Practical Skills for Managing Reactivity and setting Life-serving Boundaries

Practical Skills for Managing Reactivity and setting Life-serving Boundaries

Let’s come together and share a space of deep intention, co-regulation, learning and transformation. Now more than ever, it is essential that we gather together to support each other in learning to live from authenticity and care.

What’s it all about?

Recognizing reactivity means freedom. The moment you can recognize that reactivity has appeared, you can be free from its grip on you. In addition, when you learn to track reactivity in yourself, you can more easily recognize it in others. This means you can take effective action to prevent misunderstandings and arguments.

Reactivity is defined as the misperception of threat to one or more needs. It can be recognized by at least three main characteristics:

1) A change in physiology, such as heart rate or breathing

2) A stuckness or narrowing of view

3) A loss of access to creativity, skills, broad perspective, wisdom, and compassion

Recognizing reactivity means becoming familiar with the many signs and symptoms that it is present. When you fully know reactivity, it can’t take over. You get to choose speech and actions that truly serve you and others.

Once you learn to recognize reactivity, it becomes your cue to engage the skills you have for managing it. Managing reactivity includes skills such as regulation, interpersonal de-escalation, self-empathy, recognizing blame, working with tender needs, and engaging in healing work.

Learn specific and concrete tools for managing reactivity in yourself and meeting reactivity in others. Begin to transform your inner dialogue to one of inner clarity and self-compassion.

In this workshop, you will practice recognizing reactivity before it takes over, intervening with reactivity to find groundedness, identifying the needs underneath reactivity, and finding specific doable actions or requests in the moment.

What are the consciousness and skills we will practice?

Connection to life is the ground of consciousness we will seek to cultivate. Connection, as we define here, includes a felt-sense of being in flow, which offers access to curiosity, creativity, compassion, kindness, and wise discernment.

Cultivation of this consciousness means developing the capacity to notice the quality of connection in various dimensions of experience as well as maintaining connection from the you that observes all of your experiences with warmth and acceptance - the compassionate witness.

Your body is the most reliable source of information about the quality of connection you are experiencing in a given moment. You will learn practices and skills to track contraction and expansion at subtle corporeal levels.

Tracking emotional connection also has its own nuanced practice. You will learn about emotions that are invariably linked to reactive thoughts and how to remain expansive in the face of any emotion. In addition, you will learn a basic emotional vocabulary that will support you in being present to what you feel without being swept away.

Tending to your energy is often a less familiar realm for most. You find that learning to sense and care for your energy can be done in surprisingly simple and powerful ways.

Your mind, thoughts, and words can also be supported to more consistently move toward connection. There are very specific habits of thought and speaking that when changed open up the doors to connection.

Two important aspects of cultivating the consciousness of connection are, one, learning to recognize and manage reactivity; and two, learning to direct your resources consistently towards what is life-serving. We call this second set of practices life-serving boundaries.

Here are some key skills for Recognizing and Managing Reactivity we will learn and integrate:

• Identify the signs of reactivity the moment it arises.
• Acknowledge that the causes for reactivity are internal and name what that looks like for you
• Identify your own “tender needs” and potential healing experiences related to these needs
• Practice with regulation strategies and anchor
• Shift to empathy or self-empathy the moment reactivity is identified

Here are some key skills for Life-serving Boundaries:

• When saying “no” to someone’s request, identify the needs to which you are saying “yes”
• Identify 3 types of useful boundaries
• Identify current limiting beliefs that interfere with boundary setting and the expansive beliefs that will support boundary setting
• Identify the signs and symptoms of behavior in yourself or others that don’t support boundaries

What to expect?

In this one-day workshop, you will engage in conceptual learning, group discussion, experiential learning, and skills practice. Practice exercises will be done individually, in pairs, and in small groups. You can apply examples from your own life in the exercises.

About Mindful Compassionate Dialogue

Mindful Compassionate Dialogue (MCD) naturally supports you in creating the relationships you want by integrating the wisdom and skills of three powerful modalities: Hakomi, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and mindfulness.

Each modality contributes something unique to the process. Hakomi offers clarity about reactivity and healing. NVC provides a method for achieving self-responsibility, skillful communication, and agency. And mindfulness adds the stable attention and clear focus needed to continuously refine your understanding and skills.

MCD is a system meant to provide access to agency, compassion, mindfulness, and wisdom. Personal transformation is achieved through practice with the 12 Relationship Competencies and Nine Foundations, which arise from a central, life-serving intention.

Details:

• Trainers: Elia Paz and Ceferino Cenizo
• When: 10:00am - 5:00pm, 11 October 2025
• Where: Lotus Hall, 15B Peterhof Rd, Hout Bay, Cape Town, South Africa
• Contribution: R1795 per person (early bird - by 26 September). R2100 standard price.
• If finances are the only obstacle to attendance, please email us at [email protected]
• Workshop includes a detailed handout with all the theory and exercises that will help you continue your learning and practice at home.
• Please bring your own lunch. Alternatively, you could order something from nearby restaurants. Coffees and teas will be available.

Facilitators:

Elia Paz

My name is Elia Paz. I founded Wise Heart with a mission to help make a shift in consciousness about how we relate to life. I dream of a world in which we value and trust the quality of connection with ourselves and others as the primary way to build and maintain a thriving life for all. I dream of a world in which becoming a master of relationship is a central value in our global culture.

Wise Heart seeks to join with others who support this shift in consciousness that will help us create a sustainable and thriving life for all.

You can read more about Elia here: https://wiseheartcommunity.org/about

Ceferino Cenizo

I am passionate about cultivating resilient and thriving relationships, networks and communities as a means for personal and collective transformation.

If we are to create and transition to a regenerative world and reality, our relationships need to not only reflect that but serve as catalyst and containers through which lasting change and transformation can occur.

As a coach, facilitator and mediator, I partner with individuals, partnerships and teams on their path towards new ways of relating, collaborating and being.

You can read more about Ceferino here: https://www.ceferinocenizo.com/about-me/