About John Kinyon
About John Kinyon
Meet the Founder of Mediate Your Life
John Kinyon has devoted his life and career to helping people respond to conflict in their personal, work, and community/society lives through awareness and language of empathy, compassion, and collaboration. His work helps people navigate individual, relational, and collective-ancestral aspects of consciousness. The approach gives the ability to access intrinsic, unconditional wellbeing and connection, and creative, emergent possibilities and solutions to the problems and challenges we face.
John is an internationally recognized mediator and trainer of his Mediate Your Life approach. For over 25 years he has mediated conflicts and developed and delivered the 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), and worked closely for over a decade with NVC creator/founder Marshall Rosenberg.
The Mediate Your Life approach offers a map, structure, and skills that integrate a mediation framework, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a mediation model, mindfulness (dual and nondual), and trauma healing. MYL helps people navigate conflicts and challenges, inner and outer, in all aspects of life.
John’s roots are deeply influenced and inspired by humanistic psychology pioneer Carl Rogers, as well as by Mahatma Gandhi and his development of "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.
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 40 years. He lives with his wife in the San Francisco Bay Area. They have three adult children and a larger circle of family in California.
- 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.