Hawke’s Bay
CNVC Certified NVC facilitator. Embodiment & NVC spirituality practitioner of Living Compassion. Filipa is a teacher of beginning/foundational NVC through to very advanced/spirituality NVC. Filipa co created the Robert Gonzales book of his teachings and practices The Spirituality of Nonviolent Communication: A Course in Living Compassion (2022) and is the content provider for the NVC mobile app NVConnect.
Filipa provides public and personally tailored trainings and sessions for: individuals, couples, parents, groups and teams, communities, educators, therapists – anyone and everyone. Facilitating through experiential learning, Filipa delivers globally online, and onsite anywhere in New Zealand or abroad. Her offerings include workshops, retreats, coaching, keynote presentations, and 1:1 sessions.
Email Filipa your interest to filipahope@gmail.com. More details on Filipa’s website FilipaHope.com, Facebook page Communication for Connection NVC w/ Filipa Hope and connection with her newsletter.
See Filipa sharing in this short interview March 2024 with Manawa Education, and this longer interview April 2020 with Conscious Collective Education April 2020.
Why NVC for Filipa?
“My daughters, now in their 20’s, astound me every day with what is possible when a human being develops amongst adults who can see and affirm them in their universal human needs. Their abilities to connect with themselves and articulate their needs with clarity, while acknowledging and valuing the needs of others, surpasses any awareness and authenticity I was capable of at 40! Like most people, I grew up amongst adults who did their best to love and support me and where not aware of their reactive patterns, so passed them on. Like most people I live with the wounds of that unintentional violence and empathy deficit. Determined to be able to respond rather than react, and so give my daughters empathy and empowered use of language started me on this incredible journey of growth – and to my surprise my own healing through deeper and deeper capacity for self-empathy. Glimpsing what is possible, I want everyone to be able to access these absolutely essential life skills – and so pass them down to every child!
Facilitating these life changing abilities, I am filled with meaningful purpose and most that precious need to contribute in ways that truly serve life/lives. With my own daughters and other youngsters, I am witness to the generational change that is possible, I see and hear feedback how it saves lives, I see and experience how it brings back connections in a world growing in disconnections (I believe our ability to connect is where our ultimate hope lives). NVC offers a simple and effective ‘how to’ guide on communication and connection – and so a real potential for world peace.
For the past 20 years, and I continue, to dedicate my life to providing this guidance that enables us to live in harmony with our intentions (as we do when free of all reactivity) and allows us to be aware of the traps in conditioned use language that disconnect us (from ourselves and each other) – so we have the ability to choose communication that is clear rather than reactive, and actually conveys what we are trying to express.
And so I am dedicated to my own ongoing growth, by cultivating my capacities for authenticity, freedom, empathy and clear communication. I continually fine-tune my facilitation as well as the exercises and practices I provide, as to be ever more effective as a teacher whose delivery results in ongoing empowered changes in peoples lives. My teaching is successful because I am able to create an optimal learning space of safety, comfort, and enjoyable connections, while providing exercises that facilitate this learning in ways that participants come to easy understandings through their own ah ha’s. Finding ways to make the learning self-evident (rather than simply a cognitive theory or understanding) is important to me, as I know that this is the learning that results in the ongoing growth and changes we are wanting.
I am passionate about developing and expanding my advanced (or Living Compassion) NVC work. I am forever grateful to my teacher and friend Robert Gonzales for sharing his profoundly powerful life work (NVC Living Compassion) providing simple ways for ongoing deepening and growth in the capacities necessary to live a life of love (compassion) and freedom (authenticity). My most profound learning ( and what I love to share) is around liberating our life force that is trapped in woundedness and reactivity. It has been a deep honour and a significant highlight of my life, to help bring the teachings and practices of Robert Gonzales to the world and for posterity, with the book The Spirituality of Nonviolent Communication: a course in Living Compassion. See my website for all my offerings. I hope you will join me!”
Filipa has been teaching since 2010 with her foundational work Communication for Connection and later expanding to offer intermediate and advanced work Living Compassion: both online for the global communities and onsite throughout New Zealand. Filipa provides Professional Learning Development for early childhood services both privately and as a funded contractor with the New Zealand Ministry of Education. She is a founder and a trustee of this website’s source: Aotearoa/NZ NVC Charitable Trust.
Filipa has an Honor’s degree in English Literature, a Post-graduate diploma in Information Systems, and an informed background in Early Childhood development as well as in Trauma support. Other areas of experience (I am not endorsing any of the following – simply saying I have had these trainings) include: NVC mediation, Restorative justice circles, Sociocracy, Byron Katie’s ‘The Work’, Dances of Universal Peace, Landmark Forum, Co-Counselling, Family constellations, Anthroposophical studies, Vipassana meditation and others. Other area’s of interest include: private pilot, dancing, hiking, swimming, veggie garden – and family, friend, community time 🙂
Feedback from Filipa’s workshop participants…..
Towards the end of 2017 our kaiako community identified a need to enrich the communication skills between us, and also to strengthen our communication with parents in our kindergarten and playgroup community. We were led to a tool; Compassionate Communication, by John Cunningham, and also Non Violent Communication (NVC) by Marshall Rosenberg. Filipa Hope brought NVC to our community and it has had a deep and lasting impact within the relationships we have with each other, and also our wider communities.
The two day workshop was full of rich learning in how to access a language that seeks to meet each of our needs, nurturing our care and understanding for each other. The best thing about the learning was that it spread deeper into each of our lives than we had originally imagined it would. The way in which we talk with our families, friends, children and partners has become richer in connection. Filipa has a way of guiding this work to meet each of the needs of the group before her, we were a varied bunch of people and each walked away taking learning with us to use in our daily lives.
The investment we made with ourselves and our time with Filipa was definitely worth it. It’s a workshop that will change the way you look at communication with yourself and those in your lives for good.
Traceylee Hooton
Manager, FOUR SEASONS – Rudolf Steiner Kindergarten, Taupo
Thank you so much Filipa, for allowing Shayne and I to attend your NVC parenting workshop that your recently facilitated. We both feel that working alongside our Dads and families and within Kidz need Dadz Hawkes Bay that this course will be very helpful indeed. It both meet our expectations and exceeded them. We were not prepared for how this parenting course would also spill into our own personal lives and be so useful in how we communicate within our own organisation and with others in our sector that we work in.
I would strongly recommend the course for other organisations that are involved with working alongside families in the community . What peaceful work places and communities we would have if we could all learn to communicate in this non violent way.
I wish you all the very best and look forward to working with you in the near future with the hope of you to be able to deliver a presentation to our Dads at our Dadzkare meetings.
ngā mihi
Cath & Shayne Jeffares, Kidz Need Dadz Hawke’s Bay July 2017
I’ve been on the planet for a good long while now. Although I have a background in teaching and learning communication, it was NVC or compassionate communication that I had wanted to explore at the personal level. Finally at retirement the opportunity presented itself through Filipa’s Foundation Course. The things that stand out about my beginnings in ‘getting my feet wet’ were how encouraged and safe I felt during the practice sessions. This was because of Filipa’s skill in providing practical examples in everyday language…..where we worked with specifics from our own lives but only at our own pace. In these sessions we made genuine connections with others and ourselves. I came to realize just how much ‘in my head’ my previous communication had been: the analysing and the theorizing and the ‘trying to get it right’. This insight came through myself not through someone else critiquing my performance. (the NVC philosophy was alive and well in the way the course was run)
Filipa is a role model for me when it comes to experiencing compassion and authentic presence.
I have a life- long habit of smiling and being pleasant and considering the other person first. I am taking steps in learning about my own needs for genuineness and self-acceptance, but to express this in a way that still considers others. Working with Filipa in the ‘now’ and spontaneously is exciting.
Faith Reed
Contact Filipa directly with any questions filipahope@gmail.com