When I came to NVC, I was walking in the world as a deeply wounded woman, Latina, the seventh of eight children to my parents Manuel and Maria Teresa Garcia, also my first teachers. I longed for a way to break free of the depression that had wrapped around and choked my heart. I wanted to come unstuck from my grief and to challenge my jackals of not being good enough, not belonging, or having to work twice as hard to be accepted in a world that did not welcome my accent, my brown skin, or my struggles related to healing my inner child.

In my new partnership I did not want to repeat the losses I had experienced and I longed to understand my patterns that contributed to major losses. I was seeking to heal these missing parts to reclaim my voice, my ability to dream for myself and have something transformative to share within the community that I could say was life serving, liberating and healing.

I needed to pause and regroup after my life path shifted. I completed a graduate program in Social Work to obtain more skills to contribute to others’ mental wellness. As a teacher and social worker, I noticed and experienced much overwhelm, stress and burnout in these fields. If I wanted to support and care for our future generations, I wanted to increase my awareness and social emotional capacities, as I built up my own resources for deepening connection, familial and community resilience and healing possibilities.

Assisting and teaching at Nonviolent Leadership for Social Justice Retreat intensives over 20 years allowed me to delve deeper into teaching the spiritual basis of NVC. Some ways I have taught and wish to continue to teach the spiritual basis of NVC is through deep listening for needs when interacting in personal or professional settings; attuning to what the energy of the others’ heart wants to be known for and helping connect at that deep spiritual place especially across differences, race, class and gender and in conflictual or everyday and informal interactions.

In living NVC consciousness, I have enjoyed supporting that spiritual basis to focus on what the heart needs, centering myself with taking a breath to come to presence, pausing and checking in to notice what needs are present in me, and then reaching for getting what the other longs for as my own internal process as a daily practice or more formal ways in work meetings, mediated conversations, role plays or in teaching sessions with deeper explorations in trainings or retreats. For instance, when activating and creatively inviting others to explore themes of grief and dreaming through art, healing with NVC consciousness has moved and inspired me and has been the vehicle to hold each other with tenderness in an interactive, deeply bonding space to hear each other's hearts. By inviting curiosity, open heartedness, we can be seen and held without judgment and this has fed my hope for transformative change in the present moment within our relationships with self and the world we want to create. Anchoring work and such lived collective experiences has nurtured love in action and has felt powerfully transformative beyond words. I am continually moved and inspired by the gift of witnessing and honoring one another’s humanity. This newfound path was hopeful and central to my integration of NVC as a spiritual practice for healing and transforming relationships and communities.

Today, this journey has brought me to continue this life work of healing and supporting vulnerable populations who rarely have access to NVC due to limited resources and access. Working with indigenous communities, immigrants/Spanish speaking communities, with my partner and others to impact our 7 generations to come is attractive and meaningful work.

In becoming a certified trainer, I want to find new, more authentic ways of bringing the consciousness and tools of NVC to communities in ways that are more aligned with their traditions and ways of knowing. I wish to continue working with diverse communities that include low-income, immigrant/bilingual, and historically marginalized communities, and a tribal community that has had a completely different worldview and overwhelmingly negative associations with the US educational system and classroom/workshop-type formats that have done them harm. Such work has been connecting and fulfilling and nourishing in a mutually satisfying way––it feels like I am just growing my family with these relationships.

I also want to continue using it within my own family, and with the broad circle of dear friends and their families.