Depolarize This

finding voice and connection within polarization Online Course · November 2026 to January 2027

Stay connected. Stay present. Find compassion. Honor your voice.

Honestly? Most of us are tired. Tired of the fights. Tired of the uncomfortable silence. Tired of pretending we don’t have a position. We don’t want to be louder, and we don’t want to disappear. We want to hold complexity together, to speak and stay in connection, and longing for hope.
The invitation

Join us for an 8-week journey on understanding polarization: within us, around us, and across the conversations that have stopped working. Together we will explore the systemic forces that feed these divides and what we can do about them. We will practice tools and hone skills to find our way to compassion and connection without losing our voice. We will meet the pain and loss these divides cost us, and start forging ways to nurture the relationships that matter to us inside a divided reality.

Two stacks of smooth stones, dark and pale, leaning toward each other with a small pink flowering shoot rising where they meet.

This course is for you if…

  • You care deeply about something, and you’ve also lost a relationship over it. You’d like the next conversation to go differently.
  • You’ve watched a family member or friend go down a rabbit hole, and you don’t know how to reach them.
  • You catch yourself dehumanizing people with opposing opinions, and you don’t want to become someone who does that.
  • You feel pressured to pick a side. You don’t want to, and you also don’t want to stay silent about what matters to you.
  • You’re an activist or organizer, and burnout from polarization is real. You want to keep doing the work without losing yourself.
  • You watch debates escalate on social media, and you spend too much time reading content that exhausts your heart.
  • You want to stay engaged with the world without losing your nervous system to it.

This isn’t a course about becoming neutral. It’s a course about becoming present and connected: to yourself, to the people you’ve stopped reaching, to the world we’re all trying to figure out how to share.

A live, 8-week online journey toward staying connected across deep divides, with your voice fully intact.

In this course you will

What eight weeks makes room for

Not a list of modules. Movements that build on each other, week by week.

  1. Two stones that were once one, lying apart with a fine pink thread still spanning the gap between them.
    01

    Meet the real cost.

    Make space for the pain polarization brings. The relationships which became distant, the rooms you stopped entering, the parts of yourself you keep folded away.

  2. Three stones balanced one on another, dark and pale alternating, held in a steady stack.
    02

    See the system accelerating polarization.

    We will explore the social and systemic forces heavily contributing to polarization today: the social media algorithms, educational systems, media channels, shrinking attention. And understand what we can actually do about them.

  3. A weathered stone statue of a human figure, both hands resting over the centre of its chest.
    03

    Understand what happens in your body.

    Polarization, our brain, our nervous system, and our perception. What happens when you’re triggered, how patterns and dynamics build over time, and how we can work to shift them. Creating circles of support for yourself that make consistent compassion and courage more possible.

  4. A pale stone with a slender pink seedling growing out of a crack at its top.
    04

    Find the needs beneath the trigger.

    The deep needs under your trigger points, personal, relational, and political. Transform those points into strength and compassion. Move from canyons of divide into an integrative space that stands for needs that matter.

  5. A dark stone and a pale stone side by side, a pink shoot rising from between them.
    05

    Become a depolarizing presence.

    Tools and skills to nurture the relationships you want to keep. Dialogue in complexity and tension. Discernment about when to seek connection and when not to, and how to set that boundary. Shift from being stuck in the spiral to creating the world you actually want. Creating circles of support for yourself that make consistent compassion and courage more possible.

Reserve my spot
Creating connection when the gap is real sometimes seems impossible. And it’s impossible until we do it.
What makes this course special

How the eight weeks are held

A video camera symbol with a replay arrow curving around its play button.

Live and recorded

Every session runs live, and every session is recorded. A written summary follows each one, so nothing is lost to a week that got away from you.

A pine cone resting among three stones, dark and pale, in an open arrangement.

Small practice rooms

You actually speak, not just listen. Most of the practice happens with one or two other people, in rooms small enough to be honest in.

Two leafy twigs curving up and meeting, their arcs enclosing the shape of a heart in the space between them.

An optional empathy buddy

A weekly meeting with one other participant, if you want it. Practice lands differently when someone knows what you are working on.

A small round table with four chairs, two speech bubbles resting on its surface.

The Depolarization Lab

An ongoing community of practice after the course, for people who want to keep building this work together.

Five open hands arranged in a ring, palms up, with small pink hearts floating at the centre.

An empathy team holding the course

You’re not alone in the container. A small team weaves care and empathy support across the eight weeks, and during the sessions themselves someone is ready to step into a 1:1 with you whenever you need it.

Who you’ll learn with

The people who hold the course

Ceri Buckmaster
Guest Masterclass

Ceri Buckmaster

Ceridwen (Ceri) Buckmaster is a CNVC-certified trainer, mediator, writer and contemporary interfaith minister, who sees her ministry as supporting people through conflict and nurturing resilience and reconciliation.

She creates spaces for conflict to be journeyed through and grief to be expressed, helping groups, organisations and individuals increase presence, heal from conflict, and make room for grief so they are empowered to transform their own and one another’s realities. A white, cis, English creative conflict practitioner, she works openly with what it means to be socialised and racialised with privilege in a colonising country. She works across sustainability and community building with organisations, galleries, schools and community groups, and collaborates with other UK trainers to offer a progressive pathway of NVC training in London and online.

Racheli Zohar
Host facilitator

Racheli Zohar

Racheli Zohar first encountered NVC at the Ecome Peace Center in the West Bank in 2010 and has been dedicated to its learning and sharing ever since.

She graduated from “Embodying and Sharing NVC” and the Mediation program with “Connecting to Life” in Amsterdam in 2019, and is also trained in Attachment-Based Couples Therapy and other modalities of couples therapy. She works with couples, parents and individuals, teaches NVC workshops in her local community, in school teams, hospitals and community centers, and works as a mediator. She is also a visual artist, community organizer and activist in Israel/Palestine, and lives in Nataf, west of Jerusalem, with her family.

Sarah Peyton
Guest Masterclass

Sarah Peyton

Sarah Peyton is a CNVC-certified trainer, constellation facilitator and neuroscience educator who integrates brain science and resonant language to heal trauma and nourish self-warmth.

She teaches and lectures internationally, and is the author of “Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing.” She is currently at work on a second book, commissioned by W.W. Norton, on the relational neuroscience of unconscious contracts. In this masterclass she brings the polarized nervous system into view: what bracing does to a brain, and how warmth toward yourself changes what you can hear from someone you disagree with.

Practical information

The shape of the course

One weekly rhythm, one clock, already translated to yours.

All 8 sessions 18:00 · 2h each
  1. Nov 8 Sun
  2. 15 Sun
  3. 22 Sun
  4. Dec 13 Sun
  5. 20 Sun
  6. Jan 10 Sun
  7. 17 Sun
  8. 24 Sun

Weekly, with a pause over the winter holidays.

First session
Sun, Nov 8, 2026
Last session
Sun, Jan 24, 2027
Weekly rhythm
Sundays, 18:00 to 20:00 CET
November 8, 2026 to January 24, 2027 · 8 live sessions

How to join

Many pale and dark stones radiating outward from a small pink leaf at the centre, joined by fine roots.
Online, from anywhere
Live sessions on Zoom. Join from wherever you are on the planet.
A dark stone and a pale stone together inside a soft pink ring.
All sessions recorded
Life happens. Every session is recorded, so you can catch up on your own time.
Three pale leaves layered like pages, each with fine veins, beside one small dark stone.
A written summary each week
The points, the exercises, the moments that mattered. For the weeks you can’t watch the whole thing.
If you’d like to bring someone with you

This work multiplies when you don’t do it alone

Most people join on their own, and the program fully supports that.

Some come with someone from their life. Then the learning can enter real conversations sooner: at home, at work, around the dinner table.

Five stones, dark and pale, arranged in a ring and joined by fine roots, with one small pink shoot growing at the centre.
One dark stone and one pale stone resting side by side on a single leaf.
With one other person
Partner, friend, family member, colleague.
Four stones with pale veins running through them, arranged in an open circle.
As a small group of 3 to 6
Book club, activism circle, peer group.
Nine stones, dark and pale alternating, arranged in a ring around a cluster of pink shoots growing at the centre.
As a team or community
Workplaces, congregations, organizations doing this together.

Each comes with meaningful group pricing. The more of you, the more the practice multiplies.

See group pricing →
Questions

The things people ask us

No. The skills aren’t about specific content, they’re about how to work with deep divides across opposing views. Whether your polarization is political, religious, generational, cultural or family-shaped, the process we create together applies.
No, that’s always optional. There will be chances to share, mostly in small rooms with one or two other people, and you never have to. There’s also a lot of journaling. Much of the sharing isn’t about your views at all, but about the needs, feelings and requests underneath them.
No. You’re welcome exactly where you are. We start at the beginning, so you won’t be lost and you won’t be the only one starting fresh. If you’ve practiced for years, the work still goes somewhere real: that mix is part of what makes a room like this alive. If you’d like a look at the basics first, read what is NVC.
No. The whole premise is the opposite: you grow deeper and more connected to your own voice, so you can stand for what matters to you and actively create it. What changes is how you work with the polarization itself.
Both. And we don’t think you can really separate them. You’ll spend the eight weeks exploring what polarization does inside you: the grief, the anger, the shame, the relationships it has cost you, and the parts of yourself you fold away to keep the peace. You’ll also learn to see the systems feeding it, in your feed, your school, your workplace, your family, and find ways to act on what you see. The inner work and the outer work feed each other. That’s the whole design.

Life happens. We built for that:

  • The full session recording. Every session is recorded in full, so you can go back to an exercise, a piece of NVC material, or a moment you want to sit with again.
  • A written summary after each session. The material and the exercises both, written out, so you can take in what was taught and practice it on your own.

You can fall behind and find your way back.

The ground is one live session a week, 2 hours, Sundays 18:00 to 20:00 CET. Eight of them, running from November 2026 to January 2027 with a pause over the winter holidays. The full schedule is on this page. If that’s all you ever do, you’ve done the course.

On top of that there’s as much as you have appetite for: light practice between sessions, an optional weekly empathy buddy meeting, and some weeks invite you to read or watch something beforehand, always optional.

If you miss a session, we’ve got you covered. See here.

We hear this, especially from parents. And we’d gently invite you to look again. This is one evening a week for eight weeks, not every night. Making room for it, even against real limitations, is a gift you give yourself. So the question we’d sit with is a practical one. Is there someone who could hold the evening for you while you attend, a partner, a family member, a friend, a babysitter? You don’t have to carry it alone. Sometimes protecting this space is the first NVC practice of the course.
Racheli Zohar hosts and facilitates the course throughout, and Ceri Buckmaster and Sarah Peyton each bring a guest masterclass. Their bios are further up this page. Alongside them, a small empathy team holds the care and support across the eight weeks.
Yes. And for some people, that changes things earlier. Each person registers and pays for their own place; there’s no shared seat. But when you come alongside someone, there are real reductions for it. You can come as a pair, a small circle of 3 to 6, or a team. Everyone still holds their own place; the group reduction simply lowers what each of you pays. See the group options.

The course is a sliding scale from $320 to $600 (roughly €295 to €555), and you choose where on that scale you land. A registration fee of 85 USD / 85 EUR holds your place when you register, and it is part of that amount, not an extra charge on top. The rest is due before the course begins.

We ask you to give what you can. We are able to open the group with a minimum of 10 participants at an average rate of 400 USD, so where you land genuinely shapes whether the course runs. If you can contribute at the higher end, you are making room for someone who cannot, and you help us offer scholarships, especially to participants from the global majority. If even the starting point isn’t workable, write to us.

Coming with someone lowers what each of you pays. Euro amounts are approximate: the exact rate is set at checkout, and the registration fee is a flat 85 in either currency.

Probably not as a first stop. This course teaches practice, it doesn’t substitute for support in an acute situation. If something heavy is alive right now, talk to us and we can think together about whether this is the right time.

The sessions are held in English. Many people in the room are not native speakers, so you’ll hear plenty of accents, and that’s simply how this community sounds.

The pace here is unhurried by design, because this work asks you to find what’s actually true before you say it, and that takes a moment in any language. Every session is recorded and comes with a written summary, so you can go back over anything at your own pace. In exercises, if you’d like, we can pair you with someone who shares your language.

And the tools have gotten good. Live subtitles and simultaneous translation into your own language are widely available now, and if that would help you, we’re glad to walk you through the options we know of. How well they work varies with the session.

Stay connected.Keep your voice.Practice both.

You’ve read this far. Maybe you feel called to join us. The world isn’t getting less polarized, but you can get more skillful inside it, without losing yourself.

Reserve your spot See pricing and payment →

Want to feel it out first?

Sometimes you can’t tell from a page whether something is for you. Fair enough. Book 15 minutes with someone on our team. Bring your questions, your hesitations, the bit you’re not sure about. We’ll listen, and we’ll see together whether this program is the right fit.

Book a 15-minute call

How the raffle works

  • On the first Monday of every month we draw three names from everyone who entered since the previous draw. Each entry takes part in exactly one draw.
  • The first name drawn wins free participation in the 2027 NVC Learning Community. The second and third each win €500 (or $500) off.
  • One entry per person per month. You need to be 18 or older. Entry to the raffle is free.
  • Already registered for the Learning Community? You can still win: your prize is applied as a refund of the difference.
  • Winners are notified by email and have 7 days to respond, otherwise we draw a new name.
  • Prizes are personal and cannot be paid out in cash.
  • This raffle is not sponsored, endorsed, or administered by Facebook or Meta.
  • Questions? Write to support@nvcrising.org.