Interview of Marshall Rosenberg by Susan Perry on NVC - This is an interview of Marshall Rosenberg by Susan Perry. I tried to embolden all of Susan's speech. **************** Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D., is Founder and Director of Educational Services for the Center for Nonviolent Communication, which

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This is an interview of Marshall Rosenberg by Susan Perry. I tried to embolden all of Susan's speech.

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Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D., is Founder and Director of Educational Services for the
Center for Nonviolent Communication, which offers training in 30 countries. Having
initiated peace programs in war-torn areas around the world, he is now based in Switzerland.

Marshall, Aikido technique has to do with communicating with a partner and, although Aikido is a martial art, it is
based on a philosophy of nonviolence. So, on the face of it, Aikido and your project — Nonviolent Communication
(NVC) — seem to be related. Do you know about Aikido? If so, do you see a connection?
I’ve given two seminars for Aikido people, and they have worked very well. One time, an Aikido teacher who was familiar
with NVC opened with an Aikido movement to get the flow and the exchange of energy started before I began my stuff.
That worked out well, since NVC deals with flow and energy exchange.
What is NVC?
NVC is a means of connecting with ourselves and others that allows compassionate giving
to happen naturally.
How did you get the idea for NVC?
From the time I was a child, I’ve been interested in what makes people violent — what
makes people want to induce pain in others. I grew up in a very violent neighborhood in
Detroit. My family moved in just in time for the race riots of 1943. For four days, we
couldn’t go out of the house. We heard that 30 people had been killed in the neighborhood!
So, as a young boy, I thought, “Wow! This is a world where people want to do you in because of your skin color!” When I
went to school, I found out that my name as well as my skin color was a stimulus for violence. Since then, I’ve learned that
differences between people is what makes them so violent. My Uncle Julius came over every night to help my mother take
care of my grandmother, who was completely paralyzed. As a child, I couldn’t wait for him to come, because of the way
he smiled when he was cleaning her up. He would be wiping the shit off of her and smiling like he was getting a gift.
There were people in the streets who wanted to hurt others and then there was Uncle Julius.
What accounted for the difference?
When it came time to decide what I wanted to do with my life, I thought that I would like to heal the people who were
violent. I thought they must have something wrong with them, mental illness,
and that it needed treatment. I was the first person in my family ever to have the
opportunity to go to the university. What do you study to learn how to cure
people of violence? I picked clinical psychology. Just when I was ready to
graduate with my doctor’s degree, I learned the best lesson I ever had in school:
Psychology and psychiatry are based on the idea that suffering is caused by an
illness that needs to be cured. But Professor Michael Hakim helped me see that
the concept of mental illness is a myth that keeps people looking inside
themselves for the cause of their suffering rather than looking at social
structures. For these structures to function, they need people to be educated to
fit into them, and this education guarantees that people will be
miserable. So, Professor Hakim helped me to see that I had just spent nine years
studying something that contributes to violence. When I finally saw this, I
asked Professor Hakim what he offered to help people. “That’s your problem,”
he said. So, my task and calling is to alert the public in the US and other countries to the dangers of the myth of mental
illness and to reveal how psychiatry and psychology play reactionary roles by drawing attention away from the structures
that create suffering.
But, if we abandon the concept of mental illness, how can we understand why people behave as they do?
If Professor Hakim is right, the answer has to do with social structures. How do the structures educate people in a way that
makes them miserable, and how do we change both the education and the structures? I directed myself to answering these
questions. NVC evolved out of my attempt to put together what we can do as human beings to liberate ourselves from the
structures that contribute to violence. How can we relate to ourselves and to others compassionately? How can we replace
the present structures, which are designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, with structures that support
compassionate interaction?
Will you give an example of how social structures contribute to violence?
Our schools, our language, our culture in general are set up to educate people to believe that authority knows what’s right
and that, if you don’t do what authority says is right, you deserve to suffer. So, authority determines and justifies the use of
punishment and rewards in our society. The theologian Walter Wink calls the resulting arrangements domination structures.
We’ve had domination structures for 8,000 years. Our families are domination structures in which parents claim to know
what children must do and try to control the children through rewards and punishments. Our schools, our businesses, and
our governments are set up in the same way. We live within domination structures. I believe that that is why we have the
enormous amount of violence on this planet.
When a psychiatrist labels someone as manic-depressive, is that an example of “domination structure” at work?
Yes, it’s a good example. Research shows almost no agreement among professionals on what they mean by terms such as
“manic depressive.” These terms have no scientific validity. Using them, we confuse value judgments with scientific
judgments. When I lived in St Louis, Missouri, during the Vietnam war, a political group asked me to help them with a
case involving a 21-year-old college student who followed the eastern philosophy of the Middle Way. To protest the war,
this student took some red paint (to symbolize blood) and poured it on a statue, partly because the statue had been donated
to the university by a weapons manufacturer. That was his manner of protest, the Middle Way. When a judge asked the
student to explain his actions, the student said that, as someone studying the Middle Way, he wanted to find a way to
protest that was neither passive nor violent. “What the hell are you talking about?” said the judge. “Your talk about the
‘Middle Way’ doesn’t make any sense!” The student tried to explain the philosophy to the judge, but the judge didn’t
listen. “I’m going to commit you to a mental hospital for observation,” the judge said. “You can come back in two weeks
after you’ve been examined. You sound nuts to me.” A psychiatrist diagnosed the student as schizophrenic, and he was
admitted to a hospital. So, a local group asked me to help him. When I interviewed the psychiatrist, I asked him whether
he knew anything about the Middle Way. He said that he did not. So, I asked on what grounds he had made his diagnosis.
“The student poured red pain on a statue,” he said, “and only a schizophrenic would do something like that.” The
psychiatrist had of course argued in a circle. He based his diagnosis on what the student had done and explained what the
student had done on the basis of the diagnosis, rather than on the basis of the student’s philosophy. For the diagnosis to be
scientifically valid, there would have had to be some independent confirmation of it. Psychiatry and psychology don’t have
logical ways of reasoning. They constantly confuse value judgments with scientific judgments. Yet the psychiatrist that I
interviewed had the power to put the student into an institution. The Russians used to do this; they always put political
dissenters into mental hospitals, never into regular prisons. Later, the same group called me about a 15-year-old woman of
color who had been admitted to a mental hospital for observation. The psychiatrist aggravated her somehow, she had called
him a “motherfucker” and asked him to leave her alone, and he immediately prescribed shock treatment. He had no
scientific reason for prescribing shock treatment. What if he was a motherfucker? According to his diagnosis, almost
everyone in the neighborhood I grew up in was mentally ill. So, I came to see that the field in which I had received my
education was unscientific and politically dangerous because it perpetuates the myth of mental illness. And I looked for
another way of doing business.
How did you arrive at that other way?
When I saw how little clinical psychology had to offer and how little psychologists understood, I wondered where I could
learn how to deal with the causes of violence. I suspected that comparative religion might be the place, and I began a study
on my own. Eventually, I came to the same conclusion as Joseph Campbell: All religions are saying the same thing. “Don’t
do anything that isn’t play,” they say. “And something will be play if our only reason for doing it is to enrich life, to give
compassion.”
OK, but how do you do that?
I studied the people who were living in the way I really wanted to live —people like my
Uncle Julius, who had avoided the misery I saw around me. What were they doing differently from the others? The
answer, I found, was that they placed importance on compassionate giving. They were givers. They seemed to get their
kicks by contributing to other people’s wellbeing. I was also influenced by the psychologist Carl Rogers, who came to the
University of Wisconsin just as I was finishing. When he saw that I was experimenting with different approaches, he asked
me to participate in the research he was conducting on the characteristics of healthy relationships.
We got together a group of psychotherapists, and each was assigned patients who were in mental hospitals. Rogers had us
do our things with the patients and record the sessions. The recordings were examined to measure certain things, and then
those things were correlated with other variables that the hospital psychiatrists used to measure healing. Rogers looked at
what went on between the therapists in these tests that correlated with healing as measured by the psychiatrists.
Were the sessions conducted in the tradition of psychology?
At the time, I was working as a psychologist in a mental hospital. But Rogers brought in people who were in private
practice, and he even brought in lay people who had no training in psychotherapy. The research showed that lay people are
just as effective in psychotherapy as professionals. And this has been confirmed many times.
What factors did correlate with healing?
There were three:
The most important was accurate empathy. The more training one has in psychology, the more difficult empathy becomes,
because theories and intellectual diagnosis get in the way of human connection.
The second factor was honesty, genuineness, or authenticity — talking like a real person and speaking from the heart,
rather than asking questions like a schoolteacher or psychotherapist. (Martin Buber said that healing occurs when two
people have an authentic connection.)
The third was a “warmth” that Rogers called unconditional positive regard. These findings fit well with what I was getting
from theology and what I was observing in people. “These things are important,” I thought. “Let’s teach people how to
empathize and how to be honest from the heart.” So I put together what struck me at the time. I had trained in
psychoanalysis, where the thought was that you had to see a person for several times a week for 3 or 4 years to get
anywhere. So, I was afraid to show what I came up with to my colleagues. The idea that teaching people some simple
skills might help them would have been judged very harshly.
When I was in private practice, I started to use what I had developed. Some people would come in with family problems,
and I would get further in a half an hour by showing them another way of responding to their children than by doing what I
had been trained to do. I was still very skeptical; it didn’t seem to be that it could be that simple. But I got more
confirmation every day. Helping people to develop these skills is far, far more powerful than trying to help them through
psychoanalysis.
How would you like NVC to be received?
I would like all of us to see the power in contributing to each other’s evolution — in contributing to a continuing
development.
In a world informed by NVC, would there be any psychologists or therapists?
Such a world would be like those that exist now in the cultures that anthropologists like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead
have studied. This afternoon I’m going to present a section on Nonviolent Communication and mediation, but I don’t like
the word “mediation.” I prefer the term my friend Bill Ury uses: third sighting. (The name of his new book is The Third
Sight. He’s well known for his first book with Roger Fisher called Getting to Yes, a book on conflict resolution.) In
addition to his work on conflict resolution, Ury is an anthropologist. He has studied cultures that have mediation built in to
them. In those cultures, they don’t talk about mediators, but about third-siders. If you have a conflict with somebody, they
say, “Call in a third-sider.” I would like us all to have the skill of a third-sider.
NVC seems to focus on the language that people use when dealing with one another.
I teach people how to recognize what we teasingly call jackal language — life-alienating language that is necessary in our
culture for the maintenance of status.
Does showing people how to recognize “jackal language” help with problems like depression?
Yes. We show people how to use depression to identify the thinking that makes them depressed, and then we show them
how to transform that thinking into life-serving thinking — thinking based on needs. When we do this — lo and behold! —
the depression is replaced with other feelings. We say that depression is caused by life-alienated violence-provocative
thinking. Thinking of this sort is cut off from life, and it makes us think that there something wrong with us. That’s how
people are educated. Some of the first phrases they hear are “bad boy” or “bad girl.” They hear this when they’re doing
something that doesn’t meet the parents’ needs. Then parents use guilt as a tactic for influence: “It hurts me when you
behave that way.” People become depressed when they are treated this way.
People call the depression an illness, and that makes the
pharmaceutical companies happy. About 41% of the population
take pharmaceuticals or anti-depressant medicine.
I don’t think that depression is an illness. I think it’s an
inevitable consequence of how we educate people.
Once people get the label, they go in and get diagnosed (if
they have the money), and then they get medication to silence
the inner voices that are calling them names. They feel a little
better because they are spiritually dead.
After feeling horribly depressed, being deadened feels
good. That’s one of the reasons why people use alcohol.
Drinking also meets two or three other needs, such as the
need for belonging. In our culture, many people off in singleunit
apartments spend their evenings watching television. If
you stop off in a bar almost anywhere in the US and buy
everyone a round, you would immediately have a community.
You go in every night, and everyone knows your name.
In bars, people drink, and some of the anger that they
don’t know how to deal with comes out: “Oh, my wife’s a bitch!”
And other people agree: “Yeah, women are bitches.” That’s
not high-class empathy, but its more than many people know
how to get in other ways.
People are taught that there is something wrong with
them for doing this, but I think it’s the best way they know
of for meeting their needs. I have no doubt that, once we
identify the needs, we can find better, less costly ways of meeting them.
The TV show Cheers was about that kind of thing.
I first saw this clearly when I was working in a mental hospital. It was built in to
the structure that people would stop off on the way home from work and drink. It was the best way for them to meet a
variety of needs. These people were labeled alcoholic. It seems to me that such labeling causes many of our problems. The
language of labels is static, but life is a process that is always changing. The static tool teaches us to ask “What am I?”
instead of “What are my needs, and what can I do to get them met?”
So, when we learn the language of NVC, we adopt a processoriented view of things?
Yes. And, having changed our lives in this way, we can start looking at how we can use this process we call Nonviolent
Communication in social change. How can we go about changing the structures that perpetuate the problems? How can we
create life-serving structures instead of domination structures?
It isn’t enough that we communicate better with ourselves or communicate with others in a compassionate way. We’ve
also got to create structures that support compassionate giving rather than maintaining the present structures, which foster
violence and competition.
Imagine that an employee isn’t working to capacity. An employer might threaten, ”Change your ways, or lose your
job.” How might the scenario go if the employer had studied NVC?
In the alternative scenario, we see the leader as a servant rather than as a control. This is a concept developed by Robert K.
Greenleaf. On this view, the leader’s job is not to control the employee but to provide expertise that can serve the
organization and its employees. In the structures we create — families, businesses, and governments — we want the leaders
to be servants.
About thirty years ago, I made a similar point about teaching and learning in a book titled Mutual Education. Teachers are
not controllers who force children to learn but servants in service to the students. Similarly, parents are not controllers; it’s
not their job to make children behave. As servants, parents must understand what the children need.
To serve the people they manage, managers would need to be aware of the wants and needs of those around them.
What response do you get when you urge business leaders to understand the needs of their followers?
When I work in corporations I very often hear, “You can’t talk that language around here. Who gives a damn what people
feel and need. No one here cares about anything but profit.” One of our trainers in Hungary has a high position in a tobacco
company. I asked, “How does it feel to spend so much of your life in the production of something that kills people?” and
his response was “Nobody forces them to buy it.” But this guy is very intelligent; he knows how stupid his response is. So
you know that it must be horrible to have this job.
The organizations that we try to create have life-serving missions. If your organization does not have a life-serving
mission, radically transform it. Don’t do anything for money. Life is too short. Have an organization that serves life. When
you do that, you don’t need punishments and rewards. It’s rewarding just to do the work when it’s serving life.
That’s a wonderful message.
It’s very radical, too. It can get you killed in some countries. “You say a lot of nasty things about your government,”
people often ask me. “Do you have any good things to say about it?” “Yes,” I reply, “I’ve said many critical things about
the government, but they haven’t killed me.” In other countries, I might have been dead in a week. But, here in the US, I
can say these things, and they don’t kill me. [laughs]
When you try to talk about NVC to your old colleagues at the mental institution, do they put up a stone wall?
The wall is described very poetically by Marshall McLuan when he says that, when people have invested much of their
lives in a single way of looking at things or doing things, change of any kind is not just an innovation, but an annihilation.
In the US, many of the difficulties I have faced have been in working with parents and teachers. When I suggest that
punishment and rewards are a losing game, it destroys everything they believe in. “If you don’t punish and reward,” they
say, “you’ll have anarchy. People will just do what they want!” I used to work with ministers in Texas, and I would hear a
lot of this. They would give me about 20 passages in the Bible that advocate punishment. Punishment is one of the most
frequent themes in the Bible. Not long ago, I was in Rome working with religious sisters and priests. On the second
morning, there were eight people waiting outside the door who were upset with what I had said the day before. One, a
religious sister who clearly had been up all night, said, “You’ve destroyed everything I believed in. You said it’s OK to do
anything you want.” I’m glad we had another couple of days, because my message is not an easy one to get across. I
wasn’t advocating permissiveness or anarchy — just talking about ways for maintaining organizations and structures other
than the ones we now have. When I work in the field of psychiatry and psychology, people are kinder than they were in
Rome. In fact, they give
me a free diagnosis. For example, when I worked in a mental
health center in Peoria, Illinois, I suggested that our way of
thinking of patients was worrisome because it got in the way of
seeing them as human beings. Quoting research to document
this, I told them that we would be much better off talking to
patients as human beings from the heart. One woman
psychiatrist said to me, “Dr. R, don’t you see than when you
talk about your own feelings and needs in a therapeutic
relationship, you’re allowing your own narcissism to interfere
with your ability as a psychotherapist?” Another psychiatrist
rose in my defense saying to the first, “Don’t you see that you
are projecting your narcissism on this man?” I was thinking,
“Woody Allen, where are you? Here’s a movie for you.”
[laughs]
I don’t try to upset psychiatrists and psychologists, but
I haven’t found a gentler way to introduce them to the
thoughts that mental illness has very little scientific validity,
that it perpetuates social problems, and so forth. It’s a hard
message to hear. I spent nine years learning how to do
something, and then Michael Hakim showed me the dangers
of it. I know how upset I was when he destroyed my career
by showing me the limitation of what I had been thinking.
(Incidentally, one of my colleagues warned me not to take a
course from Michael Hakim, saying, “He’s really sick.” There’s one way to deal with the differences: put a label on them.)
Aikido is usually described as a harmonious and peaceful art, people have to do violent things to learn it: there is a
great deal of inner struggle and fighting. It sounds as if NVC may be violent in the same way.
NVC requires a very courageous forward step. In a refugee camp, a man about 70-years-old heard me introduced by an
interpreter as an American. He jumped up and yelled at me. He was coming at me. A friend, Dean Perry, had showed me
that in Aikido you don’t come back with the same energy, and I didn’t. Rather than coming at him in the way he was used
to, I said, “Are you feeling furious because your need for support isn’t being met by my country?” I wasn’t being passive; I
was trying to transform his energy. “You’re damn right,” the man replied, “we don’t have housing, and we don’t have
sewers. Why are you sending weapons?” “Sir, I understand you,” I said. “I know how painful it is when your basic needs
aren’t being met and you see all these weapons are being sent.” “Do you know what it’s like to live under these conditions
for 28 years?” he asked. He wanted some understanding. How horrible those conditions must be for one day, let alone 28
years! Forty-five minutes later, the guy invited me to dinner at his house. I tried to transform the energy into a life-serving
energy.
In Aikido, we talk about blending — about understanding where a person is coming from and respecting the force.
By respecting the force, you show an empathic connection. You don’t say, “You shouldn’t be coming at me that way!” No,
the attack is coming from the life energy. I try to hear the life energy, to understand where it’s coming from, and to
transform it from violent energy to life-serving energy. That takes time, and many of the people I work with (including
some police) ask, “What if a person is coming at you physically?” “Then,” I say, “you have to use protective force. You
study Aikido or something like that. In those situations, you don’t have time to talk.” And sometimes it’s a whole army
coming at you, not just one fist. There are very good books on the subject of how to apply these principles when there’s an
army coming at you, such as Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action. These books record how, throughout
history, Aikido-like moves have been made by groups of people against armies and governments — moves that are neither
passive nor violent. So, of course, when I’m in a place like Rwanda, I need to recognize we’re often up against situations
that need these other arts.
Are you interested in eastern philosophy?
Some Buddhists are very upset by what I say. They say that we don’t have needs according to Buddha, but my process is
based on needs. But I don’t think the Buddha denied that we have needs, such as our need for food or air. I think Buddha
told us not to be addicted to our strategies. And I think Buddha warned against confusing needs with requests. In our
training, we distinguish between requests and needs. That’s my interpretation.
You’ve trained many people in NVC. What is the hardest part to get across?
The hardest part of the training is to keep the purpose in mind. That’s what I have to go over again and again. The purpose
is to create a quality of connection necessary for everyone’s needs to get met out of compassionate giving. I do everything
I can to get people to understand this. In a culture that teaches people that what works is getting your way, it’s not an easy
thing to remember this and integrate it into your life. The spirit behind the process is the hardest part for people to
remember.
Let’s take an example — say, a woman whose son refuses to do work around the house. The woman insists that the
son help out, but he still refuses. In this situation, how can everyone’s needs be met?
The woman has a need for order in the house and a need for support in creating that order. The problem seems to be that
her request was a demand. She is after getting her way, and she measures what works by how well she gets others to do
what she wants. Since she makes the request her objective, her son hears it as a demand. That threatens his autonomy and
makes it very hard for him to care about her needs. This is a message we need to keep sending parents who were educated
in a culture that taught that it’s their job to make children behave — and to teachers who were taught
that it’s their job to make the students do certain things. We’re used to pushing and forcing others to do things.I’m not
saying that parents and teachers should ever give up or give in. The purpose of NVC is to create a quality of connection
that allows everyone’s needs to be met in compassionate giving. My new book Life Enriching Education gives an overview
of the life-enriching schools we’ve created in several countries. The most successful are in the Middle East — 76 in Israel
and several in Palestine.
From the beginning, our schools are designed to educate parents, teachers, and students in the NVC language and to
look at the structures to see whether they support — whether they are based on serving life rather than on domination.
We’re pleased at how these radical schools are doing. Studies in Israel show a 50% decrease in violence in the 76 schools.
And the head of our first school has been made the head of a national commission to prevent violence in school.
That’s wonderful. Do you have schools in the US?
Yes, we hope to start some in Cleveland, Ohio, and we have some in Arizona. But we don’t have as many in the US as I
had hoped.
How did you get started with these schools?
A teacher, Bill Page, came to me and asked to talk to me
privately. “What would a class look like with an [NVC]
process?” I loved that question.
“Marshall, if I don’t find another way of teaching,” he said,
“I am going to quit. Do you know what teaching is? Teaching
is 30 empty glasses lined up in a row — the kids. The teacher
has a pitcher full of milk, and the instructions are to pour in
the milk into the glasses. At the end of the semester, you’re
left with 30 dirty glasses and a pitcher filled with dirty, tainted
milk. I don’t want to play that.”
Page created a proposal that he took to the school board.
They said that they had some 12-year-old students that didn’t
learn anything, but just caused trouble. They said to take 30
of the students and try our crazy program. That was our first
classroom. It wasn’t even a school — just a classroom.
The program was a success. For every three months in it,
the students averaged 18 months of academic achievement.
They were learning six times the rate of regular students! We
got some money from the Ford Foundation to research this.
After one year in the program, the students went back
into the regular program, and we followed their work for the
next four years. The students who were in our program didn’t
continue to learn as fast, but they were far better off than they
had been before. They went back into the other program to be
dehumanized, but at least they had one year for learning with
joy and fun.
What would an NVC world look like?
An NVC world would have an economic system in which
everyone’s needs were being met. We have the resources; we
don’t have to have 20,000 people or so starving everyday. But
we don’t have the system. We need a radical transformation in
the economic system.
Another other major change would be in the concept of
justice. We must pay tribute to justice. Nonviolent
Communication is now being used to restore justice to the
program.
In all our trainings, I do everything I can to make people
conscious and to teach them what to do to develop their
consciousness. And we would have protective services — armies and
police trained to protect.
An NVC would be a radically different global system. Right
now we are working to see how we can train people who will
join global coalitions to bring about the radical transformations.
Are these changes happening?
Oh, yes. They have been happening for quite a while.
Thousands of people have been working at it, and they are
very powerful. We obviously haven’t reached a critical mass of
people yet. But you don’t need to have 100% of the people
radically educated to cause transformation — just a small
percentage. We are getting there.
Earlier, you mentioned “protective force.” Will you say what you
mean by that phrase?
When our needs are in danger, we need to take action to protect.
Let me give you some examples:
A child is about to run out onto a busy street, and I yell
out to the child. But he steps onto the street anyway. I say,
“I’m going to put you in the yard where I don’t have to worry
about you getting hit by a car.” Now think about the difference
between that and punishment. My thinking was oriented toward
the child’s need for protection; my intention was not to make
him suffer for his evil deed but to protect. That’s not too hard
to see.
Now what if my next-door neighbor is raping someone? I
have to use force with a couple of my friends and take the
rapist to prison. But, in a good prison, the idea behind use of
force is not punishment, but education. So they control the
environment with protective use of force.
One of the most effective projects in the US is the freedom
project in prisons, which started in Seattle. Lucy Leu is helping
out with that program. They are helping prisoners to get out
and supporting groups for helping prisoners get out.
Has there been any research on prisoners getting out?
Yes, Lucy is getting that pulled together. She has a stack of
testimonials about exactly how they did it.
Recently, one of the prisoners went with me to Puerto Rico
and one to Germany. They communicated very powerfully to
people how they used their training to stay out of prison once
they got out and how their training radically transformed how
they see themselves and other people. It was a very precious
experience. You could tell very quickly that they are not just
trying to con their way out of something.
Is there anything that you’d like to add?
Yes. If someone straps on a bomb and kills 30 people, he or
she can get some attention from the news. But there are other
people whom you don’t usually see in the media — an
international army of people making good use of training
themselves and others, teaching people to do their jobs better.
I’m excited about doing interviews (like this one) about
movements that seem to be along the same line as Aikido. I
really respect what ATM is doing. I know how hard it is to get
people to see a different way when they’ve been trained in a
different system.
Looking at today’s world, many people think that we cannot
manage our way out. I’m well aware of the problems, but I see
that people have energy for transforming — and this gives me
my optimism. In a short amount of time, we can do a lot.
I would like to experiment further with how Aikido and
NVC might work together. I’m not sure how to pursue that yet
but, if people are interested, I’d like to hear their ideas.