What is it all about?

This course is offered from the framework of Mindful Compassionate Dialogue (MCD). MCD naturally supports you in creating the relationships you want by integrating the wisdom and skills of three powerful modalities:  Hakomi, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and Mindfulness.

Hakomi offers clarity about reactivity and healing, NVC offers a means for self-responsibility, skillful communication, and agency, and Mindfulness adds the stable attention and the clear focus needed to continuously refine your understanding and skills.

MCD is a system meant to provide access to agency, compassion, mindfulness, and wisdom through transformation and practice with 12 Relationship Competencies, nine foundations, and, at the center, a life-serving intention. 

Powerful healing can be accessed as a part of daily interactions with friends, partners, coworkers, and community members. A pivotal moment of compassion or subtle understanding can change the direction of someone’s life.

In this course, you will learn to watch for these moments and to see through your own and other’s reactive patterns and societal roles to the tender needs underneath. It’s not about analyzing or diagnosing. It’s about connecting. From a place of connection, you can offer a healing response without trying to fix or rescue another person. If it doesn’t contribute to the other person, you can let it go and offer curiosity about what will contribute.

A healing response is something that is offered from the heart with the intention to contribute to the well-being of another. Healing responses can be both spontaneous acts of kindness and well-considered offerings that are informed by a subtle understanding of another’s experience. 

In this course, you will learn and practice offering  healing responses along both of these dimensions. You will have the opportunity to learn and practice attunement to another’s experience. The practice of attunement often gives rise to spontaneous acts of kindness that contribute to healing. Attunement helps one to sense more accurately how and when another might be able to receive a healing response.

You will also learn and practice healing responses as presented in Hakomi character theory, which I call chronic reactive patterns. These healing responses are designed to address a particular tender need. By adopting the language, intent, and tone related to a specific need, they can be absorbed by the receiver in a less defended and therefore more nourishing way.

You will systematically practice with healing responses for each of the eight chronic reactive patterns.