The Leelah Play
About Leelah
Leelah is a drama-therapy model and a language for working with group process. It invites individuals and groups into a shared world — shaped over time through characters, relationships, story and play.
The method grew out of Dr. Dov Bloom-Yazdi’s work over more than 20 years of therapy, teaching, research and play. It emerged from a search for a way in which process can arise from the life of the group itself: from what is shaped, woven and revealed between the participants.
Some things are understood when we speak about them.
Others become clear only when they begin to live.
The way of Leelah is the golden thread that connects the two.
The Meaning of the Name
The word Leelah comes from Sanskrit, where it means “the play of the gods” — a view of the world as a constant movement of creation, renewal and becoming.
The name opens a doorway into the method. In Leelah, play is not an ornament. It is the way things begin to take form: a person, a group, relationships, roles, desires, fears, closeness, distance and movement.
In the space of Leelah, the question is not only “Who am I?”
Another question begins to open:
Who do I become within an encounter?
What begins to emerge when I enter a character, when a group holds a world, and when play is given real time to unfold?
Where Leelah Comes From
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Leelah grew out of the world of drama therapy, and from a deep love of play itself.
It is shaped by questions of identity, freedom, power, relationship and process, and draws inspiration from thinkers and therapists such as Winnicott, Foucault and Gadamer.
Alongside its therapeutic and philosophical roots, Leelah is also inspired by very living sources:
Role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons — with their characters, worlds built from within, ongoing stories, and narratives born from the choices of the participants.
The Greek polis — with the shared life of a group inside a space that has structure, roles, dynamics, order and mutual responsibility.
Ritual practices and ancient forms of knowledge — which carry the understanding that human beings meet knowledge through play, rhythm, image, movement and passage.
This is part of what makes Leelah what it is:
a professional model within drama therapy,
a language for group work,
and a space with something mythical, alive and deeply imaginative within it.
Within the world of Leelah, there are two complementary layers.
"Leelah – The Play Paradigm" is the broader theoretical language: a way of thinking about play, identity, freedom, power and process.
"Leelah – Play as Itself" is the living practice: the model in which these ideas take form inside a group, through characters, a story frame and an ongoing process.
The theoretical layer gives the method depth and language.
The practical layer gives it body, life and movement.
Leelah lives in the meeting between them:
a way of working in which idea, experience, imagination, group and relationship begin to act together.
Two Layers of Leelah
Inside a Leelah Process
In Leelah, participants create characters and enter a shared world that develops over time. Usually, it begins as a place: a town, a house, streets, an assembly, roles, relationships, secrets, tensions and events that begin to accumulate.
Each character has a name, a profession, a desire, a history, relationships and a story. Through these characters, connections begin to form: curiosity, identification, alliances, distance and closeness. Slowly, the world begins to remember, and the group begins to feel that it has a life of its own.
The play in Leelah is not based on acting ability or performance. It is based on presence: the ability to be, for a moment, inside a character; to listen to what is happening; to respond, imagine, and allow things to unfold through the encounter.
At the same time, the group itself begins to take shape. It becomes a space with memory, rhythm, language, imagination and the capacity to hold process.
This is one of the central points of Leelah: the individual goes through a process inside a character, while the group goes through a process as a living entity. What is created between the participants, the way the world is built, and the way roles emerge and shift — all become part of the work itself.
Three Living Elements of Leelah
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Character
The character allows a person to meet themselves through a distance that creates freedom. It opens a space in which one can approach, try, move, discover and appear differently. Through the character, emotions, patterns, desires and relationships can emerge — including those that are not always accessible through direct conversation.
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Group
The group in Leelah develops its own language, rhythm, memory and dynamics. It becomes an active space that carries the process together with the participants. The relationships, roles, tensions, alliances and things woven between people become part of the living material of the work.
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World
The story frame creates a shared world: places, characters, relationships, roles and events. This world gives the process body, time and continuity. The town, the house, the streets, the assembly and the character’s journal create a structure that allows the process to keep resonating beyond a single session.
The Facilitator’s Stance
One of the unique aspects of Leelah is the facilitator’s stance.
Leelah is based on a facilitation stance that both holds the frame and joins the living process. It holds the space, the story, the conditions and the attention — while remaining responsive to what unfolds.
There is an important distinction here:
The facilitator’s role is to hold the space.
The participant’s role is to generate the process from within the life of the character, the group and the play.
This means that Leelah creates a space that heightens our sensitivity to what is already beginning to organise itself from within.
What Leelah Makes Possible
Leelah allows a person to meet themselves from a new angle — through character, play, relationship and group.
It allows the group to become a living space, with depth, imagination, movement and shared memory.
And it allows us to see what is woven between people over time: roles, bonds, tensions, closeness, distance and choices that take shape through what happens in the space.
Within this space, creative, playful, emotional and relational parts can begin to appear. There is room for what emerges before it is fully understood, and room for deep human material that rises through the characters, the scenes and the shared life of the group.
One of the meaningful aspects of Leelah is that what happens inside the play space can begin to resonate in life itself. Qualities discovered through the character — courage, softness, boundary, freedom, creativity, confidence or a new way of being in relationship — can leave the room and take real form in the world.
What opens in the character begins to move in the person.
What happens in the group continues to echo in life.
In this way, play becomes a path of change.
