March 8 -- Efy's group in Kfar Vradim"One man cried -- and told me he hadn't cried in twenty years."
This was to be an all-day workshop with Jewish men and women who were studying playback theatre with Efy, in Kfar Vradim. Efy had been to Omega Institute and has worked with me and the Beyond Words group there. So Beyond Words helped her organize this big group of mostly women, and just two men, all Jews.
This was a fabulous group experienc
e because all of the participants were involved with therapeutic theatre work, and all of them had done emotional work in the past, so we were able to dive right in.
When we work with groups like this that are very emotionally adept, I sometimes like to
start with a mandala exercise. With this group, we created a big circle with everyone’s heads in the center, so they were arranged like spokes of a wheel. Anna and I got them all breathing and releasing simultaneously, kicking, making sounds. This exercise creates an energy flow that becomes palpable. When everyone is on the floor doing the same thing, it enables them to have a big emotional release and let go easily.That was happening beautifully with this group. Anna and I walked around and facilitated, reading people’s energy. You kind of work the room, moving from person to person, helping them in places where they’re stuck to keep the energy building and building. It creates a huge energy field you can work with and move around, like a giant organ
ism.From doing this so many years, I can spot where energy is throbbing and wanting to break through. I look at the room and often pinpoint one person in whom the energy has built to such a pitch that when I work with that person, they will take the whole room with them. It’s as if that single person becomes the key that facilitates the entire group process.
In this particular group, I looked around the circle and, noticing one woman, I could feel there was something very powerful that needed to go through her. When I focused in on her, she quickly went to a very early place of needing her mother. I took her to an old and raw childhood trauma, where she re-experienced the loss of her mother when she was just a young child--and then she completely let go. Her cries and her pain, in turn, opened up the room. As often happens when one person really lets go and
breaks through, a lot of people start feeling things at once. It feels like an electrical charge goes through the room and everyone feels the jolt and comes alive.
Sometimes it’s difficult to describe this work to those who haven’t done it. But the beauty of the Radical Aliveness process is that when you can get a group of people like this to experience deep emotions fully, without inhibition or censorship, they begin to feel things that they would never normally feel. Among this group, there was a beautiful Jewish man who finally felt grief he hadn’t expressed for many years. It’s much more unusual for men to be involved in this kind of work, particularly in their Israeli culture, so we were all touched by his vulnerability and openness. He got very radically aliv
e, and told me he hadn’t cried in twenty years. Later he danced and said he also hadn’t danced in twenty years. And that is the beauty of this work, when we fully embrace our pain we also open to our pleasure.Everyone was thrilled by what had happened that day. When we finished, you could look around the room and see that people were feeling their energy and were fully alive.
