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Research shows that couples with a secure bond experience arguments that are shorter, lower in intensity, and easier to recover from. Building and keeping a secure bond with your partner requires mindfulness and consistency: respond to what’s needed or supportive in a given moment; give them your full attention and affection in a spacious greeting; conveying care, consideration, and that they matter and are seen.

Let this inspiring video guide you through exercises as if you are actually present at the workshop with Mary Mackenzie! The video opens with Mary leading you through an exercise that generates a physical experience of the NVC consciousness.

David explores how movement helps you hold your center when navigating challenging conversations. Example: Move to Wind ~ to calm your system; Move to Ground ~ to notice the ground on which you stand; and Step to Shikaku ~ step behind to practice empathic listening. Listen Now.

For this exercise choose a situation in which you have said a “yes” to someone‛s request but you didn't experience your “yes” as given freely or joyfully. Then explore judgements, feelings, needs, and alternate strategies that come up in relation to your “yes”, your “no”, and in relation to what the other person might be experiencing.

This article outlines a four-part transformation process to help us recognize what's giving rise to our suffering and resentment -- and transform it into more freedom, creativity, and choice.

In this audio presentation, Jori offers clarity about the three different layers of empathy and the value of differentiating each layer. If you're looking for a daily practice for deepening your empathy skills, this is for you. 

According to this article, what we do before we move into the NVC dance profoundly influences the outcome and everyone involved.  This "before" step increases the likelihood of living compassionately, and our support openness to outcome.  It can also make our NVC practice less connecting, and more evaluative.  The article addresses these points and talks about ways to move beyond the dead past, and the imagined future, to step into the the only “time and place” that both NVC operates and that the connection we so fervently want actually exists (ie. the present moment).

I love the insights, resources, and inspiration I get from this course. It gives you a glimpse into the support Miki offers around deepening the practice of nonviolence in thought, word, and action.
—Lore Baur, NVCA Course Coordinator, CNVC Certified Trainer.

Miki is sharing what that means "Responding to the Call of our Time" for her and invites us to feel that call. This video illustrates how she is helping participants through teaching, coaching and mentoring so they can move forward with their challenges.

Why is it so difficult to not take things personally? It's because everything reinforces the sense that whatever is being said is indeed about us – both from without and from within. However, we can get better at not taking things personally with a practice of shifting our focus by being open to multiple interpretations, understanding that our reaction is about our own need, and noticing how the other person’s words, no matter how they sound to us, are an expression of their needs. We can then be more present and available to navigate the situation.

Follow worry to the underlying universal need and discern wise action. To get there, we can try out prayer, wishes, savoring the need, or compassionate witnessing. If you notice and name the aspects of worry continuously, the compassionate witnessing practice will interrupt the habitual spinning of worry-filled stories. There are at least six things you can witness with curiosity. Read on for more.

When you experience an emotion, your body send a message to your brain that lights up the amygdala. Then what? Listen as Sarah Peyton demonstrates the NVC practice of Naming the Feeling and Need, which calms the amygdala and enables you to move into relational space.

Before you make a request you can connect fully to a time when your need was met. Notice how your request feels and sounds different from this place of aliveness. Excitement about meeting a need implies confidence and trust about moving forward together. Offer an invitation to find strategies that work for both of you.

When we are completely involved in an activity for its own sake we are in engagement. Here, the ego falls away and time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Our whole being is involved, and we're using our skills to the utmost. Read on for activities that could stimulate engagement, a list of subjectively experienced elements of engagement and a list of what supports engagement.

Use this interactive empathy exercise to track the relationship and shifting of body sensations, feelings and needs as you note them out loud.

In some situations you might expect people to show a degree of maturity or skill. When they don't, your anger-fueled response doesn't lead to lasting improved relationship change. Instead, find someone who retains focus on your feelings and needs rather than colluding with you about what should(n't) be. This can support greater acceptance, grief, vulnerability, groundedness and discernment, from which next steps can arise.

Building trust involves each person taking responsibility for what they want by identifying their needs, and making specific and doable requests that open a negotiation. Identify in what contexts you already have trust, what you want to be able to trust, and how you may be blocking or cultivating that trust. Making requests for specific actions of what to do differently can also help.

Fully connecting to the deeper need under the anger can transform and release the anger, without requiring the other person to do anything differently. From there, you can reach an understanding of the other person's experience, feelings and needs underlying the actions that stimulated your anger to re-establish connection with your own and the other person's humanity.

Ever have a hard time saying "no" to someone, or feel obligated to say yes? Here's an exercise that can help you notice where you are placing yourself as someone who "has to" say yes; the needs in the other person making the request; what you want to say "yes" to (regarding your needs and theirs) by saying "no"; what prevents you from saying "yes"; plus your request and how you might express it.