Workshops offered by all trainers

Through guided meditation followed by dyad exercises, you will get to reveal your personal Core Values, those long-term needs that feel like the foundation under your feet. Knowing your core values becomes a personal scaffold for growing your relationships, and supporting you through decisions.

We sometimes hurt other people unintentionally. It could even happen during this retreat. Instead of defending your intention (and adding to separation), learn how to have a repair conversation that connects and leaves both parties relieved and relaxed. We will also talk about those cases where you don’t get that the other person felt hurt by your actions. Expect roleplays and an intrinsic experience of what it feels to have restored balance. 

Sometimes, feelings words don’t really catch the other person’s experience. Or the other is not in a relationship with their feelings. Metaphors can serve as a shortcut to what really matters. In this session, you will learn and practice how to use metaphors in empathy without imposing something on the other. It lightens the conversation while offering synchronized accompaniment. As catching your partner in the beautiful dance of aerial acrobatics.

In this class, we will look at the identities we humans carry with us – and what they mean to our ability to connect from the heart. We will look at the barriers to a connection that cultural norms and power differences have prompted on us, and find our personal language to promote eye-level connection anyway. Expect to explore how your multi-faceted identity – especially those aspects you are not aware of – influences you and others, and how to bypass them through acknowledgment of yourself and the other person.

Have you ever been told not to be so harsh on yourself? Did it support you toward inner peace – or did it just add another layer to your self-criticism?

Many of us have an inner commentary track that ongoingly points out what we shouldn’t have said or done, that we should look differently; simply that we are not good enough. It can be exhausting and draining. You’ll learn to recognize the voice of your inner critic and understand its origins. You will discover why it exists and how it is intending to protect you. Through acknowledging its noble purpose,  you will practice how to transform your inner critic from a harsh judge into a supportive ally.

The workshop is experiential with theory from NVC and Internal Family Systems, IFS. Expect a demo and partner exercises.

An evening session with Family Constellations exercises and a constellation for a participant. Family (or systemic) constellations create a 3D map of the client’s issue, using the wisdom of the living bodies in the room. It is an efficient way of understanding and releasing stuck patterns coming from family traumas, often resulting in clarity, transformation, and agency for the client. Participants are actively involved and can expect to get expanded understanding of their own issues and an experience of witnessing true healing.

How do we embody the art of  Nonviolent Communication so it becomes who we are?  I approach NVC as lifelong learning and art. Here I will share the basics of my somatic approach to NVC and will lay out some key elements for shaping your own NVC practices in ways that are generative, felt, shareable and lasting.  In this session, I will also offer some basic practices for building new learning pathways and habits that bring a felt sense to Nonviolent Communication’s basics.  To create new ways of being in our lives we need practices that nurture growth and change over the long haul. 

S.U.R.F. Centering practice is a centering practice for somatically exploring and imbuing empathic listening with qualities of presence that we choose to embody. It is a simple yet expansive mind/body practice for exploring the qualities of needs in great depth, over time, and for inner guidance.  Over time, it increases the ability to articulate and integrate thoughts with feelings, clear emotional blockage, and embody and extend an empathic listening field imbued with ennobling qualities. The acronym S.U.R.F. stands for Shape, Unify, Resource, and Field. In the practices for embodying NVC, each word that expresses a need becomes a somatic exploration of a quality of Life, a welcome signpost pointing toward something much more comprehensive. 

How we shape ourselves is inextricably linked to how we shape our relationships, shape the world around us, as well as, how the world responds back to us. In all encounters, there is a play of nonverbal forces, habits, and responses. What we communicate through tone, gesture, body shape, and movement exceeds the impact of our choice of words. This five-elemental training explored over time develops “somatic impressions”—whole body/mind understandings– that reveal the wisdom found through the living of essential and ennobling needs such as:

– Understanding and meaning (ground), – Belonging and empathy (water), – Lightness and joy (wind),            -Creativity and expression (fire), -Presence and clarity (space).

Each element provides an opportunity for profound insights and self-growth This practice combines visualization and linguistic features with the Tai Chi movement to form a profound daily practice for managing internal overwhelms, listening with empathy, and harmonizing conflict in relationships.

Invariably, we all grow up creating strategies that organize around a unique set of circumstances. Core strategies are the deeply embedded primary physical, emotional, and linguistic behaviors we’ve historically put in place to safeguard our basic needs for safety and belonging. These experiences and stories carried over time settle, through repetition and practice, into our muscles, cells, intentions, and what we communicate. Embodied historical stories and automatic habits that we suppress or ignore eventually taint our clarity and expression and can compel our actions beyond what we may truly intend or want.

 As an internal process, mourning and celebration breathe life into the places we have learned to protect, hide away, or in some manner or form have forsaken. This inner process builds tolerance of ourselves and understanding of our emotions as it grows the capacity for holding with compassion the emotional difficulties of others.

Mourning is when we grieve what we love and miss. Celebration is when we love what is present for us. They are two sides to gratitude. Celebration and mourning, fully felt, honors life. They bring sweet sorrow that is healing. Embracing both is not only healthy, the more heartfelt and clear, but we can also express our gratitude, the less prone we are to resentment, depression, despair, and violence. A deep, honest, authentic, expression of gratitude is an agent of change.

 This training session begins with a reconciliation between our inner schisms.  As an internal process, mourning and celebration breathe life into the places we have learned to protect, hideaway, or have forsaken. This inner process builds tolerance for ourselves and understanding of our emotions as it grows the capacity for holding with compassion the emotional difficulties of others. Mourning and celebration are processes that help us to fully receive and give in. 

This session introduces 7 qualities – care, courage, curiosity, centering, creativity, confidence, and commitment – that support the journey towards the embodiment of an art, in this case, Nonviolent Communication. The focus here is on a way to cultivate skillful vulnerability that supports us in feeling safe, resourced, and empathic.  This practice allows the intelligence of our hearts, intuition, and mind to work in consensus to guide our words, choices, and actions. 

Mourning is when we grieve what we love and miss. Celebration is when we love what is present for us. They are two sides to gratitude. Celebration and mourning, fully felt, honors life. They bring sweet sorrow that is healing. Embracing both is not only healthy, the more heartfelt and clear, but we can also express our gratitude, the less prone we are to resentment, depression, despair, and violence. A deep, honest, authentic, expression of gratitude is an agent of change.

 This training session begins with a reconciliation between our inner schisms.  As an internal process, mourning and celebration breathe life into the places we have learned to protect, hideaway, or have forsaken. This inner process builds tolerance for ourselves and understanding of our emotions as it grows the capacity for holding with compassion the emotional difficulties of others. Mourning and celebration are processes that help us to fully receive and give in.  

Spiral Blend offers an integrated physical, emotional, and linguistic map for practicing and understanding Nonviolent Communication processes. The Spiral Blend slows things down enough to establish awareness of our emotions during challenging and triggering moments. This allows our bodies’ signals to become an “inner guidance system” that brings direction and clarity to the choices at hand. The Spiral Blend brings special attention to the interplay of nonverbal forces, habits, and responses beneath the words we use and the stories we tell ourselves. When centered, we can discern the messages of our emotions. When un-centered, the tendency is to operate more mechanically through old, well-practiced patterns of comporting and expressing ourselves. The Spiral Blend is a process for staying present in conflict, listening empathically, and exploring collaborative strategies that honor everyone’s needs.

We will explore practices for organizing and empowering word and action by grounding ourselves in NVC consciousness.  Leadership qualities such as honesty, integrity, humility, acceptance, empathy, and choice are learnable skills and states of being. When you know deeply what matters and what you care about and you move from that place, you can powerfully lead yourself and others. Much of what we express is non-verbal.  When words and action come out of an internal consensus, when we are deeply moved by the life that courses through and around us, we can affect life-affirming change based on loving protection for all.

In this workshop, we will explore the painful situation of someone not responding to you. It can stimulate a lot of pain, and it can be difficult to accept. But what might the unmet need(s) be for you? I will offer some situations as inspiration, and we will explore one of them further – or a situation from a participant – through a slow roleplay. The goal is to bring light to the situation and foster more self-connection and tenderness.

In this workshop, we will gain clarity on the importance of saying ‘no’ in human interactions and setting boundaries. Through a demonstration role play, we will reflect on the elements of a clear and connective “no.” We will examine the benefits that come with such clear and conscious “no’s”: clarity, trust, growth, and getting to know one another better. If time permits, we will also formulate a “no” using an example from a participant.

Are there things, places, or people in your life that you find hard to let go of? If so, you probably know the power of attachment and how difficult it can be. In this workshop, we will gain clarity on the elements and process needed to reach a place where you can say a full—and mournful—goodbye. There will be space to work on an attachment in your personal life.

We will share our experiences with NVC and the religious traditions each of us may be part of. Where does NVC harmonize with religion, and where does it clash? By exploring together, we may bring more understanding and transform clashes into enriching relationships. I will begin by sharing my personal story about how NVC has influenced me and my work as a priest. It is completely okay to just come and listen if you prefer not to share—curiosity is enough.

In this workshop, we will create clarity about NVC requests and then split into pairs. With some simple rules, each person in the pair will take turns making a request to the other, balancing seriousness and play. This may lead to adventures in the building and the surrounding area—and a lot of fun. The goal is to experience how conscious requests can bring space, movement, and lightness to a relationship. Plus, you can take the game with you.

We are in a constant decision-making process. Many of the choices we make are routine, some even don’t require much attention. In this workshop, we will explore how to make conscious choices when we are facing inner conflict, as these choices we make, may have an important impact on our lives. We will learn and practice how to resolve inner conflict by getting deep embodied contact to live in us, our feelings and needs, and search for strategies that support life in us. A simple yet powerful tool to use in daily life and practice.

Connecting and keeping a connection to life in us in any given moment enables us to speak and act aligned, with peace, and empathy, express honestly and find the courage to show vulnerability, allowing others to connect to us. Using the process of deep self-empathy, we can utilise our body intelligence to change our responses to inner or outer stimuli and connect to our needs rather than experiencing triggers and experience strong unpleasant feelings and emotions. It can also help us understand and internalise a path to embody and connect to our inner world, feelings and needs with more ease and confidence.

I often hear that NVC is a serious practice and should not be taken lightly.  At he same time, I get feedback from participants, that their family, friends, or colleagues struggle to learn NVC, as it involves lots of pain, vulnerability, and commitment (and it’s not fun). As much as learning and sharing principles of NVC may be a deep and emotionally intense process, there are also many ways of learning and sharing NVC with your dearest ones and workshop participants where people are more likely to dive into exploring NVC with ease, play and more creative and still efficient and enriching ways. We will be exploring a series of playful exercises you can use in many situations with more relaxed and less formal ways.

I find requests the most tricky part of NVC. In this workshop, we will mainly focus on small and important details, how to create requests that may serve and enrich your life and at the same time support others to be able to hear it and give them more choices of saying joyfully yes to it. We will be deeply engaged in the principles of inter-dependence and use most of the time to practice by moving through the space of request staps.

In this workshop, we will focus on experiencing finding a win-win solution. First, we will raise our awareness of needs, feelings and strategies we use to fulfill our needs. By engaging in exercises we will work on our conflicts to see what is it that prevents us from finding a solution that is best for both parties. And lastly, the safe space we create will let our imagination run free and find unique win-win solutions. The experience will help us apply this skill in other conflicts as well. We will go home ready to take on the world with our minds open. 

In this session, we will take up learning how to ask for the moon (if that is something that will meet our needs ). With a quick warmup activity, we will remind our subconscious selves about everything we know about needs, feelings, and strategies. Working in pairs we will address our personal conflicts to see how we could enrich your lives by learning how to ask for what will in fact fulfill our needs. Requests that actually do make our lives more wonderful have a few particularities and we will explore that too. When we hit that homerun though … we will celebrate too.

Argh, regret, self-blame, blaming others – feelings and states that we are struggling to overcome in our lives. And we get better with each practice. And it takes time, but our capacity grows. You are kindly invited to explore calming down techniques from meditating to EFT and find your favorite. 

Anxiety is just a normal stress response and yet, when it is occurring too often, it can become a mind pattern that can lead us to anxiety disorders. 

We will talk about what is going on in our brains when anxiety becomes too persistent and interferes with our daily life, and how to break the pattern.

When we forgive others, we make more space in our hearts. The more space we have, the easier it is to be compassionate and self-connected. Forgiveness is sometimes hard because a wish for revenge or deep pain and a wish to forgive are fighting. That’s why many people don’t really forgive, they just suppress.

We will learn how to forgive others and ourselves through four steps that will lead us a deeper place of ourselves and help us in genuine empathy and self- empathy.

How NVC can support us to grow through levels of consciousness. When we open our hearts wide enough and connect with Needs, we connect with aspects of our consciousness that – rather than missing – are already complete and full. 

Ceremony is powerful beyond the mind, because it follows our nature, which is beyond it. Coming together, opening our hearts, being vulnerable, and helping each other with naked presence will be parts of this ceremony. It will deepen the process of radical forgiveness and integrate it more easily into life.

All of us have feminine and masculine aspects in us. 

Carl G. Jung describes them as Anima / Animus, we know Jin / Jang in Chinese and Shiva/ Shakti in Eastern philosophy. We will talk about what is their role in the journey to authenticity and learn to look at and transform their past pains to open the qualities behind in order to become more whole and present.

When we are looking for feelings and needs, we reach deeper into ourselves.

When we leave our mind behind and start to be in touch with our body, It takes as even deeper. We will explore parts of our psyche through elements of the dance therapy approach and go to places, that reveal themselves easier when we just make space. With movement, we will go into the field of life and explore how we express and live ourselves in it.

This offering embraces the notion that what we have known/experienced as children informs how we show up as parents. In our longing to show up as the best parents, we can be we are challenged to “re-parent” ourselves—most often—while in the challenging daily process of being parents.This class will offer lively exploration and discussion of NVC consciousness and linguistics in relation to parenting.  We will integrate David Weinstock’s somatic practices to support the alignment of “head over heart, over belly”, to explore and identify the inconsistencies that occur between our hearts and our lips, and to gently hold the grief that we feel when our actions don’t match up with who we wish to be.  These practices support and illuminate the incremental shifts to celebrate as we bring our whole selves into alignment, anchored in the language of our hearts.

This offering is an exploration of the NVC distinction of needs and strategies, specifically in the context of sexuality.  We will invite a lively conversation to illuminate enculturated assumptions around sexuality to support the development of the conscious choice of sex as a mutual strategy toward connection. We will integrate David Weinstock’s somatic practices to support exploration and alignment of “head over heart, over belly” in the context of how we engage in sexual relationships, what need we are longing to fulfill, the grief we may feel in needs not met, or meeting ones needs at the cost of another’s not getting met, and how we can consciously move toward choosing sex as a strategy to joyfully meet mutual needs.

This offering is an exploration, discussion of, and practices to inform and develop our universal need for community.  Integrating David Weinstock’s somatic practices, we can develop our muscles toward a more fluid experience of the dance between “me and we” to support our communal life.  Living in an intentional community since 1991, we are conscious of the “long arc of time” that invites us to witness, fight and forgive smaller grievances and to bring more compassion into our collective desire to create a more beautiful, compassionate world for all life on the planet.

In this workshop, we will explore the beautiful forest surrounding the venue. We will go for an intentional walk, spend some individual time in nature, and let the forest inspire us and help us to connect to ourselves and our needs.

The workshop will help those new to Nonviolent Communication recognize and understand the feelings and needs behind various behaviors and the connection between needs and strategies. It will also provide more experienced participants with a useful tool for explaining feelings and needs in introductory workshops.

Throughout the workshop, we will explore our expectations of our partners, the needs behind these expectations, and how to express them through respectful and empowering dialogue.

The workshop will offer various games and physical exercises that can be used when introducing NVC to youngsters or adults, making workshops more dynamic and fun. Participants will also be invited to share the exercises they use in their work.

In this workshop, we will try out the group dialogue form developed by David Bohm. Bohmian group dialogue is a conversational practice created by physicist David Bohm, aimed at fostering open and reflective communication among participants. It emphasizes collective thinking and understanding, where individuals share their thoughts without judgment or immediate response, allowing for deeper listening and mutual exploration of ideas. The process aims to transcend individual perspectives, leading to shared meaning and insight, and promoting a sense of connectedness and coherence within the group.