Ann Bradney

The Radical Aliveness Institute has always been a learning organization. One of our key founding principles is the willingness to be changed by our encounters.  Five years ago I went to Nairobi, Kenya to work with Niki Angel doing an International Radical Aliveness Program with the desire to make the Radical Aliveness philosophy and model all that it could be.  The intention was to learn and grow and to bring back all the wisdom and knowledge gained to the Program here in Los Angeles.  The conundrum? How do you create a model that can hold all the ways that socialized human [...]

When you come to a school like ours, you make a commitment to step into a laboratory where everything that is part of the world is also here, and everything becomes an opportunity to learn, to know ourselves more deeply, and to be open to the different perspectives that make up the human race. We are not a school of easy answers.  When you come to a school like ours, you agree to learn about yourselves and others through intense processes, working with the body, deep feelings, and awareness.  When you come to a school like ours, you learn to not [...]

Life is many things, it can be hard and exciting and frightening and ecstatic. When you think of the hugeness of it, the mystery and the awesome uncontrolled force of it, it is nothing short of FABULOUS. What a privilege it is to be alive. I love the name of our upcoming fundraiser: fabulous aliveness. It really indicates what we are doing at the school. We work on staying alive, awake, excited and open in the face of all that life brings us. It requires us to learn how to use our experiences as a pathway to find out more about [...]

It is not easy to change. There are so many choice points- they are fleeting and we need to catch them because it is the only way to change. And they are hard to catch because catching them implies letting go of the past. It means we become willing to feel our pain- accept it, know it is ours to hold and to find out the gifts that are inherent in the lives that we have lived and every single thing that has shaped us. The healing we can hold for others comes directly from this place. In the feeling and [...]

It began as a vision in New York City, and it was so strong that it caused me to give up everything I knew to move to a city I had never lived in, where I had only 4 contacts, in order to say yes to something that was calling me. In January of 2008, I landed in Los Angeles with my husband and no clue how this was going to happen, but with faith that it would. I wanted to do work that held power differently. I wanted to say yes to the wisdom of the group. In some ways [...]