We have 3 control centers that help us move through life: 1 . Gut: emotional impulses, drives and urges, instinct. 2 . Head: Mind, rationality, causality and functionality. 3 . Heart: mindfulness, conscious feeling, intuition, connection of belly and head through the heart. Of course, our behavior is always based on a mixture of impulsivity, cognition and emotion. The question, however, is from which center we take action. The Enneagram is a well-known type model that works with this tripartition of heart, head and belly. It can be interesting for all those who want to know more about it on a purely personal level. In addition, we could also look at a cultural development model such as Spiral Dynamics (Clare W. Graves), with which we can recognize the signature of heart, head or belly not only in individuals but also in whole cultures. In our currently mainly functionally oriented culture (the head aspect rules), our impulsive life force is tamed by a corset of rational rules and laws, and our feelings have a hard time making sense. At the beginning and in the prime of this phase we first learn not only to live instinctively-impulsively in orders and structures (belly-dominance), but also to understand them better and better. The brain, the language, the social order, the whole cultural environment change significantly. This allows technology and causal and functional interdependence to flourish, which is a basis for larger societies. But without emotional intelligence, which is based on feelings, there is also no interactive intelligence, which goes beyond cleverly designed technical togetherness. That is why we are currently much more likely to be called nice than loving, and why we are on quite thin ice as far as our heart development is concerned. The life usefulness of our projects and social systems is questionable, since their organic embedding was a pure matter of luck in the beginning and must deteriorate more and more in the course of time. With more and more rules, laws and regulations, an administrative apparatus grows up that itself becomes a problem and slows down togetherness without still being able to solve the problems. The culture is in a crisis that can no longer be solved on this cultural level (head, functionality, causal understanding). It is only when our collective thoughts and actions are connected and guided by our cordiality that we begin to rest in an individual and cultural integrity that we can trust. Thus, the heyday of functional togetherness will eventually come to an end. The functional culture of togetherness then proves to be a dead end and it needs the leap to the next level, without which there must inevitably be a decline (See also: The Mouse Utopia Experiment by John Calhoun, the video on this below). If we want to better understand our inner dynamics with the practical means of communication development, we can refer to the heart-head-belly process (Gabriel Fritsch). With it we find out that between these three centers heart-head-belly there is a direction of flow that is life-serving and integrative and one that rather sidelines us. (More about this on request under the keyword heart- head-belly-process). The lively togetherness we strive for with NVC-plus needs an interplay of heart, head and belly. Without the belly the impulsive liveliness is missing, without the head the overview and the clever routines and without the heart the life-serving connectedness.

For NVC-plus we don't need to focus on all that, because in the process we automatically develop more and more mindfulness and sensitivity, because this problem was taken into account in the construction of the model. With NVC-plus we expect a steady development of awareness in our systems of togetherness.