March 9 -- Silvi and Nurit's group in Zefat-Mgrar
"The Jewish women were saying, our culture and religion tells us we shouldn't be meeting."
On the third day, Beyond Words had arranged for us to work in this gorgeous, magical place called Zefat-Mgrar. It was an ancient Arab village, but now only Jews live there. In this beautiful place, you could still feel, in the walls and the ground, the energy and the presence of the Arabs who had lived here for centuries. Regardless of your political viewpoint, it’s unavoidable when you're in a place like this not to feel the conflict between the cultures, and to experience some sort of internal conflict as well. You come face to face with the history of this country, where people had to leave their ancestral homes and can’t return. 
The place where we met had the feeling of a harem--a secluded house in older Muslim cultures where only women would live. There were stone passageways and big amazing stone rooms. Intricate and richly colored carpets covered the floors and there was a huge vaulted ceiling and windows high up that let in the natural light. It was a completely spectacular space.
This particular group was composed of about 15 women, extremely religious Jewish and Christian, Muslim, and Druze women. They have been working with Silvi (who is Arab Christian) and Nurit (who is Jewish) from Beyond Words.
One Druse woman had done Radical Aliveness work with me before, so she was very excited for Anna and me to get there. She started by talking about something that had happened to her at work, where she lost her ability to speak up for herself. As we listened to her and worked with her, she started feeling like she was having a past-life experience. She became frightened when she tried to describe the sensation of being strangled.
As I've mentioned before, in groups where intense energy starts moving and people are going to very deep emotional places, it's not unusual for one person's cathartic emotions to get things moving and serve as a trigger for others. This woman’s past-life experience brought up feelings in another woman, a Jewish woman, who was having trouble finding her voice. We worked with her also- helping her to move open her voice- she felt liberated and empowered in this process.
The religious Jewish women told us that in her culture it's highly unusual that they and other women would be involved in work like this. In fact, many of them did so in secret. "Our culture and religion tells us we shouldn't be meeting."
All the women really loved the work we did that day. They expressed to us that they were proud of the fact that they had become such an amazing group. With Anna and myself, and in their ongoing group work with Silvi, Nurit, and the Beyond Words organization, these women are bravely defying the oppressive aspects of their culture. I felt honored to support and
further their efforts.
In all of the places we went, the people were interested in the Radical Aliveness work and interested in going deeper--in being a part of a process and a movement. Mostly the thing that's amazing about collaborating with Beyond Words is seeing people coming from such different points of view--really wanting to be together, loving each other, bearing witness to others' deep work.
Noha had said at her college that there is intense political conflict, but when you get these people working with each other and revealing profound feelings and experiences, it starts to accomplish deep healing even around still-raw historic wounds. After working with fellow human beings in a room and feeling their fear, pain, and exaltation, they really can't look at so-called enemies in the same way.
This is a big part of the Beyond Words mission: to get these women in connection with each other, to really get to know each other and care about each other, and to move beyond differences of culture, religion, and politics. Only then can we find the place of commonality, where we are all human beings.
