Acts of Kindness in Daily Life
The behavioural wing of compassion training: deliberately practising generosity, hospitality or kindness toward specific people — someone close, someone neutral, someone difficu…
Relating R4
Empathy and Compassion
Connecting to others, oneself, and nature with kindness, care, and love, guided by the intention to reduce suffering.
Tools for this skill (21)
Building and maintaining psychological safety
To create an environment where team members feel safe to express themselves, take risks, and be vulnerable. Psychological safety is built through consistent behavior over time:…
Care Ethics Mapping
A 75-minute case exercise from the Uni Bern facilitator guide: for a real complex challenge, map on sticky notes who needs care and who gives it — deliberately including future…
Climate Circles / Climate Cafés
Hosted talking circles where participants voluntarily share what the climate crisis stirs in them — fear, anger, guilt, hope — in a confidential, non-judgmental space with no fi…
Compassionate accountability
To address performance issues and concerns in ways that maintain care for the person while being honest about the problem. Compassion does not mean avoiding difficult conversati…
Council of All Beings
A communal ritual in which participants set aside their human identity, are "chosen" by another life-form, often make simple masks, and then sit in council speaking AS that bein…
Deep Listening
Listening past the words: in pairs or small groups, the listener holds complete, non-judgmental attention — without inner censorship, rehearsing a reply, or steering — staying o…
Despair Ritual
A communal ritual in which sorrows for the world are spoken archetypally — moving between small groups and the whole circle, voices joined and witnessed — building emotional sol…
Extending the circle of care
To cultivate the team's capacity to care about those beyond its immediate boundaries. Periodically extend empathic attention beyond the team: • Who is affected by our work that…
Grief Walking
A structured way for a community to accompany loss or hard transition: people move between four stations — each holding a different mode of being with grief (solitude, witnessin…
Heard, Seen, Respected
In pairs, participants take turns telling a story about a time they were NOT heard, seen, or respected, while the partner listens without interrupting, fixing, or judging. A str…
Inviting Non-Human Stakeholders
Role-play that adds the missing chairs: participants embody non-human stakeholders — animals, rivers, trees, future ecosystems — inside a real case or project discussion, speaki…
Loving-Kindness / Compassion Meditation
The progressive compassion practice at the heart of most compassion trainings: settle into body and breath; direct kind, non-judging attention first to yourself (self-compassion…
Noticing and responding to struggles
To ensure that when team members are struggling, the team notices and responds supportively. Create practices that help the team stay attuned to member wellbeing: • Check-ins th…
Open Sentences
Pairs sit face to face; one speaks, completing a sentence-stem read aloud by the facilitator ("When I see what's happening to the natural world, what breaks my heart is…"), whil…
The Kind Response
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Empathy and Compassion (VCoL collection): When you notice someone struggling, resist the urge to ignore it, judge them, or immediately j…
The Milling
The group walks silently through the room in shifting currents; at the facilitator's word, each person pauses face to face with whoever is near for a guided, wordless encounter…
The Self-Compassion Pause
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Empathy and Compassion (VCoL collection): When you notice self-criticism arising, pause. Ask: "What would I say to a good friend in this…
The Understanding Attempt
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Empathy and Compassion (VCoL collection): When you notice a negative reaction to someone, pause. Ask: "What might be going on for this p…
Tonglen Meditation
The Tibetan practice of exchange: breathing IN the suffering of another — or one's own, or the world's — as heavy, hot darkness, and breathing OUT relief, spaciousness, and well…
Truth Mandala
A ritual structure for honoring pain for the world. The circle is divided into quadrants holding symbolic objects — a stone (fear), dead leaves (sorrow), a stick (anger), an emp…
Also develops it (29)
Active Listening
The foundational listening exercise in its many dressings: in pairs, one person speaks about something real while the listener gives full attention — no interrupting, no advisin…
Becoming the Water Body
A perspective-shift practice from the Ocean Ambassadors Compass: imagine being your local river, sea, or one of its animals or plants, and voice its needs and challenges in firs…
Building Psychological Safety
Sustainability work requires speaking uncomfortable truths, acknowledging uncertainty, and challenging unsustainable practices. None of this is possible without psychological sa…
Case Clinic
Structured peer-coaching for 5–8 people (~70 minutes): a case giver presents a current leadership challenge at their growing edge; after clarifying questions, the group holds th…
Climate Emotions Wheel
A color wheel of climate-related emotions (anger, fear, sadness, positivity and their finer shades) used as a check-in and vocabulary tool: participants locate and name what the…
Connectedness in decision-making
To ensure that awareness of connections informs actual decisions. When facing significant decisions, include explicit consideration of connections: • How does this decision affe…
Connection to Impact
Genuine care for affected communities and ecosystems drives more authentic sustainability efforts than compliance alone. This practice strengthens felt connection to those impac…
Creating genuinely inclusive engagement with external actors
To model inclusive practice in how the team reaches out and collaborates. When planning engagement with external actors, consider who is being included and who might be left out…
Creating norms that welcome vulnerability
To reduce pressure toward conformity and create space for authenticity. Cultivate norms that make it safe to be authentic: • The team leader regularly models vulnerability by ad…
Dedicated time for relationship-building
Relationships develop through interaction, and interaction requires time. For internal relationships: Informal gatherings provide low-pressure opportunities to know each other b…
Dialogue Interview
A prepared but generative one-to-one conversation (30–90 minutes) designed to open reflection rather than extract answers: the interviewer sets an inner container in silence bef…
Empathy Walk
Choose a person significantly different from you — across a boundary of politics, faith, class, life experience — invite them for a walk, and practice holding space across that…
Ensuring diverse perspectives shape decisions
Inclusion is not merely about participation but about influence. Diverse perspectives must actually shape decisions. Examine how decisions actually get made. Who has voice in si…
Interrelational Meditation
Mindfulness extended into relationship: in pairs, participants alternate between eyes-closed contact with their own present experience and open-eyed, non-judgmental seeing of th…
Jeans Journey
A ten-minute guided meditation that starts in the body and ends in the world: after settling into the breath, attention moves to the felt contact between skin and clothing — scr…
Making connections vivid and real
To move connectedness from abstraction to felt reality by creating direct contact with those the team is connected to. Periodically create experiences that make the team's conne…
Meeting check-ins
To help team members arrive mentally and emotionally at the meeting. Begin meetings with a brief check-in round. Each person shares briefly in response to a simple prompt: • 'Ho…
Noticing and naming team patterns in real-time
To develop the team's capacity to notice what is happening in the moment. Cultivate the habit of pausing to name what is happening: • 'I notice the energy dropped when we starte…
NVC Dialogue Practice
Practicing Marshall Rosenberg's core sequence on a real tension, in pairs or triads: state the observation without evaluation, name the feeling, connect it to the underlying nee…
Perspective contrast exercises
To sharpen awareness of how different perspectives frame the same issue. When facing a dilemma with different legitimate perspectives, assign small groups to deliberately adopt…
RAIN Meditation
A four-step mindfulness practice for meeting difficult emotion where it stands: Recognize what is happening, Allow it to be here, Investigate with gentle curiosity (in the body,…
Restorative Circles
A community process for conflict developed by Dominic Barter with residents of Rio's favelas: those who acted, those affected, and their community meet in facilitated circles —…
Restorative Dialogue
A repair practice for after classroom or team "hot moments": once a discussion has run too intense, the group returns to it deliberately — reflecting on what happened, exchangin…
Sensing Journey
Leaving the office to see the system from its edges: small groups visit places and people that matter in the system they work on — users, front lines, forgotten corners — with t…
Seventh Generation
A ritual dialogue across two hundred years: in a double circle, the inner ring speaks as people of the seventh generation hence, asking the outer ring — people of today — what i…
Simple Ethnography
Go where the users are: observers spend real time in the field — alone or in pairs — silently watching and recording what people actually do (not what they say they do), then de…
Structured approach to repair
To provide a framework for repair conversations when harm has occurred. When addressing harm, a repair conversation typically moves through stages: 1. The harmed person describe…
Unconditional Forgiveness Practice
A guided reflective process for releasing a held grievance — not excusing the deed, not requiring reconciliation, but freeing the forgiver from carrying it: recalling the hurt a…
Widening Circles
In groups of four, each person speaks about an issue they care about four times over: first as themselves, then from the perspective of a person who opposes their view — in firs…