Yes, Larry really knows how to play, but more importantly, Larry really knows how to emote, and how to help you energize your ability to do so as well. This is at the core of his workshop, ‘Masters of Self-Expression.’  Does the name sound a bit outlandish, abstract? Yet Larry, together with the program’s founder, Dan Fauci, and their talented faculty, brings it down to earth. The workshop’s goal is to help us discover the path to a deeper, more meaningful expression of our true selves. Their methods range from highly entertaining to terrifying and are almost always exhilarating.

The workshop started in New York City, circa 1976; Fauci was doing one-day workshops to introduce actors to casting agents and producers. Beforehand he would put the actors through a series of exercises designed to help them relax and focus; many of those original exercises are still in the workshop. Those one day workshops have now expanded into The Mastery, the weekend workshop which to date has been conducted in over 25 cities worldwide for more than 30,000 people, from all walks of life.  The almost uniform response to the workshop is one of revelation and liberation.

I’m always a bit skeptical about promises of self-liberation, but having taken the workshop, I can testify; it’s a dynamic experience, completely riveting, and it unleashed a boldness in me that I’d managed, somewhere along the way, to decommission.  I am now happy to say it’s back online again. For me, the workshop acted as a sort of refresher course in being alive - on how to work from my authentic self, how to act in concert with it, speak from it, be it.

The emphasis in the Mastery workshops begins with becoming present, essentially on being conscious.  This is in fact no small feat, and so we are continually led back to the basis of consciousness - the breath. We do a lot of returning to the breath. The process then unfolds as exercises encourage participants to act out, at full tilt, a whole range of human emotions. This is one of the workshop’s prime features - giving one the psychic space in which to open up, and doing so yields a heightened sense of vulnerability; I found myself feeling like a newborn. 

 As we collectively drop the defense mechanisms that inhibit us, we feel an enhanced awareness that what in fact courses through our veins is love. And suddenly we’re in touch with the sense that this is what gives our lives meaning.  Ultimately people find themselves standing on a stage, as do all their fellow participants, revealing themselves in ways they perhaps never had before and rediscovering that at the core of their psyches is a primal, creative, animating spark, and that this spark is a force of nature and a gift.  

From the English Mastery Website:

“Entertain the premises:

• The past is a set of stories that kept you 'safe' but that now the danger is past - you just haven't switched off the behaviors.
• You really do know what you want - you just stopped wanting it so that you don’t have to be disappointed one more time.
• You have passion - and it is a tool for your use, not an energy to keep apologizing for.
• You are the cause of your own creativity.
• We cannot guarantee that there is life after death, but of this we can be certain - there is life before death and it is yours to create - it begins and ends with you.”