Beloved Divine Energy

When people ask me about Nonviolent Communication (NVC), I usually begin by describing the four basic components of the process -- observations, feelings, needs, and requests. But that kind of introduction fails to convey the real essence of NVC.
Marshall Rosenberg, who created (or 'discovered') the NVC process, views it as a "spiritual practice" and a "way of life," part of the tradition of nonviolence promoted by Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Jesus.

At the heart of this practice is Rosenberg's concept of God, which he describes as a "beauty" and "powerful energy" that awakens in us our natural joyful desire to give to others. His preferred term for God is "Beloved Divine Energy". According to Rosenberg, the technique of NVC is simply a tool that allows us to connect with Beloved Divine Energy. In an interview about spirituality and NVC, Rosenberg says:

"I’m connected with Beloved Divine Energy when I 
connect with human beings in this certain way. Then God is very alive for me. Also talking with trees, talking with dogs and pigs, those are some of my other favorite ways."

I myself have felt this Beloved Divine Energy numerous times when I've used --or tried to use-- Nonviolent Communication. On one recent occasion, I had found myself in an emotionally "ugly" place during a conversation with A-----.  I had been trying to talk about certain religious experiences I had undergone, and when A-----, who did not realize I was seeking a lot of empathy, appreciation, and affirmation of my experiences, failed to meet my needs, I felt deflated, annoyed, and just generally "bla".

At first, I was not aware of any of my own needs. And when I started feeling discouraged and uncomfortable, I was very tempted to label the conversation a failure and give up, judging myself as "immature" for letting my listener's perfectly reasonable and respectful response ruin my mood just because he had failed to be quite as excited as I had been.

I've experienced this sort of deflation many times in the past, and I've often become quite annoyed at myself for losing steam so easily and entering into a sort of "dead" state of heart and mind. On these recent occasions, as usual, I felt afraid and frustrated as I sensed myself reliving that old pattern of dampening spirits, defeating my own chances of achieving the connection and appreciation that I had been seeking in the conversation.

But rather than dismiss those "immature," "dead" feelings and try and move past them, I remembered Nonviolent Communication (remembering the process is a crucial first step to using the process!). Albeit a bit grudgingly, I decided to try and get in touch with my feelings and needs. A----- and I had discussed NVC at length in the past and it was not our first time experimenting with it, so I was thankful to at least feel comfortable attempting NVC in the conversation.

In the first instance, as I began to express what I was feeling, we began to realize that we had both felt discouraged and disheartened in recent conversations about spirituality because we both had strong needs for appreciation, empathy, openness, connection, understanding, and love. Yet, having identified those needs, I stayed with the process and expressed that I still felt discouraged and hopeless. I said that I didn't know how we could meet each other's needs, given our strong feelings and opposing intuitions about religious matters.

It was around that moment when I started thinking more clearly and creatively, and I felt Beloved Divine Energy descend upon us and our interaction. We began to brainstorm how we might possibly be able to meet each other's needs for empathy and appreciation, while still meeting our own needs for security in our own intuitions and convictions. As we stayed with the NVC process, solutions began to bubble up, and I felt growing hope and excitement. We realized that we could acknowledge and affirm one another's spiritual experiences while also maintaining and celebrating our own. We could even have differing intuitions about what those experiences meant, and what was ultimately true, while remembering that on some level we do not know whether our conclusions are right, so that while listening to one another, we can suspend our skepticism and judgment in the human humility of "non-knowing," and affirm the reality of one another's experiences and the validity of our attempts to understand and interpret those experiences.


These solutions that we came up with (which, after the conversation, I translated into a UN-style resolution for the members of our relationship to sign, both humorously and sincerely), I will not describe at further length here.

The point in my relating this incident is to illustrate how the NVC process brought us into a palpable force-field of Beloved Divine Energy. Later, reflecting upon the conversation, A----- and I both recalled the almost magical transformation of our conversation and mood. We went from feeling frustrated, hopeless, and alone, thinking in futile circles about a seeming impasse in our relationship, to feeling a vibrant energy, full of connection, ease, hope, freedom, and love. And that energy, Beloved Divine Energy as we might call it, brought not only a new mood, but clarity and creativity to our minds. What had seemed unsolvable suddenly became a friendly doorway to a new adventure. And we were grateful to those "ugly" feelings that had prompted that brief and powerful journey to Beloved Divine Energy.


I think the following words from Carl Rogers (taken from Rosenberg's book) aptly explains how Beloved Divine Energy can come to dwell with us when we use NVC to speak, and particularly when we are listened to with the kind of empathy that NVC allows:

"When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens. How confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard."