We are wistful about the golden days of the past and dream of a distant future unclouded by necessity. But I suspect that if our inner souls were asked what in life they really missed, the answer would be primal danger and stress.

No one is exempt from nature's mandate to be both a sender and receiver of positive messages.

Everybody needs positive messages, and no living creature possessing a personality can escape this fact any more than a sentient being living in a human body can deny that body's need for physical food.

My needs are to experience some experience everyday.

Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday school. These are the things I learned: Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.  The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation.  Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.  Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm.  Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.  And it is true, no matter how old you are - when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten.  Remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - look.

The things you need in life are those that will help you to fulfill your dominant purpose.  Things you may want but not need may lead you aside from that purpose.  It is only by making everything serve your main objective that success is attained.

Communication. It's the first thing we really learn in life. Funny thing is, once we grow up, learn our words and really start talking, the harder it becomes to know what to say, or how to ask for what we really need.

Communication. It's the first thing we really learn in life. Funny thing is, once we grow up, learn our words and really start talking, the harder it becomes to know what to say, or how to ask for what we really need.

If humans are essentially self-enclosed or self-interested or idiotist psychological systems (a la Freud), then "love" is just the name for a kind of psychic imperialism among psyches (the visceral irrationalism of the Id/libido being rationalized and executed by the otherwise-vacant Ego and presided over by the irrational authoritarianism of the Superego). One bag of appetites and emotions (he) tries to arrogate control over another bag of appetites and emotions (she -- or vice versa), all for the first bag's own benefit, like a war between oversized amoebas. If human beings are conceived strictly in terms of what finite-banausic or finite-doulic mentalities can comprehend, then "love" will necessarily look like a "magical" or illusionistic pseudo-cure for our necessitated animalistic (and deterministic bourgeois-"rationalist") natures. Our natural power of self-centered delusion projects for itself a cure for its self-enclosure, and calls this fantasy "love." Uncountable are the times that this grandiose fantasy has failed, and actual finite human beings could not live up to the narcotic infatuation or "salvation from self" that they needed out of one another.

What I want is what I've not got
But what I need is all around me

The church is not here to meet our needs. We are the church here to meet the needs of the world.

Here's a practice for dealing with envy...each time you find yourself envious of someone...ask yourself, "What is there that I am noticing in the other person that I want to find in myself?"...If it's money, is it the freedom? The cance to play that money buys? A sense of security? Whatever it is--more play, a sense of security, free time--you can work on getting more of it in your life, no matter what the circumstances.

Gratitude is the realization that we have everything we need, at least in this moment.

Gratitude is the realization that we have everything we need, at least in this moment.

Among the multitudes will be found many who cannot discriminate between what is merely wanted and what is needed, what is necessary for bare subsistence and what is indispensable for the sake of the freedom and clarity of one's higher powers. 

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one.

Strip life of every perception that exists in your mind and you will see the raw perfection that exists in everything.  View this through the lens of your heart and you will find everything you have ever wanted and needed.

10 things we can do to contribute to internal, interpersonal, and organizational peace

 (1)  Spend some time each day quietly reflecting on how we would like to relate to ourselves and others.

  (2)  Remember that all human beings have the same needs.

  (3)  Check our intention to see if we are as interested in others getting their needs met as our own.

  (4)  When asking someone to do something, check first to see if we are making a request or a demand.

  (5)  Instead of saying what we DON'T want someone to do, say what we DO want the person to do.

  (6)  Instead of saying what we want someone to BE, say what action we'd like the person to take that we hope will help the person be that way.

  (7)  Before agreeing or disagreeing with anyone's opinions, try to tune in to what the person is feeling and needing.

  (8)  Instead of saying "No," say what need of ours prevents us from saying "Yes."

  (9)  If we are feeling upset, think about what need of ours is not being met, and what we could do to meet it, instead of thinking about what's wrong with others or ourselves.

  (10)  Instead of praising someone who did something we like, express our gratitude by telling the person what need of ours that action met.

The Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) would like there to be a critical mass of people using Nonviolent Communication language so all people will get their needs met and resolve their conflicts peacefully.

© 2001, revised 2004 Gary Baran & CNVC
The right to freely duplicate this document is hereby granted.

In reality no food is valued solely for its nutritive power and no garment or house solely for the protection it affords against cold weather and rain…. the demand for goods is widely influenced by metaphysical, religious, and ethical considerations, by aesthetic value judgments, by customs, habits, prejudice, tradition, changing fashions, and many other things.

Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.

We all have different gifts and different ways of saying to the world who we are. The world needs a sense of worth, and it will achieve it only by its people feeling they are worthwhile.

Don't ask what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

We're all torn between the desire for privacy and the fear of lonliness.  We need each other and we need to get away from each other.  We need proximity and distance, conversation and silence.  We almost always get more of each than we want at any one time.

How will you know someone really loves if they only meet your expectations and not your needs

"We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities, and if we want to meet the obligations of our civilization and our culture which are to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our
parents gave us, we've got to start by protecting that infrastructure; the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the landscapes that enrich us. We're not protecting nature for nature's sake. We're protecting it because it enriches us, yes, it enriches our economy and we ignore that at our peril. But it is also enriching us aesthetically, recreationally, culturally, historically and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money. And if
we don't feed them, we're not going to grow up…we're not going to become the kind of beings that our creator intended us to become."

People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease in their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well.

“To deal with individual human needs at the everyday level can be noble sometimes.”

But man has other needs as well: emotional needs. These, too, are few, but every bit as important as his physical requirements, yet not so simple. If they aren't met, they can be as devastating as physical hunger, as uncomfortable as a lack of shelter, as incapacitating as thirst. The frustration, isolation and anxiety brought about by unmet emotional needs can, like physical privation, produce death or a degree of living death - neurosis and psychosis.

The wise man...lacked nothing but needed a great number of things, whereas the fool, on the other hand, needs nothing (for he does not know how to use anything) but lacks everything.