Empathy and Mindfulness in Conversation
8-week Online Program - Level 1 (Foundation)
Respond to the Growing Challenges and Adversities in Your Life, and in the World, with Empathic Connection and Community
Develop deep foundational skills and abilities with dimensions of mindful awareness in empathic communication with yourself and others, for responding to the impacts of social-economic-environmental turbulence, uncertainties, and difficulties in your life and in the world.
You’ll Walk Away With The Ability To:
- Experience greater health and wellness through emotional well being
- Recover more quickly from difficult situations and interactions
- Feel more peace, centeredness, ease, and creativity responding to life's challenges
- Be more present and connected in your relationships
- Use language more skillfully in your interactions with people
- Increase self-knowledge and self-connection
- Experience more compassion for yourself and others
- Listen in a way people notice and appreciate
- Build empathic community of connection, learning, and support
- Develop greater access to creativity and new possibilities
- Experience more happiness and well being
Course Outline
Week 1: Overview and Practice with Awareness and Language
Week 2: Observation: Language of the Mind — Speaking and listening with awareness of mind activity (perceiving, words, images) and using observation language.
Week 3: Feeling: Language of the Body — Speaking and listening from compassionate presence with body sensation and emotion, and using feeling language.
Week 4: Need: Language of the Universal, Human Needs, Life Energy, and Levels of Empowerment — Using a language of universal human needs combined with experiencing the energy and aliveness of the body and wholistic awareness (awareness of awareness).
Week 5: Request: Language of Giving and Receiving — Accessing the field of creative potential and possibility by connecting needs with specific requests, asking for what you want to contribute to wellbeing for self and others, give and receive compassionately, and find solutions.
Week 6: The Four Communication Choices — The OFNR components can be focused and used in 4 ways: self-empathy, self-expression, and silent and out loud empathic listening with others.
Week 7: Courageous Honesty and The Power of Empathy — We'll practice honest self-expression from the heart and being able to empathically receive and hear beneath judgment, blame, criticism and demand to the heart of the other person and find our shared human connection.
Week 8: Integration, Deepening, and Next Steps