About
Rachel Turiel
A little more about me: Rachel Turiel’s mission is to inspire and support both personal and community growth by offering tools of communication and group collaboration. She has facilitated trainings and mediations at many schools, organizations and businesses locally and nationally. In 2019 she won the Durango Women’s Resource Center Extraordinary Woman Award: Champion of Peace and Nonviolence. Nonviolent Communication, for her, is both practical and spiritual, containing seeds to change ourselves and the world. She has been published in The New York Times, lives occasionally with two adult children, and full time with one dog, five chickens, and one husband. She runs on coffee, reads novels as a survival strategy, and does it all with a flip phone.
I first discovered Nonviolent Communication when my kids were 4 and 6. I was constantly trying to answer the question:
How do I deal with big emotions (mine and theirs) in a way that both honors their experience and fosters resilience?
NVC gave me tools to make sense of this questions, as well as many more, like:
How can I speak what’s true for me in a way someone is likely to hear?
How can I metabolize painful messages and receive the truth underneath them?
How can I hold someone’s humanity even when I don’t like their behavior?
How can I make room for my needs, even when society says ‘agreeable people are most likable’?
How can I collaborate with people who have different strategies and ideas than me?
My household became the test kitchen for practicing tools of nonviolence, which included many blunders and repairs (a great way to integrate learning). Now I see Nonviolent Communication as a spiritual practice with practical applications; or maybe it's a set of practical tools with spiritual applications. Many years later I am honored to work with parents, individuals, couples, businesses, organizations and schools. I love sharing peace-making and collaborative practices designed to liberate ourselves and our relationships from the confining constructs of our society and our own minds so we can live with more authenticity, connection, trust and empowerment.