Becoming What You Need
"The body never lies. And if the body never lies, then learning to listen to it — really listen, with curiosity and care — is the most direct route to becoming the person you most want to be."
You may already know something about Nonviolent Communication — about empathy, about needs, about the difference between observation and evaluation. And still, in the heat of a real moment, the body takes over. The old patterns run. The words you said weren't quite what you meant.— This course is built for that gap.
This is not a course about learning more. It is a course about embodying what you already sense is true — that how we meet ourselves, and how we meet each other, changes everything. That presence is not a personality trait. It is a practice.
Over eight modules, you will bring Nonviolent Communication, Aikido, somatic awareness, and the wisdom of community into your body — so that in the moments that matter most, they are available to you. Not as concepts you remember. As something your nervous system knows how to do.
David Weinstock has been practicing Aikido and Nonviolent Communication for more than four decades. He trained with Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of NVC. He studied somatic coaching with Dr. Stuart Heller and embodied presence with Wendy Palmer. He is a student of the Aikido lineage of Koichi Barrish. Since 1990, he has lived within an intentional community he co-founded — his most sustained laboratory for the human ecosystem of relationship, consensus, and repair. He has brought this work into prisons, intentional communities, corporate boardrooms, international training programs, marriages, and family rooms.
This course is the distillation of that practice — not as a system to learn, but as a living path to inhabit.
Aikido & Embodied Presence
The art of moving with what is — blending, centering, and finding power in non-resistance. Drawn from Koichi Barrish, Wendy Palmer, and forty years on the mat.
Nonviolent Communication
The language of needs, empathy, and honest expression as taught by Marshall Rosenberg — brought off the page and into the living tissue of the body.
Somatic Coaching
The body as the site of change. Drawing from Dr. Stuart Heller's somatic coaching, the Five Elements, and the intelligence that lives below the neck.
Community & Collective Practice
Healing doesn't happen alone. This work is rooted in intentional community — empathy partnerships, group consensus, and the promise of practicing together.
NVC Practitioners
You know the model. You want it in your body — so that in the hard moment, it's available, not just in your head.
Therapists & Coaches
You work with people in conflict or pain. The tools here — SURF, Inner Consensus, the Spiral Blend — are yours to use and to offer.
Community Builders
You believe relationships and community are where transformation happens. This course was built with that in mind, from the ground up.
Anyone Navigating Relationship
No prior NVC or somatic background required. You need only be someone who wants their relationships to feel more honest, more alive, and more free.
This course is built around practices — each one named, specific, and returnable. The ones named here are anchors; there are more woven throughout. Every practice is designed to be readily learned and immediately accessible, whatever your background. And they are expansive — life practices that keep teaching you. The more you work with them, the more they reveal.
Shape · Unify · Resource · Field
A 60-second daily centering practice that anchors you in who you are under any conditions — before a hard conversation, in the middle of one, or at the end of a difficult day.
The Integrative Creative Opening
Brings all the practices together as one fluid movement — a creative opening to what becomes possible when body, heart, and attention move as one. Designed to be used generatively across all aspects of life.
The Internal Democracy
A somatic process for bringing the voices inside you — head, heart, gut, ground — into alignment, so you can speak and act from a unified self, not a divided one.
Receiving Without Losing Yourself
An Aikido-rooted empathy practice — learning to become empty enough to truly receive another person, while remaining fully present as yourself.
Practicing With Support
Calling in the resources that are always there — teachers, ancestors, qualities of being — so you are never practicing alone, even when you are practicing alone.
Agreement From the Inside Out
David's own developed work — a body-based approach to organizing ourselves physically, emotionally, and relationally so our actions can align with what we care about most.
Foundations for Practice
S.U.R.F. · Beginner's Mind · Deep Needs · Ki & the Empathic Field · Wind & Ground
Shape Shifting & Self-Regulation
The Five Elements · Embodied Shape Shifting · Power of Care · Resources at Our Backs
Resourcing Ourselves
House of Belonging · Daily Somatic Practices · NVC × Aikido · Personal Resource Map
Empathic Connection
The Seven C's · The Hollow Bone · NVC Fundamentals · Somatic Autobiography
Choice and Commitment
The Signals We Give · Choosing Decisively · Working with Anger · Speaking Virtuous Qualities
Inner Consensus
The Internal Democracy · 15-Step Consensus Process · The Open Door Practice
The Spiral Blend
7 Somatic Vantages · The Empathic Guess · Dance of Empathy & Honesty · Grounded Choice
The Rhythm of Relationships
Ma-ai · Community & NVC · Protective Use of Force · Sustaining the Practice
Appreciating Our Histories
Authenticity
Protective Use of Force Extended
Working with Anger
The Promise of Community
A Private Hour with David — Just You, the Work, and Whatever Is Alive
As a founding student, you receive a private 60-minute session with David. This isn't a support call or an orientation. It's a full working hour — held space to bring your questions, your edges, a relationship you're sitting with, or a practice you want to go deeper into together.
David will reach out personally by email after you enroll. No scheduling portal. No link to click. Just a note in your inbox, finding a time that works.
"Community is the quiet hand on your back when your spirit is tired." — This session is that hand.
14-Day Full Confidence Guarantee
Move through the first two modules. If the work doesn't land — if it isn't the right fit for where you are right now — email me within 14 days of enrollment and I will refund you in full. No questions asked, no process to navigate. I want you here because it's genuinely right for you.
The poet David Whyte writes: "Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing close in, the step you don't want to take."
In somatic practice, we call this centering. You don't arrive prepared. You arrive, and then you find your ground. The work begins there — in the breath, in the body, in the willingness to notice what is actually happening before you decide what it means.
That is what this course teaches. And it begins with one step — this one.
