Confidence In Intimacy Coaching For Actors
Advanced Coaching to Transform You
Your Work, and How You Approach Your Busines
Group Work and One-on-One Coaching Available
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Do you feel ready to really lay it all bare in your work, emotionally and physically?
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Does the idea of feeling empowered inside of sensitive and vulnerable scenes excite you?
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Do you want to feel safe as you step out of your own way?
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Not sure how to do that?
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Wondering how to access those deeper parts of yourself?
Welcome!
Please disregard the dates named in this video. Thank you!
Email Mara at info@brazenlighttheater.org to have an initial conversation, to see if this program is right for you, and to get yourself signed up!
Use the subject line: About Coaching
Spaces are limited.
An initial meeting is required to make sure the group container is held with integrity, or to see if one-on-one coaching is right for you.
"If you're an actor seeking a way to portray intimate moments in an authentic and emotionally safe way, Mara is the coach for you."
Laura Lundy, International Creative Career Coach, Theater Producer, Founder of Blue Panther Productions.
Thank you so much! I really appreciated working with you - I feel a lot more confident and clear now, going into an intimate scene.
KOUSHIK Chattopadhyay, Actor, Writer, Creator of The Naked Yogi and Indian in Hollywood
Navigate the page with this menu, or enjoy scrolling through!
Have you ever felt the magic of truly embodying a character?
Where there's no fear or doubts in your portrayal? In fact, you can't even call it a portrayal - you were BEing the character?
And you experienced the power of being fully present,
even with heightened senses,
as you crossed out of your comfort zone, on your own terms, into true vulnerability and intimacy
with yourself, your fellow actors, and the audience?
Perhaps you even surprised yourself with the boldness of your choices!
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You might believe this is a rare gift, offered only when all the elements are lined up just right to support your performance, so you can finally get there! AND, that you have no control over when this may happen.
But it's not.
Being able to do this for yourself, regardless of the circumstances, is a requirement as a professional actor. And every week I experience this for myself in live performances, just as I have on film sets as well.
You can too when you master the skills and principles taught in the Confidence In Intimacy Coaching for Actors Program.
If you've been sensing that you're ready to really lay it all bare in your work, emotionally and physically;
BUT, you're not sure how to do so safely, or you don't know how to access those deeper places in yourself...
This program is designed specifically for you.
Think of it as a Graduate Course in Intimacy.
[NOTE: For the purposes of this program, "Intimacy" is an all encompassing term,
and can mean anything from sex scenes and blatant displays of sexuality, to violence and disturbing character behavior, as well as emotional vulnerability in conversations.]
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The modalities in this program are created around building a dialogue directly with our bodies, through the connection between our conscious and unconscious mind. This is the space of our Inner Magic.
And, this is the single most powerful asset that any person can have. Learning as actors, step by step, how to access and play with your own inner magic is of inestimable value!
What Would It Be Like If You Could
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Trust your instincts to the point that you allow them to take over?
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Stop wondering what to do with your body, and/or worrying about what you look like?
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Navigate boundaries and communicate them with confidence?
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Hold the energy of the room in the palm of your hand, or the wink of an eye, or the twitch of your shoulder, for real?
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Truly be listening to your fellow actors - in fact, Feeling them - so you can react authentically, rather than planning out and choreographing your responses?
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Feel safe as you step out of your own way, trusting that you've got your own back to get fully vulnerable, and walk away unharmed?
Your body holds the key to unlocking these doors.
The dialogue I will help you build between your physical and non-physical self is like a treasure map, allowing us to navigate choppy waters without sinking our ships - in fact, we can even dance within the waves.
Whatever metaphor we may use, the power of this work is that it happens deep, deep underneath the surface levels of what we're aware of - the place where our truths are fluid, intense, raw, and we have access to many new possibilities and wisdom.
The place where our instincts, and intuition, lie. The "where did that come from? I didn't know I had that in me," place.
I have a belief: Our instincts are wisest. They are actually never steering us wrong.
Some people confuse instincts with impulse. Here is how I distinguish them:
Impulse is acting on an idea you haven’t thought (or rather, Felt) through.
Instinct is full body, heart, soul harmony. It is being “tuned in.”
Instincts use the wisdom of the body to inform decisions.
Impulses chase ideas, often ignoring the deeper wisdom of our bodies and our innate knowing.
Read through the rest of my personal manifesto for living a deeply intimate life. We will be going over these concepts throughout the program. I developed this manifesto through my years of work and study in this area.
Read My Story at the bottom of the page.
Mara Lee Gilbert is the real deal. She is supremely gifted at guiding people through the dark, and connecting to the inner realms in a way I haven't seen before.
Christina Berkley, Master Coach to the business elite, including NASA engineers; Founder of Lighthouse Coaching
This work has given me a better trust of myself and a willingness to face myself when it’s hard. I felt confident before, but now I’m feeling a more extended, and deeper,
self-honesty and confidence.
Mara was able to help me navigate simultaneously both my conscious emotional and mental states, paired with the deep subconscious places were the more negative conscious beliefs, thoughts and emotions were stemming from. By guiding me to bravely look at my self- hidden, "not acceptable" desires, I was able to face myself by moving through the emotions that came up, understand the symbolism of my outer world by seeing my inner world and come out the other side with a new sense of self.
Bryan Kimmelman, Actor, Voice-Over Artist, Co-Creator of The Narcissist musical
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What You'll Get
Here are some of the benefits you'll get from joining this program:
Your own transformation through participating in the exercises and processes for yourself.
Confidence to take on intimate and sensitive roles and feeling empowered in these portrayals.
A sense of ownership over your boundaries, so you can be an advocate for yourself during challenging roles.
An understanding of how to play with your boundaries, so that you will feel more free in performances, rather than constrained. They don't have to hold you back!
Develop a centering practice to connect you with your body in deep ways and continue to build your dialogue.
Discover what the ultimate safe space is that we can hold for ourselves when stepping out of our comfort zone and develop your own.
Grow your understanding and trust for pushing your own boundaries - knowing when this is ok for you and when this is not.
Know how to connect and work with your own difficult inner experiences and triggers, so you can use them as allies in your work, rather than places to avoid at all costs.
Practice heightening your own senses so that you can connect more deeply to your surroundings and feel your instincts more clearly.
See and experience vulnerability through a new lens, so that you'll actually want to lean into it, rather than away from it.
What Your Business Will Get
As your freedom of self in performance becomes more powerful, you will:
Gain confidence in the quality of your work which will then make it easier to sell it.
Save time in submitting for roles by knowing what to say No to, and why you're saying Yes to the others.
Lean into fear and take scary/excited actions.
Have the energy of owning the room when you walk into auditions, rather than trying to please the casting team.
Make bolder choices that are aligned with your unique gifts. When you start surprising yourself, you know you're surprising the casting team - in a good way.
Gain clarity in how you market and talk about your work.
Be able to showcase your power as an actor, rather than hoping to receive validation and feeling the power is always on the other side of the table.
Be able to lean into higher quality connections with others in all of your business building activities.
Feel safe being visible.
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Ideal Candidates
This program is for actors who know what it means to take responsibility for their craft and the trajectory of their career, and want to continue to expand their capabilities.
This includes responsibility over their emotions.
While this will be a highly safe and supportive space, we will be exploring our deeper emotionality, which may bring up triggers. Those who join the program need to be ready to discuss their emotions maturely and with an open mind, within a group setting.
Although, no one will ever be asked to share or do anything they do not want to.
This program explores our connection between the conscious and the unconscious. Actors joining should be looking to get underneath the thinking mind to the roots of their experiences and patterns, and are not afraid of what they may find there.
Actors joining should be eager to become more powerful performers and ready/open to deepen their relationship with themselves.
Who It's Not For
This program is not for anyone looking for "magic pill" formulas to enhance their performance abilities and career trajectory.
This is not a course in how to become an actor, or in learning basic acting skills. You may be earlier on your acting path, but if you are seeking a foundation in craft, this program will not suit your needs.
This program is not for people who are curious to learn new information, but not fully committed to doing deeper work with themselves.
This program is not for anyone who feels unable to do deep emotional work in a group setting, or that a group setting will make them feel unsafe in any way. If this is you, please feel free to reach out to me at leemagilbert@gmail.com to discuss one-on-one coaching.
This program is not therapy. It is a coaching program.
While we will be exploring our deeper emotions, this program is not intended to diagnose, heal, or prescribe any sort of treatment plans. Please seek out a licensed therapist if you need this type of assistance.
However, you are absolutely welcome if you are already working with a therapist. Please contact me if you have questions about joining this program while also working with a therapist.
The Program
A deeply connected cohort of talented actors who are committed to upgrading their power as performers in sensitive roles.
15 weeks of 2.5 hour sessions (3 sessions a month).
One-on-One attention and coaching throughout the program, during class time.
Daily and weekly practices to deepen your skills.
Online group to keep us all connected, inspired, and supporting each other.
We will go through different phases of Discovery, Expansion, and Integration throughout the program.
Discovery will have us working with our bodies, senses, and the nature of sound and our voices to discover emotional blocks and where we are holding fear.
Expansion will have us building our dialogue with our bodies and inner selves, learning to communicate with all parts of ourselves and recognizing our inherent innocence. We will also be strengthening the use of our voices to help move energy.
Integration helps us harness and apply our vocal, physical, and emotional energy to express our authentic self, and that of the character. It also helps us navigate the expansion of our energy, even through fear, so we can stay on course and not retreat into old patterns.
These modalities emerged for me throughout my journey studying Forensic Psychology, working in psychiatric centers and prisons, while also being cast in highly sexual roles and navigating my own boundaries, studying Orgasmic Meditation, Pleasure Research, working with Plant Medicines, and working with my own energetic coaches.
We will be working together during class time, and you will be working on your own at home.
My Story and the Genesis of This Work
I've walked through the dark to understand what it is to be human, which is essential to our work as actors. In the darkness, I discovered that intimacy, and innocence, continue to exist. And when we can remove our judgement, we are able to see just how brightly they shine there.
I started out believing that always having the answer was best way to win at everything.
Now, I understand that living as the question, "Then, Who Am I?" transcends the desire to win, because everything can be accessed from this place.
Surviving Cancer
I was diagnosed with Leukemia on New Year's Eve when I was 11 years old. This happened to be a time, now written about in medical textbooks, that certain breakthroughs happened in treatment for children my age with this diagnosis. However, things were still being tested and worked out. It remained an uncertain time, and I was randomly assigned to a track of treatment - the most aggressive one they were testing - with only a 50% chance of it being a treatment that would work for me. Furthermore, overall, regardless of which track of treatment I was assigned to, the doctors told my parents that I only had a 40% chance of survival.
They told my parents, "We're going to bring her to the brink of death, and then we're going to bring her back."
Well, in truth, I was already at the brink of death, without the help of chemotherapy - however, they pushed the line even further, continuously, for the next 2.5 years of my life.
Amidst this tight-rope walk with death, my pivotal moment, was being shown my own cancer cells under a microscope, while the toxic medicine was dripping into my veins through the IV.
This is what my illness looks like, I thought to myself. So, this is what's killing me.
I found my cancer cells quite beautiful: purply-blue orbs all swirled together in a kind of dance.
It was an incredibly intimate moment.
This was MY cancer. This was my body. It wasn't some outside entity, or some monster, or something happening To me... it was... Me. I felt an incredibly deep love for it. I didn't know why. I just did. It was mine. It was me.
And this was really the genesis of my larger journey towards seeking to know intimacy, regardless of the circumstances.
A Degree in Forensic Psychology, Drama Therapy, and Romance Between Murderers
Entering college, I had a dueling love for both performance, and the psychology of violent people. I wasn't sure if I wanted to work for the FBI profiling serial killers, or grow into a professional actor. I had been actively preparing in both art forms; writing school papers on the mind of killers, working with children and adults living with developmental disabilties (who often displayed bouts of violence), also working at a local dance studio, and performing in school and for the town at every chance I could.
In fact, I got my first coaching assignment while still in high school - working with a younger student who had been accused of stalking other students. I was asked to be her mentor by the guidance counselors who weren't making progress, and we met weekly for the next 2 years until I graduated. She stopped stalking her classmates.
Ultimately, I decided to get my Master's in Forensic Psychology. Little did I know this choice would lead to incredible performance opportunities, and opportunities to combine my passions - leading drama therapy groups inside of a prison, where I also performed with the incarcerated individuals, as well as a maximum security psychiatric complex for the criminally insane.
Read my larger story about the two murderers who fell in love inside of my drama therapy group Here.
This experience deepened my understanding of innocence and intimacy, regardless of the circumstances, in surprising ways.
My First Roles, Studying Orgasmic Meditation, Plant Medicine
The short form of the rest of the story is:
I've been hired to perform highly sexualized roles since I was still in my late teens. My first on-screen role was an extended sex scene, during which I had to portray an orgasm with the camera inches from my face, so I learned fast how to navigate and own this space for myself.
In truth, the sex of it all was the easy part for me (I know this is not true for many people). I had a natural comfortability with my body and my sexual energy - my aliveness - since I was a young child, which only grew stronger after surviving leukemia. And I loved the power of it all. I still do.
What scared me most was to be emotionally raw and vulnerable, whether in a sex scene or otherwise. To come from the place of powerlessness, to allow the veneer of attractiveness and turn-on to crack open and reveal the deeper unknown.
And with time, focus, discovery and determination, facing the deep unknown parts of myself that scared me, this is no longer scary, but actually feels really really good to access and express.
Beyond working with my own coaches (and I still do work with them); two of the largest informers of my journey were Orgasmic Meditation and Plant Medicines.
Orgasmic Meditation is, at its core, a beautiful practice of partnered meditation while directly activating our sexual energy. I learned an incredible amount about my own energy, my social conditioning around sex, and how to navigate the complicated weavings of group healings happening at high intensity. I also experienced first-hand when integrity isn't held to its highest standard and the beautiful practice turns into a cult. This helped me enhance my own levels of integrity in my work.
While studying within this community, I did extensive Pleasure Research, as it was called, including attending nudist events, sex parties, meeting with a sexual surrogate, and spending 30 days granting other people's wishes - a research project devised to expand my own capacity for love and ability to hold unconditional space.
During this time, I was also introduced to ceremonial plant medicines. And after eight years of working consistently with them, both in group ceremony as well as solo, I have been shown how to love myself at my absolute worst. I have also learned how to harness this love when facing what feels like pending death, to navigate the extremes of terror with an open heart, and come out the other side feeling even more alive.
This work reconnected me to my natural ability for sound healing through my voice. This is an ability I believe we all have, once we're able to see through our egos.
Email Mara at info@brazenlighttheater.org to have an initial conversation,
to see if this program is right for you, and to get yourself signed up!
Use the subject line: About Coaching
Spaces are limited.
An initial meeting is required to make sure the group container is held with integrity,
or to see if one-on-one coaching is right for you.
Are you ready?
This program will change your life, because it will change you.
Investments are discussed during our initial meeting, as they are often tailored to the group or individual.
"Intimacy is not something that just happens between two people; it is a way of being alive.
... Intimacy is making the choice to be connected to, rather than isolated from, our deepest truth at that moment."
- Geneen Roth
Working with Mara was very enlightening. She has a welcoming and accepting presence, and her intuitive questions guided me to a deeper exploration of myself. I gained a new sense of clarity, feeling of peace, and ability to trust my instincts.
Eleanore Altman, Mental Health Counselor and Musician
I can tell I made a good decision by signing up for your coaching. Thank you!
Alicia Underwood, Actor, Ghost Note, A Dangerous Business: Lainee Delaney Undercover
After my work with Mara, I felt less at war with myself and more whole. I now view my negative thinking with self-compassion, and as opportunities to offer myself more loving attention, and each time I do so, I feel more lightness and peace. I’m certainly happier now than when I started working with Mara and I generally feel good about myself. Moreover, I feel excited about my continued future growth. In short, I’m grateful for Mara’s kindness, patience, and wisdom. I’ve grown more in working with her than with anyone else.
- Dan Cohen, Mental Health Practitioner
You are so free with your voice! I see you listening and following and allowing a process to happen. I found watching and listening very powerful! You are so present, and grounded, embodied and aware. I feel like you are tapping into something we all share as humans, but often close off to, and won't access. I admire your trust and courage!
I think you are connected deeply to healing power. In the workshops I facilitate, I am inviting people to open to this source inside themselves, wherever they may be, whatever that may feel, look or sound like. Thank you again!!
- Leah Stein, Founder of Leah Stein Dance Company