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| Non-Violent Communication, A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenburg, PhD Purchase on Amazon.com |
The word “love” being in the word “violent” intrigues me. Beginning with A Course in Miracles in 1991, I have kept several of its teachings in use in many situations. The one that returns to me regarding feeling violent is that everything spoken comes from either a place of love or a place of fear. How unusual it seems then that both of these sources appear in the word “violent”—violent having fear as its source and love having love as its source.
It has been fourteen years since I experienced an epiphany about love and fear. Spoken to in an angry voice, for the first time I recognized a need for love. I do not always speak by nonviolent communication—it is an ongoing practice—but I do listen to what I say, and later, when I recognize that words of mine were outside of an arena of kindness, I consider how I might have spoken differently
I find hope that the following world languages all contain the letters for the word “love” in their word for “violent”: Catalan, Danish, English, French, Galician, Italian, Latin, Maltese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Zulu.
My realization is, “I believe that spiritual learning comes for most by glimmerings of a new way to see each other—like the change of colors in a kaleidoscope.”