BEHOLD BELOVED BECOMING
Behold, int. – a call to attention. v. - to take in (with one’s knowing); to attend to,
regard, consider.
Beloved, adj. loved. n. one who is loved, that which is loved.
Becoming, n . a coming to be.
To see with wonder! Our own and others divinity! Life’s longing for life, the freshness of our unfolding!
To be so present to our Self or an Other, noticing our thinking as we are thinking it, bringing will into thinking, such that we begin to wonder about the longings that are calling to us from the future; life's longing for life, that which moves us forward. To know, to matter, to be seen, to be understood.
To then bring thinking into will, as we make our Love visible by our deeds, one of these, the gift of Empathy. Staying ever curious and spacious, allowing the seeing of our own and others becoming.
As we develop our capacity for this, we grow our generosity, wonder, patience,intuition and inspiration! We become more free to come from Love.
regard, consider.
Beloved, adj. loved. n. one who is loved, that which is loved.
Becoming, n . a coming to be.
To see with wonder! Our own and others divinity! Life’s longing for life, the freshness of our unfolding!
To be so present to our Self or an Other, noticing our thinking as we are thinking it, bringing will into thinking, such that we begin to wonder about the longings that are calling to us from the future; life's longing for life, that which moves us forward. To know, to matter, to be seen, to be understood.
To then bring thinking into will, as we make our Love visible by our deeds, one of these, the gift of Empathy. Staying ever curious and spacious, allowing the seeing of our own and others becoming.
As we develop our capacity for this, we grow our generosity, wonder, patience,intuition and inspiration! We become more free to come from Love.
To embrace human becoming, our thinking must be as alive as life itself; hence, behold beloved becoming is a metamorphic practice.
Behold Beloved Becoming
What does this mean in regards to NVC?
When given the concepts of Jackal and Giraffe, within the context of Nonviolent Communication, one begins to able to develop the capacity to think about ones thinking.
The metaphor of Jackal thinking points to “dead” thinking…thinking that is judging, blaming, shaming, analyzing; thinking that is back or white, impenetrable, conclusive. The metaphor of Giraffe thinking points to an openness, to wonder and curiosity. It is about learning how to digest the “thorns”…”the tragic expression of unmet needs”, into life-serving thinking.
NVC training brings the awareness of the concepts of Jackal and Giraffe. It presents us with the possibility of developing the capacity to translate dead into alive! We can become translators of life-alienating into life-serving. Die and become! This is when we can experience the becoming of ourselves and others. This is where we are free and at choice. This is where we can come from love, not fear.
NVC supports us to see the beauty of unmet needs, the longings of another or ourselves, regardless of how they are expressed. It teaches us to be curious about feelings and needs, rather than engage in evaluation and analysis. It offers us skills that point us to where we can be free. Where we see and are seen in the spaciousness of an ever changing unfolding growing, in our becoming.
Behold Belovéd Becoming
More! To share the meaning we seek to communicate to prospective participants in: Behold Belovéd Becoming Through a Metamorphic Practice of Compassionate Communication:
When we made Behold Belovéd Becoming the motif of our October 2011 wedding and the essence of our vows, it was also our intention to use this phrase to identify our NVC-based work/business/service/initiative in the world. In these three precise, meaning-rich conceptual strands, we sought to weave them together into an evocative, poetic call to the human soul.
Behold!
Behold is a rich, old, storied English verb that means to regard, to observe, or to give attention to. It is an attentiveness filled with wonder, reverence and the open gaze of the lover (of humanity). It is attentiveness as love. Behold is also used as an interjection or call to attention, as in: Behold, I make all things new! Does not the event of self-empathy make all things new? We think it does! Isn’t the seed of empathy a sense of wonder? We think it is! When we empathize, are we not calling forth and listening into the longings of the Other? Might we say we behold the Other’s need? Behold, as a verb, weaves together, in a mysterious way, both threads of meaning-making – cognition and perception – into a knowing seeing, that again for us, speaks deeply to both events of self-empathy and empathy.
Belovéd comes out of a similar old English lineage and has stood the test of time for its transcendent luminosity: the love of my life is my Belovéd. We often see it capitalized in this sense (as is Other for similar reasons). Can we meet and behold a stranger as belovéd? We believe we can and that is who we long to become. Belovéd can be both an adjective and a noun and, in our usage here, it is both. I can behold my Belovéd (or the Other) in her/his process of becoming; I can behold her with wonder, interest and reverent delight. Or I can behold her becoming belovéd. We want to be able to do both; we offer participants the skills to do so!
What about Becoming? This concept is at the heart of a holistic understanding of that which we seek to make visible through the vocabulary of needs. When we change our way of seeing and see the needs arising in Self and Other, we support Self and Other in becoming who Self and Other long to become. Thus it has a precise and potent meaning in our thinking. To take this concept from our work is to tear the heart out of it!
Unlike the other two terms, Becoming does not have a rich poetic history and, though it first arose among the Romantics, and specifically in Goethe’s work, it has really only come into its own in very recent times within scientific-philosophical thinking of the last thirty or forty years. It is most fully developed in the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze in relation to system theory. It emerges as well in the work of two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, in relation to embodied cognition and living systems, in Autopoesis and Cognition. (see quotes below, if interested).
Here is how Goethe uses it. I have taken the liberty to translate the German Vernunft (reason) as Giraffe and Verstand (intellectual understanding) as Jackal: “Giraffe has as its object that which is in the process of becoming, jackal that which has become; the former (giraffe) is not concerned to know ‘for what purpose?’ and the latter (jackal) does not ask ‘whence?’ Giraffe takes delight in development; jackal wishes to hold everything fast in order to make use of it.”
With this concept, we see all life as in a process of becoming, streaming rhythms of arising, emerging, growing and unfolding as well as dying and passing away. All life is in becoming. In addition to human being, we have human becoming!
In the name we have taken for our work, we invite participants to Behold all life in a process of Becoming and every encounter with the (Belovéd) Other as an encounter with Human Becoming!
Metamorphic practice?
What about metamorphic? For us, this refers to the dying and becoming found in all living systems. This too comes from Goethe’s work.
In a metamorphic practice of Compassionate Communication, we recognize that to empathize, we must let something fall away—our jackal thinking—so that we can enter into our Self-becoming or the becoming of the Other. We notice and confront the jackal thoughts and let them go in order to enter lovingly, livingly into our own Self-longing for life (our needs), or the Other’s life-longing (his/her needs). It is through our willingness to die and become – inwardly through self-empathy, socially through empathy with the Other – that we develop a metamorphic practice of Compassionate Communication.
Through the concept of metamorphosis, we point to this rhythm of dying and becoming within the human encounter. Each encounter with the Other invites us to the event of tomb/womb. Thus, our practice is a metamorphic practice!
Behold Belovéd Becoming Through a Metamorphic Practice of Compassionate Communication. What we are saying is exact! This is what we offer to participants!
