Distinctions

Featured Article • On Our Finite and Infinite Nature

“I live my life in widening circles.” -Rilke

Journal entries from a 2-week road trip through Ireland with my wife and our 14-year-old.  

—

A concentration of warmth, somewhat spherical in shape, it sometimes has a more noticeable vibrational quality to it, and is infused with a yearning that speeds to bursting. The density of energy feels as if it could explode beyond any sense-of-self I maintain and become more intimately, closely knit together with every atom of the universe. In moments it does and for the most part it doesn’t. I live with a tension of being finite and the humble grounding, the sobering longing of living within limitations.

Day 6

We sat on the rock edge overlooking Upper Lake in Killarney National Park. “I could spend weeks here.” My body expanding, heart settling with the utterance; and in the same instant a cleansing clarity. We were on our way to Dingle where we had lodging for the night. We stayed as long as we could. 

Day 8

We were more seriously examining our itinerary. “What if we spend one more night in Doolin and then drive to…”, there was a pause.  We made one adjustment, left the rest, and made our way to Fenton’s for dinner.

Practice • Renewing Our Life

Renewing Our Life

Let’s use the summer as a chance to reset, refocus, and renew our life.

As we seize this opportunity to reflect, we can do so using the determination of our nervous system, designed to habitualize us by naturally detecting recurring patterns in situations, conversations, relationships, and even in our internal states and then bringing about a response just like any earlier occasion. 

The Practice: 

Stop twice daily for the next 30 days and record short responses to the following questions. 

Every week, please read over your notes, collect your learning, and make changes/corrections accordingly.

—In what ways was my life fresh, new, vital? What brought that about (especially if I didn’t like what was happening)?

—In what ways was my life rote, mechanical, stale? What were the causes and conditions of that (especially if I had been looking forward to what was going to happen, or if I historically would have enjoyed what happened)?

—How well did I do in acting from who/what is essentially important for me now? What supported or got in the way of that?

—What habit, behavior, relationship, or use of resources did I shift or let go of? On what basis did I do that?

—What will I take up or put down in the next period of observation from what I learned here?

Let us know how this practice works for you and feel free to share your own tips on renewing your life in the comments by engaging with us on LinkedIn.

Graduate News

Graduate Engaged Pathway — Fall 2026

What we find present time and time again is the sacred reciprocity at the heart of this community. This is our way to genuinely connect with others and notice how it calls us forward. We want to return to that here, because it’s the very reason the Graduate Engaged Pathway exists.

One thing we’ve noticed, working with graduates over the years, is that the PCC tends to open something in you that doesn’t close on its own. Both the quality of attention you practiced and the way of being with yourself and others that the methodology cultivates stay in motion after the cohort year ends. It either keeps developing, or slowly and gradually recedes. Oftentimes, it happens without you noticing, until you do.

The Graduate Engaged Pathway is a container for the graduates who feel that pull toward more integration, more depth, more of the particular quality of presence the PCC first made available. It’s its own offering, with its own shape: a year-long cohort experience for NVW graduates, long-standing alumni, and certified coaches ready to go deeper in skill and in being.

This October we’re opening a new cohort. Sahar and Adam, along with the faculty below, have put together four offerings that form the core of this year’s pathway. You can participate in the full cohort or join individual courses à la carte, though we’d say the cohort experience is where the deeper work tends to happen, because the people you’re in it with matter as much as the content.

Here’s what’s on offer:

The Cohort Experience. Led by Sahar Azarabadi and Adam Klein, this offer is the central strand running through the yearlong pathway. With a kick-off session in October, three mid-year integration sessions, and a commencement session in September 2027, the cohort gives the year its shape and its through-line, a steady group you return to again and again as the individual courses come and go.

Integral Group Development. Led by Sahar Azarabadi and Adam Klein, this is a six-session series running October through December, virtual. We’ll be exploring how groups form, how they develop, how they get stuck, and what it takes to work with them skillfully from the inside. Most of us are already in rooms where this matters (e.g., teams, cohorts, communities, organizations). This course gives you frameworks and lived practice for those rooms. It’s one of the most practically transferable things we teach.

Living More Unified. A residential retreat (in person) at San Damiano in California, led by Sahar Azarabadi and Adam Klein. Participants arrive February 9th and spend two full days together, February 10–11, 2027. This is the kind of work that’s hard to do at a distance. Embodiment, integration, genuine community. If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to come back, this is it.

Trauma and Coaching. Led by Cynthia Luna and Melissa Knight-Taylor, this course is for coaches who want to work with the full complexity of what walks into the room. It treats trauma as a basic dimension of human experience (present, in some form, in nearly everyone who sits across from you), and therefore as something skilled, whole-person coaching needs to be equipped to meet. Spring 2027, virtual (dates and details to be confirmed).

Group Mentor Coaching. Monthly two-hour sessions with Cynthia Luna, running April through September 2027. Six months of sustained reflection on your coaching practice, with a group of peers who share your foundation. The kind of honest, methodologically grounded feedback that’s hard to find elsewhere. And the kind of accountability that quietly makes you better.

All four courses are included in the Graduate Engaged Pathway. Registration is now open.

While you’re welcome to participate in all of the courses, the intention with the Graduate Engaged Pathway is for you to curate a journey that aligns with your interests and capacity. Thus, it is not required that you participate in every course on offer.

If for any reason, you cannot participate in the Graduate Engaged Pathway but would like to be in a supportive developmental container, you have the option to register for the cohort as a standalone experience.

The cohort kicks off October 1, 2026. If something here is alive for you, don’t wait too long to answer it. The PCC opened a door, and the Graduate Engaged Pathway is the room on the other side. There’s a place in it with your name on it and we hope you’ll come in.

Karen Kininsberg

Director of Communications, NVW