How can we reweave the fabric of humanity to create a world where everyone's deepest needs are met? How do we even know what our deepest needs are - for security (physical and emotional), freedom, connection and meaning? In part 1 of 2, Miki Kashtan gives us answers - and a vision of the future. 

Practical visionary Miki Kashtan has devoted her life to the exploration and practice of non violent communication: to finding ways in which choice can become a central part of human existence: the capacity to set aside the patriarchal wounds of separation, scarcity and powerlessness and to choose instead, connection, flow and the ability to meet the needs of the whole of the web of life.   In this two-part podcast, she lays out the baselines of choice, of the ways we can think and feel and be beyond the confines of our patriarchal system, ahead of part 2, where we explore the futures we could reach if we all committed to choice and change.

Miki Kashtan website: https://mikikashtan.org

Miki Kashtan blog: https://thefearlessheart.org

Tom Atlee: http://www.tomatleeblog.com

Genevieve Vaughan - the maternal gift economy: http://gift-economy.com

James Gilligan - Conference ‘the Making of Destructive Leaders’ - https://www.confer.uk.com/event/leaders.html

Nonviolent Global Liberation Community - https://nglcommunity.org

Books: 

James Gilligan: Violence: Reflections on a National Pandemic: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/60198/violence-by-james-gilligan-m-d/

Alice Miller: ‘For your own Good’ https://www.alice-miller.com/en/for-your-own-good/

Walter Wink ‘Powers that Be’ https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Powers-That-Be-by-Walter-Wink-author/9780385487528

Rebecca Solnit  ‘Paradise Made in Hell’ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/

Life after Covid-19 - Miki has a chapter in this - available for pre-order here: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/life-after-covid-19

Collaborative Lawmaking Study: http://efficientcollaboration.org/wp-content/uploads/MinnesotaCaseStudy.pdf

Marija Gimbutas ‘The Balts’ https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.40925

Article on the disempowerment of our ancestors: https://thefearlessheart.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/From-Obedience-and-Shame-to-Freedom-and-Belonging.pdf

(relevant detail here: In Goettner-Abendroth’s account, on the other hand, it’s specific events that change the experience and result in different choices leading to different actions. In other words, it’s stress and trauma on a large scale that interfere with the spontaneous unfolding of trusting relationships and love. The scale has to be large enough to overwhelm the capacity of a group or culture to metabolize stressful events within its finite resources and resilience. In the case of the “Kurgan” culture that Gimbutas identified, the possible causes could be the flooding of the black sea[1] and/or the desertification of large swaths of land on which many groups depended for their survival. Both of these events pushed large numbers and groups of people outside the bounds of their previous modes of subsistence, thereby creating both trauma and a clash between survival and their manner of living.[2]

It is almost impossible, I believe, for our modern minds to grasp the calamity of what these waves of invasions from the Kurgans westward signified, because we no longer have the lived sensibility of what it’s like to live in a peaceful, life-loving, egalitarian culture in unity with nature and each other. I continue to contemplate this description of it and to extrapolate to the present to be able to grasp the loss and begin to mourn it, on behalf of all of humanity:

“when [the Kurgans’] barrow-type graves appeared in Europe for the first time (primarily containing males with weapons), nearly 700 major habitation sites, representing a rich fabric of cultural and technological developments, disintegrated after flourishing undisturbed for many hundreds of years.” (Marler 179)

[1] See Ryan et al, “An Abrupt Drowning of the Black Sea Shelf”, Marine Geology, 138 (1997) 119-126, where evidence is provided of a major, cataclysmic flooding of the Black Sea, which is now believed to be the source of mythological accounts such as that of Noah’s ark in the bible (not the only one in the region). [2] See The Rule of Mars for several overlapping accounts of these events.)