Healing Inner Barriers to Empathic Presence in Helping Others Through Conflict and Challenges
with Sarah Peyton & John Kinyon
Starts Tuesday, June 16 through August 4, 2026
2-4pm Pacific Time for 8 weeks
In the role of guiding and helping others navigate life's conflicts and challenges, we also carry hurt from attachment wounds, individual, collective, and generational traumatic experience, and burdens of social injustice. These hurts can create systems of protection in us that become inner barriers to empathic presence, attunement, and being as effective as we could with people we are supporting. These barriers can lead to avoiding certain emotions and places of connection, often unconsciously.
In this 8-week course, Healing Inner Barriers to Empathic Presence in Helping Others Through Conflict and Challenges, Sarah Peyton and John Kinyon will together share their approaches to working with these inner barriers of protection in the context of helping others in conflict. They will use John's 3Chair Model from his Mediate Your Life body of work and aspects of Sarah's neuroscience-based Resonance work to facilitate conflict situations from workshop participants. As inner barriers to empathic presence and attunement arise in the practice, the focus will shift to putting those barriers into the mediation chairs to create inner reconciliation, healing, and collaboration.
This course is especially for anyone who supports others with conflicts and challenges, e.g. mediators, coaches, therapists, HR, managers, educators. It will also be valuable to anyone who wants to deepen their ability to remain present and connected in the intensity of conflict in your own life.
Prerequisite For this course, we recommend that you have had training in and feel comfortable with the foundation skills of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), or feel versed in the Feelings and Needs portion of Resonant Language.
Are you in the MYL Program?
If you are registered for the upcoming MYL Mediation & Conflict Coaching Program, or planning to enroll, you can get 20% off this course with Sarah and John. Please email the team at programs@mediateyourlife.com.
MEET THE FACILITATORS
- Meet Facilitator -
Sarah Peyton
Sarah Peyton, author, Certified Nonviolent Communication Trainer and neuroscience educator, integrates constellations, brain science and the use of resonant language to heal trauma with exquisite and warm gentleness. Sarah teaches and lectures internationally and is the author of four books on relational neuroscience and self-compassion: Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain's Capacity for Healing, the companion Your Resonant Self Workbook: From Self-sabotage to Self-care, and Affirmations for Turbulent Times: Resonant Words to Soothe Body and Mind, and The Antiracist Heart: A Self-Compassion and Activism Handbook, co-authored with Roxy Manning, PhD. Find her at www.sarahpeyton.com.
- Meet Facilitator -
John Kinyon
John Kinyon has devoted his life and career to human connection and the ability to shift from conflict to understanding and collaboration through empathic communication and an exploration of consciousness. John trains individuals around the world in his Mediate Your Life approach, and is a guide for people and organizations experiencing all forms of conflict challenges, internal and external. His Mediate Your Life approach offers a map based in the work of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) that integrates a mediation framework, mindfulness (dual and nondual), and trauma healing. For over 25 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. He is a certified trainer of the Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC).
The structure of each class is: brief self-connection practice and group connection, presentation, demonstration with participants from the class, breakout practice in dyads and triads, group sharing and Q&A.
Week 1: Inner Barriers to Empathic Presence and "3rd Chair" Empathic, Resonant Awareness
Sarah presents on inner barriers, and John presents the 3Chair Model of Mediate Your Life. John and Sarah offer guided meditations and breakout sharing.
Week 2: The Neuroscience of Understanding and Connection, and a 5-Step Mediation Process
Sarah presents on the neuroscience of key aspects of NVC-based mediation, and John presents and demonstrates his mediation process, followed by breakout practice in triads.
Week 3: Triad Practice and Putting Inner Barriers in the Mediation Chairs
The practice begins with interpersonal mediation, and then shifts to mediating with inner barriers.
Week 4: More Practice with Emotional Barriers
Week 5: Warmth, Self-Warmth, and the Broken Mother Field in Mediation
Week 6: How Accessing the Field of Constellations Work (Family, Society, Ancestral) Can Support Interpersonal Mediation
Week 7: The Neuroscience of "I-You-We" Language in the 3 Chairs of Mediation
Week 8: Review, Integration, Next Steps, and Closing Sharing
Are you in the MYL Program?
If you are registered for the upcoming MYL Mediation & Conflict Coaching Program, or planning to enroll, you can get 20% off this course with Sarah and John. Please email the team at programs@mediateyourlife.com.