About
Meet the Founder of Mediate Your Life
John Kinyon has devoted his life and career to human connection and the ability to shift from conflict to understanding, compassion, and collaboration through empathic communication.
John provides mediation and training with individuals and organizations around the world. He is a certified trainer of the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC).
His Mediate Your Life approach is based in the work of Nonviolent Communication and integrates a mediation framework, mindfulness, and trauma work. For over 20 years he has mediated conflicts and developed and delivered the NVC/MYL training throughout the U.S. and in countries around the world in Europe, Asia, and Australia. His approach provides conflict “maps” for navigating conflicts and challenges, inner and outer, in all aspects of life.
Mediate Your Life integrates Nonviolent Communication, a mediation framework, mindfulness, and an understanding of trauma healing, particularly from Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems and the generational and collective trauma work of Thomas Hübl.
John teaches professional training certification programs and personal growth courses. He also facilitates weekly Community Healing Spaces focused on social-political and personal divides and creating empathic community. John offers individual conflict coaching, interpersonal and group mediation, and organizational culture change. He also facilitates International Intensive Trainings for the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) around the world. John is a published author, MYL app creator, podcaster, and speaker.
John received his undergraduate degree from the University of San Francisco, where he studied psychology and philosophy (and played for USF’s nationally ranked soccer team). He went on to graduate training in clinical psychology at Penn State University. During his doctoral studies, he worked with individuals and groups in the campus Psychological Clinic and as a researcher at the Stress and Anxiety Disorders Institute. After graduate school, John helped launch and develop a small commercial business before discovering Nonviolent Communication (NVC). John has been studying and practicing mindfulness, meditation, consciousness and spirituality traditions for over 30 years. He lives with his wife and children in the San Francisco Bay Area.
John’s roots are deeply influenced and inspired by humanistic psychology pioneer Carl Rogers, as well as by Mahatma Gandhi and his work with "nonviolence" in social-political change. In 1998, John met the founder of the international work of Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg, and went on to study closely with him for over a decade. In 2002, following a harrowing adventure together working with Afghan tribal elders in a refugee camp on the Pakistan border, John and close colleague Ike Lasater began co-developing a body of work and training program based in NVC that came to be called Mediate Your Life.
- Meet Founder -
John Kinyon
John has been an internationally renowned leader of Nonviolent Communication for over 25 years. He mentored closely with NVC creator, Marshall Rosenberg, for over a decade and was one of his most trusted students.
John has facilitated, trained, coached, and mediated with thousands of people and communities around the world. In the last decade, John has more deeply integrated mindfulness (dual & non-dual) and trauma-healing into his Mediate Your Life approach.
As conflict grows and intensifies in the world — from global to personal and organizational — the Mediate Your Life approach shows us a way to access the power of conflict and transform it into new possibilities and greater wellbeing.