NVC is brilliant at minimizing defense and building trust.
This allows us to make choices in service of life interdependently.

If you’ve worked or played with Kristin Masters, you’ve known her as a human with depth and breadth, with a grounding in gratitude and grief, as someone who is clear about her vulnerability and strengths in holding true to integrity in her values. Kristin brings attunement, resonance, insight, and compassion to her work toward personal healing and social change.

If you haven’t met her yet, you might want to know that those values are rooted in a reach for the truths of interdependence, trust building, and willingness to stretch that serve human relationships and the Earth we share. And it has been said that Kristin “relates to everything, even the most serious of matters, with the spirits of attuned play and creativity.” She can often be found singing and art making, often inspired by the natural world or witness to human generosity and kindness. She feels into the mycelial network beneath our feet as a pointer toward the communities she belongs to and tends to with all she’s got.

One of Kristin’s passions and “specializations” is working with grief and gratitude. She believes that “we only grieve that which we love”, believing that we are meant to share heartbreak/mourning and joy/play in community, not alone.

As a facilitator and holder of spaces for groups in learning and in conflict, Kristin draws on many models to be responsive to group and individual experiences, to build/support brave space that attends to layers of needs, and to build trust and capacities for what might be possible.

Kristin began learning the principles and skills of Nonviolent communication in 1994 when she worked with Jean Morrison in San Quentin Prison doing Alternatives to Violence programs. She realized the power of NVC when it saved her marriage (thanks to Jean!) one day in 2001 and decided she was all in. Kristin became a Certified trainer in 2010. Kristin is a weaver of models, principles, and frameworks, using NVC supports as root and guiding sun. She is deeply thankful to teachers and co-creators for finding ways to powerfully address the challenges we face in humanity.

And Kristin offers this below for context:
I am a white US’er. I’m a queer widow who lost my wife to brain cancer, a loving mom (of a favorite ever-human, a 20-something daughter). I live in a softly aging cis-female fat body that still does most of what I ask of it.

I offer individual coaching, mediation/facilitated dialogue, facilitation, organizational consulting, workshops, and retreats on myriad topics. Whether I have a chance to meet/work/play with you or not, I am thrilled to imagine the visions and dreams we might share and the differences we might make.

Gratitude to teachers and influences:

Kristin bows most deeply to two beloved mentors crucial in the Venn diagram of models on the path to personal healing and social/political action.
Lillian Roybal Rose as a teacher/trainer on diversity, cross-cultural communication, and conflict resolution.
Joanna Macy (& “The Work that Reconnects”) is an elder that has incorporated living systems theory, Buddhist principles and empowerment to address despair about our beautiful and ailing world’s environmental and social justice crises.
And also deeply to…
Robert Gonzales for his inner work of compassion, self-responsibility, and the beauty of needs.
Miki Kashtan for her approaches to and applications of the core commitments, her thinking on moving from scarcity, separation and powerlessness to enoughness, interdependence and choice.
Sarah Peyton, for her frameworks of Relational Neurobiology, uses resonant language, unconscious contracts, time travel empathy, and family constellations to show us how to hold our nervous systems in healing from trauma.
Dr. Roxy Manning for her work on holding awareness of power and privilege, addressing microaggressions, and building a beloved community.
Kazu Haga and Mike Tinoco for their holding of the principles and ways of Kingian Nonviolence
And too many others to name as student, team member and co-facilitator.