Here's guidance on how to approach your inner experience when triggered or stuck in a distressing life experience. Self-Compassion in life can be experienced as: "There is room for life experience in me. There is an open space for ‘what is’ to be fully present in my inner experience". This exercise is more about tracing your felt experience than verbalizing it.

Trainer Tip: Clarifying our requests can make the difference between frustration and satisfaction, Mary shows you how.

Mary Mackenzie, renowned CNVC Certified Trainer, shares her understanding and experience of empathy.

Instead of wondering, invest time today to ask at least one friend your friendship enhances her life. Such clarification can deepen the connection.

Learn when to use the two types of requests in the practice of Nonviolent Communication: Action Requests and Connection Requests. Both are important when working through conflict or difficult situations and for building connection.

Eric Bowers explains how needs and strategies correlate to different brain hemispheres, and how relaxing into our needs opens us to greater possibilities.

There are endless ways to meet our needs. Conflict occurs when we argue over strategies. When we actively value everyone’s needs, we foster openness and deeper connection in our relationships. Today look for opportunities to focus on needs in order to resolve an issue with at least one person.

An exploration of four types of feedback: destructive criticism, constructive criticism, feedback by demonstration and dialogue.

What have you lost this year during this COVID-19 pandemic? Are you grieving too? Recognition of loss can helped contextualize our emotions. When we can meet grief with understanding, patience and tenderness, when we create space to mourn our losses -- and to begin to process, heal and metabolize loss. This can helps us make sense of change and orient to a new reality. Grief is a longing for what we love.

If we befriend our fear we cannot be paralyzed by it. Every fear that arises is a moment to increase our capacity. Fear is connected to something that is precious to us. We also can see what we do to numb our pain and how we try to avoid it. This knowledge can help us to choose healthier strategies to deal with our fears.