Train Your Relational Nervous System

A practice-based lab for experienced practitioners ready to meet the edge, stay in the body, and not abandon themselves when intensity arises.

For Advanced Relational Practitioners

This lab is for people with prior experience in Authentic Relating, Nonviolent Communication, Circling, or somatic relational work
who want deeper clarity, honesty, and nervous system resilience in contact.

This is not a beginner space — an edge-practice space. Participants should already have grounding in relational awareness, emotional self-ownership, and presence-based communication.

Meet Your Facilitator

Where Other Related Techniques Explore & Where This Lab Trains

Circling

Explores what is arising

Authentic Relating

Develops awareness and presence

NVC

supports emotional clarity and responsibility

Somatic Relating

This relational lab builds on those foundations — and trains staying embodied and honest when things intensify.

What This Lab Trains

  • staying in sensation rather than story

  • honesty under relational intensity

  • self-ownership instead of managing others

  • speaking what you usually suppress

  • protecting embodied contact

This is Nervous System Training — Not Processing

We practice the exact moments where people usually collapse, avoid, or perform — and train staying connected to self and contact.

Join A Lab Inside of The Circle Community

After Labs, Participants Notice

  • increased ability to stay present when things intensify

  • less impulse to manage, perform, or collapse

  • greater honesty with themselves and others

  • clearer awareness of withholding and avoidance patterns

  • stronger connection to sensation while speaking

  • deeper self-trust at the edge of vulnerability

Structure Inside Labs

  1. Capacity Orientation — clear focus + intention

  2. Whole-Group Embodied Framing — contacting the edge together

  3. Truth-Telling in Exposure — individual shares to the room

  4. Sensation-Based Speaking — staying in the body while expressing

  5. Paired + Small-Group Reps — repetition builds integration

  6. Return to Group with Support — facilitator-guided depth + refinement

This is Nervous System Training — Not Processing

Join A Lab Inside of The Circle Community

A FAQ:

How is this different from circling?

It’s related to circling, but it isn’t circling. Circling usually explores what’s arising in the group through curiosity and shared presence. This space is a little different — it’s a practice-based relational training lab.

Instead of staying in one open circle, we move through guided practices, small-group reps, and sometimes 1-on-1 work where we intentionally train capacity at the edge — staying in the body, noticing the impulse to withhold, and practicing honest expression without going into story or managing the other.

It is less about exploring whatever emerges, and more about strengthening the somatic “muscle” of embodied honesty in the moments where people would normally leave themselves.