Workshops and Trainings
Workshops and trainings are customized to meet the needs of the specific group or audience. Groups are offered by the hour or by the day. Prices will be specifically quoted in writing after a free consultation in which you will collaborate with us to create the experience that will be the most effective for your group or audience.
Listening First: Compassionate Communication
Compassionate Communication emphasizes empathy, understanding, and mutual respect in interactions, aiming to foster connection and resolve conflicts constructively. Learn how to expand non-blaming language, focus your listening on the needs of the speaker, and recognize honest and dishonest forms of communication. Leave the workshop connected to your dominant communication style and equipped to maintain assertive expression and listening. Workshop includes practice sessions, feedback and strategies to sustain communication that have the highest rate of effectiveness. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
Help That Helps - Supporting Family and Friends
Caring for a friend or loved one who is struggling is often confusing. Frequently we want to help with what we think they need rather than waiting for invitations for support. In this workshop you will learn your own helping style, needs that move you to help more vigorously, and personal responses to failed helping attempts. Discover the distinctions between control and influence as well as personal tolerance levels you have for different kinds of suffering. In this workshop you will have practical experience with empathic listening, empowering speech, and management of your own activate human emotions as you provide help that actually helps. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
Balance As A Lifestyle
Multi-tasking was a phenomenon that truly harmed our ability to focus, to self soothe, and to manage personal needs with priority. Workaholism is an epidemic with most Americans expressing an excessive and compulsive need to work, often at the expense of other aspects of life, such as relationships, health, and leisure. The lack of balance between work and leisure has overworked our nervous systems so severely that the medical community is reporting epic proportions of stress related heart disease, gastro-intestinal maladies, insomnia, and even higher rates of certain cancers. In this workshop you will develop a personal assessment to determine what specifically is out of balance for you, create a detailed plan to establish then maintain balance, and explore “danger zones” specific to you alone that have a likelihood of distorting your balance. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
The Healthier Relationship
Human beings cannot avoid relationships. We are in relationships with ourselves and the world around us from the moment our life begins but few of us got any training on how to be in a relationship, which ones to be be in and which ones to avoid, what to do when we get hurt, and understanding our own power to wound another. The workshop is packed with practice opportunities and examples from various media (art, music, film). Using that various media participants can safely assess their own responses to various relational interactions and get feedback designed to support healthier interactions within the participant’s own relationships. The use of compassionate humor and a non-judgmental approach creates a uniquely safe environment with emphasis on understanding and criticism. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
Intentional Wellness
Our cultural is obsessed with wellness as a concept. We spend significant amounts of money attempting to achieve wellness but find ourselves far from honestly identifying as well. This workshop teaches you how to identify your personal wellness needs, helps you shift the “have-to” mindset (“I have to go to the gym”) to the “get to” mindset (“I get to take my dog for a hike”) to increase the likelihood of sustaining your wellness plan, and supports you as you determine what revives you. This workshop is a bit of a lab with participants sorting, creating and developing in higher proportion to the presenter delivering large amounts of information. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
Abuse Prevention and Recovery
It is simply a fact that humans abuse other humans in relationships. When the abuse becomes a pattern in frequency and intensity we are left confused, chaotic, angry, dejected, frightened and uncertain about the future. This workshop explains the various kinds of abuse, the phases of recovery, and evidence supported plans for future protection from harm. Participants will be connected with local resources that provide additional support (legal, housing, financial, therapeutic, medical etc). This workshop also links participants to local support groups for continued support beyond the workshop. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
Improve Your Relationship with Food, Sex and Money
Food, sex and money are the trifecta of distorted personal relationships. We obsess about we think we should and shouldn’t have, what we do and don’t deserve, and how best to hide our vulnerabilities in these three areas. Very few people describe contentment with any of these three in their lives. Our anxieties and obsessions frequently hurt the one’s we love and ourselves, generate justifications that are rarely accepted, and leave is in a yo-yoing existence between rigid plans and all out rebellion. The workshop allows the participants to push pause on the all to familiar merry-go-round; begin to gain insight; and develop a wise mind about three things that will forever just be a part of our human lives. Learn where and when you developed your value system around these three things and explore your attachment to those values. Begin deciding in freedom rather than responding in guilt and fear. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
Compassion Resilience
Compassion is a deep awareness of another's suffering, coupled with a strong desire and motivation to alleviate that suffering, often involving empathy and a willingness to act to help. Compassion is most assuredly a necessity for humans to survive. However, when we dispense compassion our reserves of this most precious commodity are immediately reduced. Compassion resilience (caring for others without depleting yourself) requires deliberate planning, intentional self-care, and very specific prevention strategies to assure those you are caring for receive your healthiest and best care. This workshop educates the participants on the very real condition of empathic distress, explores recovery plans, and develops resilience plans with each individual. Participants are provided personal assessment tools to identify empathic drain before it evolves to distress as well as identifying personal barriers to committing to a resilience plan. The workshop encourages compassion givers to care for themselves with priority care as an act of compassion. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
Understanding Adolescents
Adolescence is a period of human develop that spans from 10 years of age to approximately 19 years of each. That span includes many developmental arcs and benchmarks. These years are driven by social acceptance primarily. Children are consumed with where they might belong in a society and social structure they and their counter parts absolutely do not understand. They are yearning to separate from their family of origins and yet terrified they will be abandoned. Fitting in (reinvention of self for acceptance) is constantly at war with belonging (secure in acceptance). What adolescents need the most - compassion, increasing power and frequent doses of reassurance coupled with experience that they have what it takes to be nearly an adult - they rarely receive. They report feeling controlled, judged and hated by adults in roles of authority. This workshops teaches participants the necessity of adolescent development to foster healthy adult development. Learn ways to communicate that are effective; ways to replace punishment with wisdom development; and nurture this fragile humans one last time before they are adults. All gender expressions are welcome and will be treated with respect in safety.
All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.
-Maya Angelou