circles (which has been the subject of call outs in the past). We obsess about dreadlocks in Berlin even though Syrian refugees bear the brunt of the racism here. And so on.

With NVC I've found something that I believe holds a key to improving our activism. I'm not great at it. Communication is a skill, one that we might work to improve all our lives. But perhaps that's the key point. NVC means *working* on communication. Social Justice theory, in and of itself, is academic, and expects others to simply hear your theories, no matter how you communicate them. It's not based on the reality of the matter: we're emotive and social beings, not just computational brains on legs.

I feel so strongly about all this I sometimes exhibit an awful irony: I get aggressive and argumentative when talking about NVC. This was my attempt to walk my talk: to communicate as effectively as I can, and not just vent.

So I have the following requests. Please read or watch Marshall Rosenberg himself when forming your ideas about NVC. Please reference Rosenberg himself if you argue against NVC, as I feel other sources are often misrepresentative. 

Please be gentle and respectful in "call out" type conversations and consider alternative social justice methods such as "call ins". And please consider NVC as a practical philosophy for ending oppression.

Finally I'd just like NVC to get a better rap in the Social Justice scene. I feel that there are a lot of fashions and unspoken rules in the scene. Things that are considered "the done thing" or beyond the pale. Fear of social backlash influences how we think and act, and not always for the better. I'm doing my best to do my part in a proactive transformation of the scene by being outspoken. If you feel similar, I'd like to encourage you to join me in this.

Observation/Feeling/Need/Request:

Observation: so far in Social Justice circles online, the outspoken opinions I've seen re: NVC have been strongly negative

Feeling: passionate, sometimes angry

Need: effective activism so we can end oppression together; and more personally, a safe feeling social environment

I had a blog for 10 years. About, broadly speaking, wisdom. (Spirituality, personal development, even social justice; anything philosophical that had an application to life). I lost it partly because of not having the money to pay for hosting, partly because I didn’t believe in the project anymore. It was a relief to let it go.

Perhaps it should have been “just” a tumblr all this time, and it took me this long to learn that I was more of a seeker of wisdom than a teacher. Better late than never, I guess?

Probably, I can do both. But I don’t want to have the pretension of being in a position to help anyone with matters of wisdom. I had a huge mental health crisis a year and a half ago, and one thing it taught me was to see myself as a neuroatypical trauma survivor, still working hard to get to emotional stability and functionality in life - no guru.

Of course, I do have opinions. Maybe even some useful wisdom. But I’ll just try and share it through my musings, journallings, and experiences. Things that work for me, or a journal of my investigations as they happen. One day I want to teach. It’s both necessary for me, and a deep interest, to work on the subject of Wisdom, hopefully until the point of being a master. I’ll know that I’m a master when I’m stable and healthy, and feel peaceful and unconflicted about sharing what I know. Probably, at that point, I’ll not have to convince people to read what I write.