Most religions are big on commandments of one form of another — do this; don’t do that — but few equip adherents with the skills to actually live the way the holy books instruct them to.
This problem is at the root of David Johnson’s life work.
“A lot of my experience of religion when I was growing up, there was a lot of instructions on what you should do — love your neighbour, turn the other cheek — but we’re not practising it,” he says. “And how do you do that? There’s no real discussion of real-life situations where it’s difficult and how do you put into practice what the religions are teaching?”
Johnson was born in England, moved to Ontario with his family as a child and came to Vancouver just over three years ago with his partner in life and work, Ranji Ariaratnam.
The couple met while doing overseas aid work in war-torn countries.
Their work was satisfying — although it left some emotional scars — but their work with people experiencing trauma caused by violence and upheaval wasn’t getting at the root of the problem: how to prevent the violence in the first place.
“We did this work overseas for years, which was important work, [but] it doesn’t address why people actually end up in refugee camps in the first place,” says Ariaratnam, who was born in California to Sri Lankan parents. “So without really being aware, we were searching for something else.”
They found it when her mother handed her a book called Nonviolent Communication by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg. The term nonviolent communication is a bit deceptive and suggests the concept is simpler than the complex practice it really is. The practice is the extension into human communication of the principles of nonviolence exemplified by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., among many others. The two immersed themselves for years in the study of the practice and now offer training for people to learn the techniques.
Nonviolent communication — NVC, for short, and more commonly known in B.C. as “compassionate communication” — assumes that humans are compassionate by nature and that acts of violence, whether verbal or physical, are learned behaviours.
“A lot of people have a very narrow view of what violence is — it’s physical,” says Johnson. “When you look at it in terms of how Gandhi held it, it was nonviolence in the sense of being compassionate to everything and everyone and living in a way that is doing the least harm possible to everyone.”
NVC is founded on the recognition that humans have needs that they attempt to have met through communication. To understand the deeper intentions behind people’s words, we must try to recognize the needs people are trying to meet.
“In mainstream culture we think of food and water and things like that,” says Ariaratnam. “But this is also looking at energies and motivations. Anything anybody does is an attempt to meet a need, such as needs for acceptance, for longing, for love, exploration, learning, there’s a whole range of needs and anything that we’re doing is an attempt to meet those needs.”
The couple plans to return to some of the war-ravaged places they have worked in before and train people in NVC, with the hope that more empathetic communication strategies can prevent future conflicts.
As a spiritual practice — Ariaratnam also calls it a “presence practice,” like yoga — NVC can work for people who are religious and those who are not, she says. For those who do have a religious faith, she says, NVC is a way to live one’s beliefs in everyday life.
“If you really believe somebody is the son of God, then the way you would be a devotee is to live the qualities of that person — not tell other people to do things — but you yourself live those qualities,” she says.
By focusing on understanding another person’s motivations and the needs they are trying to meet, NVC allows people to act toward others in ways that reflect best practices of either religious or humanist approaches to life.
“It’s basically drawing on the wisdom traditions of all the religions and spiritual teachings in the world,” she explains. But Rosenberg “came up with steps and formulas to help people to recognize and get out of their own habits of communication and to actually help people live some of the teachings, like love your neighbour and do unto others and all these kinds of things that people know intellectually but don’t know actually how to do.”
It’s more than about communication, it’s about human empathy.
“If you take these layers away, we have this essence or core within us,” Ariaratnam says. “And if we lived in a place of recognizing that in one another, then violence isn’t possible. NVC is a way to get there.”
@Pat604Johnson
