• Learn concrete tools to engage meaningfully and authentically with the world
• Increase your connection with the natural world
• Deepen your capacity for grief and wonder
• Experience the power of life-centered engagement with those you love (and even those you don’t!)
   

Wednesdays, March 19-April 16, 2025 (five sessions)
10:00am-12:00pm Pacific (California) Time
Online via Zoom

“My education didn’t focus on helping me be more alive, more in touch with myself and others. It was oriented toward rewarding me for giving right answers as defined by authorities.”

—Marshall Rosenberg

For those committed to deep inquiry and relational living, this course will provide a path of inquiry to “unlearn” what gets in the way of your collective birthright to genuinely live relationally. 

Together, we will explore some of the historical and neurological patterns that have compromised our human capacity to be in healthy rewarding relationships with ourselves and others. 

At the same time, you will learn the enormous power your words have to change the course of your relationships by rooting your speech to the aliveness within you that is intuitively drawn to be in service to life.

Over 5 sessions, you can expect a focus on two aspects of relating:

1. Using Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) process, you’ll explore the impact your thoughts and speech have on both yourself and others and learn how to apply the NVC process to a variety of situations. You will be invited to bring your own relationship and communication challenges to the class.

2. You’ll explore the habits and reflexes that are so ingrained in your life that you are unlikely to be conscious of them and consequently, even less likely to question them. You’ll stretch yourself mentally and emotionally to become more aware of the source of the beliefs and narratives that influence your drives, choices, and actions.

Each week will focus on a specific theme that invites you to recognize and track what keeps humans unwittingly separated from life as you simultaneously embark on the crucial task of becoming more relational using the NVC process. 

Themes of inquiry:

� The web of life: respecting the interconnectivity of all life
� What’s your story? Examining personal and collective narratives
� Your mutable brain: rewiring for relational engagement
� Repositioning conflict as an invitation and not as a problem
� Developing skillfulness for repair work for when we mess up

You can look forward to in-session exercises as well as assignments between sessions to strengthen your learning.

Come with an open mind and a readiness to roll up your sleeves so you can experience the power of life-centered engagement with those you love, those you don't love, and the living world that sustains us all.

Throughout this experience, you may:

🏵️ Deepen your capacity for grief and wonder. 
Why? Because many of us have become experts at grievance and certainty, both of which are “hard” and armored energies. Grief and wonder are, by contrast, “soft” and supple energies that increase a person’s ability to be relational.

🏵️ Learn to exercise greater discernment around the myriad of external forces competing for your attention. 
Why? Because our personalized social media newsfeeds, or the latest scientific research proving x, y, or z .. can occupy a great deal of space within our souls and psyches, consequently leaving little room for human beings to connect with their own inner wisdom and the world beyond humans.

🏵️ Increase your connection with the natural world. 
Why? Because rarely does a day go by where we don’t hear about climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel impact, and other related data. Much of what we hear is overwhelming, and discouraging, and confines us to data-oriented thought modes. Cultivating a relationship with a bird or a plant in your own backyard is a medicine that is rarely mentioned in public discourse.

🏵️ Reevaluate beliefs that maintain and reinforce disconnection. 
Why? Because getting to the root of any unexamined belief keeps us stuck. For instance, if I believe I should never do anything out of any sense of obligation, even though it may sound like a good idea in theory, I am unwittingly cutting myself off from exploring the nature of service itself as well as my kinship with others and with the natural world.

Meet Your Trainer
Rachelle Lamb is a recognized speaker, writer, poet, NVC trainer, and “relationship whisperer”. She brings an earthy, practical yet innovative wisdom to her work which she has curated over decades of study drawing from cultural anthropology, history, psychology, mythology, poetry, storytelling, and deep ecology. 

This course will draw heavily from Rachelle’s 20+ years of teaching Nonviolent Communication to a wide variety of audiences. It will also draw from the works of the following teachers, authors, activists, storytellers: Joanna Macy, Stephen Jenkinson, Francis Weller, Martín Prechtel, James Hillman, Jean Liedloff, Chellis Glendenning, Gabor Maté, John Taylor-Gatto, Wendell Berry, Chief Oren Lyons, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Martin Shaw, Daniel Quinn, Malidoma Somé, Terrence Real, Esther Perel, Alain de Botton, David Richo

Here at the NVC Academy we run a number of Live Courses every year. This particular course is part of our Beginner’s Pathway — courses for those who are new or relatively new to the practice of Nonviolent Communication. It is for those with little/no experience of NVC, or those who lack confidence in their practice of it.

While courses on our Beginner’s Pathway are designed for newcomers, seasoned NVC enthusiasts are very welcome to attend. Most long-time NVC enthusiasts enjoy the opportunity to get refreshers of some of the building blocks of Nonviolent Communication to reinvigorate and deepen their practice.