“Most important, once we study NVC we can’t ignore the potential for transformation that lies in any difficult relationship – if we only bother to communicate with skill and empathy.”

The reason we get overwhelmed is that we’re attached to a certain result or taht we want to achieve a certain result or that we to achieve a certain goal.

You can’t do the same stroke coming down a small stream as you would coming down Niagara Falls.

If we weren’t attached we wouldn’t be overwhelmed. It’s endless. And we just take one step after the next

Let me give you a wonderful Zen practice. Wake up in the morning…look in the mirror, and laugh at yourself.

The extraordinary language of Nonviolent Communication is changing how parents relate to children, teachers to students, and how we all related to each other and even to ourselves. It is precise, disciplined, and enormously compassionate.

Even if you’re only rowing down a stream, different things happen: maybe the wind changes, maybe the current, and suddenly everything’s different. So gently is really important.

In that state you’ve immediately raised the mind of compassion, because if nothing is in, everything is in, and you are now free to experience yourself as the world.

I always tell people that if you get upset over what someone says, imagine him or her with a clown’s nose on and you won’t get so angry.

The basic problem, actually, is how to get rid of the idea that we’re going to get rid of our problems. Only then can we relate directly with the real issues of our life.

Don’t make a whole to-do about it. Don’t get down on yourself be- cause you’re not an expert rower; don’t start reading too many books in order to do it right.

Don’t power yourself or blast through; rock with the way things are.

Each of is an arm of Kannon, enabling Kannon to do her work. Like her, we’re also overwhelmed, but when we reallize that the millions of pieces are all operating as one, then there’s no problem.

I honor businesses for what they do, I honor nonprofits for what they do, I honor government for what it does, and then I invite everyone to the table so that together we can come up with innovative and broad-based solutions that can serve as many people as possible.

It’s very rare to be in a state where there’s nothing in, where you have no attachment to any idea or concept about yourself.

When I spend time with students, they tell me that they’ve read something in a book or heard something from a teacher that they don’t think they’re living up to. And I tell them, “Take care of yourself right now.

When you care about perfection, you care about an expectation. But there is also caring for where I am right now, for what’s happening right now.

Prayer is not a matter of getting what we want the most.

Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It’s the most loquacious of all. You really can’t get a word in edgeways.

Lovers of the town have been content, for the most part, to say they loved it. They do not brag about its uplifting qualities. They have none of the infernal smugness which makes the lover of the country insupportable.

The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

There’s no precedent for women philosophers and there’s no precedence for most of the things I did.

It is a fact that all women contribute more to marriage than men for the most part they have to change their place of living, their method of work, a great many women today changing their occupation entirely on marriage and they must even change their name.

I’m mostly self-taught. I didn’t learn much in school.

One of the central lessons I have learned after a half century of working in the developing world is that the replacement of fear by hope is probably the single most powerful trampoline of progress.