Past Events

Navigating Conflict: Building Skills for Connection and Resilience

More than ever, the world needs your aliveness. Gather to learn and practice relating with energy, skill, and effectiveness. Come Learn and Practice the Foundations of Nonviolent Communication in a beautiful rural outdoor setting. 

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We want to know that our collective efforts to bring about needed changes and work toward Just Transition will be fruitful. When we pour ourselves into the things we care about, we want to know it matters. Especially in times such as these, how exhausting to see our hard work melt away as conflict slows down, stalls out, or, worse yet, dissolves our collaborations.
 

The legacies of a domination paradigm (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, to name a few) have left us without the skills we need to lean in to interdependence. This makes it incredibly hard to collaborate effectively. It makes it harder still to find generativity in conflict.
 

But it doesn’t have to be this way! Nonviolent or “Compassionate” Communication (NVC) offers us a toolkit to deepen our own embodied self-connection, build our capacity to reach out for support, and relate to ourselves and one another with empathy so that we can show up more fully to our work in the world. And as we begin to unpack the way that domination culture has shaped our very language, we can learn new/old ways of communicating that bring us more deeply into alignment with our values, our purpose, and into connection with one another.

During this weekend workshop series that offers 2, 4, or 6 hours of learning, we will explore practical strategies for undoing domination in ourselves, our communication, our relationships, and our collaborations. Each two-hour session will include interactive content and practices to engage with real-time examples from your life. You will have the opportunity to be paired up with a buddy for practice in between sessions and beyond the course (if you choose). This course will support you to:

Identify patterns of domination culture and develop a needs-based orientation that can enable you to undo domination

Explore NVC as an embodied mindfulness practice and grow your capacity to tune into body sensations as valuable feedback from your nervous system pointing you towards what matters to you

Grow your awareness of and vocabulary for resonant language including “feelings” and “needs”, and your understanding of the brain science behind why this kind of language works

Develop an empathic listening practice with a buddy between sessions as a foundational tool for resourcing yourself to show up better in conflict and collaboration

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About Nicole Bauman:
 

Nicole Bauman is a midwest-based queer parent steeped in the sacred work of facilitation, transformative justice, somatics and Nonviolent Communication. They see building conflict resiliency as an essential part of living into the world to come, and are passionate about creating space where personal and collective liberation feel possible. As the descendant of white Western European peasant farmers who carried their trauma with them to the Americas, Nicole is committed to centering racial justice and ancestral healing in their work.
 

Nicole’s background in farming, yoga, doula work and natural building grounds their work in connection to the earth and the body. Nicole is an ICF-certified Professional and Community Healing-Centered Coach and a student of Somatics with the Strozzi Institute and in the lineage of generative somatics. Nicole finds rootedness in growing food, daily walks to the river, sewing ancestral quilts and through being a part of the Prairie Wolf Collective co-housing community in the Rust Belt city of Elkhart, Indiana (occupied Potawatomi territory).