What we offer
Learning opportunities
To delve into the principles we work with and learn what’s possible through live learning or our immense library of resources
With the exception of extremely few people who still live in intact, indigenous, matriarchal societies, all of us have been socialized away from this way of being that is cellularly imprinted, and made to fit into societies that function on the basis of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness.
One of the foundations of our work within the Nonviolent Global Liberation community (NGL) is an unwavering trust that a different way of living is entirely possible and that we can make these shifts, both individually and collectively, and fully restore our capacity to live in flow, togetherness, and choice. Not in the sky, not in an afterlife, and not somewhere else: here, now, with each other, in ever widening circles.
Although NGL has only existed since 2017, a number of us have been experimenting and teaching for years before. The recent years have accelerated our own learning and our resulting toolkit, and we share all we know in courses that are all offered on a gift economy basis.
Learning Packets, Videos, Audio Recordings, Articles
We also have a wealth of resources, including audio and video recordings, hundreds of written articles, a few books, a few dozen learning packets covering the entire range of the NGL framework, and a self-study course in a unique approach to Nonviolent Communication. With the exception of all printed books and some of the electronic version of the books, all this is available on the Fearless Heart website on a gift economy basis, without a paywall, though we make requests for contribution for some of them.
One of the foundations of our work within the Nonviolent Global Liberation community (NGL) is an unwavering trust that a different way of living is entirely possible and that we can make these shifts, both individually and collectively, and fully restore our capacity to live in flow, togetherness, and choice. Not in the sky, not in an afterlife, and not somewhere else: here, now, with each other, in ever widening circles.
Calls, courses and programs
To see our current calls, courses and programs, click here
Previously offered programs and offerings
Deaccumulation Lab
The purpose of the Deaccumulation Lab is to deepen our collective understanding about how to restore trust in life through experimenting with practices for deaccumulation within community. This 2.5-hour, monthly lab (offered at two different times) is designed around individual coaching and support offered by Miki to people who have committed to being both part of this experimentation and witnessed by those joining the offering.
Please visit our landing page for more details, to register, and to explore resources for more information related to this work.
No previous experience with Nonviolent Communication or the Nonviolent Global Liberation Community is needed.
NVC for Liberation
NVC for Liberation is an approach to sharing Nonviolent Communication that connects the basic building blocks of NVC to the legacy of nonviolence and bring a systemic lens to it.
NVC for Liberation (NVCL) contributes to an awareness of how we got to the individual, collective and planetary conditions we currently live with and how we can actively work towards fully interdependent living.
Our purpose is to share and embody the tools, principles and practices of NVC through a systemic lens and increase the capacity of anyone who learns and shares NVC to reclaim choice and togetherness.
Learn more and access course recordings about Nonviolence for Liberation. You can also delve into some of the materials in Miki Kashtan’s learning packet: “NVC as a Path of Liberation”
Introductions to the Vision Mobilization
These are six-week introductions to this framework which are offered a few times a year. The Vision Mobilization (VM) framework is how we organize into one coherent whole all of the original work that came from Miki Kashtan and is now the NGL framework, as well as all that we have continued to work with and develop within NGL. This framework supports any of us in moving towards vision from wherever we are.
These are offered by Emma Quayle, Eddy Quinn, and A. Yaren Köse, with support from others within NGL. You can learn more here. You can also delve into some of the materials in the “Mobilizing toward Vision” packet.
Convergent Facilitation Intensives
This course is an intensive introduction to Convergent Facilitation, a method developed by Miki Kashtan to support groups in making collaborative decisions that work for everyone even when significant divergences or even conflict are present.
This course is offered a few times a year by different individuals, often by Roni Weiner and Magda Baranska. You can learn more about these intensives, along with other Convergent Facilitation introductory workshops here, and about Convergent Facilitation in general here. You can also download the book The Highest Common Denominator by Miki Kashtan or buy a physical copy here.
Convergent Facilitation Coaching Calls
For people who have taken the intensive or have read the book, we are offering ongoing coaching calls in support of actually implementing and facilitating decisions for groups.
These are offered by experienced Convergent Facilitators as often as possible. You can learn more and register here.
Introduction to the Maternal Gift Economy
This offering is not yet available.
We are beginning to design these offerings, in which we can share with others the principles and practices we have been using within NGL to do everything we are doing. We aim to do everything within NGL based on willingness and within capacity. This means uncoupling giving from receiving and flowing resources to where they are needed, without any coercion. We have no bosses and no employees. And about 30 people are sustaining themselves in whole or part based on money freely gifted to NGL and shared based on needs. All this is what we want to support others in beginning to use and experiment with elsewhere.
Liberation for All: Power, Privilege, and Our Collective Future
In December 2022 Miki Kashtan, Aurélia Saint Just, and Menaka Neotia offered our first course in this area through the NVC Academy. The particular focus of that course was on integrating this lens into the sharing of Nonviolent Communication. We are planning more courses in this area over the coming period.
Introduction to Organizational Systems
This offering is not yet available.
Since 2012, Miki Kashtan has been working with organizations using an approach that focuses on aligning five organizational systems with purpose and values: decision making, resource flow, information flow, feedback flow, and conflict engagement. When the Vision Mobilization framework was synthesized, this approach became an integral part of it, both for individuals and for groups, teams, organizations, movements, and communities, supporting them in moving, as a whole, towards their own vision. The course is intended to support people who want to learn how to work with groups and organizations, either those they are part of or those they serve.
Tools
To put into practice, immediately, to increase capacity
Something basic is not working in how our current systems function. Many of us, all over the globe, know it. And yet most groups and organizations continue to function in the exact same ways that we have inherited from thousands of years of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness. We do this even when we have large visions, when we tell ourselves we will manage to do things differently, or we are actively mobilized to create change.
One of the reasons is that most people don’t know of alternatives.
Here’s where we come in based on our own experience, both within NGL and in working with other organizations and communities. We want to support you in creating the structures that will allow your entire organization to take a leap in the direction of your own vision.
Here’s what it can look like:
Working with your organizational systems
If you truly want to align your work with vision, we can support you to articulate your vision, discern your values from within it, name your purpose based on actual capacity as it exists within the organization, and then align everything else with these foundations. This is careful and delicate work that is based on deep accompaniment, voluntary participation, and a commitment to truth-telling and discovery. It is likely to take many months and move slowly from system to system so that you can keep functioning and attending to purpose even while the deep realignment is unfolding.
Practical implementation support
Beyond setting up organizational systems, being able to function in a visionary way requires specific and ongoing practices that re-groove how individuals and teams function. We can support you here through facilitation, accompaniment, and coaching in multiple areas, such as:
- Converting principles to practical steps for the implementation of new systems
- Reaching collaborative outcomes in areas of high divergence
- Speaking more truthfully and with utmost care
- Sharing impacts usefully, including across power differences
- Integrating the shift to functioning based on needs and willingness
Impact Digestion Support
NGL is now offering 1:1 coaching and accompaniment to restore peace, clarity and balance in relationships. This is available both for individuals and organisations.
Click here to book a session, and read more about the Impact Digestion offering.
Hands-on customized capacity building
Almost all of us are very far from being fully alive, empowered, creative, and collaborative selves. This is because of how much we have internalized “business as usual” approaches. Shifting to a new way of functioning can often accelerate when the capacity to do so increases instead of only relying on agreements to fill the gaps in capacity. Here are some specific training topics that other organizations have found useful, and we can engage with you in finding others that are more precisely tailored to your needs.
- Giving and receiving useable feedback
- Engaging in difficult conversations
- Group and dialogue facilitation
- Collaborative leadership as care for the whole
- Collaborating across power differences
Our experience is that not every organization is a fit for the approach that we use. Here are some questions for you to consider before approaching us:
1. Are you open to aligning means with ends even if it may mean reducing or eliminating profits?
2. Are you committed to functioning on the basis of willingness, without any direct or indirect coercive measures
3. Do you see the organization embracing the principles of radical transparency?
4. Do you trust that the people working within the organization are open to being pulled towards more empowered choices even if it’s uncomfortable?
5. Is collaboration deeply important to you?
If you answered “yes” to all or most of the above, let’s talk. You can contact us here, and one of us will be in touch.
Pathways
To support us, join us, and experiment with us
None of us know what, if anything, has the potential to turn around humanity’s march towards massive and unimaginable destruction on planet Earth. The complex, painful, and simple reality is that we don’t actually know, collectively, how to solve any of our global challenges. Beyond mourning this painful reality, we are each called, both individually and collectively, into deep discernment about what is ours to do in this context.
Our own discernment within NGL has led to identifying our purpose: “To integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation.”
Our work is leading us to learn and discover what is possible for humans and how we can function under optimal conditions of high togetherness and high trust, so that we can then share the results of our experimentation – through offering learning opportunities and tools – with others who are in contexts where the conditions are less optimal.
We are eager to grow our capacity to plant seeds, experiment, and gift the results. Is engaging with us in support of what we are doing part of what’s yours to do? Are you pulled towards putting the fullness of your life energy towards closing the gap between the current global crises and fully interdependent living?
Below are links to four of our experiments.
Each of them relates to one pathway of engaging with us.
Global Myceilum Web: An Emergent Web of NGL Live-in Communities
We envision an interdependent web of Mycelium Communities that spans the entire globe. Our goal is to create a viable, scalable alternative to current systems, structures, and ways of living that are reproducing patterns of separation, powerlessness, and scarcity by sharing resources within and between communities based on needs, impacts, and resources. We focus on anchoring the power of love on the material plane to co-create a local and global culture of nonviolence.
Currently, we are a bunch of very committed people who are moving towards establishing Mycelium communities based on the NGL framework in Spain, the Netherlands, the US and Australia.
Seeding a global maternal gift economy
NGL started in September 2017, and we have been experimenting, ever since, with how far we can go purely on the basis of the core principle of resources flowing from where they exist to where they are needed within willingness.
Liberation from Socialization
From the start, we have been actively investigating deep questions about what needs to be in place for us humans to be able to recover from individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma which gets internalized through patriarchal socialization into scarcity, separation, and powerlessness. We are concerned that the path of individual healing from trauma is too slow for the gravity of what we are facing, and we are exploring when such healing is truly necessary.
Inverting Corporate Structures
In our experimentation, we question everything we’ve been told is true, necessary, or inevitable. We have no taboos or limits on what we are willing to explore. What guides us is the depth of our commitment to nonviolence. We want to create a field of love strong enough to surround the patriarchal field of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness, and bring humanity again to live in flow, togetherness, and choice. Even as we don’t know what it will take, on the practical plane, to generate so much love, we keep humbly taking the next step in our experimentation.