A liberating new paradigm?

Our ideas about individual and collective human nature have evolved and will continue to evolve. These ideas shape our expectations of what’s possible, the social structures we create, and how we interact with ourselves and other people. Therefore the assumptions we make can have a profound effect on the life we live and the world we collectively create.

The following are key assumptions that compassionate (NVC) practice is based on. Many traditions share these assumptions; NVC gives us concrete, powerful tools for putting them into practice. When we live based on these assumptions, self-connection and connection with others become increasingly possible and easy.

Life expanding assumptions?

  • All human beings have the same needs, and are connected through them.

  • Feelings inform us of our needs.

  • All human behaviour is an attempt to meet a need; however ineffective, tragic, violent or abhorrent it may be.

  • Everybody’s needs matter, and focussing on needs-consciousness allows win-win solutions to emerge.

  • Human beings enjoy giving: we inherently enjoy contributing to others when we have connected with our own and others' needs and can experience our giving as coming from choice. 

  • The most direct path to peace is through self-connection: our capacity for peace is not dependent on having our needs met. Even when many needs are unmet, meeting our need for self-connection can be sufficient for inner peace.

  • Human beings change: by virtue of the constantly unfolding nature of needs and the strategies to meet them, all of us are dynamic processes, not static entities. 

  • Human beings are interdependent: we meet many of our needs through our relationships with other people and with nature, though some needs are met principally through the quality of our relationship with ourselves and for some, with a spiritual dimension to life. When others' needs are not met, some needs of our own also remain unmet. 


Upon reading these you might notice that some are easier to digest than others. Some might seem ok in certain situations but not in others, or with certain people. Your awareness of how you are reacting at any given moment is grist for the self-understanding and self-compassion mill!