My Story
“I grew up in an emotionally dysfunctional family: feeling especially painfully estranged from my father. In the end I became so numb with alcohol and lost in my head I didn’t even know what feeling meant.
After decades of therapeutic seeking it was eventually in learning nonviolent communication (NVC), also known as courageous communication, that I began to feel and understand the meaning of compassion. Suddenly, everything made sense.
Now I use this learning to help people generate a quality of connection in their communication which prevents misunderstandings, more readily resolves conflicts, and taps into the spontaneous generosity that emerges from being deeply authentic.”
— Mark Britton
Mark is a CNVC℠ Certified Trainer Candidate, CNVC’s Membership Coordinator and the Certification Candidate Voice for NVC-UK CIC. His approach is IFS-informed.
A Wider Lens…
“I create a world of connection to what matters.
Here we welcome the truths of your heart and guts, and honour your story.
Together we open to wonder and vitality… our birthright.”
I’d experienced a high ACE and PCE upbringing and wrestled with Patanjali’s various limbs for 20+ years before the suicide of a dear father figure impacted me to the core in 2016. The shockwaves ruptured many important relationships and, with hindsight, left me adrift in an ocean of grief and confusion. It was this pain, ultimately, which catalysed my coming alive.
The following year I began the journey of ‘coming home to my body’ by beginning a 3-year training in Pulsation Breathwork. I learnt to sense, welcome and express emotions without judgement and to release the energetic charges that had become entangled inside me, often as a result of overwhelming events in earlier life.
A year later, in a modern male rite of passage, I initiated into The ManKind Project through their anthropological recreation of the hero’s journey. This resulted in membership of a men’s circle structured using Robert Moore’s archetypes of the healthy masculine and Jungian shadow work.
Interspersing weeklong retreats of Osho active meditations grounded my awareness in the body and then began to open it beyond the limits I’d imagined, to eventually realise that ‘wisdom is knowing I am nothing’.
The NVC consciousness of our common humanity - shone through the lens of IFS - is interwoven into the totality of all this experience and has led me to new understandings, not least of which is that of love being ‘the experience that others are not others’.
By welcoming my hurts and honouring my protections with warmth, curiosity and openheartedness, compassion itself has transformed my suffering… and I have come to life.
The cure for the pain is indeed the pain, and the things ‘in my way’ indeed are the way.
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"We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body.
If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.
This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness.
We need not wait to see what others do.”
— Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Karamchand Gandhi