8 Week Series: Offering Compassion with Healthy Boundaries (Video Conferencing or Self-Paced)

Saturday, April 3, 2021
10:00 AM 12:00 PM

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Is this you?

You want to be generous and kind, yet find that you are giving yourself away. You end up saying yes to more than can or want to do.

Or, perhaps you find yourself participating in toxic interactions and wish you could rely on yourself to set a boundary.

Or, perhaps you want to be closer to others and find yourself feeling distant and disconnected regardless of your hope to be close.

You are ready to get clear about how to yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no. You want the tools to determine what really works for you. You want to trust yourself to navigate relationship decisions with skill and wisdom.

What is it all about?

Life-serving Boundaries: Relationship Competency 8 in Mindful Compassionate Dialogue

Having clarity about life-serving boundaries in relationships allows a greater sense of security and freedom. When you know what the boundaries are for you and others, you also know where you are free to play and grow together.

Life-serving boundaries are about honoring the life in you and another rather cutting off connection. Setting life-serving boundaries means having clarity about what really serves life or meets needs and making a conscious decision about how you will relate to another or behave in a particular situation while being able to remain heart-connected.

To set life-serving boundaries, you need to be able to recognize and honor your own needs, speak clearly about them, understand the verbal and behavioral language of boundary setting, honor the needs of others without taking responsibility for them, and engage in healing work with regard to your experiences of boundary violations in the past.

Learning to set life-serving boundaries is a competency that helps you embody an authentic life and live respectfully with others.

An essential part of setting boundaries is being aware of and honoring your own needs. The series will begin with exercises to teach you how to stay grounded in yourself in difficult interactions.

You will also learn about six different types of boundaries and work with examples for each. In structured exercises you will have an opportunity to study how you set boundaries and organize priorities. Specifically you will have an opportunity to notice how you may have systematically excluded certain needs from being met while others are tended to regularly.

You can find many articles on life-serving boundaries in our archives. This one is a good place to start.

How it works

Throughout the day particular concepts and skills will be presented. You will practice skills in short structured exercises in either pairs or small groups. Exercises can be modified to give you more or less challenge depending on your learning edge.You may also engage in role plays.There will be an opportunity for debrief and questions after each exercise.

You will receive a detailed handout as a part of the workshop.

Topics for the series

Introduction to Boundaries

What is needed to set a boundary and stay connected to compassion?

You will learn about six different types of boundaries and work with examples for each. In structured exercises, you will have an opportunity to study how you set boundaries and organize priorities. Specifically you will have an opportunity to notice how you may have systematically excluded certain needs from being met while favoring others.

Evaluating Boundaries

You will learn tools to evaluate the boundary that will best meet your needs and the needs of others in a variety of relationships such as with yourself, work, school, family, friends, and intimate partnership. You will then practice ways to set the boundaries you want in those relationships.

Boundaries and Power

You will study power dynamics in experiential exercises. You will have the opportunity to study how you engage in “power over” or “power under” and make distinctions about how to maintain equitable power (“power with”) in personal relationships, hiearchies at work, and in community.

Repairing Boundary Violations

Repairing boundary violations can happen in a variety of ways. You will learn a variety of ways to approach repair depending on the boundary you want to set in a particular relationship. For example, repair looks very different in relationships in which you want to maintain healthy intimacy versus those in which you want to maintain healthy distance.

About Mindful Compassionate Dialogue

Mindful Compassionate Dialogue (MCD) naturally supports you in creating the relationships you want by integrating the wisdom and skills of three powerful modalities: Hakomi, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and mindfulness.

Each modality contributes something unique to the process. Hakomi offers clarity about reactivity and healing. NVC provides a method for achieving self-responsibility, skillful communication, and agency. And mindfulness adds the stable attention and clear focus needed to continuously refine your understanding and skills.

MCD is a system meant to provide access to agency, compassion, mindfulness, and wisdom. Personal transformation is achieved through practice with the 12 Relationship Competencies and Nine Foundations, which arise from a central, life-serving intention.

What to expect?

In this two-hour workshop, you will engage in conceptual learning, group discussion, experiential learning, and skills practice. Practice exercises will be done individually, in pairs, and in small groups. You can apply examples from your own life that you choose in the exercises.

Understanding the Online Format:

Students will be signing in to the workshop simultaneously in real time from their own locations, using Zoom. We will be able to see and hear each other. For visibility, it’s important to have a light in front of you, not behind you. The technology allows for breaking up into pairs or small groups, which the trainers can visit and check in with just as would happen in an in-person course.

You will be able to review a recording of the workshop for a full week after it ends. Students won’t be shown on the recording, but can be heard. You can participate in discussions via chat if you don’t want your voice recorded. Courses may be sold later as a pre-recorded course.

You can also opt to take the series only through the recording.

Asking for a study buddy to do exercises with is especially recommended for this option.

You will receive a detailed handout as a part of the workshop.

Details:

Live attendance means:

Arriving on time to the workshop

Attending and participating for the duration of the class

Access to the video recording for eight weeks following the course
Receiving a detailed handout
The opportunity to be assigned an study buddy
Consistent access to internet speeds and connectivity that support video conferencing (600kbps/1.2Mbps (up/down) for HQ video; 1.5Mbps/1.5Mbps (up/down) for gallery view).