NVC Resources on Compassion

Inbal offers parents and anyone with children in their life a lucid discussion of the important role self-empathy plays in creating healthy, supportive relationships.

Join Jim Manske for practice exercises that will help you navigate away from reactivity toward a more compassionate way of being in the world, and learn to express vulnerable honesty(scary honesty} .

Jori and Jim Manske offer writing practices to help us become more firmly grounded in the authorship of our lives. That grounding helps us share ourselves with others more authentically and vulnerably(scary honesty)

Ask the Trainer: My question is about wanting to empathize more with my husband. Sometimes we connect very deeply, other times he slips back into "jackal talk..."

Ask the Trainer: I feel overwhelmed thinking of writing to someone with cancer. What can I do?

Experience the remarkable healing power of self-empathy, guided by CNVC Certified Trainers, Mary Mackenzie and Raj Gill. In this audio course, the trainers lead participants through a demonstration and then supplement the learning with discussion and answers to questions.

Trainer Tip: Accepting our true feelings, needs and values can lead us to a more compassionate life. Are you being true to yourself?

Join CNVC Certified Trainer Mary Mackenzie to learn a few of her tried-and-true simple Self-Empathy techniques, especially focused on the challenges of the holiday season.

The human needs that we all share are the foundation of the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) process because it is in connecting to needs that we find inner freedom, empowerment and compassion.

In this interactive video, Susan Skye helps you unlearn existing, negative associations with the term "needs" to instead build a new association grounded in your natural state of compassion.

Join CNVC Certified Trainer Arnina Kashtan as she explores enemy images to increase your capacity to embrace life more fully. Free yourself from the “us-them” paradigm and experience true compassion for the people whose actions most trouble you.

To keep our life energy moving and growing we can find the resources to welcome and accompany various parts of ourselves with compassion and love -- as though these parts are very young children. And even if these parts contain difficult emotions...

In the "obnoxious stage" we care for our needs in a way that doesn't respect others' needs. In the "emotional liberation" stage we fully care for others' needs as much as our own—while being free of fear, guilt, shame, or obligation. Often NVC training teaches us how to achieve the latter stage without the former. For greater compassion we can be more rigorous in how we talk about...

In order to bring in more nonviolence into the world, we need to take our own needs seriously and recognize that no amount of seeing someone’s innocence would mean putting up with more of their harmful behavior. We need to disentangle compassion towards another from the willingness to tolerate more harmful actions. At times this means finding enough self-love, support, or clarity, to take...

Trainer Tip: It's impossible to value other people’s needs and remain compassionate if we simultaneously harbor judgments. If we're willing to shift this behavior we can translate our judgments into acknowledging how something affects us. Once I got into the habit of this, my judgments began to subside dramatically. It became easy to love people and feel compassion for them, and I experienced a...

Trainer Tip: The ways that we interact with our children shape the way they will interact in their world. How do your actions model compassion, tolerance, and love for your children?

Ask the Trainer: "I'm part of a small, self-led NVC group that's been working together for almost two years. We are experiencing some growing pains in that we're still not certain how and under what circumstances to make requests, especially negative ones."

Have you been nice? Well then you must be enjoying the reward: depression, intermittent explosiveness, job meaninglessness, ambiguous anxiety, low resentment and subtle self hate. The antidotes: honesty, passion and compassion.

Can you give me advice on what to do when people won't talk to me? I find it very difficult to discover what their needs are that aren't being met! Also, how can I be effective with people who don't actually want to think about why they're being the way they are?

One NVC principle is "stimulus vs cause" - one may be the stimulus but never the cause of another's feelings. When we're upset this principle can help us express pain without blame. However, when others are upset it's easy to slip into blaming them using this principle. Instead, we can hear their pain with care and heartfelt mourning - without guilt nor defensiveness, and whether or not we...