Multi-session NVC Courses

What happens when empathy isn't enough?

When you and the people you love keep getting into the same argument again and again with no resolution or change, it can feel deeply distressing. It may even be challenging to hold on to hope. 

When you look at the outer world, you may find yourself wondering how humanity can possibly work through the deep issues that divide us. Political differences, infidelity, betrayal, acts of violence, world events, racism, intergenerational trauma, or unhealed wounds from childhood.

If you have received empathy for these issues from multiple sources, and still there is no significant relief, then you might even start to question the effectiveness of empathy and your own capacity to heal.

This is where an understanding of the neurobiology of trauma and resonance is vital to supporting healing and connection in long-term relationships.

In this collection of recordings from Sarah Peyton’s 2020 course, you will discover:

• New paths designed to enable you to move towards integrating – and healing – difficult events
• How learning about the brain brings us more self-compassion, self-acceptance, and healing
• How to look at your old patterns with warmth – while also opening you up to change
• Support healing and connecting in your long-term relationships – even when it seems there is no resolution in sight!

Realizing what trauma is – a phenomenon that affects us all – increases your self-compassion and gives you solid ground to stand on. Then, when you begin to integrate the tool of unconscious contract work, you can become intimate with your own survival strategies and those of the people you love.

When you begin to integrate these tools and understanding, you open a door to deep healing and connection that you may not have been able to access before.

• Sarah Peyton
• empathy
• resonance
• neurobiology
• trauma
• self compassion
• connection
• healing
• family
• parents
• children

We've seen how Nonviolent Communication can provide immense personal healing, but questions have arisen on whether it can also contribute to meaningful social change. Roxy believes it can, on both the individual level and the systemic level. NVC for Social Change teaches how to navigate these challenging social issues with love and compassion. By leveraging the depth of understanding that NVC provides, we can then begin to generate equitable processes in our networks and our communities.

You could come away with:

• An intimate understanding of the essential relationship between personal healing and social change — and how to communicate it to others.
• A higher capacity of compassion for different ways of being in the world.
• Clarity about the difference between equity and equality — and how to generate equitable processes in your communities and networks.
• Tools to explore the various factors that contribute to your understanding of power and privilege — including your own.

By the end of these course recordings, you could walk away with your own response to the question, "How can NVC contribute to meaningful social change?"

• Roxy Manning
• Roxanne Manning
• social change
• power
• privilege
• compassion
• systemic change
• equity
• equality

To get stuff done, groups need to come together.

What happens when the group is composed of individuals who share the same mission, but who vary widely in their life experiences?

So many times, those groups start out with a clear sense of the ‘what’  that is bringing them together, but fall apart as they try to navigate the ‘how’ of being together. 

There are various ways in which prior assumptions and individual perspectives impact how a group works together. Facilitating in a way that is attuned to these is key.

For instance, how do you determine who needs to be in the room? What should you consider in deciding the agenda or focus for the gathering? 

What structures can you establish that will support each person’s equitable participation? How do you navigate expressions of unconscious use of power and privilege that impact the group? 

What can you do to guide the group towards decisions that everyone can stand behind?

Roxy Manning's 2023, 4 session course, will help you

• Explore several essential components of facilitation using a caring for all, power-with lens
• Know how to identify and gather together the people who need to be in the room
• Learn tips and strategies for ensuring all voices are heard
• Grow your capacity to name and address power dynamics and unconscious bias that impacts group members’ experience

• Roxy Manning
• facilitation
• equity
• bias
• power differences

2020 added three major global crises to our long and painful list of ongoing challenges:

• Public health crisis emerging from the Coronavirus infecting humans;
• Governance crisis manifesting especially in global protests against police brutality and governments more generally; and
• Economic crisis unfolding from responses to the pandemic.

And as a result, many of us who share NVC with others have been feeling a growing unease about our roles. I have heard from quite a few who want to go beyond using NVC primarily as a personal growth tool within the market economy, and often don't know how to do so. This course is designed to respond to this need by supporting anyone who shares NVC with others – regardless of experience or certification – in opening to the way systemic perspectives deepen and transform how we bring NVC to people, communities, and organizations.

Course Outline

The course is comprised of three 90-min sessions that were held on three consecutive days. The outline below is loose and may shift to adapt to needs, experiences, and situations as they arise in the course of our time together.

Session 1: Systemic Awareness as Compassion

In our current mindset, whenever needs are not met all eyes focus on individuals. NVC teaches us to shift from punitive perspectives based on right/wrong thinking to a view of all actions as an attempt to meet needs. As NVC is usually taught, participants don't learn why we choose specific strategies, why some needs are glorified and others denigrated – and why those may vary between and within cultures; or why we have a story that locates everything in the individual. A systemic awareness that is rooted in understanding the historical, political, and economic roots of much individual behavior de-personalizes what we do and what is done to us, and invites seeing all of us as deeply shaped by our collective history and current social locations. This kind of awareness can fundamentally shift how we look at NVC, what we will choose to learn in addition in order to make our teaching relevant to others across many differences, and how we can bring NVC to bear on situations that have dramatically different purposes from personal healing, growth, or even liberation.

Session 2: NVC Practices for Liberation

Patriarchy, the root system that has given rise to all forms of oppression – starting with the oppression of women and children, and continuing to oppression based on newly created categories such as class, race, religion, and ethnicity, leading to all the divisions we have today – emerges from scarcity, functions in separation, and results in powerlessness. Liberation, individually and collectively, proceeds by restoring capacity in the opposite direction: what was lost last is restored first, and we move towards life instead of away from life. Our liberation shifts us from powerlessness to choice, from separation to togetherness, and from scarcity to flow. The path of liberation embraces nonviolence as the full flowering of humanity. This session examines specific and concrete ways in which NVC principles and practices support this move, beyond a communication template. Here are some examples:

• Vulnerability, including the willingness to inhabit our needs without knowing if they will ever be met; making requests even when we may hear a "no"; and speaking only from what we know (observations, internal states, and the present moment) all support choice.
• Embracing all our feelings and bringing tenderness to our experience supports movement from right/wrong thinking, including judgments of self and others, into tenderness for all, which then supports togetherness even in the face of disagreements.
• Mourning and celebration, which lead to willingness to give and willingness to receive, support movement towards putting all needs, impacts (feelings and other experiences), and resources (willingness to give) on the table instead of focusing on who deserves what when decisions need to be made.

Session 3: Adapting NVC Core Practices to Power and Cultural Differences

Understanding how our socialization into different positions within society is entirely different from anything essential about us allows us to open up to the possibility that all we learned about NVC may not apply to a world divided along so many lines. We are not equal, and we are not all the same, even if we long for commonality and togetherness at all times. Every single one of the components of the NVC template and all core NVC practices are deeply influenced by such differences. This session explores some of these influences and offers pathways to strengthen capacity. Some examples include:

• Observations: How do we account for the fact that who is observing and where they are observing from shapes what is noticed? How do we find as close to observational language as possible to describe patterns?
• Feelings: How do we account for the danger of experiencing and expressing certain feelings depending on where you are located? (e.g. Black women in the US can get backlash when expressing anger; all men can be ridiculed when expressing vulnerability.)
• Needs: How do we engage with the reality that some people's needs are consistently and systematically prioritized in relation to other people? How do we find capacity to attend to all needs when our socialization may prohibit some needs and not others?
• Requests: How do we learn to make requests and to say "no" to others' requests if we have been socialized not to? How do we release control and make true requests if we have been socialized and habituated to our needs being prioritized and our perspective appearing correct?
• Empathy: How do we open our hearts to the needs and perspectives of people different from us, such as those with more or less power; those embracing different worldviews based on their culture; or those who don't know how to open themselves to us because of such differences?
• Feedback: How do we learn to hear impact without becoming defensive about intention when we have more power in a particular situation? How do we learn to offer feedback about impact without implying intention when we have less power in a particular situation?

• Miki Kashtan
• feedback
• empathy
• requests
• feelings
• needs
• observation
• mourning
• celebration
• vulnerability
• sharing NVC

Ever since the Women's Movement of the 60s and 70s, we have known that "the personal is the political" – that individual suffering and challenges often have their source in the social systems within which we live.

How can we mobilize this insight in support of our own and others' healing?

Join Miki Kashtan for this course designed to shed light on how the social context into which we are born affects our experience, and what we can do about it at the individual level within the paradigm of nonviolence. 

Outline

Session 1: Overcoming Modern Patriarchal Socialization

• Obedience as a core value of all patriarchal societies
• Shaming as a core socializing strategy
• Tips for offering immediate freedom and relief by bringing attention to the systemic context and releasing self-blame
• The either/or of freedom and belonging
• Practices for moving towards integration and inner freedom

Session 2: Reclaiming Interdependence

• Why we need others: transcending self-sufficiency as a core element of modern capitalism
• The dual role of authentic love and honest feedback in the process of healing
• Practices for transcending the paradigm of separation 

Session 3: Social Location and Healing

• Why social location matters in shaping experience: shining a light on narratives of deserving
• Power differences between practitioner and client
• Where individual responsibility begins and ends: releasing blame of self and other
• Moving beyond othering: empathic imagination as a tool for self-liberation
• Practices for embracing liberation for all

• Miki Kashtan
• systems
• integration
• liberation
• power differences

Feeling frustrated about the stress that is present in your life and in your relationships?

Then consider the following: the way you speak – and how you hear others – significantly impacts the joy and stress you experience in each of your relationships.

If you are ready to get beyond the emotional triggers that goad you into responding in counterproductive ways – or if you would simply like to see an increase in the harmony you experience at home or at work, this course may be the perfect fit.

In eight sessions you will be given practical tools designed to help you:

• Move beyond anger, blame and judgment… 
• Make sense of the baffling or offensive people in your life… 
• Deepen your compassion for yourself and others… and
• Transform your old thought and speaking patterns into new ones that inspire harmony and fun!

Together we will cover the basics of the Nonviolent Communication process, including Self Empathy (compassion for yourself), Empathy (compassion for others), and Speaking Your Truth (even when it's difficult to ask for what you really want).

• Mary Mackenzie
• NVC fundamentals
• NVC basics
• multisession course
• empathy
• self empathy
• relationships
• compassion
• feelings
• needs
• requests
• observations
• captions
• searchable transcript

When we're deeply heard, our whole bodies relax. We return to equilibrium, we can breathe again, and access renewed curiosity, empowerment and choice. We also get a fresh perspective and new insights: like a fog lifting, we see ideas and solutions that evaded us before. And with that restored vision, we're able to find new ways to engage with others that, just moments earlier, seemed impossible or a chore. 

You can become an empathy wizard—with anyone, in any situation, including the most challenging!

Join Dian to explore key concepts and practices, including new ways of seeing and practicing NVC, and learn all this through direct experience, via exercises, pair work, and role play. 

In this course recording, you'll learn how to:

• Make use of felt-sense and somatic awareness to support faster and deeper shifts in yourself and others
• Master silent empathy to give more ease and flow in your empathy guessing
• "Streetify" your NVC practice by learning how to make your NVC practice more fluent, colloquial, and "natural" and match the person you're speaking with
• De-mystify empathy guessing by learning to identify key linguistic queues
• Build an "emergency empathy" tool kit---with "quick fixes" for challenging situations by using each step of the model for maximum effectiveness
• Interplay both the NVC "mindset" (consciousness/intention) and the NVC "tool kit" for greater ease, fluency and effectiveness

• Dian Killian
• empathy
• NVC
• empathic guess
• colloquial NVC
• street NVC
• silent empathy
• role play
• exercises

Discover how to transform your life by aligning your actions with what matters most to you. David's 4-session course offers you practical, learnable skills that are crucial in today's world—skills like managing your moods, making decisive and values-driven choices, and building stronger relationships through grounded compassion. With a combination of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and somatic techniques, you'll tap into simple life practices that allow you to bridge divides, discharge anxiety held in old, embodied reactions, and connect to deep needs that may have been overlooked. These practices are designed to help you align with your core values, make decisions with clarity, and enhance your emotional and relational capabilities.

Whether you're just starting out with NVC or are an advanced trainer, this course provides valuable insights that can deepen your practice and enrich your life. By attuning to your body's signals and the present moment, you'll develop greater self-awareness and access to intuitive guidance. Throughout the course, you'll be supported in organizing yourself physically, emotionally, and linguistically, giving you the tools to live more compassionately and intentionally. As you engage with the material, you'll not only refine your communication skills but also uncover your greatest gifts, empowering you to make a meaningful impact in your relationships and in the world.

Key takeaways from this course include:

• Practical techniques for managing your moods and emotional states
• Tools for making decisions and taking actions that align with your deepest values
• Strategies for discharging anxiety held in old, embodied reactions
• Guidance for bridging divides and creating stronger, more compassionate relationships
• Daily and lifetime NVC practices for enhancing body awareness and present-moment experience
• A deeper connection to your intuition, self-awareness, and the ability to align your words and actions with what you care about most

• David Weinstock
• NVC application
• somatic
• conflict resolution
• compassion
• needs consciousness
• self connection
• active listening
• values
• relationships
• empathy guessing
• body awareness
• emotional regulation
• leadership

 Would you like to learn how to:

• Use line and color to deeply connect with the feelings and needs that are alive for you ?
• Find a way forward that comes from your creative self ?
• Meet your creative self, even if you have never had the pleasure of meeting it before ?

Come join Olga for Neuroart / Visual NVC– even if you have never drawn or painted before, and even if you are a professional in the midst of a creative block!

You will learn how to:

• Express your feelings and needs on paper with line and color;
• Uncover the steps necessary to help you meet those needs; 
• Use Neuroart to do foundational depth work;
• Transform blocks that are preventing you from making your life wonderful; and 
• Add color and fun to your life by integrating visual journaling into your journaling practice!

You will also receive detailed, step-by-step video instructions, a visual "how to" for every stage (an original approach created by Olga), and guided exercises designed to help you tune into the right hemisphere of your brain throughout the creative process, enhancing your capacity for expressing your feelings, needs, and strategies with line and color! Ample time will be set aside for support and feedback, as well as to answer any questions you may have.

Keywords:

• Olga Nguyen
• integrating NVC
• NVC spirit
• neuroscience
• unconscious contracts
• parts work
• self expression
• transformation
• flow
• self awareness
• captions
• searchable transcript

It is time to create true transparency, empathy and trust in your intimate relationships! In this inspiring telecourse recording, Kelly combines humor, music, group readings and experiential exercises to help you realize the fulfilling and intimate relationships you long for.

If you’ve ever dreaded attending a meeting – or watched in dismay as your group collapses into conflict – know that a methodology known as Convergent Facilitation offers you possible solutions.

It’s based on one simple experience: that people come together at the level of their underlying principles, needs, aspirations, and dreams, not at the level of their surface positions.

Convergent Facilitation is a highly efficient decision-making process developed by Miki Kashtan from the principles of Nonviolent Communication. It enables you to look beneath the surface and find the essence of what’s important to different stakeholders, and bring it together into one set of principles that lead to proposals and ultimately decisions. As a result, it readily produces solutions and decisions that everyone can embrace.

This method is uniquely effective, because it:

• Taps into a group’s shared purpose, and leads to decisions that everyone truly supports – without sacrificing productivity, efficiency, and forward momentum.
• Is very versatile: it may be used for fast emergency responses, for breaking through bottlenecks, or collaborating throughout the life cycle of a long-term project.
• Gives you tools to address power differences to increase the chances that everyone at the table can offer their needs, ideas, and concerns and speak frankly about what really matters to them. It even works with highly polarized groups, like the longtime political enemies who used Convergent Facilitation to pass landmark legislation in Minnesota.

Who It’s For

If you work with groups that make decisions and need to collaborate effectively, this course is for you.

• Team leaders: Reap the benefits of whole-hearted collaboration; create genuine buy-in at all levels; enjoy a more cohesive team that makes better decisions informed by stakeholder needs.
• Community organizers and activists: Learn to bring people’s core concerns to the surface and reach consensus decisions where no one is marginalized – all while avoiding long, draining, and divisive meetings.
• Facilitators: Zoom in on the source of conflicts, and learn transformative, practical options that work even when your group seems completely stuck.
• Mediators: Receive new tools to help any number of parties work towards breakthrough solutions, using a process that is transparent to all.

What You Can Take Away

• Practical, step-by-step process for discovering breakthrough solutions to problems, including those that seem unsolvable.
• Strategies that help people transcend conflicts, stretch beyond their initial positions, and embrace a decision that attends to everyone’s needs.
• Many ways of keeping a meeting moving forward without leaving anyone behind.
• Opportunities for ongoing coaching and development. Miki is passionate about cultivating a community of practice around Convergent Facilitation and her other work, and is launching the Nonviolent Global Liberation Apprenticeship Program and Learning Community for practitioners who are serious about using her approach. This will be an opportunity for you to connect with peers for many purposes, including coaching from Miki and others. 

• Miki Kashtan
• facilitation
• decision making
• NVC principles
• collaboration

This 4 session course is designed to help you more fully integrate NVC values and language into your daily life. Plan on practicing Nonviolent Communication's Radical Honesty through demonstrations, role-playing, and exercises designed to help you more fully integrate NVC values and language into your daily life.

The topics addressed include how to:

• Be radically honest without pushing "the other" away
• Stand firmly and gracefully for your needs
• Assertively ask for what you want
• Enjoy conflicts
• Express and hear 'NO' and stay together / stay alive
• Use the power of empathy to dissolve anger, pain, fear, and hurt
• Hear the essence of what other people say, no matter how they express it – and more!

• applying NVC
• multisession course
• Yoram Mosenzon
• empathic presence
• empathy guess
• hearing no
• resolve conflict
• honesty
• guessing needs
• integrating NVC
• role play

Come. Let us journey together into our own authentic Life force: the essential living energy that permeates all of our lives.

Your journey will begin at the center: with the divine / life force, or soul force.

Robert Gonzales shares how this fundamental life energy is the tender expression of your inner being, or soul. It unfolds through the heart as your deepest longings, which manifest themselves in all forms of human needs and values. When you live from the energies of compassion, creativity, love, and clarity – while remaining wholly grounded and aware of needs and values – then you are living your passion… You are living the Self-In-Life.

When you're unable to live in that rich fullness of your completely authentic essence, you suffer.

What you'll learn in this course recording will increase your capacity for self-compassion and unconditional self-acceptance, even in the most trying circumstances. Your ability to come openly to your pain in the natural open-heartedness of mourning will be deepened and strengthened. Meeting life with full vulnerability will also become increasingly available to your innermost self as we explore mutuality via inner – and outer – relational space experiences.

You may experience: 

• Augmented practices designed to help you retain connection to your authentic essence; 
• Deepened capacity for self-acceptance and self-compassion;
• Practical tips for bringing greater compassion to your relationships;
• Increased capacity for vulnerability and mourning;
• Clarified sense of your own spirituality; and
• Enhanced sense of trusting your own place in life, as well as your purpose.

Finally, spirituality is your relationship to the divine / life force, where beauty is the central essence of your heart. Our practice time together will be comprised of integrating and living with both – and always from a place of wholeness.

• Robert Gonzales
• relationships
• spirituality
• self acceptance
• vulnerability

At the end of the calendar year, many of us feel an old pressure to come up with New Year's resolutions

This may be followed by internal demands along with our inevitable and life-alienating reactions to those demands.

Sound familiar? Are you looking for something different?

If your answer is yes, then join Kristin Masters for a delightful 3-session journey into intention setting, accompanied by warm companionship from yourself and one another.

What you can expect:

• Inquire into your celebrations and mournings in four important categories of your life – body, heart, mind, and spirit – and "take stock" of how satisfied you are in these areas
• Assess your current and past relationships to life, with an eye to leaning into intention setting for the next short (30 days) and midterm (6 months to 1 year) periods of time
• Give and capture empathy for your future self, the self that revisits your intentions in 30, 180, and 360 days (this provides companionship for your future self)

• Kristin Masters
• applying NVC
• intention
• demands
• life alienating
• celebration
• mourning
• relationships
• empathy
• multisession course

In this 6-session course Sarah Peyton will take you through the 5 levels of unconscious contracts that can create patterns of self-sabotage and self-defeat. Each session introduces a different unconscious contract based on various aspects of relational neuroscience and provides support for the release of these contracts. 

Sarah Peyton shows you how, with deep empathy, self-accompaniment, and an understanding of neuroscience, you can free yourself from your original constraints. 

It can be bewildering to be human.

We can make so many choices that are not good for us. Why do we persist in habits, incapacities or self-judgments that are harmful to our long-term well-being? 

The answer to this question is surprising – it is usually either love – or - paradoxically, survival!

Love is at the root of self-sabotage.

Though we often aren't aware of it, our nervous systems are essentially still paired with our earliest caregivers and often related to how we responded as a child. Our first interactions shape us in ways that can limit our life energy.

In Defusing Self-Sabotage, you will learn:

• how you turn off entire flavors of emotion and how to turn them back on
• the relationship between blocked life energy and self-sabotage
• to understand the life-serving power of negative beliefs
• about the "false bodhisattva vows"
• what the universal release process is

• Sarah Peyton
• neuroscience
• feelings
• needs
• unconscious contracts
• empathy
• resonance

Mediation as a practice in daily life is based on the assumption that the structure of two is not enough. When two people are stimulated they are less available to empathize, to see the beauty in one another. The mediator is simply a third party who is not stimulated and has the skills to help facilitate connection, cooperation, and creativity to discover and meet everyone’s needs.

In this powerful course, you will discover:

• How to enjoy conflict – and stay centered when a conflict becomes heated
• The role of mediator – what a mediator is actually responsible for, and how to make it fun and meaningful (rather than feel like a stressful job)
• The 5 Movements of Passing a Message – this is the basic rhythm of a mediation
• The practice of 'Interruption that Brings Connection'
• How to deepen your empathic skills – empathy as the bread and butter of mediation
• How to support a dialogue to go beyond ‘NO’ and differences in opinion

The content in the recordings from this course will demonstrate the intention, art, and craft of mediation, including mediation structure, how to lead dialogue toward sustainable agreements, how to be impartial, and much more!

• Yoram Mosenzon
• mediation
• dialogue
• conflict resolution
• empathy
• captions
• searchable transcript
• agreements
• NVC application

Have you ever had the experience of being truly heard and understood by another person? Or felt the astounding, breath-taking connection that arises when someone sheds all preconceived notions, gives you their full presence, and really sees you?

We call this The Amazing Power of Empathy – and the power does not stop there.

• Cultivate thriving interpersonal relationships
• Discover paths to move beyond anger, blame, and judgment
• Connect with the Divine essence in other people
• Experience greater ease and joy in all your interactions

Empathy starts with presence and a sincere desire to understand another person's perspective. When this occurs, a transformation happens – there is a shift in intention and attention.

Empathy lifts the cloud of disconnection and opens us up to new possibilities we could not see before. When this happens, fresh reserves of kindness and generosity emerge, and often creative solutions will burst forth in seemingly impossible situations.

In this course recording, veteran CNVC Certified Trainer, Mary Mackenzie, will teach a simple method for developing empathy skills to help you experience deeper compassion, stronger connections, and more mutual understanding in your interactions.

In 4 powerful sessions, Mary will teach you how to:

• Deepen your listening skills and develop an empathetic presence
• Compassionately connect with your own and others' humanity
• Let other people know you really heard them
• See important conversations through to peaceful resolution 

The full presence of empathy is a remarkable gift to give another person and to yourself. Enjoy more heartfelt connections, discover greater depths of compassion, and watch your relationships grow and THRIVE.

• Mary Mackenzie
• captions
• searchable transcript
• empathy
• compassion
• presence
• NVC fundamentals
• empathic presence
• relationship building
• listening
• active listening

Come fall in love with yourself again…

In this course recording, facilitated by Arnina Kashtan, you will discover your ability to...

• Simply love yourself…
• Live fully and express your greatness in the world… and
• Shorten the way to realizing your true self!

Arnina will share with you the deepest process of self-connection and meaningful discovery. You will learn how to listen to your innermost self, discover how to lead a life that is much more than anything you have ever dreamed of, and fall in love with yourself all over again!

Because self-love is the whole story. 

When you love yourself, your ability to cope with the challenges of life changes… In fact, when you love yourself, your whole life experience and sense of reality changes, too.

During this 6-session recording, you will:

• Gain a new, surprising, and exciting connection to yourself that will enable you to both deepen the sense of power in your life and actualize everything you have always dreamed of…
• Experience being fully present in the world — despite your habits — so that you will always be connected to your inner center and thus be able to choose at any given moment where to take your life…
• Understand how to create within yourself (and others!) a sense of flow and love, making your life much more beautiful and exciting… 
• Learn how to open up in your relationships in ways you never thought would be possible, creating an entirely different closeness and intimacy in your life…
• Receive precise tools designed to help you exit stuck places and fully express yourself even in situations that have been difficult in the past…
• Discover an infrastructure of renewable energy for celebrating your life, your gifts, and your uniqueness, along with the full and true ability to be who you are and celebrate your being! 

The result? Life becomes simpler… and you become more real and more fully connected to who you truly are.

• self connection
• Arnina Kashtan
• self love
• expression
• relation

If you answer yes to at least one of the questions below, then this course may be key to building the relationship you want with your children:

• Do you know in your bones that you want to build a relationship in which both your needs and those of your children are fully included?
• Are you tired of seeing yourself time and again using methods to get your children to "cooperate" that you don't actually subscribe to?
• Do you struggle to imagine how to find enough hours in the day to collaborate for real with your children?
• Do you brace for any conversation with extended family and community who criticize you for being too soft with your children? 
• Do you often feel all alone and wonder if you are actually on the right path?

What You Can Take Away

This course is fast pace with lots of content, that offers deep engagement with issues that can be quite painful. Some of the gifts you may receive are:

• Breaking out of isolation: so many parents, especially those trying to live a collaborative paradigm, feel alone and lack support; here you will hear others whose struggles are similar; 
• Compassion for yourself through understanding why your capacity may lag so far behind your commitment and what you can do to bridge the gap;
• Compassion for your children as you understand better what life is like from within your children's experience rather than from the outside looking in;
• Surge in energy that you can put into new conversations with your children that are designed to make agreements based on the truth of where you all are rather than on any "should;"
• A glimpse of life beyond right/wrong thinking as you release yourself from both the old concepts of what is right, such as "an obedient child" and the new concepts of what is right, such as "a parent who never loses it;" and
• Actual tips and stories about parenting, which Lisa Rothman will bring forth from her many years of parenting two boys using the methods outlined in this course.

• Miki Kashtan
• Arnina Kashtan
• Lisa Rothman
• NVC parenting
• relationships
• needs
• feelings
• collaboration
• right wrong thinking
• community
• compassion
• comparison
• commitment

What does nonviolence have to do with group facilitation?

Miki believes that nonviolence is a way of being and living that orients us in all our thoughts, words and deeds toward the integration of truth, love and courage. All nonviolent individual and collective actions are aimed at preserving what serves life and challenging what does not. Facilitation is one clear path for bringing nonviolence to the world!

How can we act now, as facilitators, as if the world of our dreams, the Beloved Community, is already in place?

This course is designed to support you in moving towards more capacity in this area. 

Course Outline

The course is comprised of three sessions. 

Session 1: Transparency and Intuition

• CLARITY OF PURPOSE: You are a human among humans, with a different purpose from anyone else, which is to support the group, not what you want
• HUMILITY: You do not "know" anything; and you are the only one who can decide moment by moment how to respond to what is happening
• INTUITION: The power of knowing without knowing; how to follow it; and how to train your intuition over time
• SPEAKING THE WHY: How transparency increases trust when used to shed a light on process decisions
• HOLDING THE WHOLE: How transparency can interfere when used to bring attention to your feelings beyond your capacity to hold

Session 2: Tracking What Matters

• PURPOSE: The group will not track it and will hold you accountable for it when they veer off
• TIME: The closer to the end, the higher the threshold for changing anything
• PEOPLE: Keeping an eye for who spoke or not; who may be stretching too much; and more
• POWER: Knowing your own power and any other source of power in the room, along with power dynamics, can help you navigate care for all
• NEEDS: What's important to the individuals in the room? How does it get included in what the group does or decides?
• OPEN LOOPS: What requests are not attended to? How not to drop anything when stakes are high?

Session 3: Challenges in the Group

• POWER AND PRIVILEGE: Who speaks, who doesn't; whose voice counts: whose pain is invisible; what you can do about it
• OUTLIERS: How to walk towards someone who presents a challenge to a group, and even to you, while caring for the whole group, still?
• CONFLICT: How to attend to what is happening in a given moment without compromising the purpose for which the group is there?

• Miki Kashtan
• facilitation
• conflict
• power
• privilege
• purpose
• nonviolence