The Language of Love / Empathy
✍️ My Journey with NVC (Non Violent Communication) - Part One
Only Love Can Do That
Addis Ababa, July 1991. After 14 years in power, the brutal regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam had fallen, and Tigrean soldiers now enforced a strict curfew. One night, ignoring all caution, we were drinking our stress away at the last place open in town, the bar of the Hilton. On our way home, we chose secondary roads, thinking we would make it unnoticed. The city was black and silent. It was risky, but sometime you just need a break. Or may be we were just numbed by years of adrenaline.
We saw the checkpoint. In seconds we sobered up and hyper vigilance kicked back in. Headlights off. Cabin lights on. Windows down. Hands visible. We knew what to do.
Two soldiers approached, one on each side, AK47s aiming at us. They ordered us out without a word. We complied slowly, hands up, holding a calm that only the imminent possibility of death can confer. One soldier directed me toward a wall. I stood there. No cover. No escape. For a moment I stared at the small black hole, a couple of feet away from my face, and his finger resting on the trigger.
Tigrean fighter were preceded only by their reputation. “One shot, one kill” was their war moto. Check points were tense, held by young men hardened by years of brutal insurgency. They were known to always keep a bullet in the chamber and the safeties off.
My mind scanned through a couple of logical options: They don’t want to shoot… but they won’t hesitate if they have to. I can’t speak to him… we don’t share a language. My only word of Tigrean is Selam (peace). What now?
In moments like this, time collapses into now. No room for plans, no room for panic. I reached for his eyes. I soften my face, relaxed but not too much, not smiling either. Just soft. Calm. Present.
And something shifted: my focus moved away from me and my imminent mortality. I saw him. He was about my age. I felt his life. Poverty. Famine. War. May be a wife and kids he has not seen in months.
I connected to the fatigue. The hunger. The absurdity of the war he is engulfed in. The longing for a different life. But not with words. With silence. I emptied out. I felt him. I was present with him. Or may be he was present in me.
And when all noise faded, there was only one thing left: the choice to love.
And love was saying: I see you. I am no threat. I trust your humanity.
It was a silent offering, a mantra of the eyes.
I had a flash of MLK’s:
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1963)
They searched the car, more by formality. They muttered among themselves. And they let us go. It felt good to be alive. We drove home for another drink.
That moment stayed with me. Although it took me years to learn how to articulate it.
The quickest way to de-escalate violence is empathy.
Silence. Connection. A deep listening to the other person’s soul.
I can’t say love saved me, for I don’t know any other outcome. I just know something cracked opened in me at the time. Like many times before, the presence of death taught me something deep about life.
The Art of Being Empty
Empathy is not sympathy.
Sympathy is when I feel for you. Either I feel sorry, or joy, or maybe I connect with an experience in my life that is similar to yours, it feels like connection. But in sympathy there is a distance, a separation, I am here, you are there. I can relate to your experience but I am not truly with you in it, because I keep my own reference to it.
I am not empty yet.
Empathy is different.
In empathy feel you and I am not here to interfere. I have made all the space needed inside me to be present with you, in your experience. I am a white screen and will not distort the image projected. I can stand within your emotional experience without being part of it. My inner voice is quiet. I am utterly perceptive, and with no personal reference coming online.
Empathy relies on the art of being empty,
so I can perceive another person’s truth without interference.
I don’t have to like, dislike, agree or have any opinions or intentions. It is pure witnessing at its deepest level.
It says I hear you. I feel you. You’re safe here.
Empathy Is Self-Empathy
Empathy is first and foremost self-empathy.
To be able to listen to someone that deeply, I must first learn to listen to myself.
To be silent within, I must have spend enough time listening to what wants to be heard within me, otherwise, that voice will come online at every occasion.
Like a nagging noise, wanting recognition, attention, care.
Until this voice is heard and met, I wont be able to acknowledge another fully. Until acknowledged, my voice will speak over theirs. I won’t be attentive to them, but to my own unmet needs that I have abandoned within myself. This inner neglect become reactivity. My own feelings of being misunderstood, hurt, unsafe come online and I would project them onto the moment. In such case, I cannot be fully with someone, because a part of my bandwidth is still with me.
Self-empathy require me to sit with my own truth, all the way to the end of it. Until it is heard, acknowledged, pacified. Until I make no more stories about it. Not thinking about it, but feeling it through, until the reason it’s present in me reveals itself. Until I see the need behind it. Until I am at peace with it’s perfection, even when it is unpleasant.
For that reason, self-empathy requires me being alone, more often than most people like to. If my needs are not met with my own presence, I will expect someone else to meet them. And if they don’t, a trigger will appear. A story will unfold: they don’t care, they are not listening, I am not safe.
But when I have listened to myself, deeply, truly, the tension dissolves. I can be present again. Empty again.
Taking care of myself is not selfishness. It is respect. For me. For others.
I am responsible for my emotional well-being so it is not a burden on anyone else.
It is my inner listening that makes it possible to listen to others.
In November 2008 I spend a month in Silence at Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu Nepal. It wasn’t a silent retreat, I chose to be silent among others who could speak freely. The first few days were challenging. I had to sit with my desire to contribute, to participate in the conversations around me. Yet being silent, I had time to look at my desire behind my intended contribution, only to realize it never was intended to give anything to other.
The words I saw, had little value for anyone else.
They were mostly expressions of a deep desire to be seen and heard.
With that clarity came a wave of humility, almost shame. I saw my own immaturity. I promised myself to become more conscious of the real intentions behind my contribution going forward, and to listen to myself enough so no one else would have to.
At the time of the story above, I have not done this inner work yet. It is the intensity of the situation that created the emptiness needed. In many ways, my adrenaline addiction was an addiction to presence, to experience the silence beyond all the distractions.
NVC Transformed Me More Than Any Other Practice
I first read Marshall Rosenberg’s “NVC the language of Life” in 2007 during a yoga training. Like most people, I learned the basics:
Describe the facts,
Express the feeling,
Identify the needs,
Make a request (not a demand).
But it didn’t go much deeper.
Ten years later, someone asked me, "Have you read this book?" - “yes” I answered casually. The same person brought it up again a month later. This time, I paid attention. I read it again, and it was a revelation!
I realized I hadn’t been ready the first time. I had read the book with my mind, but the second time, it touched me differently. Much deeper. It felt like a relief, like the person who had written it could understand me.
Be warned, this is a common scenario. The book is a transmission. And sometimes, transmissions only land when we’re ready to receive them.
My invitation is to do an intensive training offered by the Center for NVC. You ‘ll find them here. It was one of the most profound experience in self-development I have ever experienced.
And NVC, like all transmission, is best taught through example and experience.
In the following post, I will bring light on what NVC defines as “Strategy & Need”, with the following chapters:
Everything We Do Is a Strategy to Meet a Need
Conflict Only Arises from Our Strategies
Attachments To Strategies Makes an Abundant World Scarce
What We Really Want (Strategies vs Needs)
Language As the Architecture of Consciousness
The Tantric Alchemy of NVC: the Magic Of Being Heard
🌀 This post is part of the “Change Your Story Companion Workshop” — a 12-week journey to rewrite your inner narrative and transform your life.
PS: “Change Your Story, Change The World” is a storytelling endeavor that looks deeply into the psyche that creates the stories we live by—with the intention to help us shape better stories, both personally and collectively.
Because the stories we tell are not just stories—they are the reality we live.
I love how you really cut through all the other forms and get to the core of what empathy truly is, the true flavor of what emptying the self is really like. I’m glad you were able to see that soldier and that he felt you see him in a way that shifted the energy, and maybe the course of both your lives. I wonder if I can see my own family (of origin) members in this way and if it would be received or just dismissed. Do you think it is true that something in that soldier wanted to be seen by your heart?
This is a lovely and wise article. Thank you for sharing it
. Your interaction with the soldiers is a powerful example of how NVC and similar approaches can impact our world.