My NVC Life by Aukje Byker

Over the years, my many judgemental thoughts have often resulted in my acting in ways I later regretted. It wasn’t until I studied Nonviolent Communication (NVC) that I learned how to turn what had been a problem into something helpful for me.

I first heard about NVC by reading the book “Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life” by Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of NVC. I loved what the book taught, but knew that I needed to actually do it to really understand it. I looked online for workshops and found one happening in Toronto in a few weeks. At the time I was in a relationship with a man named Dennis who lived in Toronto, so I had a place to stay during the workshop.

During the workshop I had an opportunity to work on an issue that was fairly current for us. That morning, before going to the workshop, Dennis and I had had a conflict as a result of my speaking my judgements. I decided to use this for my practice. That evening, after the workshop, I asked Dennis if I could have a redo of that morning, to use what I had learned. I made a clear observation of what had happened, making sure there were no evaluations or judgments in it. I clearly stated how I felt, and what my need was, and then made a request. One of the things I had learned that day was that the request could be as simple as asking the other person how it was for them to hear this, so that was my request. He responded that it was much easier to hear it this way. We were then able to talk more about the issue and resolve it. I knew then that NVC was something that could really benefit me, and I wanted to learn more.

I started attending many NVC workshops, including a week-long workshop with Marshall Rosenberg, then a two-year long program with another trainer. I worked with a mentor in Toronto and attended many other trainings. I wanted to become a certified trainer. This meant that I had to demonstrate that I was living NVC, that I knew it, and that I could teach it. It was a lot of work but I knew that, even if I didn’t complete the certification process, my life would still be enriched for doing all this work.

NVC is based on the idea that everyone is always trying to meet a need and that people use different strategies to meet their needs. We may not like the strategy they used, or even one we used, but if we can connect to the need, then we can have empathy for them or for ourselves. By doing this work, I was able to heal some old wounds. Many of my relationships became deeper and had less conflict. I could hear what was important to others and what need they were trying to meet when they did something I didn’t enjoy. I also learned how to have more compassion for myself when I regretted something that I did.

I soon started sharing NVC with others. In 2015, I became a certified trainer. I enjoy sharing NVC because I know what a difference it has made in my life and in other people’s lives. I teach workshops from time to time and I’ve been running a practice group in Peterborough for several years. On November 15th, the KCC NVC Practice Group will meet for the first time from 7-9pm. Doing this lets me share NVC and help others learn it, but also helps me to stay connected to NVC consciousness. To really live it.

I still find that judgements pop into my head all the time. However, now I know that they are there just to give me information. That I can either get empathy from others or give it to myself and I can work through it. And if I think it’s important to say something to someone else, I can say it to them without the judgement. That means it’s usually much better received. 

Judy’s Wonderfully Easy Pineapple Cake by -Judy Amsbury

This is a super moist, fast, easy, and delicious cake that we often make for the One Roof Diner, a Peterborough Community Centre for the many marginalized folk in Peterborough. Lyn heads up the team who prep a full hot meal every Tuesday for currently 150 people who line up outside to receive their meal because of Covid. Normally we serve in their dining room. This is an Outreach program sponsored by Emmanuel United Peterborough with major support from the Sisters of St Joseph. We have been involved in this Outreach for well over 10 years.

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 9 x13 cake tin.

In a large bowl:

1 x 19 oz tin crushed pineapple
2 c. flour
2 c. white sugar
3 eggs (unbeaten)
2 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
½ tsp vanilla

Mix until just blended. Pour into cake tin.
Bake 35 minutes (top will brown). Cool.

Cream cheese icing

½ c cream cheese (softened).
¼ c margarine or butter
1 tsp vanilla
2 c sifted icing sugar

Beat icing ingredients together and spread on cooled cake.

Equity Member Interview – Sheila Nabigon-Howlett

Sheila is someone who looks at the world, tries to understand how it works and tries to change it for the better. Another activist! So, of course, she is a long-time friend with Linda and Al Slavin, and Gayle Hutchison too. They all visited India together in 2014. Decades ago, Sheila and Linda met while teaching core French at the same school. Sheila and Lyn Miller roomed together while volunteer teaching in Jamaica.

But let’s start at the beginning. Sheila was born in 1940 in Dublin to an Irish Catholic family. Her parents separated when she was 2. They tried to reconcile a few times, and she went back and forth between England and Ireland. She did get to know her father later, but she could see how they were incompatible. In those days in Ireland, a Catholic woman could not be divorced and her mother was shunned; the community was not conducive to her or her children’s happiness, so her mother took her and her older brother to England and made her living as a hairdresser. Sheila says she has more of an English accent because she deliberately changed it to try to fit in when she was a teenager, and it stuck.

She had a lovely Anglican-based grammar school experience in England, but left at 16 because she wanted to be more independent. She went to France to work as an au pair (a live-in child caregiver) for a year. She went back to England and upgraded her education and then went to London University where she studied English and French. When she got her BA, she took a year and taught in Jamaica at a private all-girls convent school on the north shore near Discovery Bay. She returned to get her teaching degree at the University of Birmingham and did one year of teaching there.

Sheila immigrated to Canada with her mother when she was 26 -- to Calgary. Why Calgary? In Dublin, they had met a nice couple from Calgary in a restaurant who sold them on the beauties of the city. The same couple helped them when they arrived while they were waiting for their money to be transferred between Ireland and Canada. Her brother immigrated around the same time. They were very close – he died about 3 years ago and she misses him a lot.

Sheila had a job to come to – in those days, they would hire you sight unseen – and she taught English and French in a Catholic high school for 2 years. After that she volunteered to go with a Catholic organization; the Canadian Lay Missioners, to Africa. To experience a different culture, they sent them to the Pic River reserve near Heron Bay, in the Thunder Bay area. They stayed in the priest’s house on the reserve. It was very undeveloped – there was a common well, dirt roads, some people lived in tents. She met Herb Nabigon, a young Indigenous man, who became her first husband. They would walk around the reserve talking. The church had so much power, the priest ruled everything, and the people seemed to have very little. Herb was a (justifiably) angry young man and stood up to the priest. That got Sheila’s attention! In the end she didn’t go to Africa because she didn’t like the organization she was with – it was white and she felt it was propping up a white regime in Rhodesia. This was 1968.

She and Herb married in 1970 and moved to Toronto because he was studying social work at Centennial College for 2 years. Their son Clement was born then. They then came to Peterborough, as Herb wanted to do Native Studies at Trent. She got a job teaching French in the public school system and ended up teaching there for 22 years. Their daughter Alana was born in 1975. Their marriage broke up after their daughter was born. They recognized they had cultural differences and he had alcohol addiction issues. He found his redemption from addiction in Indigenous spirituality – Sheila has great respect for the sharing circles, the healing circles, the sweat lodge and has known so many indigenous people who have not come to healing through the Western way but through their own spiritual traditions – this has to be applauded and helped. She and Herb continued to be friends as they had the children at heart; it was important to her that the relationship was strong. Herb remarried and has since passed away, but she is friends with his widow.

Sheila was single for about 18 years and was involved with some social justice initiatives: 1. Jamaica Self Help – a Ptbo NGO now folded after 35 years and did volunteer teaching during summers. 2. Kawartha Ploughshares –a disarmament, peace movement that now runs through the Peace Council.

When her daughter was starting university and moving out, Sheila married again, to Floyd Howlett, who moved in. He was a retired, widowed United Church minister also into the same sort of peace activism. He worked through and in the church, but was critical of the mindset of the “comfortable pew”, which he called “Churchianity”, of people sitting with their devotion to God, but not getting their hands dirty and helping suffering people. It was a wonderful marriage that lasted 10 years until he passed away from cancer in 2003. She is still close with his family.

Sheila has always supported women’s and Indigenous groups. With 2 other women she initiated a relationship with a NW Ontario Reserve, Mishkeegogamang, sending Xmas toys, skates and hockey equipment and other things. This group lasted to 2013. She still has a relationship with some people there.

She says she’s been “here, there and everywhere” with respect to religion and is now an attender, though not actually a member, of the Quakers for the last 10 years and feels it is her spiritual home.

Sheila’s daughter and son-in-law are teachers with 2 teenagers, who live just around the corner from her near Jackson Park. Her son is a lawyer doing family law with a son age 10, and lives in Oshawa.

She loves walking and hiking in the park; she used to bike but not so much now. She likes to sew and knit, but uses her quiet times more for reading and researching history, economics and what makes the world tick. She got into cohousing through the Slavins and loves the idea of living more simply and lightly on the earth in a green building, and in community. Sheila feels badly she has not gotten more involved in KCC group endeavours, as she is so busy in her current community activism. She says she is “crazily involved” with the homelessness issue, working very hard to bring sleeping cabins and tiny homes to Peterborough.

Introducing… Tzabia Siegel

Tzabia was born in Kingston. Her parents had a retail auto-parts business. She is the youngest of 4; she has 2 brothers and a sister. She is closest to her brother Winston, who is 3 years older and who she considers a friend as well as family. While growing up she couldn’t wait to leave; she says she’s always had a sense of adventure and a love of change and that started by leaving home.

She went to Western University in London with the intention of studying medicine, but partied too hard the first year, so changed to physical education, specializing in fitness. She says she has always been drawn to the body; she remembers being curious as a child about the feelings of her muscles as she used them.

Tzabia waitressed to earn money to get through school. That skill allowed her to move out west, living in Whistler and Vancouver. She took a 6-month trip: 3 weeks on the Cote d’Azur sailing with a friend and his family, 3 weeks in Europe and an expedition in Africa with a group of 25 for around 5 months through 11 countries. Tzabia turned 25 on the Serengeti.

For her trip, she’d bought a camera and fell in love with photography. She returned and enrolled in a photography school in Victoria for a 1-year intensive course to be a free-lance photographer. She graduated as the top student. She moved to Vancouver with her boyfriend and had some wonderful opportunities crop up because she had done so well at school. But, she says, to be honest, she blew it – she didn’t know how to run a business and didn’t work hard enough without the accountability of school supervision. She moved back to Victoria and got a job at her old school. (“A bit weird since I barely worked in the field.”) She loved it, though.

Tzabia got pregnant at age 27. She had no intention of marrying her boyfriend but did want a child. She did end up marrying him to please her parents even though she knew she it wouldn’t last. She gave birth to her son Sacha, in a cabin in the woods with a midwife – she was a total naturalist. But Sacha’s father grew abusive and when her son was 1 ½, she ran.

Tzabia came back east and threw herself into a commune called Philoxia for about 4 years. It was founded by someone who saw himself as a guru. Did she see him that way? Yes and no – he was very flawed and didn’t acknowledge it. He was controlling and claimed all the power. But she grew up a lot there; she worked on some of her own issues and has some gratitude for that. She did love living in community – the shared gardening, meals, the intimacy and support. It ended when they had a house fire and she lost everything she owned in it; fortunately, no one died.

She moved back to Kingston for 2-3 years. Her father had died of cancer in 1992. Her mother, who had always been supportive, helped her buy a house outside of Kingston in Newburg. She realized she needed to go back to school and took a correspondence course in nutrition. At the same time, she got a job in a supplement store and worked in Belleville and Kingston.

In 2002 Tzabia moved to Toronto. Her son was 12. He was a challenging child to raise – really strong-willed, intelligent, a total extrovert and creative. He was the only Jewish child in Newburg. She herself was not practicing, but had grown up in a Jewish home where her mother had become observant. Moving to Toronto meant that he had a multicultural milieu, with lots of friends and a stimulating environment and he thrived. She met Barry while working at the Big Carrot in the supplement section. Not long after meeting, they moved in with him in Riverdale. He became a father figure for Sacha at a time when he really needed one. Sacha is now 32 and she says they are very close and she is very proud of him.

She started working as a nutritionist in a clinic but learned it was one thing to give out information and another to make behavioural change, so she also took life coach training. When she was studying photography, Tzabia had learned that when she was completely immersed in her creativity, it was easy for her to lose 20 pounds and then stay at her ideal weight. Years later, that would contribute to the work that she would do as The Food Coach; her brand was coaching on biology and behaviour with a specialty in sustainable weight loss. She took business courses. She decided to work in a clinic in the financial district of Toronto. Unlike a dietician, a nutritionist is not covered by OHIP or extended health coverage, so she had to have clients who had money. Eventually, she wanted to expand her business and work more from home. She left the clinic and many of her clients came with her. Now she is 61 and says, “there’s a reason we retire at 65”. She loves the work itself, but is tired of marketing it. She fits her clients into 2 days/week and is happy with that.

Barry was running a café, but they started planning an exit strategy and wanted to travel. A friend suggested RVing. They sold their house and café and bought an Airstream, which they had gutted and customized. They joined a house-sitting service where they take care of the house and pets; no money changes hands, they get a free place to stay.

In January 2020, they started their journey to the U.S. It was a big learning curve since neither of them had ever towed anything and never RV’d. They went to California and Arizona. No regrets, but it was quite a journey. When Covid hit, they came back and rented a house in Glenbury, north of Kingston. This past summer they had fun staying on Kris & Mark’s land. They were grateful and appreciated getting to be a part of their community.
Community makes sense to her: to live with people, to share resources, the workload and celebrations, to age in place and support each other.

Tzabia likes photography, gardening, travel blogging, hiking, paddling, yoga, some meditation, swimming in lakes and rivers, and absolutely adores cycling. She has learned this past year that as long as she is stationed in the countryside (rather than the city), she doesn’t dislike winters as much as she thought. They both cross-country ski and on a snowy day will go out and play.