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Steve Torma speaking about Compassion Camp

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Transcript from Video:

Steve: Hi folks! This is Steve Torma from Asheville, North Carolina and Earthaven Ecovillage.

Terrie: I’m Terrie LeWine and I’m from Philadelphia and I’m at Earthaven Ecovillage.

Steve: So, here we are today, spring equinox. We’re sitting here with our lovely flowers here at Earthaven. We are dreaming about Compassion Camp this summer, hoping that you all might want to come and join us. This is our third year, and we’re planning to have a wonderful time together.

Terrie: I love Compassion Camp because it brings people together from western North Carolina and beyond. It’s really a dream of people gathering in a way that they can share intimately, get to know each other, and learn a few skills along the way.
What are some of the things that are highlights for you, Steve?

Steve: Well, non-violent communication, which you and I both care so deeply about, it’s a core part of what we do at Compassion Camp. But, there’s many other things. Many other issues, related to how to create more peace, and justice in the world, and loving relationships, and inner peace. We also have a lot of fun.  We try to create a safe container where people’s needs to be taken care of are really respected.  And we do singing, and we do creative movement things.
What about walking around here? What do you think?

Terrie: What people have said (we often do tours of Earthaven, people sleep here in tents and inside indoors) you really get a sense of the life that is happening here at Earthaven. A sense of being connected to the earth and why that’s important too. So Compassion Camp, while it really is steeped in non-violent communication, it’s really morphed into all things compassion. What are ways we can care for each other? And care about each other?  And develop sustainable relationships, that feel really good? So one of the ways that has happened is through connecting with the people of the land here.

Steve: I really think of compassion as the medicine for our time. Learning how to just push out further, and further who we can care for, and care about not only the humans, but the beyond the human worlds. At Earthaven, if you’ve never been here before, there’s some really beautiful parts of nature that you can have access to, streams, trails, trees. So if this sounds interesting to you, we’d love to have you join us.

Terrie: One of the things that we’ve done, and we’ve grown into over all the years, is how we do leadership. It started out that we would have a few of these classes, NVC classes and things that are prepared by people who already teach.

It’s also an opportunity if you have something or some skill either that you want to ask for to kind of be immersed in a group, or that you really want to practice your own leadership skills or co-leading skills. So, we have open source (what we call our version of open source) technology, where in the beginning is when we decide what’s going to happen here. It’s designed and it’s decided by everybody who is here together. So it isn’t decided by us. That’s something that’s really important to me and it makes for a really interesting well-rounded group of topics that we can explore together.

Steve: To create a teaching – learning community. People who come together to share their talents with each other. So that we collectively become more connected, more intelligent, more skilled, more compassionate.  So, look forward to having you join us. Thank you, folks.

Terrie: Oh, a couple other things that you might want to know: One is that your kids are welcome here. We have a robust program for young people. And one of the things that people report is the food here is so good.  A lot of the food is off the land, it’s grown off the land. Most of it is cooked by people here on the land. So it’s a nice place to come to get a good meal as well.

Steve: Thank you folks, thanks for watching this. see you soon!

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(Transcript from video)

Courtney Brooke: Hi Steve.

Steve: Hi.

Courtney Brooke:  I was just noticing you know in my life the longing for more mentorship and elders. So I’ve been asking some people in my life who are who are more experienced and farther along the journey. If you could give yourself some advice when you were 20 years old, what would it be?

Feelings and Needs

Steve: Wow I like the question. Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is the concept of feelings and needs.

It’s the amazing realization that everything that I do is an attempt to meet a need. All of my feelings are this amazing elegant feedback system that my body mind has to guide me. So I would encourage my 20 year old self to get more in touch with my feelings and learn what the basic needs are. You know that I think that would have been incredibly powerful.

Pain Can Inform Life

I think maybe the other thing would be that when painful things happen, it doesn’t mean necessarily that there’s something wrong or that I’ve done anything wrong or anyone else has done anything wrong. When you look out in nature you see death and destruction all the time that leads to life. So I would tell my 20 year old self: yes, feel the uncomfortable painful feelings. Don’t deny those and don’t repress that. But also don’t jump to conclusions that just because this thing is painful that is necessarily bad for me. I have a lot in my own life, I had a lot of stories about that, that made everything much more difficult. That pain is a way for life, to get information about life.

Failure = Living Systems Educating Themselves

The third one is kind of similar. It is around the concept of failure. I had a dear friend who years ago told me this: “there’s no such thing as failure, there’s only feedback and learning.”  If I could have had that wisdom when I was 20; I used to beat myself up so much about having failed at this and failed at that. Then eventually adopted a more evolutionary and nature perspective of reality. Like the quote “failure things happen all the time but they’re just part of living systems educating themselves.”  That would have given me a lot of relief.  I had much more energy in my life if I had less of that failure thought and more of just realizing that “oh, this is just a living system, I’m a living system learning.”

Reclaim the Sacred…Earth, Feminine, and Relationship to Our Bodies

Let’s see the fourth one I think would be around the concept of the sacred. What does it mean for things to be sacred? What things are sacred and what things have lost their sacredness in our culture that would be really helpful if I could reclaim? The three that come to mind is something that I think I heard from Starhawk. I’m not sure exactly where I heard it.  The three aspects of life that got most damaged in the patriarchy has been our relationship to the earth, our relationship to the feminine, and our relationship to our bodies. I would I really encourage my 20 year old self to reflect on and pray and read and whatever would help to reclaim my the sense of the sacredness of earth and feminine in my body.

Courtney Brooke:  Wow thanks so much Steve. Thank you.

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(Transcript from video)

Hi! Steve Torma again and today I want to talk to you about my upcoming class being sponsored by School of Integrated Living.  It’s going to be September 2021 and it’s called Compassionate Communication in Community.

This is one of my very favorite topics. I’ve been in intentional communities for about 40 years now.  I’ve been part of Earthaven since the beginning. What I love to share is that how we relate to each other and how we communicate makes all the difference between whether our communities are sustainable or whether they go under. And if they are staying alive, how enjoyable are they.

So I’m going to be sharing the things that I learned through some of it. Through a lot of pain and learning the hard way about the things that that we do and how we can do them in ways that better meets our needs.

A lot of it’s going to be focused on non-violent communication because that’s one my favorite tools. I think it’s the best tool for creating sustainable relationships and inner peace.

So I’ll be bringing a lot of those tools and practices, but in some ways even more important than the tools and the practices, is the consciousness or the spirituality of NVC. It’s like a you take all the core wisdom of the world’s religions and you distill it down and you put it in a like a post-modern kind of more psychological language and that’s how I think of NVC. It takes the best of these world religions and puts it in language that most of us can really identify with.

So come and join the class. Even if you’re not necessarily in a community right now, but you just like to learn more skills for your own relationships, and especially if you are involved in some kind of a community.

Doesn’t necessarily mean even an intentional community…the community of your school, the community of your workplace, any place where you want to build more meaningful nourishing connection with the people in your life.

Come and join us! I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

Thank you.

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(Transcript from video)

Steve:

Hey, folks..I really want to invite you to join us for compassion camp this summer, July 15 through 18  2021 at Earthaven Ecovillage.

If you haven’t heard of compassion camp before this is our third time doing it and it has some features to it that i just absolutely love.

One of the main features is that we gather as a teaching-learning community, where we invite what we want to share with each other and what we want to ask of each other. We invite this into what’s called open space technology process, where we learn. We become a learning teaching community.

The topics a lot of it is NVC based, but we also have a lot of other topics related to compassion social justice and the whole range of what it means to create a compassionate culture. There’s also a strong emphasis on community building and relational connection.

We have singing and movement, dance, story telling, a variety of different ways that we connect and celebrate and build community together and enjoying nature. Earthaven has so much beauty with all these other beings that we’re sharing here; the trees, the water, the crawling animals. There’s so much gorgeous trails and woods that it’s such a balm for the soul.

So for all of those reasons and many more… great local food especially that’s another great one.. really encourage you to come and join us this year at compassion camp 2021. Hope to see you there!

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Transcript from Video:

Hi folks, my name’s Steve Torma, and I’m coming to you from Earthaven Ecovillage. I’d like to share with you five of my favorite moments of being here at Earthaven since the beginning really.

The probably the first one that comes to my mind is the first day that we as a group ritually entered the land on September 11th 1994. We formed like a bird as we all walked in and it was just really special moment that I will always cherish.

The next one that comes to my mind is working on building the council hall. We did it all ourselves. We were kind of figuring it out as we went along. It was a lot of fun . It was very exciting; a lot of both playful and creative energy going on.

Another one for me is playing sports on the village green. Kickball has been one of my favorites because it’s so inclusive of people of so many different ages and skill levels. Especially watching the kids learning the rules and having fun. Making sure that we don’t keep score so that people feel bad and all that kind of thing. I just really have a lot of fun just being out there running around playing.

I’ve also had some great beautiful moments in the stream near the neighborhood where I live, Village Terraces. There’s this gorgeous stream and a little waterfall and it’s such, especially in the hot weather, it’s such a beautiful cooling nourishing sensual experience. I just so, so love that!

Then the last one is the most recent one.  We just had a an NVC class so I call it a level three class and the level of connection between people was so sweet and nourishing to me. The depth of learning. All of us kind of learning together these beautiful principles that help make our lives more wonderful. On our final day we had a gift exchange kind of process where people just offered and asked for all things that they wanted to make our lives more wonderful together. That was a really nourishing experience for me as well the whole class was but especially that last day.

So thanks for listening and look forward to talking to you some more…

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Compassionate Communication in Community Settings with Steve Torma

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Steve Torma laughs when he remembers his first exposure to nonviolent communication (NVC), the system of compassionate human relations developed by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg. As a fresh-faced 25-year-old at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, he attended exactly one afternoon in-service program about the practice. “I thought that I knew what NVC was after that introduction!” he recalls.

But it wasn’t until 2007 that Steve truly began to understand the transformative potential of NVC. After an eight-week intensive course by one of Compassion Camp’s facilitators, Jerry Donoghue, he saw that the practice went far beyond a way of talking with others. “It’s a postmodern understanding of what all religions basically talk about at their core, which is the Golden Rule: Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Steve says. “For me, NVC has become a spiritual path.”

Since that revelation, Steve has founded The REAL Center and 10,000 Love Letters, two projects for spreading the word of NVC, and has instructed nearly 600 people in the practice. He brings that mission to Earthaven in partnership with School of Integrated Living (SOIL) through Compassion Camp, taking place August 15-18. Read Steve’s interview on the School of Integrated Living website, where he shares more about the camp, the power of NVC, and its value to sustainability advocates.

Compassion Camp is a four-day event for adults and children where we create a community of people who learn, play, and celebrate together, empowered to send each other back into the world to spread these seeds of justice and love. Our time together is designed to foster community among the growing number of people who are passionate about living and promoting compassionate consciousness. Be inspired, empowered, and connected.

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Over a hundred people from all over the US gathered at Earthaven, June 4-7, for “Restorative Circles in Our Communities,” a conference with Restorative Circles (RC) founder Dominic Barter and facilitator/trainers Karl Stayaert and “Duke” Duchscherer. All three, as well as others at the event, have shared Restorative Circles and other ways to come to dialog in conflict situations, some internationally, including Brazil, Nepal and the Ukraine. The conference was sponsored by Earthaven’s affiliate non-profit, Culture’s Edge, and hosted by members Steve Torma and Arjuna da Silva.

RC is a “restorative justice” approach to addressing conflict within the context of the wider community. Used in schools, court systems and other organizations and agencies in more than 25 countries, it was developed by Dominic Barter in the 1990s in Brazil to help resolve conflicts in the high crime-burdened favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

The first two days included a focus on the importance of setting up conscious restorative justice systems in our communities, and an in-depth exploration of the three phases: pre-Circles, Circle, post-Circle. ‘Semi-simulated circles’ serve as practice sessions and are a key component in the learning process. On Friday night, Dominic spoke to over 120 people in Asheville about walking toward conflict. The last two days of the conference were filled with Open Space session organized by participants.

One highlight of the conference for many was the final “Financial Co-Responsibility” meeting, called “money
piles.” While people paid fees for food and lodging, there was no fixed conference fee. Instead, sitting in a large circle in the Council Hall, surrounded by a good half of the participants, Arjuna, Steve, Dominic, Karl and Duke, as hosts and presenters, candidly described their financial situations and how much it had cost them to put on and participate in the conference. Participants were asked to contribute as much as they could toward the
expenses, given the benefit they’d each received being part of the conference —a radically transparent experience which was quite emotionally moving for many in the room.

As the total of contributions made up to that point was matched to the total costs and requests, an ever-increasing pile of cash-filled envelopes and IOUs was placed in the “money pile” in the middle of the floor. Additional online contributions via computer were also being made, as the group began allocating the “pile” to the various expenses and organizational and presentation services on the list.
As it turned out, everyone received more than they had asked for!

Dom said one of the best things about the conference was his opportunity to be a listener and a learner.

Steve, Arjuna and the conference Staff, including Jerry, Abdullah, Sara, Gaspar, NikiAnne and several others in minor roles, reported some serious levels of satisfaction at their debriefing meeting.

Comments and evaluations from participants were delightfully positive: folks felt well cared for, well nourished, and saturated with possibilities for a more just world of restorative communities. Arjuna also reports the spread of interest in RC locally, in Asheville.

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