Villa Bassa Prelato · Italy · October 13–17, 2027

Becoming What We Need

Embodying Nonviolent Communication in Italy

Five days of community and a lifelong practice of connection.

Led by David Weinstock
With contributing trainer Judith Weinstock

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An invitation

Community and a lifelong practice of connection

In the beautiful surroundings of Villa Bassa Prelato, we invite you to spend five days learning and living in community. At the heart of this gathering are the relationships we want to deepen and the communities we hope to create around us.

The training is organized around David’s somatic approach to Nonviolent Communication. As lead trainer, he will guide the morning and afternoon foundation sessions throughout the five days. Judith brings her gifts as a contributing trainer, enriching this foundation through community, food, music, and selected conversations. Together with a wonderful team of trainers and organizers, we are setting the table for a rich meal of life, community, and learning.

With warmth,
David, Judith, and the organizing team

Villa Bassa Prelato, our planned gathering place. Venue arrangements are being finalized.

Learning to live together

Community is part of the practice

Learning to live together

Music, conversation, and the pleasure of being together.

For those interested in living well in community or cultivating more community around them, David’s foundation offers practices for making room for different needs, sharing decisions, staying in conversation through disagreement, and repairing connection. Judith will enrich this learning with her own gifts and hard-won experience. They will share stories from community life, with relevance for families, friendships, households, and groups.

For David and Judith, this has been an everyday practice since 1990, when they co-founded an intentional community with eight other families. They raised their children there; now their grandchildren are part of a flourishing community spanning four generations. Over time, Nonviolent Communication has become woven into the fabric of their community: how they listen, make decisions, meet differences, and care for one another. This is important reclamation work. In everyday community, our empathic faculties, our capacity to sense and care about life in ourselves and others, can be exercised and reclaimed more deeply and widely.

Our circle includes the earth

Deep listening includes the life and nature within and around us. Through food, time outdoors, and shared attention, we can become more aware of the relationships that sustain us. Judith’s work with food invites us to experience nourishment as a connection with the earth and with the many lives that feed our own.

For David and Judith, community building is a direction for their work and activism: practicing care in everyday choices and contributing to a world where people and the wider life of the earth can flourish.

The somatic foundation

NVC as a lifelong learning path

How do we remain available to one another when our bodies have already begun to defend, withdraw, or push? Somatic means learning through the whole body. We listen to breath, posture, feelings, and the impulses that shape how we meet another person.

NVC becomes embodied through returning to practice, in ordinary conversations as well as difficult ones. Over time, what we understand can become more available in our tone, posture, listening, and actions. Reclaiming this listening brings us closer to what matters and moves us. Feelings, needs, and bodily experience become an inner guidance for how we want to live.

How we practice to embody

Somatic practice is whole-self learning. David will share doable, immediately accessible practices and the basics for building new pathways of learning. Through repeated practice, we bring what we care about into how we listen, speak, move, and respond. Over time, these new ways of being become more available in everyday life, giving us more room to choose and stay connected.

Receive support and reclaim empathy

Resourcing means connecting with support we can feel: a person who cares for us, a place in nature, a memory of belonging, or the ground beneath our feet. As our systems relax, we can become more available to another person while staying connected with ourselves. We practice listening before explaining, fixing, or defending.

Find your voice and move from what you care about

When you know on a felt level what you care about, move from that place, and put it out into the world, you are in your power. This gives weight and life to the words you speak and the choices and actions you take. We will practice expressing a truth, boundary, or request with clarity and care, while remaining open to a response.

For those new to NVC and those with years of practice

Newcomers can discover the ground-level felt sense of NVC through accessible practices in bodily awareness, feelings, needs, and connection. No previous training is required. Seasoned practitioners and trainers will find a distinctive set of somatic practices that complements their NVC learning. David’s particular strength is bringing the body fully into self-awareness, resourcing, and everything we communicate through our presence, movement, tone, words, and actions.

An interactive map

The Spiral Blend

View the map at full size

A map for new possibilities

Something new has been unfolding in my work, and I am excited to invite you into it. A difficult moment can pull us away from the presence, honesty, and care we long to bring.

The Spiral Blend gathers the practices of Somatic Consensus into a living map that helps us come home to the body and move from reaction toward greater choice, connection, and compassionate action. Come explore it with me through guided teaching and embodied practice. Whether you are new to this work or have practiced NVC for many years, you are welcome. Together, we will explore all nine vantages and their main practices.

01Come Home to the Body

Notice what is happening before acting. Simple centering practices bring attention to breath, posture, and sensation so that the body becomes a place to return to.

02Wind: Self-Regulation

Step off the line of a familiar reaction. Through movement and a wider view, explore enough space to pause, recover curiosity, and choose.

03Core Strategies

Recognize the protective pattern your body learned. Explore where it lives, how it began, and what need it served, with appreciation and room for a new response.

04The Ground You Stand On

Listen for the need beneath the strategy. Practice settling into your own experience and finding the ground from which to meet another person.

05Resourcing All Our Relationships

Let support become something you can feel. Bring meaningful people, places, and relationships into awareness and notice how they change your capacity to be present.

06Empathic Connection

Listen with the whole body. Make room for another person’s feelings and needs while keeping a connection with your own experience.

07The Empathy–Honesty Pulse

Move between receiving and expressing. Explore how to listen, speak from what matters, and make a clear request without losing the thread of connection.

08Mutual Strategies

Hear the needs in yourself and in the group. Create and test possibilities that include more of what matters to everyone.

09Resourced Honesty

Find support and inner agreement before speaking. Express a truth, boundary, request, or commitment with clarity, care, and openness to the other person.

The people behind the practice

Your trainers

David Weinstock

Lead trainer | A lifetime of practice and a foundation to share

David is the originator of Somatic Consensus, a CNVC-certified international NVC trainer, somatic coach, and author of Becoming What You Need: Practices for Embodying Nonviolent Communication.

For 30 years, he has dedicated himself to developing somatic practices for embodying NVC. His teaching draws on a lifelong practice of Aikido, family, community, and learning how to bring our values into our words and actions. This five day intensive brings that work together in a concentrated, shared experience.

An Aikido instructor, fourth-degree black belt, and master goldsmith, David has brought his work to schools, prisons, organizations, businesses, and communities around the world.

His invitation is to develop practices that help us hear what matters, find our voices, and keep learning in the relationships that shape our lives.

Through www.liminalsomatics.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Liminal Somatics, David continues to support individuals, facilitators, and communities in developing the capacity to reclaim depthful, empowering relationship.

Judith Weinstock

Contributing trainer | How to build community from the ground up

A longtime certified international NVC trainer herself, Judith brings her own depth of experience in business, community, parenting, long-term relationships, and mediation. Her contributions support and enrich the foundation David leads.

A chef, teacher, and singer-songwriter, she has taught her Connective Culinary Arts curriculum for more than 20 years. Her curriculum integrates history, food justice/economics, agriculture/culture, science, chemistry and nutrition through food and the art of cooking. The premise of her teaching is that “Food is the connective tissue for all life on the planet.” And that three times a day we get to shape the world we wish to live in!

Judith has co-led workshops around the world and offers mediation for families, parents, children, siblings, and couples. Over 40 years, she has partnered in or owned four restaurants and published 3 cookbooks.

She and David will share stories about community life, music and selected conversations.

The wider circle