LALA – life arts learning academy – is a place of learning, reflection, and transformation. Till the present moment, it is a nomadic academy for learning and sharing the arts of living. LALA’s nomadic journey is a developmental process that includes looking for partners and support to find and create a base, a home, a center for LALA.
When the name LALA came I was taken aback by the word academy, it sounded a bit heavy. So I did some research, much to my delight, I discovered that Akedemia was the name of the grove where Plato met with his students and friends to contemplate and share insights about life. Sitting under some lovely trees to do the soul work of LALA is a graceful image I could fully say yes to.
The principle that inspires and informs our proposals is that each and every one of us is an artist whose creation is the life we live.
LALA is continuously researching, developing, and sharing skills for facing the challenges of 21st-century living. Everyone is aware that we’ve entered a time of vertiginous and continuous transformation – rapid radical change and the subsequent need for reinventing ourselves every so often has never been more important. We need to be cultivating the mental, emotional, and spiritual resilience, flexibility, strength, and inspiration to help us balance successfully on the edge of the emerging future.
LALA’s curriculum is based on the 5 Steps For Achieving Anything — self-connection, purpose, communication, collaboration and celebration (the 5 Steps is the working title of a book by LALA founder ron bunzl). LALA programs are interdisciplinary, holistic, and experiential. They weave together artistic, psychotherapeutic, and spiritual practices to create an integrated skill set for the art of living.
Meditation – mindfulness, chakra sounding alignment voice work, dynamic breath/movement meditation, and creative writing form an integrated practice aimed at opening channels of intuition to discover our purposes as we contemplate The Great Smoking Mirror of Dreamtime.
The Power of Stories – a deeply poetic and practical reflection on the creative power of our inner and outer narratives and the magic of words. Automatic writing, self-narration, creative autobiography, poetry, storytelling. How we know and present ourselves in the world and thereby create our realities.
Voice – exploring, appreciating and liberating the voice as unique individual expression and collective harmony in the celebration of diversity.
The Big Question – holistic and experiential instruments from a variety of psychotherapeutic and spiritual approaches to self-discovery including elements of voice dialog (psychology of the selves), and the art of process (inspired by the work of ~Arnold Mindell).
Conscious Creative Communication – inspired by NVC (nonviolent communication) and mindful communication.
The Storytelling Body – a variety of conscious movement practices including evolutionary sources of movement, yoga, vyayam, gyrokinesis, alexander technique, and dancing to the silence and to the music.
The Theater of the Soul – improvisation, working with words, sounds, images and the body to express and explore what moves within and wants to be embodied in our acting (actions)
Live Food – preparing and eating food from every world culinary tradition with its life energy intact.
Integrated Massage – intuitive and knowledgeable touch therapy.
Seeing Things & Crafting Imagination– painting, drawing, photography, video, modeling, assembling and mosaic.
The Music of Chance – listening and playing – rhythms and melodies from the heartbeat to the sounds the breath makes as it passes through us and other instruments.
Our programs are in evolution and are adapted to meet the needs of our participants and our evolving curiosity, love of learning, research and sharing. They are designed to awaken presence, creativity, courage, awareness, and intimacy with ourselves, others, and the world.
LALA’s courses, workshops, groups, and individual residential retreats and events are practical and celebrative.