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When you experience an emotion, your body send a message to your brain that lights up the amygdala. Then what? Listen as Sarah Peyton demonstrates the NVC practice of Naming the Feeling and Need, which calms the amygdala and enables you to move into relational space.

Resonant language is language that takes us out of the static brain space and into the brain’s fluid space. In this video, Sarah describes the basics of resonant language and how, when you start to move into the fluid space of the right brain hemisphere, everything starts to change.

When avoidance coping or positive thinking sidesteps challenges, internal and external injustice and unrest also rises as we sidestep our values and integrity. It leaves us in sadness and distress. What's unacknowledged impacts ourselves and others undesirably. To live nonviolently we need to be in touch with what's real. With resonance we can more likely be with what's true, and trust our resilience and inner alignment.

• Look at your old patterns with warmth – while also opening yourself up to change.
• Increase your self-compassion – and gain a solid ground to stand on.
• Become intimate with your own survival strategies – and those of the people you love.
• Support healing and connecting in your long-term relationships – even when it seems there is no resolution in sight!

Our everyday personal experiences of diminishment, and the destruction of our planet has a through-line. Societal traumas lead to us shutting down to avoid pain, and this limits us. The avoidance shifts our brains so we don’t see other beings, species and our planet as wondrous, precious and irreplaceable. Thus, we meet others with diminishment, oblivion, or abuse; trauma keeps passing on. This leads to being blind and mute, and to othering based on social location, and to destruction of our planet.

• Celebrate and nurture your relationship to the Earth — and each other! 
• Explore your connections to family, partner, work, nature, self and more 
• Discover new ways to grow in community and work together to make this world a better place  
• Engage and immerse yourself in NVC while making new friends! 

Every one of us is impacted many times each day by micro-freezes that are the resulting fallout from both recent and long ago painful events. During this powerfully healing course, Sarah will walk you through a unforgettable tour of neuroscience, and succinctly demonstrate how NVC and neuroscience together can change your brain and enable your life to become both more fluid and far more resilient.

There are healers and therapists who see climate anxiety as a pathology. Instead, we can see it as an understandable reaction to the magnitude of the environmental problems that surround us. And we can see it as a subset of eco-anxiety: a feeling of worry, nervousness or unease triggered by an awareness of the ecological threats facing the earth due to climate catastrophe. Read on for tips on coping with the anxiety.

An addiction to something (eg. opioids, fats, sugars, salts, cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, etc.) or a compulsion (eg. gambling, shopping, working, sex or love addictions) is often an unconscious attempt to soothe trauma - fear, loneliness and shame that's frozen in unconscious memory. The addiction or compulsion is a substitute for what we really need. It is an endless craving that's never enough. Read on for more.

When it comes to self-sabotage and self-limitation, what's happening when we make ourselves smaller than we are? And what is it with the crippling experience we suffer when we exceed our own self-imposed limitations? What unconscious needs is your nervous system meeting by remaining small? Read on for the insights of Beatrice Beebe's research on biological imperatives, emotional language, and emotional limitations.

Understanding how our brains operate in relation to power, privilege and status is important if we wish to build a world that works for all. This article gives an overview of the brain tendencies we have in relationship to groups, and provides remedies to counteract the automatic labor-saving devices of our human brains (which often prevent us from seeing the fullness of others, and our own, humanity).

Our pattern-making minds make predictions about how best to survive in the world. So deep wounds from our past can influence our minds to make life long generalizations that harden into core beliefs about groups of people. Read on for a demonstration of how empathy can shift these wounds and thus the core beliefs.

There's reactive anger - the sudden outbursts of words, temper or action that create a nervous system response in another. And then there's the anger that's a reaction to someone's anger -- a nervous system startle-response. Instead of either of these, we can learn to heal with empathy, look for unequal power dynamics, take responsibility to make repairs, and shift into the clean, life-serving, fully expressed anger and love.

When bullying occurs, if we do our own healing, our brains can become more sharp and present and willing to take action to connect and to begin to shift and mitigate the harm that trauma does in our world. We can reduce trauma inflicted upon others when we recognize the patterns of abuse and bullying, hold zero tolerance for it, bring in support for both sides of the conflict, and take action to effect systemic change. Read on for more.

When we're received with resonant understanding painful moments can lessen their charge and became part of the whole tapestry of life -- important but no longer able to hijack us into the eternal re-run of pain. When held this way, we can touch the memories with our attention the way one touches a newly repaired tooth with the tongue, searching for the old roughness, the old wound, but not finding it.

One way to understand trauma is it means we got a blow greater than our nervous system can tolerate – then we move into hyperarousal, and then hypoarousal or dissociation. This cycle can continue long after. Here, we're not able to fully process emotional cues, information, our body, and others. It's important we consider re-writing the cultural paradigm of separation so that our trauma doesn't get marginalized.

Sometimes we want to avoid placing our love and trust in someone, to protect our hearts and our life energies. And so there are deeper questions that we can use to check whether we're in relationship with someone who doesn't have capacity to be in relationship with us (eg. “Do I have a sense of mattering in this relationship?”). Read on for more questions we use to assess our empathy and efforts in relationships.

Living in this ceaselessly demanding world, how do we recover from emotional exhaustion? The hopelessness of not being met in the world can leave us wrung out like an old mop. Our heart rate plummets, our blood pressure and respiration drop, and energy and information processing start slogging along. Instead, we can build the bridge of empathy for greater rejuvenation.

This resource is free for all to enjoy during May. Sarah Peyton explains how your brain's left hemisphere excels at pattern making. NVC can help integrate both hemispheres, enabling you to use the left side's love of patterns for abstract thinking.