General NVC work
General NVC work
Arnina came across Marshall Rosenberg and NVC in 1990, in Israel, and became a certified trainer in 1992. Given the closeness of the three sisters, she immediately introduced Miki and Inbal to it, too, and within a few years all three dedicated their lives to integrating and sharing the principles and practices that make up NVC as part of their passion for creating a world where everyone’s needs matter and people have the skills for making peace (Inbal’s version of vision for the world at the time).
In 1995, all three sisters attended the first NVC International Intensive Training in the USA, which took plane in Atlanta, Georgia, and which deepened the path of intensive engagement with NVC for all three of them.
For two years, when Arnina was living in the USA (1996 – 1998), all three sisters collaborated. Most of the time outside these two years, given the geographical distance, Inbal collaborated mostly with Miki as they lived in the same town.
Inbal co-founded BayNVC with Miki, Julie Greene, and John Kinyon, and continued to co-hold BayNVC with Miki after John chose a different path and after Julie died, both of which happened in 2004. It was her vision which led to the establishment of the BayNVC Leadership Program in 2002. She understood before many others did that developing capacity and leadership in others was key to the possibility of creating significant shifts in how humans function.
The two of them were present in a historic meeting with Marshall Rosenberg in 2000, along with a few other key NVC trainers at the time. Marshall’s purpose for the meeting was to attempt to create a unified approach to sharing NVC that would emerge through us engaging with him and with each other. That project never materialized, and yet it unleashed more capacity and clarity of purpose for some of those who were present. Following this meeting and inspired by the clarity that emerged there about NVC, Inbal and Miki began developing the materials that became the backbone of the BayNVC Leadership Program. While most of the materials were a joint creation, Inbal was the one who wrote the initial version of what is now the “Empathy for Self and Others: a Compendium”packet.
One of her other key contributions was developing an approach to integrating NVC with the body in three different ways: The NVC Tree of Life, BodyNVC, and the Self-Integration process, all of which are now part of the “NVC in the Body” packet. Inbal’s work in this area also inspired the creation of Miki’s “Gesture-Based NVC Activities” (which is also part of that packet) and Arnina’s “Conscious Relationships Triangle” (which is part of an upcoming learning packet about Arnina’s method, The Compass).
It is impossible to track and count all the many additional creative moments that led to elements that are now common practice in NVC circles and which she initiated: empathy groups and empathy buddies; self-reflection journals of all kinds; particular ways of coming up with activities on the spot for almost anything; putting clarity and order into different ways to do role plays; and capturing much of the complexity and nuance of many NVC practices and processes in simple lists of seed points.
Inbal’s NVC work, as well as her participation in leading BayNVC, came to an abrupt end with her cancer diagnosis in 2007. Even then, she continued to nurture the dream of organizing the work she and Miki developed into learning packets. Almost to the last day of her life, she and Miki continued to engage in small ways with the conceptual and spiritual basis of NVC and she continued to encourage Miki to take on the work that they didn’t finish together. Miki has held on to this dream, and eventually put it into action and created dozens of learning packets, both from materials that Inbal was part of developing and from additional materials.
To share just one example, Inbal and Miki put together one document that they called “Power, Resources, Choice”, which formed the basis of their approach to teaching about power and privilege within an NVC framework. This happened one feverish evening, when Inbal called Miki upstairs and they sat together long into the night to complete the first draft. Between Inbal’s capacity to see vision and craft it into accessible language, and their joint commitment to rigor, when Miki incorporated and expanded on this one short document into the learning packets, it resulted in more than 200 pages in four different learning packets to unpack all that was there. Inbal continued to engage with Miki about NVC materials until shortly before her death in 2014.
Here is a list of packets that contain the most concentrated version of her contributions, though her legacy is present everywhere within the packets, including in areas she never participated in, and in the work that both Arnina and Miki continue to develop.
I am celebrating the continuing integration and presence of Inbal! She's with us... in every NVC Academy, NGL, and previous coming togethers -- because of how intricately her being, her work, and passionate exploration, creativity, ideas and seeds are woven throughout all of it!
Some of Inbal's tools in the NVC in the Body packet supported me in increasing by a significant step my capacity for self-connection and connection with others. These are the Body NVC and Self-Integration processes. Since I discovered these body processes, I use them as much as I can because they are so potent for me. The Body NVC helped me get into a depth of self-connection I've rarely experienced before. I now orient to this practice with every situation where I sense I have some intensity of body reaction, along with mental reactions, which I interpret as having some undigested past experience still echoing/stirring in me through body sensations. It supports connection to needs and brings a sense of inner peace (possibly through a process of mourning the "unmet-ness" of the need). I use the Self-Integration process regularly to work on situations of the day. It supports me in landing in a space of deep trust and mutual care between parts (including the other person's) from where a dialogue happens with a powerful sense of togetherness, often leading to shifts and sometimes new creative strategies. I generally experience a different energy when a similar situation happens again, where I have less reactivity and more choice. All of this helped me a lot in particular in relation to my children.
