10-Month
Global Online Program
Course Highlights
Special Formats, Workshop teasers, and Immersion Week Highlights
Creating Intimacy, Strengthening Connection: Special Formats Enrich the Program
Themed sharing circles + celebration and mourning
We will practice the tool of Empathic listening circle around specific chosen topics that are alive for us. In smaller groups formed around these topics we will share in turn, be received in Empathy and perhaps heartfelt reactions, hear the tenderness and wisdom that comes through a deep listening circle. Possible topics can be Parenting and NVC, healing from loss, challenges of dating, intimate relationships, holding NVC consciousness in the workspace and more.
Our third hour will be dedicated to mournings and celebrations in the big circle and in Dyads.
Gift Circle and Dyads on Abundance, Giving and Receiving
In this session we will practice the flow of giving and receiving, see what it awakens in us, and get to know another aspect of one another. It might be nice to start reflecting on what you would love to give and receive.
We will create a living and fun resource of the many surprising and inspiring gifts we can exchange within the community. Things to give can be as simple as a poem I love. This will create a yearlong resource for the community as a living web of giving and receiving.
Practice teaching
Jump into the water of sharing NVC and leading practice groups in a supportive environment.
Sharing circles, celebrations and mourning
In this community meeting we will create space for all voices to be heard.
We will start with a one hour sharing circle of a topic that the community itself will bring to surface.
Our third hour will be dedicated to mournings and celebrations in the big circle and in small groups.
Co creating Social Change
As a community we will open a space for NVC Projects Development and create a support circle for the individuals in the group that want to lead social change with the NVC practice.
The Leadership Hub
If this is your second or third year with the NVC Rising Community we invite you to join the Leadership Hub. The Leadership Hub is about deepening Connection, Contribution, and Practice of Creative NVC Leadership within the Learning Community, and Learning together specific NVC and Leadership content that may interest you. You can read more here.
Conflict Café(s)
Getting comfortable and confident with conflict to navigate everyday life “because conflict is inevitable and re~solution is possible”
We get it - conflict can be scary. So why join us in the Conflict Cafe?
Because conflict is common in our everyday lives and because NVC gifts us powerful skills, tools, re-frames and practices for navigating this conflict restoratively.
At home, at work … with family, friends, colleagues, neighbours … actually with anyone! … conflict can arise and cause us discomfort, even stress. And then it affects our everyday well-being and that of the people we care about. Yes, conflict is a health issue!
So we offer you the Conflict Cafe: an informal, friendly, practical and fun space to get more comfortable and confident with navigating everyday conflict.
“When we wish something would be different, we can try doing something different”.
Take part in the varied programme with demos, clarifications, games, tips & steps, and practice. To bring something new back to help with your conflict situations.
This offering is will be offered by Reethah Desai and will take place several times during the course.
Home groups
Homegroups are your little community within the bigger community, a more intimate group of 4-12 participants. Each homegroup meets at a different time of the week.
The intention of the home groups is to have a supportive nonjudgmental space where we practice hearing and seeing everyone with whatever is alive for them, sharing about our lives and processes, and allowing ourselves to be heard and received with empathy within a circle.
Empathy Café(s)
Time and space to be heard, practice giving and receiving empathy and be in community. These events will take place in addition to the pre-planned sessions.
Certification Hub
If you are a CNVC certification candidate, thinking about becoming one or are offering NVC trainings and wanting to exchange with others around how to integrate your learnings from the program into your work as a trainer, we invite you to join the certification hub!
We'll meet once a month to create community, get to know each other, integrate our learnings, reflect together, and support each other on our journey as NVC trainers.
Together, we will organize and run an Empathy Café where participants can receive and practice empathy, and we can get valuable feedback to grow further.
Immersion Time (5 workshops in total)
Intro - reviewing the basics of NVC (2 sessions of 3 hours)
We will learn together the OFNR foundational steps of NVC (observations, feelings, needs, requests). These sessions will take place in smaller circles allowing us to get to know each other. This content is meaningful for those who are new to NVC, as well as for intermediate and advanced practitioners who want to learn how to teach intro sessions. Beginners: It is important to attend so that the rest of the program will make more sense for you.
Intro to Empathy + Home Groups immersion
In this session, we will Mainly have an Intro to what Empathy is and how to work with it in the home group setting and with empathy buddies: “Your presence is the biggest gift you can give another person” ( Marshall Rosenberg) In empathy, we support each other - creating spaciousness for whatever is alive within us. We will explore how we live Empathy through NVC consciousness, What empathy can create and bring to our lives? We will practice empathic listening and will experience how empathy feels in Empathy Dyads. How to work together in the home group setting and with Empathy buddies, in a productive supportive way and allow for feedback on how I like to be supported. No matter our level of previous experience, in this session, we will build a common language to support our joint practice as a Learning and practicing community this year with Empathy being one of the major pillars of our NVC practice. ** In the first 30 min, you'll get to know your home group leaders and fellow, as we will have a short round of people introducing themselves, you’ll get a more extended time to meet the group members at your second home group meeting.
Living NVC in the Learning Community
This is an exciting session creating a rich “rainbow” of hearing voices from the large circle for the first time. Our group will include people from ALL time zones around the globe. Every person in the circle has a unique perspective and quality to gift the circle. In this session, we will hear from a number of people about their intention for this year-long Learning Community. As well as getting the chance to meet more intimately in breakout rooms. It is important for us that everyone will be present to start to get a taste of the full rainbow of colors-the special human beings who will be creating this process together learning, growing, and supporting each other this year.
Creating inclusivity in a global community
The unique situation of coming together from across the globe, and from across very different life circumstances and privileges, as well as different cultures, requires extra care, awareness and a willingness to learn from each other about what it takes to truly meet across these barriers.
Issues of intersectionality and power differences within the system we all live with, require ongoing work and a willingness to make mistakes, be accountable,
and together as a learning community continue to support each other in our growth towards the world we truly wish to live in.
How can we differentiate between intentional harm, blame and impact, and accountability?
How do we as a community hold with care and integrity Isms within the context of NVC?
We will be introduced and talk about terms like microaggressions, white privilege, pronouns and isms, Systemic Triggers and how these currently live within our prospective cultures.
Workshop teasers
Mourning: Welcoming our unpleasant feelings
Yoram Mosenzon
I was very confused about the word ‘mourning'. I have heard it as a central concept in Nonviolent Communication, but I didn't fully grasp its concrete meaning. So I have been exploring it for the past 15 years...
During this session, we will explore ‘Mourning’: gaining a clear understanding of what it entails and how to put it into practice.
Key topics we'll touch upon:
- Embracing Unpleasant Feelings: Exploring the purpose of unpleasant feelings and learning how to welcome them
- Accompanying others in their Mourning process: Discovering ways to support and be present for others as they navigate their own journey of Mourning.
During this session, we will only scratch the surface of these essential questions and practices, but it will serve as an introduction to help us better comprehend the transformative power of Mourning in our lives and relationships.
Empathy: How to enjoy annoying people?
Yoram Mosenzon
Do you find yourself occasionally getting annoyed with the way people speak to you, and secretly wishing they would change their behavior?
Here's an intriguing challenge: when you yearn for them to change, you might unknowingly become the annoying one...
Empathy for me means: ’take the power back’. Instead of waiting for others to alter their communication style, I aspire to develop the skill of truly understanding (and fall in love with!!) the core message behind their words, regardless of how it is expressed.
In this session, we will focus on refining the Art of 'Guessing Feelings and Needs,' empowering you to embrace empathy and foster deeper connections with those around you.
Awareness Of Life Alienating Systems (ALAS)
Myra Walden
In this workshop, we will explore the following questions.
- Are the systems we inhabit or encounter such as the family, the workplace,
health care, education, or law enforcement life-enhancing or life-alienating?
- If the latter, what are the unmet needs in this situation, and how is this
affecting our well-being?
Clarity about unmet systemic or societal needs, along with a vision of a more life-
serving system or society can be a powerful source of strength and motivation to create
or seek better conditions. Once we uncover systemic impact, we endeavor to develop
strategies to address it.
The crucible of conflict - Conflict as a place where new pathways are forged
Ceridwen Buckmaster
Trauma-informed NVC and Internal Family Systems
Azzam Talhami
Odd moments when NVC can be utilized in Constellation work
Sarah Peyton
You may have experienced the magic of Family Constellation Work with its invitation to look into the transgenerational patterns of our families and how they impact us. Or you may have heard of this kind of work and wondered about it. When I first experienced the beauty of this work, I immediately began to wonder how NVC could inform and deepen the healing possible in this approach. I have spent the last twelve years learning and experiencing and continuing to wonder, and finding small ways in which NVC does indeed take us farther into transgenerational healing. Join me, Sarah Peyton, for a 3 hour experiential exploration of these questions.
Sarah Peyton, author, constellations facilitator, Certified Nonviolent Communication Trainer and neuroscience educator, integrates constellations, brain science and the use of resonant language to heal trauma with exquisite and warm gentleness. Sarah teaches and lectures internationally and is the author of four books on relational neuroscience and self-compassion: Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing, the companion Your Resonant Self Workbook: From Self-sabotage to Self-care, and Affirmations for Turbulent Times: Resonant Words to Soothe Body and Mind, and The Antiracist Heart: A Self-Compassion and Activism Handbook, co-authored alongside Roxy Manning, PhD.
How to Be the Mediator of Your Life’s Journey Through Challenges: Navigate Any Difficulty from Conflict to Connection and New Possibilities
John Kinyon
In this workshop John Kinyon will share his Mediate Your Life (MYL) approach to Nonviolent Communication. The approach offers “conflict maps” to navigate different regions and territories of the world of human conflict as you experience it in the challenges and difficulties of your life. Perhaps you want to have a difficult or healing conversation, or be able to respond effectively to difficult moments in a conversation, or work with your painful reactions to a situation, or mediate empathy and compassion between parts of yourself. MYL combines a “three-chair” mediation model, the Observation, Feeling, Need, Request (OFNR) communication components, and mindfulness.
NVC Pillars: Exploring the World of Needs in relation to Strategies and Feelings
Sudha Shankar
The Money and MWe (Me+We)
Olga Nguyen
Join this session to:
Explore money through different lenses - money as energy/money as a resource/money and power...and more - including how money touches upon us personally ("me"), relationships ("we"), and the "fabric" of our systems (MWe).
Map out the unconscious obstacles (from personal to generational to societal) between you and what makes you and others' lives wonderful (the concept is that money can be a medium - one out of many - for creating some change in ourselves or the world around us).
Work further with this in small groups and a demo in a large group.
The facilitator for this session is Olga Nguyen. Olga started off as an accountant (MSc, GCMA) when her connection with money and other people was interrupted by societal trauma. At that point, amidst other things, she became interested in NVC and trauma healing. 20+ years onwards, on top of her knowledge of Macroeconomics and Finance, Olga brings to this session her systemic constellation skills and her practice of Nonviolent Communication (as a Certified Trainer and assessor-in-training), as well as her training as an Art Therapist and trauma healing skills.
“For me (Olga), the way that I facilitate and teach systemic constellations is very compatible with NVC. In this particular session we will practice the skills of NVC observation: observing one's body sensations, feelings, and needs in relation to what emerges in exploring money. It is a start of a concrete, phenomenological approach for observing what happens in the spaces between us and other beings, and between us and the systems that affect us. A clearer way to see the systemic may be helpful if you are looking to develop your NVC skills beyond personal and interpersonal. To me, this helps to make sense of complexity that otherwise many find overwhelming when dealing with various systems around us.
The way I work with systemic constellations, we also practice our facilitators' neutrality - observing the phenomena with acknowledgment of what is, clarity, and honesty.
As we work with identifying and transforming patterns in different strands of NVC (e.g., working with core beliefs, or with unconscious contracts), here you will also have a chance to learn another way to identify and capture patterns and how to transform them.”
Healing and listening to the Wisdom of Our Bodies
David Weinstock
Learn and Practice NVC Mediation Skills for Helping Others in Conflict: The Mediate Your Life Approach
John Kinyon
The Mediate Your Life (MYL) approach to NVC mediation offers 9 mediation skills to be able to respond to any type of challenge in your role as facilitator of a conflict conversation and process. In this workshop MYL co-creator John Kinyon will provide demonstrations and experiential learning and practice with the NVC mediation model and some of the key mediation skills. You’ll get to experience playing the roles of both sides of a conflict situation as well as being the mediator, and give and receive helpful and supportive learning and feedback as you practice.
Power and Protective use of force
Liv Larsson
NVC is often seen as a gentle process where we listen and try to accommodate everyone's needs and requests. This might make us lose contour as we don't want to be seen as dominant or even powerful. But there is a place to use our force to protect instead of continuing to listen or express. It can be with our children, not getting to bed, it can be with an adult that threatens others and we want to set a limit to this. The action of protection sometimes looks the same as when someone punishes someone and in this session, we will try to distinguish the difference. When is it time to say ”Stop” and when is it time for dialogue?
Shame - As part of our development
Liv Larsson
Befriending shame is a real doorway to more deeply connecting with our human needs. When we no longer let shame define who we are and can be, we can go for our dreams (even if we are still not perfect) and say no to things that are not in line with how we want to live (even if this might mean that people might blame us for being cold or inconsiderate) and let people close (as our greatest fear is no longer that they will call our bluff).
This is an active first exploration of shame and how shame is affecting us from childhood to adulthood.
