What is
Mindful Compassionate Dialogue?
What does it take to communicate in your relationships in a way that connects, and is in integrity with your deepest values? How can you cultivate a sense of mastery in understanding and navigating relationships?
Meditation, prayer, and other spiritual practices can connect you to your values. Yet, when you step back into your daily life you can get lost in a swirl of criticism, doubt, and confusion. You don't always see how to put your values into action, especially when it gets heated between you and someone close to you. You need new tools to find and express compassion, love, and honesty.
Mindful Compassionate Dialogue (MCD) can help. MCD expresses from the consciousness of a life-serving intention. It includes 9 Foundations for an integrated sense of self and 12 Relationship Competencies. Both the Foundations and the Competencies describe relational concepts, and list specific and doable practices and skills. Relationship mastery manifests through the 4 Fruits of MCD: compassionate relating, access to agency, wise action and mindful engagement. MCD is a system of transformation and learning that helps you create the relationships you want.
Click on the interactive map below to learn more about each of the 9 Foundations and 12 Relationship Competencies:
Life-SErving Intention
The intention to connect and focus on present moment experience is central to MCD, because this is where a powerful paradigm shift occurs: learning to trust the truth that when we attain a particular quality of connection within ourselves and with another, we naturally want to engage with generosity, creativity, and consideration of all needs present in a given situation.
The 9 Foundations
The 9 Foundations (attunement, warmth, security, awareness, health, regulation, equanimity, clarity, and concentration) are the key to working with obstacles to learning and transformation. Cultivating the 9 Foundations allows you to access skills when you need them most and count on them as your natural response. They are the foundation of your well-being; core parts of every person's emotional, psychological, and physical experience. They are places that any therapist, spiritual director, or naturopath would look to help you heal, transform, and grow. When cultivated and strengthened, the nine foundations support a resilient and confident sense of self and allow you to move forward and master the Relationship Competencies.
The 12 Relationship Competencies
The 12 Relationship Competencies are a subtle and comprehensive guide for creating thriving relationships. Each Relationship Competency identifies six concrete skills, along with specific practices for learning each skill. That’s 72 skills and more than 72 specific and doable practices for learning those skills!
The Relationship Competencies naturally support emotional security, while at the same time promoting healthy differentiation. You learn to express appreciation, listen with empathy, make requests, access self-empathy, stay grounded through reactivity, negotiate, set clear boundaries, cultivate thriving and resilience, and repair disconnect.
Mindful Compassionate Dialogue is presenting much more than a new or better way to communicate. It is asking you to make a paradigm shift in the way you relate to your experience, decide what you trust, and how you perceive others. As you strengthen and learn the 9 Foundations and the 12 Relationship Competencies of MCD, you will experience yourself and your relationships in a profoundly new way. You will learn to identify unsupportive relationship dynamics through an accessible framework and learn a set of skills that enables you to make immediate changes.
Learn more about the 12 Relationship Competencies on our YouTube channel and in our online courses.
The 4 fruits
The 4 Fruits of relating arise from integrated selfhood and mastery of the 12 Relationship Competencies. When you are relating from a sense of thriving, you naturally relate with mindfulness, compassion, wisdom and agency. When any of these are missing in a particular moment of relating to yourself and others, you are invited to become grounded in your Life-Serving Intention and then draw upon the skills of one or more of the 9 Foundations or 12 Relationship Competencies.
The 9 Foundations
Heart
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Attunement means turning attention toward the experience and behavior of another for the purpose of offering care. Attunement includes consistent responsivity. Attunement is distinct from vigilance, which involves carefully observing others for the purpose of tracking threat.
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Warmth could be described as a diffuse felt-sense of love. It is usually accompanied by a softening of muscles in the face and around the heart, a feeling of openness, an attitude of caring, physical warmth, and an embracing or allowing of experience. It is distinguished by a lack of judgment. Compassion and loving-kindness are warmth practices.
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Security is a relational confidence in which you are experiencing a felt-sense of trust that you can be received and held with care by others; and that all aspects of your experience are acceptable and can be met with care and comfort.
Body
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Awareness is the ability to identify aspects of experience as they arise such as: body sensations, body processes, posture, movement, impulses, energy, emotions, needs, images, thoughts, and behaviors.
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Health refers to care for the body. This means the body is getting the rest, exercise, medical attention, and nutrition it needs to function smoothly while supporting you throughout daily activities.
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Regulation is the process of tracking and managing physiological homeostasis and reactivity. This means noticing disequilibrium and reactivity as they show up in the body and then engaging in interventions that return the body to physiological homeostasis; that is, a consistent rhythm and balance that support other functions.
Mind
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Equanimity includes access to a still point inside that enables you to meet experience with a profound allowing. With equanimity, you can observe experiences such as craving, aversion, impulses, or intense feelings without attempting to push away or hold on to them. Equanimity is characterized by the ability to notice experience and a sense of self with curiosity and lightness.
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Clarity is a state of mind rooted in ethical living. At one level clarity is a quality of mind that allows you to perceive the vibrancy of life. At another level clarity means that you stay grounded in the truth of life as constant change and this clarity informs your perception and behavior. Clarity gives you the ability to examine experience with skill and wisdom, take in new information, synthesize old information, and notice which conditions give rise to which effects.
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Concentration is the ability to direct your attention where you would like and hold it there as long as you would like. Concentration is a power of mind developed through specific meditation practices such as holding your attention on a single subtle object like the breath for specific lengths of time. By focusing the mind one increases its power significantly. If the mind skips from one object to another in time, or flits from this or that object in space, it can’t possibly generate the depth or stability to see anything clearly. Concentration is supported in daily life through tasks of uninterrupted single focus, rather than multitasking.
The 12 Relationship Competencies
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Appreciation is a form of honest expression. It’s about noticing what’s working well and saying that aloud more often than expressing what’s not working. It is actually a form of positive feedback: Appreciation is about expressing what works in clear and specific terms. It’s not about building someone’s self-esteem or giving praise. Appreciation practice lays a foundation for collaborative and vibrant relationships. It supports the ability to meet challenges with skill and grace and contributes to resilience by creating a sense of confidence that each person’s good intentions and effective contributions are known. Read more about appreciation in this Connection Gem.
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There are so many benefits of cultivating empathy in your relationships. When you can give and receive empathy, each person has a deep sense of being heard. Knowing you can be heard allows defensiveness to relax and connection to become possible. Empathy contributes to healthy differentiation, as well as emotional security. With empathy, you can truly be a companion and provide support for another without taking on their struggles as your own.
Empathy is a heart-based response to a heart-based expression of another. Empathy means giving your compassionate curiosity to another’s experience without having an agenda. It often involves verbally guessing another’s feelings and needs. For example, when someone shares about a difficulty at work, instead of trying to problem-solve you can make an empathy guess like, “Are you feeling discouraged because you need support?” In this way, empathy makes space for being present with feelings and needs so that the door to wisdom and compassion opens naturally.
Learn the skills of empathy in our pre-recorded courses.
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Honest expression is a rich and subtle practice that empowers you to live in alignment with your deepest values. Doing so often feels vulnerable, as it requires awareness and direct expression of your needs, explicit acknowledgment of interdependence through specific and doable requests, and negotiation with others. It helps you to truly collaborate with others while fully maintaining autonomy and self-responsibility.
Honest expression includes the following:
Awareness of your intention when you speak
Awareness of the quality of connection in a given moment, both with yourself and another
Taking responsibility for reactivity by learning to recognize it and then name it aloud or taking time to get grounded before continuing to engage in dialogue
Expressing feelings and needs with full self-responsibility by making specific and doable requests of yourself or another
Taking responsibility for thoughts, speech, and reactivity by discerning the difference between what you actually observed and the interpretations you made
Knowing the difference between universal needs and related preferences and strategies for how needs are met
Communicating specific and doable requests as the starting point of collaboration
Read more about honest expression in this Connection Gem.
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Self-Empathy is the process of building a warm and compassionate relationship to your experience. It is an essential ingredient in a thriving relationship. To have a loving and conscious relationship with another, you also need to have a loving and conscious relationship with yourself.
Self-empathy gives you relief from internal conflict, criticism, and doubt. You learn to greet each part of your experience with compassion and acceptance, which gives you access to wise discernment and effective action.
Self-empathy is a skillful means for taking responsibility for your experience. When you can sort experience into categories, such as observations, thoughts, feelings, needs, and requests, it is easier to meet it with equanimity and compassion. In addition, it enables you to stay true to values and be honest with another.
Read more about Self-empathy in this Connection Gem. Learn the skills of Self-empathy in our pre-recorded courses.
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Recognizing reactivity means freedom. The moment you can recognize reactivity arising, you can be free from its grip on you. In addition, when you learn to track reactivity in yourself, you can more easily recognize it in others. This means you can take effective action to prevent escalating arguments.
Reactivity is defined as the misperception of threat to one or more needs. It can be recognized by at least three main characteristics:
A change in physiology, such as heart rate or breathing
A stuckness or narrowing of view
A loss of access to creativity, skills, broad perspective, wisdom, and compassion
Recognizing reactivity means becoming familiar with the many signs and symptoms that it is arising. When you fully know reactivity, it can’t take over. You get to choose speech and actions that truly serve you and others.
You can find many articles on reactivity here. Learn the skills of transforming reactivity in our pre-recorded courses.
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When you learn to manage reactivity effectively, a whole world of possibility opens up for you and your relationships. You find it is safe to be yourself in your relationships. Reactivity can come and go without causing major ruptures in connection. You see it as normal and trust that it won’t take over. When you are not walking on eggshells because of reactivity, your relationships have space to grow and evolve in new ways.
Once you learn to recognize reactivity, it becomes your cue to engage the skills you have for managing it. Managing reactivity includes skills such as regulation, interpersonal de-escalation, self-empathy, naming, recognizing blame, working with tender needs, and engaging in healing work.
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Learning needs-based negotiation will give you a sense of ease and creativity as you face the most difficult situations in life. You will be able to enter into challenging dialogues with a confidence that all needs can be honored.
There are three key distinctions that make needs-based negotiation different from other forms of negotiation. First, in needs-based negotiation, the quality of connection is the top priority. We trust that when there is a particular quality of connection, collaboration and creativity become accessible.
Second, when the aliveness of needs/values in the present moment inform the process, we find truly effective strategies, solutions, and agreements.
Lastly, needs-based negotiation is inclusive. It rests on a confidence that each person can be equally honored and respected.
Read more about this relationship competency here. Learn more about Needs-based negotiation in our online couples courses.
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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.
You can find many articles on life-serving boundaries in our archives. This one is a good place to start.
Learn the skills of setting life-serving boundaries in our mini-course or other pre-recorded boundaries courses.
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Maintaining thriving and resilience in your life means you can meet life’s challenges without being swept up in a roller coaster of reactivity.
Thriving means consistently engaging in that which truly supports your life, taking care of your needs day-by-day. When you’re thriving, you not only enjoy your life, you are also a gift to others.
Cultivating thriving and resilience means knowing the difference between what’s actually happening and your interpretations of it. It means learning to maintain equanimity through the ups and downs of life. It is the ability to process intense experiences with confidence. It includes effective self-care, gratitude practice, finding meaning, building community, and more.
Read more about thriving & resilience.
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When you learn the skills of relationship repair, you can remain equanimous in times of disconnect. You trust that you can find your way back to connection in the face of hurt and anger. Relationship repair builds confidence that your relationships can weather the most difficult of times.
Relationship repair means coming back together after an experience of disconnect and unmet needs. It requires the intention to connect and take responsibility for your behavior by naming what didn’t work, offering empathy, and making a plan to do something differently next time.
Relationship repair is most effective when you take care of reactivity before you begin the dialogue. Repair dialogue is a likely place for blame, shame, and defensiveness. By working with reactivity in specific ways before you initiate repair, you can maintain focus on connection, empathy, and honesty. Repair can then become an opportunity to build trust and to learn how to move forward in new ways.
Read more about relationship repair here.
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When you are grounded in emotional security, your relationships change dramatically. Instead of being potential sources of hurt, threat, or confusion they become sources of caring, joy, and support.
Emotional security is a relational confidence in which you are experiencing a felt sense of trust that you can be received and held with care by others and that all aspects of your experience are acceptable and can be met with care and comfort. Emotional security is often confused with enmeshment, which is a push for closeness or merging that is driven by insecurity.
Understanding what contributes to emotional security for you and others allows you to build this important resource. While there are some universal behaviors that can contribute to security, such as eye gazing, receiving care and comfort, and consistent responsiveness,it’s essential to know what is most easily received for you. When you know what you can receive easily, you can consciously strengthen your sense of emotional security both within yourself and within a relationship.
There are multiple articles on emotional security in our Connection Gem archives. This one is a good place to start.
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When healthy differentiation is present you are able to discern what is true for you and what you are responsible for and not responsible for in a given interaction. You have a strong sense of healthy differentiation, you can access a new sense of both autonomy and intimacy in your relationships. When you are not afraid of losing yourself in or being controlled by another, you can allow yourself to feel deeply connected and affected, while standing strong in your own sense of self.
With healthy differentiation, your relationships transform from something you are beholden to into something that supports you in new adventures of discovery and learning in the world.
There are many ways to cultivate a sense of healthy differentiation. One important way is being able to stand clearly in the values that guide your life. When you are grounded in your values, you can make effective decisions for yourself and engage in effective collaboration with others. Healthy differentiation also involves learning to tolerate disharmony, embrace differences, self-soothe, offer compassion, and set boundaries.
The 4 Fruits
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An engaged attention that arises from an enhanced presence of mind, directed by the intention of loving-kindness. A heightened attentiveness to experience in the present moment. A special non-reactive quality of attention formed from a life-serving attitude/intention.
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To become bigger than the suffering you witness, and to direct caring attention toward it by offering prayers, wishes, or taking action for relief and freedom from suffering.
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Agency is a state of having the internal and external resources to act on your choice.
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Wise action is action that arises from both embodied understanding and an intuitive knowing.
Mindful Compassionate Dialogue was born from a deep grounding in mindfulness, Hakomi (body centered therapy), and Compassionate Communication (also called Nonviolent Communication - NVC).
It is a framework and system founded by Wise Heart. Let's look at the three disciplines contained in MCD:
Compassionate Communication / Nonviolent Communication (NVC)
NVC was founded by Marshall Rosenberg in the 1960’s. For more history and resources on NVC see the Center for Nonviolent Communication.
The purpose of NVC is to create a quality of connection that inspires a natural giving from the heart. The premise of this work is that our natural state is one of compassion and connection, even though our experience of life isn’t always compassionate or connected. At the center of NVC is the concept of universal needs. MCD relies heavily on this concept. This is the proposal that all human beings have the same needs that they are working to nourish and be integrity with as they go through life. Coming from a deep respect for diversity we can embrace this concept of universal needs, while honoring that every person, family, and culture has a very different relationship to how those needs are met, talked about, and related to.
When you hear the word “need” you might associate it with an idea of lack, weakness, or neediness. In MCD, relating to needs is about a deep sense of self-responsibility and contributing to thriving for yourself and other living beings. Universal needs are the guidebook for your life. Here’s a very simple example. When you’re thirsty you connect with the need for water and get yourself a drink. Listening to your need and taking action from it, you contribute to your own well-being which in turn makes you more available to contribute to others.
NVC helps to create life-connecting consciousness and communication by engaging the thinking and language that reflects the constantly changing flow of aliveness. In NVC consciousness, the intention is to continually connect to what is alive in the present moment. From a place grounded in universal needs, compassion, and acceptance of what’s true, you can take wise and compassionate action.
NVC proposes three basic modes of relating to experience: receiving with empathy, engaging in self-empathy, and expressing with honesty. When you are listening with empathy, you are listening for the speaker’s experience, especially feelings and needs, regardless of the words they are using. You remember that everything anyone ever says or does is an attempt to meet or be in harmony with universal needs. People are only saying two things: Please or thank you. Learning to listen with empathy makes life a lot easier. You find that where you once heard criticisms or attacks you now hear someone expressing their feelings and needs. Even as you listen and help guess someone's feelings and needs that doesn't make you responsible for them. Empathy requires clear boundaries.
When you turn empathy toward yourself you learn to hear your own inner voices of doubt, judgment, and criticism as expressions of feelings and needs. With self-empathy, you can find relief from the pain of self-criticism. Connecting compassionately with your experience is the practice of self-empathy and supports agency and empowerment.
NVC honest expression means you are choosing words that reveal the contents of your experience in a self-responsible way. You are able to make five basic distinctions in experience and your communication reflects this understanding:
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You distinguish what actually happened from your interpretations of an event. That is, you are able to articulate a neutral observation. A neutral observation includes only what a camera could record.
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In NVC feelings are important messengers letting you know about universal needs met or unmet. Naming and expressing feelings in a responsible way also contributes to shared vulnerability and connection. NVC syntax reflects this understanding and responsibility around feelings by connecting the feeling to the need (rather than the behavior of another) and placing both within the context of a neutral observation and a specific do-able request.
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Building a feelings vocabulary helps you know the difference between feelings and interpretations. For example, you learn that there are many words that get used as feelings, but are actually interpretations of what you think someone is doing to you. For example, when you say I feel "rejected" you are interpreting that someone is pushing you away out of dislike. While this may or may not be true, it’s not the end of the story. When you interpret someone’s behavior in this way, feelings and needs immediately come up for you; perhaps feelings of hurt and disappointment and needs for acceptance and companionship. You can find a list of common words that are used as feelings but are actually interpretations here.
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Learning the list of universal needs creates space for creativity, flexibility, and compassion. When you confuse universal needs with the strategies to meet them, you can easily become stuck. Problems and arguments become unsolvable. Connecting with the universal need opens the door for many strategies to meet that need. Phrases like, "He needs to control everything," reveal a common confusion between a strategy and a need. Control is not a universal need. Control is a strategy, a pretty popular one, to meet needs, perhaps for safety, predictability, or acceptance. All humans have the same needs and it is these universal needs that motivate behavior and help us find our shared humanity.
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Lastly, in NVC you learn to express requests that are specific, do-able, and connected to needs rather than vague invitations or demands. For example, "I need predictability in our work together. Would you be willing to let me know a day in advance if you won't attend the meetings on Fridays?" states a need and a specific request. "Be more considerate" implies a need and doesn’t make a specific request. “Be there, or else!” is a demand.
The most important thing to remember about NVC consciousness is that it is about creating connection by listening and speaking from the heart.
You can let go of tragic strategies of compromise, giving in, and making demands. By naming and expressing universal needs in this self-responsible framework, you open the door to creative negotiation in which everyone's needs can be met. This might seem unlikely now. You might be saying, "Yeah but, needs are sometimes in conflict and one person just has to be flexible." From the framework of NVC, needs are never in conflict. Conflict happens around the strategies to meet needs. When you imagine your need can only be met at a certain time, with a certain person, and in a certain way, you will likely find yourself in conflict. However, if you can separate your need from the strategy, you open space for new and creative ways to meet your needs.
Hakomi: Understanding your experience
Hakomi Therapy is a system of body-centered psychotherapy which is based on the principles of mindfulness, nonviolence, and the unity of mind and body. It was developed by Ron Kurtz and others at the Hakomi Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Hakomi asks you to become ever more subtly aware of your experience and turn toward your experience with compassion and acceptance. It offers insight into universal patterns of reactivity and healing.
From the framework of Hakomi, you will recognize a set of core experiences or so called “core material” that may exert unconscious influence on your perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and decisions.
Core material is composed of conditioned relationships between various aspects of experience such as memories, posture, images, beliefs, neural patterns, thoughts, impulses, needs, feelings, etc. Some core material supports you in responding to life in a satisfying way, while some of it, learned in response to acute and/or chronic stress, continues to limit you (e.g., reactivity).
Hakomi offers very specific ways to use mindfulness to access core material.
As core material unfolds into conscious awareness it is met with empathy and specific healing responses, and transforms in the direction of integration and wholeness. This then changes the way you respond to life or, in other words, changes your habits, behaviors, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes.
Mindfulness: directing & sustaining attention
Mindfulness is a quality of consciousness and kind attention. With mindfulness you are able to become aware of what goes on in you from the moment you perceive something to the moment you respond. In a single moment, you cycle through a river of thoughts, impulses, images, feelings, and needs. Shedding light on this river of experience helps you to connect to your heart and respond with wisdom and compassion.
Mindfulness was first described and taught in ancient India before the time of the Buddha. Mindfulness is characterized by a wholesome state of mind, that is, one free from greed, hate, and delusion. It is a kind and compassionate attention gently directed toward experience in the moment. It is characterized by non-forgetfulness and the absence of confusion. It arises from clear perception. In sum, it is an enhanced presence of mind, a heightened non-wavering attentiveness, and a special non-ordinary quality of attention.
Relative to Hakomi, mindfulness of present experience, especially experiences of the body, is the primary doorway to bring unconscious core material into consciousness so that healing can happen. It frees you from the trap of making decisions based on habits, assumptions, or what you think you “should” do.
Relative to NVC, mindfulness allows you to notice when you are connected or disconnected and helps you discern the five basic distinctions named in the introduction to NVC.