Greetings from afar! I’m communing with Mother India, who speaks to my soul, who I can love or hate but never feel indifferent about.
I’m here with a group of travellers who trust my dear friend Barbra and myself — two wild women — enough to follow us and our passions to the hot, gorgeous, gigantic country. We spent a week at a NonViolent Communication convention in Kerala, nestled on the southern tip of India. The Convention this year was organized by a self governing collective of people completely based on gift economy. More about ‘gift economy’ later — it’s still a new term for me.
The convention was called Creativity and the Gift of Conflict. Think about that for a minute. How can conflict be a gift? How is creativity connected to conflict?
I’m living this gift every minute in India and feeling the struggle, surprises, ah-ha moments, upsets. Travelling with a group of others in a foreign country with intense heat and delayed buses and irrelevant technology and missed sleep — talk about conflict! But I see how creative we are all being as we face everything from beauty to tragedy on our travels.
Any two people in a conversation is a cross-cultural experience. Nonviolent communication has helped me clarify where I am speaking from and whether another is getting what I speak.
Check out some of these cross-cultural moments:
[spacer height=”20px”]A Jesus sitting in fountain in Padmasana!!
[spacer height=”20px”]A wedding with golden elephants and flames
right outside our compound!
[spacer height=”2
0px”]And in the mornings, I’m grateful to deliver open-air yoga to start our day.
[spacer height=”20px”]
I’m so excited to infuse this India-influenced learning into the Yoga & NonViolent Communication spring workshop series & summer retreat I’m teaching with Kathleen Macferran once I’m back home. Happy to spread this rich and amazing partnership of practices all over the Seattle area.
More soon!
Chiara
