Peaceful and Powerful Language

Peaceful and Powerful Language

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. -  Rumi

How we speak forms how we create our world.

How we speak is formed/influenced by how we think/feel.

We will be examining our feelings/ our passions/our connections.

We will be challenging you to step our of acting from/being influenced by your fears and stepping into acting from/being influenced by your passions and thereby moving into manifesting your personal dreams. The words we use greatly influence our feelings and actions.

One important aspect is creating a new relationship to aggression and violence both in the world and within ourselves. We are often the most violent/cruel to ourselves.

There seems to be certain forms of language and communication which contribute to our thinking/behaving violently and therefor alienating ourselves from our natural state of compassion/passion. The English language can be particularly judgmental and combative. Speaking in “I statements” is one way to begin identifying our feelings. We have included a list of “Feelings when our needs are getting met” and “Feelings when our needs are not getting met“. Use these to help define feelings and look for the needs under the feelings. Speaking from your feelings and needs encourages self-awareness and transparency.

We will focus on how we use language at different times in the workshop.

One section will look at language and the dynamics of violence.

Let’s look at the roles we play in violence and become aware of ways we can step out of co-dependency.

See the page about co-dependent, co-empowered and bridger triangle.

Persecutor, victim, rescuer – which do you play most often? How does this serve you?

Spontaneity, Exhibitionist, Voyeur awareness, showing who you really are, truly seeing others and acting in the moment.

Supporter, Listener, Challenger being in a non-judgmental place and from there listening, supporting and challenging others into excellence.

How do we eliminate violence from our language?

Some ways to do this in our language are:

We start by taking full responsibility for our own feelings/experience by speak from an I place and staying with our feelings and needs.

Feelings can be misinterpreted as judgements. A simple test is if you can change the sentence to say i’m_________.

For example:

I feel happy becomes I’m happy and the meaning remains the same.

However -

I feel abandoned becomes i’m abandoned and the meaning changes. So you can see that this is more of a judgement/evaluation than a feeling.

They are simple suggestions and often difficult to maintain.

Watching our words – paying attention to what the words we say really mean, noticing if we are saying what we intended to communicate and being willing to “try again” if it didn’t come out as we wished – enables us to change our relationship to ourselves and others. This is an important aspect of creating personal power and co-empowerment.