NGL lineage
NGL lineage
Written by Miki Kashtan, NGL’s Seed Founder
I am writing this section in memory of my sister Inbal Kashtan, thought and application partner in the work of teaching and articulating principles and practices that are now part of the NGL framework. Though Inbal died in 2014, three years before NGL was founded, her clarity, depth, and creative thinking are still present in everything I do and write. The learning packets, which are the most comprehensive and succinct articulation of the NGL framework, build on work we did between 2001 and 2007, when she was diagnosed with cancer.
In this page, I am listing, with gratitude and reverence, the core inspirations that have been integrated into what is now the NGL framework through me and later also in collaboration with others. I am anticipating that as more people integrate the NGL framework to the point of being able to co-hold its continued development with me – as some few already are – additional pieces will come into place and support our experimentation. At present, thinking about how to integrate permaculture and aspects of indigenous wisdom are active explorations.
Even as the NGL framework springs from within NVC, which places Marshall Rosenberg and NVC first in the sequence, my thinking has been continually influenced by many other sources, before and since. In this I also see myself as continuing in the footsteps of Marshall, who remained an avid reader, learner, and integrator for as long as he lived.
Beyond him, everything else is organized in chronological order; not in order of significance. What I have chosen to include is not everything that has influenced me, as that would take the length of my life to list. I have chosen elements that I think of as being a “before and after” influence: who I was and what I thought before being exposed to this item is different from who I am and what I think after this exposure.
Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication
The NGL framework was initially articulated by me from within my years of studying, integrating, applying, teaching, and writing about Nonviolent Communication (NVC).
Judaism
Though fully secular and non-observant, I hold reverence for Judaism as a commitment to heaven on earth and deep faith in the purity of human soul.
Feminist theory and practice
Feminism has given me the systemic orientation, conviction that something else existed before patriarchy and can exist again after it, and the commitment to integrative frameworks.
Karl Marx
Learning about and from Karl Marx imprinted in me the deep respect for the influence of material conditions and lived reality of how we deal with resources on who we become as humans, individually and collectively.
Understanding violence:Alice Miller and James Gilligan
Alice Miller and James Gilligan gave me the gift of being able to make sense of the prevalence of violence without assuming that it’s inherent to human beings.
Victor Lee Lewis and Liberation for All
The shortest version of what I got from Victor Lee Lewis is a deep understanding that liberation for all means unconditional, unilateral, and universal solidarity.
Dominic Barter
Dominic “cured” me from the idea that teaching NVC to others is a form of social change by pointing to the necessity of experimenting and applying the principles; contributed to my thinking about systems; and deeply influenced early experimentation in gifting.
Nonviolence
The more I discovered the roots of NVC within movements of nonviolent social change and the more I understood the deep spiritual layer of nonviolence, the more everything in my thinking shifted to ground everything in nonviolence.
Radical liberation: Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, and Manfred Max-Neef
Radical liberation: Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, and Manfred Max-Neef
These four men who are from or worked in Latin America have all experimented with and wrote about the possibility of radical liberation even in the most extreme conditions, faith that I now drink from in dark times.
Frederic Laloux and Reinventing Organizations
Frederic Laloux and Reinventing Organizations
Frederic’s Laloux’s work is the articulation of experimentation done by a number of organizations to reorganize into self-led, life-aligned purpose, and whole being forms even within the world as it is, making it abundantly clear that it’s possible.
Genevieve Vaughan and the Maternal Gift Economy
Genevieve Vaughan and the Maternal Gift Economy
What Genevieve Vaughan has given humanity is yet to be grasped, which is showing the relationship between gifting and mothering as the root of what it means to be human, even as both continue to be denigrated.
The re-commoning movement
I have known about the enclosures and the loss of the commons for many years before encountering David Bollier and Silke Helfrisch and realizing through their work that re-commoning is a move that breaks down the impossible either/or of personal or social transformation, because it’s both, and is on a community scale.
Mary Parker Follett
What I received from Mary Parker Follett is the initial spark to bring NGL into being and the deep affirmation of what I was doing seeing that so much of it was done by her a century earlier without me knowing about it.
My sister Arnina and “The Compass”
There are many modalities for healing from trauma and for liberation, and The Compass feels the most relevant that I am aware of because it includes, within it, a collective understanding of trauma rooted in a systemic perspective.
How we got here: From the biology of love to capitalist patriarchy
How we got here: From the biology of love to capitalist patriarchy
Feminism has given me the systemic orientation, conviction that something else existed before patriarchy and can exist again after it, and the commitment to integrative frameworks.