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• 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)

Control may help us feel safe in an unpredictable, unsafe, wild world. Wanting control may be a response to shielding ourselves from feeling fear and being aware of our vulnerability. The more we insulate from fear, discomfort, and vulnerability, the more we are cut off from aliveness; we can become more anxious, and depressed. The more we control the more we are disconnected from empathy and care. With aliveness come joy, peace, love, awe.

• Find your voice in response to words you hear as racist
• Build bridges across significant differences of opinion
• Become a powerful ally for the racial justice movement

Feelings and Needs form the cornerstone of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), offering a profound framework for cultivating empathy, compassion, and authenticity in our interactions. This comprehensive 9-page Feelings and Needs Reference Guide is designed to support you in integrating these vital concepts into your daily life.

Feelings and Needs form the cornerstone of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), offering a profound framework for cultivating empathy, compassion, and authenticity in our interactions. This comprehensive 9-page Feelings and Needs Reference Guide is designed to support you in integrating these vital concepts into your daily life.

Dear readers,

I’m writing this letter from Bangalore, India. The monsoons have begun in the South of India after a long, dry summer and we’re grateful for the rain.

Gregg Kendrick and Marie Miyashiro share the importance of nonviolent communication and needs awareness at multiple levels of organizational structure —individual, interpersonal, and organizational.

• Dive deep into the book, Peaceful Living: Daily Meditations for Living with Love, Healing and Compassion with the author
• Deepen your ability to live NVC on a day-to-day basis
• Experience the combination of Mary’s wisdom, daily meditations, journaling, and community
• Enjoy accompaniment throughout 2025 with like-minded individuals

• Strengthen your influence and impact in your workplace using NVC
• Learn how to influence without authority
• Gain skills for dealing with challenging people
• Discover how to foster an organizational culture of empathy and respect!

• Discover the healing magic that comes from welcoming pain rather than avoiding it
• Learn how to navigate ‘healing dialogues’ when hurt or pain is present
• Increase your empathy/honesty skills and your ability to navigate painful conversations
• Embrace pain as a precious life-guiding force that teaches us how to be together!

Discover how fostering strong attachment and connection with your child can lead to fewer conflicts and more harmonious interactions. Ingrid Bauer offers practical guidance on using empathy, self-connection, and consistent care to create a secure and loving environment for your child.

As a beginner in NVC, you might find your attempts to practice your NVC only increases conflict, disconnection and upset in your interactions with people.  Or perhaps people start seeing you as inauthentic. From there, you may find yourself sinking deeper into self-judgement. In this article, Jim Manske shows us how to shift these potential unintended outcomes, into deeper NVC consciousness that brings in more warmth, presence and open-hearted connection.

Use these cards in your practice group or NVC training to understand 4 different ways of responding to hard to hear messages. Become aware of the way you habitually respond to stimulus and develop skills to respond with empathy and express honestly.

A challenge is an expansion of making a clear, positive doable request — and, when given, the person feels deeply seen by the challenger. A challenge isn't just about getting someone to take action on something important to them; it's a fierce form of empathy that supports people in connecting with their life force, and integrates it into their lives with action. A real challenge is tied to the receiver's goals, passions and dreams -- and expands their potential.

To express opposition without stimulating distress, stop judging and look for ways to honor, understand, and have compassion for others. You can do this by finding a point of agreement. For example, you can agree with part of what they said. Or if you completely disagree, you can express what greater understanding, inspiration, appreciation or empathy you have in response to what they're saying. Read on for more on this, plus, ten sentence stems to get you started.

The more we can stay present with our hurt, and own our interpretations, we are more likely to express what's important to us without blame and also to become resilient. From there, the listener can have more space to offer their full presence and empathy. Read on for more.

Little negative impacts can become big when left unattended. Watch for things like using a sharp tone, choosing not to share something, going along with something when you don’t really want to, trying to convince your partner, impulsively turning away, shrinking, losing access to parts of yourself, hiding, daydreaming about a different life, and judgmental thoughts. Instead, shift the dynamic: take responsibility, provide empathy, and commit to change.

There's reactive anger - the sudden outbursts of words, temper or action that create a nervous system response in another. And then there's the anger that's a reaction to someone's anger -- a nervous system startle-response. Instead of either of these, we can learn to heal with empathy, look for unequal power dynamics, take responsibility to make repairs, and shift into the clean, life-serving, fully expressed anger and love.

Puzzling about needs and feelings? Check out this excerpt from Dian Killian's course, Embracing the Body: Somatic Self Empathy, where she leads participants through an exercise that demonstrates how our physical sensations connect us to our feelings and needs.