Radical Aliveness is a transformative process that works with the body's energy, and uncensored emotions. Developed by Ann Bradney, this work is a further evolution of Core Energetics. Drawing on Core's body-based techniques, Radical Aliveness creates a space where individuals are encouraged to step into their own authority and become influential leaders who are present and involved in the world.
She is currently in Israel continuing this work:
Ann is currently back in Israel, continuing her work with training Palestinian and Jewish women in Radical Aliveness process and techniques. She is included in this video, and speaks about the work.
March 17-19 — A three-day workshop with a group of Bedouin women in Ashkelon, Israel.
"What are you so afraid of? I'm facing my fears. If today is your day to die, then so be it." What can you say to that? I started laughing.
Perhaps it's fitting that during the last two days of my trip I experienced firsthand what it feels like to be under mortar attack, because now I have a new understanding of the fear and danger these women live with on a daily basis.
Here's what happened. Rina, a Bedouin woman who had done work with me at Omega, invited me and three women from the Beyond Words organization—Silvi, an Arab Christian, and two Jewish women, Nitsan and Liri—to run a three-day workshop at a kibbutz two m
iles from the Gaza strip, with all Bedouin women.
Many of the twenty Bedouin women were wearing headscarves. In Bedouin culture the women's husbands are permitted to take multiple wives, and the women are told whom they can marry—and sometimes are forced to marry very young. Their lives are controlled. They don't have money. The tribes stay separate. Women are really not free in their Bedouin culture, and they're oppressed in Israeli society as well. They are getting it from all directions—from their husbands and families, from their tribal culture, and from the government of Israel.
When we got there the first night I was really tired. Silvi hadn't arrived yet, so I asked Liri and Nitsan to take the lead and run the first workshop. They had been Beyond Words leaders for many years, and I quietly observed.
The next day Silvi arrived, along with a Bedouin woman named Amal, who had been nominated for a Nobel Peace prize for her work in the Bedouin community. As I started working with the whole group, I was thrilled to see that the Bedouin women were really ready to get into it. For these women, it was a special treat that someone had come in from the outside to give them something. It was clear that they were going to take advantage of every single second.
They started telling stories that were so unbelievable. One woman said they had tried to marry her off but she'd stood up to them and said no. She wanted to go to school. For punishment, her family had taken her books and burned them. She was ostracized by her tribe. Four years later she met a man whom she felt was her soulmate. His wife had died and he had scars because he had been a skin donor to try in vain to save his wife's life, who was injured in a car wreck but ended up 
dying. She felt this man's suffering and married him. But her family was still against her and banished her, including her own twin brother. Because she had done what she wanted to do, she had born the punishment for it her whole life. She just couldn't bring herself to submit. After she married this man, he decided to take a second wife. Feeling deeply betrayed, she took her child with her back to her family, but they shut their doors on her and the child. Somehow, she supported herself and her child, and built her own house. Her husband, unhappy with his second marriage, ended up coming back to her. He begged her to take him back. She agreed, but on one condition: that they would live in her house.
Another woman said, "My husband used to beat me, but finally I turned him in and he went to prison. But now he's out of prison and he's beating my children." We got her hitting and saying "NO!" She started telling her husband he can never hit her children again. Her emotions radiated through the room and triggered a lot of pent-up feelings. Another woman started screaming, "Mother, where are you? Why aren't you protecting me?" Many of the women screamed and cried for their mothers. In Bedouin society, oppression is handed down from mothers and perpetuated by them.
The women went home, and the next day gunmen from Gaza started bomb
ing the kibbutz where we were. At first, the shelling sounded far away. Then we heard this bomb explode really close by. We ran inside and tried to get under the bed. Then we saw people running outside, so we ran outside and followed them into a small concrete room that was the bomb shelter. Liri told me that even if a bomb hit on top of us we'd be fine. She was in post-traumatic shock. And I could see that Silvi was really angry. It was chaotic and confusing. Then the bombing stopped.
When we went outside to investigate, the bombing started again, so we ran back into the shelter. Ring ring. It was the Bedouin women calling us on phone. "We want to finish the workshop. We're coming to get you." The woman, who the day before had had the courage to stand up to her husband, arrived in a taxi with two other giant, powerful women, who put their arms around us. She (who remains nameless to protect her identity) looked me in the eyes and said, "What are you so afraid of? I'm facing my fears. If today is your day to die, then so be it. Come on!" What can you say to that? I started laughing. They reminded me of powerful angels coming to take us away.
We went in separate cars to a house that was away from the bombing to finish the workshop. I was in a car with Liri and Silvi, and Silvi was in a rage. "The government leaders use us," she cried. "The Jewish and Arab leaders use the conflict to support their causes, and we've got to take this away from them." She said they use us by getting us scared and angry, which perpetuates their conflict. "We can take it away from them. We can use it differently. The mortars are coming from Gaza, but Israel has so much more firepower to bomb the shit out of the Gaza leaders." She said they would use every opportunity to continue the conflict. "We women have to say no. We have to go to the streets and say no!"
In the backseat on the verge of tears, I was feeling 
their rage and their fear. I was thinking, how terrible that people around the world are living in these situations and we're in our comfortable privileged lives and not giving it a second thought. That car ride was more intense than the bomb. I felt their rage so fully.
In the end, they were all really happy that I had had this experience. Everyone said, "You need to know what life is like here and need to know what we're living with and what we're dealing with."
When we got all the women together for the final workshop, one of the Bedouin women who had come 
to get us said when she had hugged Liri in the bomb shelter, she had felt split. I love this woman, she said, but feel for the people of Gaza. She talked about how split her heart feels and how much she wants peace, but how her heart in that moment was with the people of Gaza and the Arabs. Liri was the only Jewish woman in that room. The women were saying all sorts of different things. All Jews aren't like Liri; they're not going to support us. Others were saying, yes, we can do this. Everything on that morning was out in the open.
I said I would never forget those brave Bedouin women coming to get me for the rest of my life.
Nor will I forget these 13 days in Israel, and all the courageous and open-hearted women who taught me and each other so much, women who are mending the rifts between religious and ethnic cultures one heart and soul at a time.
March 16 -- A day with my Esalen group from last year, at Talitha Kumi, in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.
I noticed that Fatina and her son were really frightened. It slowly dawned on me that they were driving on a road that was traveled by Jews only.
I was so looking forward to my time in occupied Palestine, because it meant I would be reunited with the group of Jewish and Arab women I had worked with here in the US at a weeklong workshop at Esalen, in Big Sur, CA.
To get to Talitha Kumi, one has to go through a checkpoint. Because the Arabs who live in Palestine are not allowed to go into Jerusalem, it's only Jews who pass back and forth through this particular checkpoint. It was not difficult for me to pass through.
The night before the workshop, Nitsan and I spent time at the home of Rasha's mother. Rasha had been at Esalen with the Beyond Words group. An Arab from the occupied territory, she had left for the states two years ago without telling her family she wasn't coming back. When her mother found out I was coming, she wanted to meet me and treat me to a feast, because she'd learned that I had been helping her daughter. Rasha had come to the States with no money and no connections, but Americans have been so inspired by her story that she's gotten support from various people. Now she's at Brandeis on a student visa, working toward her PhD.
Rasha's mother, a religious Muslim, had spent two days preparing a feast for our group, and I had been told, "Don't eat before you go there. You won't belie
ve what they're going to do for you." When the mother saw me, we both simultaneously burst into tears. She had fixed this unbelievable meal with Rasha's sister and 
two best friends, and all the little kids sitting around the table for this amazing feast—soup and rice and beans and three different meat courses, olives and pickles and vegetables—and I ate and ate and ate. I was just about to clear away when the mother put a whole chicken on my plate! She cried half the time I was there. Nitsan, from Beyond Words, and Rasha's friends who could speak English were translating. They 
all wanted me to know what life was like for them. It was an amazing experience—and the feast lasted for two hours.
The workshop the next day was in a room of an Arab school. All the women who came had been at Esalen with me—half of them Jewish, and the other half Arabs—three of whom lived in Palestine, and the rest Arab women who lived in Israel. The women of Gaza have to be really careful about not letting people know they are doing this peace work with me and the Beyond Words organization. Only their families know; they are doing this undercover.
The work got very deep, very fast. The women really dug into the politics of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and their feelings of anger and grief were palpable in the room. At Esalen, the Radical Aliveness work was challenging for them, but here, with me, in their own backyard, everyone just went for it. No one was holding back.
They had been working together on and off since I last saw them about a year before. The women of the group were really present and bringing up their feelings. One Arab woman was telling a story about how she works for the housing authority that gives building permits. She had met an Arab man who was dying of cancer and who wanted to build a home for his family. She issued the permit and told him to go ahead and build it, then the Israelis bulldozed his house. She was sobbing, saying how betrayed she felt, and how terrible she felt about her participation in the system. An Arab woman stood up and was angry too. Then a Jewish woman got up and said, "I am an angry Jew—I'm angry at what's going on too." She went wild, and soon everyone was howling in pain. The women really worked directly on the conflict and it was inspiring to see how much safety and trust they were able to create in that room, and how much work they had done together since Esalen a year earlier, work that had freed them up to be more real and more honest. It was a wonderful, deep group and experience.
In the end, we talked about how they had gotten empowered by the work, and how different they felt now compared with when they were at Esalen. They also remarked on how healing it was for them to have an outsider—not Jewish, not part of the conflict—to facilitate. They said it made them much freer to express their feelings. Actually, everyone said this to me everywhere I went. My "outsider" status brought safety and neutrality to the groups, and allowed them to express themselves more powerfully.
At the end of that workshop one of the Beyond Words women, Fatina, a Muslim Arab, wanted to take me to Bethlehem. I agreed. She and her son took me around Bethlehem and showed me the church where people had hidden out without food or medicine to avoid being killed by Israeli forces. The town was thousands of years old. In the center of the town were a lot of youth staging a peaceful demonstration to try and bring the two parties together, Fatah and Hamas. At the time, the town was split between these two parties. They also took me to the center Fatina is starting with other women in the occupied territories—a place to empower women to make money. They served me sweets and coffee and I met all the budding entrepreneurial women.
As they drove me back on the road toward the checkpoint to take me back into Israel, I noticed that Fatina and her son were really frightened. It slowly dawned on me that they were driving on a road that was traveled by Jews only, because Arabs were not allowed to cross at the checkpoint it led to. They were terrified to be caught on that "forbidden" road, and it really brought home to me the kind of fear they live with. Basically, it's a road only for Jews. We were driving really slowly because they were really nervous just to be on that road where Arabs are not supposed to be. Nitsan and Assaf, both Jewish, had already driven through the checkpoint from the Israeli side and were waiting for us, parked just past the checkpoint. This aroused the suspicions of the soldiers. When Nitsan saw Fatina and her son drive up with me, she saw the look on their faces and burst into tears. "I'm so sorry," she said. She kept saying over and over how unfair it was for Fatina and her son, and how badly she felt for them. Nitsan later told me she saw a mother and child who cried and cried because they couldn't go through the checkpoint.
The soldiers did let us drive through, after really checking us out. My own fear, though, made me realize what these Arab women live with daily.
photos by: Sherri Brown
March 15 -- A day with peace facilitators and social workers at Givat Haviva.
I have seen with my own eyes hundreds of ordinary people performing extraordinarily skillful acts of emotional healing.
I had the privilege of traveling to the community of Givat Haviva, where the Beyond Words organization arranged for me to work with some women at the Jewish Arab Center for Peace. It’s an inspiring place, having been established way back in the early 1960s with the mission of bringing Jews and Arabs in Israel closer together, and to help them achieve a mutual understanding of their cultures and concerns. What better place to do my Radical Aliveness work?
What was wonderful is that these dozen social workers were all studying post-graduate facilitation skills in a year-long course. So in a sense, we all went into the workshop with the same vocabulary and intentions. The leader of the school was quite nervous about bringing me in. But people who had worked with me in the past had recommended me highly.
First, I got the women into small groups and we did an ice-breaker exercise in which women in each small group shared with each other the messages they had received from their families, messages they had received from their culture, and talked about how these messages affected their bodies. This is generally a good one to get workshop participants talking, emoting, feeling, listening, and observing. It always opens up a goldmine of issues and gets energy in the room and in their bodies flowing freely. It’s like bringing an enormous pile of art supplies into the middle of the room -- it gives us lots to work with.
This is a good opportunity for me to offer a quick aside -- some background on what's really behind my approach. Yes, getting people into small groups is an ice-breaker. But here's why: All human beings have innate healing, intuitive, and empathic qualities, yet they don't necessarily know how to access these. For example, if I were to say to a perfect stranger, "Here, spend some time with this partner and really connect. Find out who she is and what makes her tick. Really relate to her," the stranger would look at me blankly and say, "I can't. I don't know what you want me to do." And yet, if you ask the same person a specific set of questions, and they know that everyone in the room will be disclosing at the same level of vulnerability and intensity, they will talk. They will listen. They will begin to feel camaraderie, or perhaps they will feel fear or grief or anger or shame or some other strong emotion.
The point is, this seemingly simple exercise gets ordinary, untrained people using quite advanced healing skills. Without consciously realizing it, real support and openness unfurls inside these small pods. They experience the sense of helping -- and asking for help. Simple? Yes. But flexing such healing muscles -- in a room where other small groups are doing exactly the same thing -- creates an almost magical atmosphere filled with emotional, electric charge that radiates out into a room vibrating with connection, support, and ability.
I love this basic exercise because it's a very real, hands-on way to show participants that they have masterful skills that come quite naturally. I love to support individuals to access their healing abilities. We have it in us – I have seen with my own eyes hundreds of ordinary people performing extraordinarily skillful acts of emotional healing.
Using their skills of listening, empathizing, supporting, and observing, every woman in that room readily saw that she already possessed leadership and healing abilities. So I got everyone started at a higher plane of confidence and connection than they entered with.
After the exercise, we started talking about what it brought up for people. It was beautiful. The women were willing to go to such deep and vulnerable places. For example, one of the Arab women got to work on the death of her brother, which she hadn’t opened up about publicly until then, and felt very relieved to do so. Another young woman had been sexually abused, and she had never told anybody. Everyone in the group was deeply affected by these and other stories. By the end, we were all were crying, feeling deeply, and really supporting each other.
What happens when you support this kind of process is that the energy moves around the room. One person opens up, and then another and another. It's like a charge that gets passed from person to person. When we open ourselves to our deepest feelings -- and those of others -- it creates spontaneous healing. The simple small-group exercise is invaluable in places where people desperately need healing, but don't know how to say it, express their need, or open up.
Afterwards, when they shared, the women were saying what a special day this was for them. Their director admitted she had been hesitant and protective for the students to have me there. She told me, “It was really an incredible experience to see how deep the whole group went.” She added that the work I did with her students was so profound and beautiful she was very happy she had taken the leap.
It was a lovely, lovely experience for me too.
It's extremely difficult to get to your true and deep feelings if you don't feel safe.
In writing about the work I did in Israel, I've tried to be very sensitive to those people who sometimes had to overcome great obstacles and even put themselves in danger to meet with me and do our group process. In the case of the day I'm about to describe, I cannot name the small town I went to, nor name the Arab women from Beyond Words who invited me. It is such a small town that everyone who lives there is related in some way or another, either by blood or by marriage. With the villagers, our work would raise suspicions.
Following my three-day break, I went next to this small Arab village, where I met with a group that was mostly Muslim Arab women, with one or two Jewish women. These were all kindergarten teachers who had been working with two Beyond Words leaders for about six months.
The challenge with this particular group was that they all worked together at the grade school, and as mentioned, were closely related, which is not conducive to creating a safe setting for revealing and unleashing deep feelings. Imagine wanting and needing very badly to talk about a traumatic experience, or reveal a secret fear, or just unleash a raw emotion in such a setting. All of these women feared judgment, and they did not feel certain that everything that happened in the room would stay there. And of course, some of their secrets or stories would likely betray the confidence of another woman in the room.
I always learn from these kinds of challenges, but that doesn't make them easier! It was clear from the beginning that most of the women in the group felt unsure and unsafe. I finally ended up getting them in the flow and feeling their emotions by helping them move their energy in a way that felt less threatening and less personally charged to them. "Babies are completely free," I told them. "Be babies, and be wild." They were able to do that. With every group you have to find a way "in," and this exercise worked, more or less.
Although letting go like this was healing for many of them, the modest progress I was able to make with this particular group reminded me of the challenge we all face: It's extremely difficult to get to your true and deep feelings if you don't feel safe. In a way, the work the Beyond Words women and I are doing with all of these courageous people is helping them learn how to create safe spaces where they can release anger, fear, and other emotions. It's all about trusting your fellow man and being in community with others who are doing so too. That's how individual healing begins and spreads out into the community, one group at a time.
