How We Turn Toward Each Other: Mindful Communication as a Relational Practice

How We Turn Toward Each Other

Mindful Communication as a Relational Practice
A Five-Week Experiential Workshop

How We Turn Toward Each Other is a five-week experiential workshop exploring mindful communication as a relational and contemplative practice. Rooted in depth psychology, mindfulness traditions, and contemporary relational neuroscience, this series invites participants to understand how we create our experience of reality—and how, with awareness and practice, we can relate differently to ourselves and one another.

At the heart of this work is a simple but transformative insight: much of our suffering and conflict does not arise from reality itself, but from how we interpret, react to, and personalize our experience. Through guided teaching, reflection, and practice, participants learn how awareness opens choice—and how choice changes relationship.

What we’ll explore together

• Mindfulness as concentration and equanimity
  Developing the capacity to steady attention while meeting experience with balance and care—strengthening our ability to stay with what is happening without being pulled into reactivity.

• The Snow Globe meditation: how we create our reality
  An experiential framework for understanding individual subjectivity—how thoughts, emotions, memories, and beliefs get shaken together, and how we often mistake our inner weather for objective truth.

• The nature of reality vs. human nature
  Exploring the difference between what is impersonal, impermanent, and imperfect, and how human minds naturally respond with grasping, aversion, and self-protection. (Yes—this is where most conflict begins.)

• Emotions and reactivity
  Understanding primary emotions we are born with, secondary emotions shaped by family and culture, and how emotional reactivity narrows perception and fuels misunderstanding.

• Choosing differently
  How awareness creates space to respond rather than react—and how we begin to take radical responsibility for our thoughts, words, and actions.

• The practices of Real Dialogue
  Learning and practicing the core skills of:

  • Speaking for yourself

  • Listening mindfully

  • Remaining curious

  Supported by the BE-attitudes of Real Dialogue:
  Commitment. Containment. Constraint.

• Love relationships and beyond
  While these practices show up most vividly in intimate partnerships and couples, we’ll explore how they apply equally to family relationships, work settings, and community life.

How we’ll work

Each session includes:

• Brief teaching and framing

• Guided mindfulness practices

• Dyadic (paired) exercises

• Group reflection and dialogue

• Time for questions, integration, and lived examples

Our time together is guided by the Touchstones of the Circle of Trust®, offering a shared container of confidentiality, respect, and care.

What participants often come away with

• Greater awareness of emotional reactivity and how to reduce it

• Increased capacity to stay present in moments of difference

• Practical tools for communication that do not escalate conflict

• A clearer sense of personal responsibility without shame or blame

• A felt experience of communication as a discipline and a practice, rather than a performance

This work is not about getting it right. It is about remembering—and having grace and humility for ourselves and others when we forget. Because we always forget. And then we practice again.

The workshop draws primarily from the work of Polly Young-Eisendrath, including Love Between Equals and Dialogue Therapy for Couples, though no prior reading or experience is required.

This workshop is open to individuals and couples. Partners are welcome but not required to attend together.