About 8 years ago I was gifted with two decks of cards (used in Nonviolent Communication, aka NVC, to identify feelings and needs), and I integrated them successfully in my healing sessions with my clients. I redesigned the cards to better suit my clients and added two additional decks to support my work.

When talking about the decks, I often say that even though emotions are what make us human, we often try to avoid feelings we judge as wrong or bad, which means many of our deeper needs remain buried and unmet, sometimes for years. Instead, we put energy into pushing away, denying, or numbing those feelings with shopping, scrolling, binge-watching series, or overindulging in food, drink, sex, and so on. Playing with the decks is all about making these deeper feelings and needs and sensations more accessible and acceptable and then guide people to healthy and appropriate strategies that address and meet those needs.

You may begin by introducing the Body Awareness deck which helps you identify the multiple sensations you can be experiencing on any given day. This deck helps distinguish actual body functions, sensations, and physical symptoms for anyone who struggles with distorted or combination of body signals. Highly sensitive people, those with learning differences, folks struggling with various disorders, or individuals suffering from complex trauma will immediately feel validated in their experiences. This deck is a valuable means of identifying the myriad ways in which our body speaks to us that we may not always correctly interpret, or in some cases, even notice.

The Feelings deck encourages acceptance of a range of emotional responses beyond ‘mad, sad and glad’, while organically extending the user’s emotional vocabulary and effectively addressing emotional projection or denial. A perfect tool to practice empathy for others in couples or group therapy, this deck also actively engages the client in the practice of self-compassion. It can be compelling to have feelings long denied sit outside you on the table. Sensing even a small separation from a challenging emotion can offer a profound grasp of what it means to say, “I am not my feelings”. From this place of greater neutrality, it becomes easier to introduce conversation around topics previously hidden or forbidden.

The Needs and Desires deck, like the others, may stand alone or work in tandem with the others: identifying, naming, and validating needs and desires that may have been effectively suppressed, belittled, or ignored for a lifetime. Engaging these cards enables the practitioner to have a meaningful discussion around the client’s forgotten or repressed needs, while also distinguishing between simply valuing the need itself, and implementing a helpful strategy to meet it. This is a powerful tool to help clients such as at-risk youth, individuals with social anxiety, or those suffering from abuse or addictions, identify how they want to be treated and what it might look and feel like for them to have specific needs met in gentle, healthy, loving ways.

The Soul Care Strategies deck rounds out the series by offering the user the opportunity to find inspiration and gain guidance in addressing a body sensation, coping with feeling, or responding constructively to a newly recognized need. This tool supports individuals to align with and respond from their inner truth, rather than how they think they should behave. So often it is the seemingly mundane that truly supports our deeper needs. Sourced from 30 years of individual client responses to the question, “How might you nurture your soul right now?”, these deceptively simple yet highly effective strategies cut to the heart of what is wanted when we seek a ‘balm for the soul’.