A 6-week experiential series for practicing empathic listening, authentic expression, mindful dialogue, navigating conflict with compassion, and nurturing relationships with presence and care.
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🌿You are warmly welcome to join us for the full six-session journey or on a session-by-session basis. Each session is complete and supportive on its own (detailed descriptions below), while the full series offers deeper integration and community connection.
Sliding scale:
$20–$40 per session
$100–$200 for Series (6 sessions)
🌿In care and support of presence, connection, and a felt sense of togetherness, space is lovingly limited to 25 participants so everyone can be seen on one Zoom screen (similar to limiting an in-person session to the number of people who can fit in a room).
🌿About This Series
Summer often brings changing rhythms and more time with family, friends, and children through travel, shared meals, outings, and everyday adventures. This can bring more joy, play, and closeness, and it can also bring more expectations, different preferences, and old relational patterns to the surface. These are exactly the kinds of real-life moments where mindful communication can support more ease, flow, and harmony.
For this reason, summer can be an especially meaningful time to practice the art of connection. The relationships and moments already unfolding in daily life can become a living field for practice, reflection, celebration, learning and deepening our relational bonds.
Research on happiness and human development continues to point toward something many of us intuitively know: the quality of our relationships significantly influences our well-being. This series invites us to slow down together and cultivate the skills and conditions that help our relationships become places of more presence, attunement, ease, flow and fun.
Together, we will practice listening beneath words, speaking with authenticity and care, creating conditions for meaningful dialogue, navigating conflict with curiosity and compassion, courageously reconnecting after ruptures, and nourishing the ongoing well-being of our relationships with partners, children, family members, friends, colleagues, community members, and ourselves. Between sessions, participants will be invited to notice real-life opportunities to practice and return with celebrations, discoveries, challenges and questions.
🌿6-Sessions (All Mondays)
You are warmly welcome to join us for the full six-session journey or on a session-by-session basis.
🌿6-Sessions (All Mondays)
You are warmly welcome to join us for the full six-session journey or on a session-by-session basis.
🌱 Session1 (June 29): The Art of Empathic Listening
Dropping Beneath Words for What Matters Most
We begin with listening as a practice of presence, care, and curiosity. Rather than listening in order to fix, advise, defend, correct, or respond, we will explore what it means to enter another person’s world with spaciousness and care while staying connected to ourselves. We will practice presence, intention, attention, and reflection as pathways for listening to feelings, needs, longings, fears, dreams, and the shared humanity underneath what is being said, especially when another person’s experience is different from our own.
🌱 Session 2 (July 6): The Art of Authentic Expression
Saying What Matters Most with Care, Courage, and Connection
This session focuses on expressing ourselves honestly without abandoning care. We will explore authenticity not as saying everything exactly as it arises, but as speaking from deeper truth, awareness of impact, and connection. We will practice noticing the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others, loosening our grip on interpretations, clarifying our intention, and translating judgements, blame, people-pleasing patterns, urgency, or withdrawal into expressions that reveal what matters most.
🌱 Session 3 (July 13): The Art of Mindful Dialogue
Creating Conditions for Ease, Flow, Mutual Understanding, and Shared Humanity
Dialogue invites us beyond speaking and listening as separate acts into a shared field of exploration and discovery. In this session, we will consider what helps conversations stay in flow, spacious, and connected, especially when there are differences in perspective, experience, needs, identity, or capacity. We will practice slowing down, reflecting what we hear, checking for understanding, making clear requests, and making room for more than one perspective.
🌱 Session 4 (July 20): The Art of Navigating Conflict with Curiosity and Compassion
Opening to Greater Understanding of Ourselves and One Another
This week turns toward conflict as a place where something important is often trying to be seen, protected, or cared for. Rather than treating conflict as failure, we will explore how challenging moments can become invitations to slow down, self-soothe, and approach ourselves and one another with greater curiosity and compassion.
We will practice listening beneath anger, defensiveness, and opposing positions to discover more about the needs, vulnerabilities, experiences, and meanings shaping each person’s response. By bringing care and curiosity to the chain of events, strong emotions, protective patterns, and past experiences that influence difficult moments, we can open to a fuller understanding of ourselves, one another, and what may support us in moving forward together.
🌱 Session 5 (July 27): The Art of Repairing Relational Ruptures
Returning to Connection and Rebuilding Trust with Courage and Care
Even with deep care, rupture happens. We misunderstand, react, withdraw, speak harshly, miss one another, or cause impact we did not intend. This session explores repair as a courageous and compassionate practice of returning. We will look at how to take responsibility without shame, hear impact without collapse, apologize without performance, and rebuild trust through presence, humility, accountability, and care.
🌱 Session 6 (August 3): The Art of Nourishing Relationships
Fostering the Conditions for Connection Flourish
In our final session, we will explore how relationships are nourished not only through repair and reconnection, but through everyday attunement, appreciation, curiosity, care, play, shared meaning, and clear pathways back to one another. We will practice nurturing fondness and admiration, listening for one another’s dreams, noticing how we each prefer to give and receive love, celebrating what is already working, and creating simple agreements that support safety, vulnerability, trust, and wholehearted connection.
🌿What We'll Explore Together
This series offers space not only to learn about the art of connection, but to practice it together.
Each session includes:
🌱 gentle teaching
🌱 guided reflections
🌱 poetry as a doorway into fresh perspectives and deeper reflection
🌱 simple, practical exercises
🌱 relational practice in pairs and small groups
🌱 optional home practices for continued inspiration and integration between sessions
The intention isn't to do this perfectly. It's simply to grow our capacity to nurture our relationships with presence and care, one conversation at a time, with plenty of tenderness along the way. 💗
Questions or requests?
Questions or requests?
Please don't hesitate to email Heather at TheHeartofCommunication@gmail.com.
“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.
When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Testimonials
Testimonials
“Heather has offered me practical strategies to transform patterns of reactivity into behaviors that are more aligned with my values.” ~ Grace Deckers, Brazil
“Heather is connected to her innate care for others, and with her, I feel seen, heard, and understood in my challenges. She has inspired me with her commitment to walk the path of compassion.” ~ Fernanda Cecin, Argentina
"Because of Heather and the principles of NVC, mindfulness, The Compass and the many other disciplines Heather shares, I am now, at 77 years old, learning the many unconscious ways my body and mind have been habitually programmed...bringing awareness where before there was little. In the gentlest, yet clearest manner possible, Heather has led our group through many exercises and discussions, bringing awareness where before there was little. Because of Heather's caring, compassionate heart, her skilled teaching methods, and her embodiment of the modalities she shares, we are experiencing the material intellectually through her references to brain science and developmental theory, viscerally, through practicing and experimenting with our bodies, and spiritually, through the presence and unconditional love and acceptance we all feel from Heather." ~ Margery Pricket, United States
“Heather is a person who gives herself without limits, without judgment, she is a being full of compassion, love, empathy, and resilience." ~ Carolina Zamorano, Columbia
"I love how you [Heather] extract the principle after each sharing and expand it. It provides a sense of being heard for the person sharing and learning for all other participants. I learn so many facilitation skills from you in addition to all the content you share. I was so much longing for exactly a space like this." ~ Csenge Fekete, Romania
Heather Austin
Heather Austin
Heather offers compassionate communication and connected parenting workshops, courses, retreats, ongoing support groups, and private coaching for individuals of all ages, couples, families, schools, organizations, and community groups.
At the heart of her work is a passion for helping others cultivate the capacity for nonjudgmental awareness and empathic communication, skills that foster self-understanding and deepen connection. Heather believes that nurturing compassionate, collaborative, and purpose-aligned relationships can plant the seeds for much-needed systemic shifts and ultimately contribute to a world that cares for all.
She offers practical, accessible tools drawn from her training in Nonviolent Communication (NVC), Mindful Schools, UCLA’s Parent Empowerment Project, UCLA’s Adaptive Schools Foundations, the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) community, Internal Family Systems (IFS), The Compass, Polyvagal Theory, and other integrative modalities. Her work is grounded not only in formal learning but also in lived experience, gently weaving these practices into her own life and relationships.
Heather brings wisdom from decades of supporting others on their journeys toward greater connection, clarity, and compassion. She has worked across four continents and speaks from the intimate lens of her own path of parenting and homeschooling her neurodivergent child.
Please share these offerings with others who you think might enjoy learning and integrating
these principles and practices in the company of a compassionate and supportive community. :)
Please share these offerings with others who you think might enjoy learning and integrating
these principles and practices in the company of a compassionate and supportive community. :)
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