4-week Online Course
February 17 - March 10, 2026
Tuesdays, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm MT
Via Zoom
BUNDLE SPECIAL
Working with Shadow
PLUS
Sameness and Difference
Save $109
This 4-session course will explore how to work with powerful sensations, feelings, and threats in the nervous system. You will learn how sameness creates relaxation and safety, and how differences create excitement, which can quickly turn to threat. Good communication rests on this embodied capacity, although most of us have not been trained to work with our defensive patterning and nervous system.
Session 1: Generating relaxation and self-regulation.
Session 2: Transmuting powerful emotions.
Session 3: Working with intensity in conversation.
Session 4: Developing a practice to support your proficiency.
What you will learn in the four sessions is beneficial for individuals and can be applied directly to your work settings, including leadership and teamwork. We will explore and practice one of the most fundamental dimensions of effective conversation and productive group work – balancing our experience of what we have in common (sameness) with our ability to identify, explore, and learn from our differences.
A COURSE FOR INDIVIDUALS, LEADERS, & TEAM MEMBERS
Overview: Research suggests that the best teams are composed of high performers who also enjoy their work and their team. We know that high-functioning teams experience psychological safety and trust. They can explore ideas, express their doubts, reveal their mistakes, and offer challenges to their teammates. Most importantly, they are not threatened by their differences. They understand that differences create growth and are necessary for good collaboration.
An ability to explore our differences allows our narrow perspectives to expand into broader, more inclusive ones that accommodate greater complexity. But working with our differences requires embodied awareness so that we can move into them, rather than away from them.
This time needs flexible, fearless individuals, leaders, and teams who have vision, who adapt to change, and who care deeply about the world. This requires us to cultivate effective relationship skills that help everyone communicate easily and work well together. Diane approaches this topic through her work as a mediator, an adult development trainer, and a Zen meditation teacher.
YOU WILL EXPERIENCE
- Commonality deepens safety and trust between individuals and in teams
- Enhancing differences creates excitement and learning.
- Excitement easily turns to threat, arousing the body’s defense system.
- Compassionate conversations require:
- Listening skills for deepening sameness
- Using embodied awareness to calibrate the nervous system.
- Including differences in conversation to grow depth and trust.
People who can work with their differences can trust more deeply, communicate more effectively, and act more coherently.
YOU WILL RECEIVE
- 6 hours of live online instruction, practice, and Q&A with Diane Musho Hamilton.
- Helpful homework to deepen and integrate your learning.
- Access to Zoom video and mp3 audio files of all teaching sessions.
SCHEDULE / COMMITMENT
Sameness and Difference: Working with Intensity in the Nervous System
with Diane Musho Hamilton
4-week Online Course, February 17 - March 10, 2026
Tuesdays, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm MT Via Zoom
(10 PT/1 ET/7 CET)
(Class dates: February 17, 24, March 3, 10)
Your learning experience in this course is built on your participation and practice. For each session, Diane will deliver teaching, and there will be practice in breakout groups with an opportunity for Q&A. Additionally, there will be homework practices for each week. We strongly encourage you to participate in all live sessions to make the most of this course. If you miss a session, classes are recorded and available for review.
Registration
GENERAL ADMISSION - $359
BUNDLE SPECIAL
Working with Shadow
PLUS
Sameness and Difference
Save $109
Partial scholarships may be available for those under 30, or in life transitions.
Please CONTACT US to inquire.
Diane Musho Hamilton is an award-winning professional mediator, author, and teacher of Zen meditation. She is a life-long practitioner of meditation and a lineage holder in the Soto Zen tradition.
As the first Director of the Office of Alternative Dispute Resolution for the Utah Judiciary, Diane established mediation programs throughout the court system and received several prestigious awards for her work in this area.
She is the Executive Director of Two Arrows Zen, a practice in Utah, and offers training programs focused on personal development and advanced facilitator skills. Diane is the author of Everything Is Workable, The Zen of You and Me, and Compassionate Conversations. Her latest book is Waking Up and Growing Up: Spiritual Cross-Training for an Evolving World, co-authored with Gabriel Wilson.