Self-Compassion in Practice🌿
Self-Compassion in Practice🌿
Deepening presence, expanding capacity, and fostering relational ease
🧡 Especially supportive for parents, educators, and caretakers🧡
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You are warmly welcome to join us for a nourishing journey of inner awareness, compassionate communication, needs-based & values-aligned living, for all who wish to experience more authenticity and ease with themselves and others.
🌿 The sessions may be joined as a 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 Monday 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
Most of us care deeply about how we show up in our relationships.
We value kindness, understanding, and responding with presence, clarity, and care.
And still, in everyday moments, something else can happen.
A reaction comes out more sharply than we intended.
We feel overwhelmed or shut down.
We get caught in worry, self-criticism, or repetitive thoughts.
We find ourselves replaying moments, wondering how we might have met them differently,
or noticing ourselves reacting in ways that don’t fully align with our values.
If any of this feels familiar, you’re not alone.
This series begins with a gentle shift in how we meet these moments.
Rather than seeing them as something to fix or judge, we explore how our inner experience shapes what becomes available to us.
Because when we feel overwhelmed or activated, it can be harder to access the very qualities we care about.
Self-compassion offers a way to meet ourselves with more understanding, gentleness, and steadiness.
🌿Why Self-Compassion?
Self-compassion is not about getting rid of difficult emotions.
It’s about changing how we relate to them.
Through this practice, we begin to soften experiences like:
🌱anxiety and worry
🌱overwhelm and emotional fatigue
🌱self-criticism and inner pressure
🌱shame, frustration, or confusion
🌱getting stuck in unwanted or repetitive thoughts
Instead of pushing these experiences away, reacting to them, or distracting ourselves from them,
we begin to meet them with more space, curiosity, and care.
And from that place, something new becomes possible.
🌿A Relational Practice
Self-compassion is not only personal. It’s deeply relational.
Because we are constantly impacting and influencing one another, the way we relate to ourselves shapes how we show up with others.
Especially with children, who often feel and respond to our internal experience more than our words.
As we build our capacity to stay present with ourselves, we often find that we can:
🌱respond with more steadiness
🌱listen with more openness
🌱meet others with more tenderness and care
In this way, self-compassion becomes a form of care not just for ourselves, but for our relationships, families, and communities.
🌿What to Expect
This series offers space not just to understand self-compassion, but to practice it.
Each session includes:
🌱gentle teaching
🌱guided reflection
🌱poetry as a gateway to self-exploration
🌱simple, practical exercises
🌱opportunities for interaction and integration
🌱optional invitations to home practice for those who would like to deepen and continue integrating between sessions
The intention is not to do this perfectly.
It’s to gently grow our capacity to return to ourselves with care, again and again, with tenderness and gentleness.
🌿6-Session Series (All Mondays)
🌿6-Session Series (All Mondays)
🌱 Session 1 (May 4th): Why Self-Compassion?
Exploring a different way of meeting yourself
A gentle introduction to self-compassion as a living practice. Together, we’ll explore what happens in moments when we feel overwhelmed, reactive, or self-critical, and begin noticing how we speak to ourselves in those moments. Through guided reflection and simple practices, we’ll begin to experience how self-compassion can shift the way we relate to ourselves.
🌱 Session 2 (May 11th): Turning Toward Yourself With Tenderness
From inner-critic to compassionate ally
In this session we will explore the habits of self-judgment and inner pressure (e.g. 'should' & 'have to') and discover what becomes possible when we begin to relate to ourselves with more understanding, patience, and care. Through reflection, journaling, gentle practices and dyad sharing, we’ll gently begin to soften the harsh inner critic and cultivate a more self-compassionate inner ally.
🌱Session 3 (May 18th): Meeting the Inner Critic with Compassion and Care
Softening pressure, perfectionism, and people-pleasing
Bringing curiosity and self-compassion to the inner voices that push, judge, or demand. Through simple exercises and inner dialogue practices, we’ll explore how these patterns may have formed as protective responses, and begin to relate to them with more understanding, flexibility, and care.
🌱 Session 4 (May 25th): Staying Present with Difficult Emotions
Building capacity for anxiety, overwhelm, shame, and more
Learning how to meet intense emotional experiences with self-compassion, without pushing them away, reacting from them, or losing ourselves in them. Through grounding practices and gentle nervous system support, we’ll explore how to stay present with these experiences in manageable ways, with increasing steadiness and care.
🌱 Session 5 (June 1st): Self-Compassion and Gentle Self-Reflection
Listening inward with clarity, compassion, and care
Creating space to connect with what matters most. Through guided inquiry and reflection, we’ll explore how to bring self-compassion to our inner experience, gently listening for needs, limits, and what is true for us, and allowing greater clarity and choice to emerge.
🌱Session 6 (June 8th): Living Self-Compassion in Everyday Moments
Bringing this practice into daily life
Integrating self-compassion into everyday life and relationships. Through reflection and real-life application, we’ll explore how to respond to ourselves and others with more presence, choice, and relational ease, while allowing small, consistent practices to support meaningful change over time.
Questions or requests?
Questions or requests?
Please don't hesitate to email Heather at Heather4Compass@nglcommunity.org.
“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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