PRODUCTIVE SLUMBER
A single dream can change the entire course of a life.
CLASSES, TELECLASSES, GROUPS
When presenting this material, I consider myself a teaching assistant who helps her students finally more regularly show up to and pay better attention in a class they’ve been enrolled in all of their lives. The real teachers in this class, in other words, are the students’ own dreams, and my role is to facilitate, intensify and make more meaningful their encounter with these utterly brilliant, deeply inspiring, breathtakingly well-informed instructors.
Night Muse
Deep Dreaming for Writers
Many writers experience the practice of their craft, at its most satisfying moments, as a sort of waking dream. And so it is. As science has shown, we are dreaming awake. What’s more, the stuff of dreams is also the stuff of poetry and fiction, the stuff, indeed, of all the creative arts. Their richly suggestive if unexpected recombinations and marvelously apt, nonlinear associations re-form patterns and perceptions brilliantly, with unaccountable wit. Whether or not we remember them, the creative wellsprings that are our dreams flow freely each and every night, offering up—along with guidance and insight—potential material in abundance. Night Muse helps writers access and utilize this material. It also enlists the dreaming mind and conscious imagination to topple unconscious barriers to increased writerly satisfaction and success, blocks made all too visible by the distance they maintain between where we are as writers—whether in terms of the work itself or of publication, readership, sales, representation, etc.—and where we wish to be.
Writers, connect to the deep rhythm and deep narration that undergird your waking hours to infuse new life and new depth into all that you write (and very likely to emerge a more clarified, energized, amazed and delighted protagonist in the story you are living as well). In this lively, experimental dream and writing workshop, we will connect with our dreams and we will write. We will take fascinating journeys to the interior, bringing back, as much as possible, just the riches our art and our lives require.
By circumventing the conscious mind, nighttime dreams help writers…
dissolve writer’s block and disperse writing doldrums
connect unforgettably with their readers
increase their familiarity and facility with the distinctive inflection, rhythms and curiosities of their own voice
work from a place of fearless, joyful ambition
free themselves from painful competition with other writers
overcome self-imposed limitations
slip free--temporarily or permanently, as preferred--from the tyrannies of the marketplace.
​
Together, we will...
revel in the power of authorship
claim and exercise authorial dominion off the page as well as on
clear out and widen our creative channel through which ideas and language flow
experiment with language and story along with other aspects of literary creation in an atmosphere of deep connection
ally ourselves with cosmic collaborators, intellectual ancestors and editors in the ether!
play
Dreaming 101
Join fellow dreamers around the world in a live, phone version of this unique class.
Discussion will supplement experiential exercises in this primarily lab-style class geared toward students more fully realizing the transformative, liberating and enlivening potential of their dreams. Novice and seasoned dreamers alike will gain tools for and practice in dream incubation, dream recall, dream interrogation and imaginative dream re-entry.
TOPICS TO BE COVERED:
Dreams and the Body
We will explore ways to collaborate with our unconscious on the care of our physical form. Rather than a pleasurable practice of self-love and nurture, for many, choices related to food, health and exercise are internalized battles, skirmishes of resistance and judgment fueled by standards originating outside of the self. We will practice using dreams to deepen our appreciation for our bodies as they are, tune into the next right steps in their care and discover practices to optimize well-being.
Dreaming Your Vision
Whether already succeeding in a satisfying career or feeling unclear and stuck with regard to employment, students will learn ways their dreams can reveal new possibilities and ease work-related transitions. When we pay attention, dreams can also aid us in identifying and realizing our life’s purpose. However enormous or unlikely they initially may seem, ambitions that emerge from the depths of our being (whether through dreams or other forms of intuition) are realistic and realizable. Dreams wonderfully embolden. Sometimes startling us into new awareness, they tell a tale of hopeful possibility in which our most authentic, joyful and useful paths are one.
Nightmare Hospitality
Horrifying dream images we may wish to forget often contain the most powerful gifts of all. Nightmare hospitality is inviting our shadow to the party. Doing so—welcoming and attending to our darker impulses as expressed in dreams—frees up immense amounts of energy. Dreamers who meet their demons head-on carry new-found courage into waking life. Put simply, facing rather than running from our fears always expands our awareness of our true selves and inevitably boosts vitality and delight!
Dreaming our Ancestors, Dreaming the Dead
By way of dreaming and dream-related exercises, students will practice drawing on the immense love and wisdom of the intense, often unacknowledged presences in their lives that are their ancestors. They will learn simultaneously to make healthy, self-honoring boundaries with these same forebears.
Muses on the Night Shift
Whatever their creative leanings or preferred expressive media, students will practice opening themselves to inspiration or sometimes very specific artistic direction that wells up from deep within, revealing itself in dreams. For students more interested in non-artistic pursuits, these exercises and concepts are easily adapted to other activities such as sports, travel, parenting, mechanics, academic study, social action, etc.
Dream Relationships
We will explore dreaming as a means of achieving increased integrity, connection and harmony in relation to others and to ourselves as well. We will consider how dreams may invite or ease the sometimes tender, seemingly threatening work of forgiveness so essential to our own well-being. Encountering others—often our nearest and dearest—in the dream realm can allow even the most prickly, complicated, stuck and painful of relationships to express lovingly; for, in dreams, we willingly relinquish the self-protective armor we cling to in waking life. Also, by revealing an individual's essence, our dreams can help us replace unrealistic expectations with acceptance, compassion, appreciation and respect.
Forgiving the Divine Masculine
Transmute Resentment and Regret into Audacity and Positive Aggression: The Universe Loves Your Power!
For the sake of your own abundance, joy, peace, well-being and freedom, make peace with the Dude in the Sky and with all of the dudes on earth as well!
"After taking Lael's workshop Forgiving the Divine Masculine, I received a new found sense of peace and contentment in my life. I had been spending a lot of time searching for a romantic partner and companion. I had experienced a lot of heartbreak, rejection, and disappointment. After taking the workshop, I was able to let go of this wanting and live in the moment of being content with my life and all I had in it. I stopped looking and searching for what I did not have and became grateful for what I did have. Now I am allowing a partner to come into my life with ease and flow, and if one does not come then I will be ok with that too. I am content and at peace with whatever will happen. I am grateful to Lael for this workshop as it really has helped me to be in a more positive and loving space in my life"
--Tara Acevedo, Founder, SocialSalsa.com
​
WHAT CAN FORGIVING THE DIVINE MASCULINE DO FOR YOU?
* Integrate more Yang energy into your life. (Embrace your masculine side to become more active, decisive and potent.)
​
* Harmonize your relationships with the men in your life.
​
* Attract more clients to your business. (Even if women are your niche, resentments, all resentments, are client repellents. Use dreams, creativity and sisterly support to open the abundant earning floodgates that much wider.)
​
* Allow more freedom, flow and fun...by depositing you squarely in the current of life!
​
* Ratchet up your P.Q. (peace and playfulness quotient!)
​
* Help you--as a mother, aunt, teacher or friend--avoid saddling children and young people in your life with negativity, whether conscious or unconscious, about their own or the opposite sex. (By esteeming and honoring ourselves and others more fully, we help them to do the same.)
​
* Improve your sex life with partners of any gender. (Okay, I just threw this in, but doesn't that seem a likely outcome? Wouldn't more freedom from feelings of bitterness and unworthiness make us better givers and receivers...in bed?! I think so.)
"Forgiveness is not so much about our past as it is about our future."
--Andriette Earl
In this dreams and healing workshop, dream work and exercises involving different expressive media will assist us in unearthing and releasing buried, self-limiting resentments at God the Father, however each of us might have internalized that construct, and also at all men currently or formerly in our lives, institutions we may identify as male and male energy in general. To be clear, we do this work of forgiving for our own benefit and liberation--not to be better or nicer but to be happier and more free.
This workshop topic came to me from a very deep place. Indeed, it initially emerged and continues to emerge straight out of my own and my clients' dreams. Its aim is to transform a deep-seated sense of unworthiness that many of us carry around and that shows up in different ways, none of them particularly happy.
There is no healer or liberator more powerful than forgiveness, but, like other revolutionary actions, forgiveness can go awry. If we've ever acted as self-aggressors, sometimes via subtle forms of self-abuse or self-neglect, the cause was likely either insufficient or insufficiently authentic forgiveness--forgiving not at all or from too superficial a place. Sometimes religion and spirituality have played a role: when we forgive in order to live up to spiritual ideals rather than follow the dictates of our Deeper Being--when forgiveness is about being "good" or "correct" rather than about being true and free--we risk turning our
hostility inward, displacing it onto ourselves. Forgiving the Divine Masculine workshop participants will transmute the toxic negativity of resentment into the life-giving twin forces of audacity and positive
aggression in support of ever fuller and ever more joyful self-expression. By learning and practicing tools for authentic forgiveness, participants realize how very much and how very passionately the Universe loves their power!
​
Contact Lael if you wish to schedule this one-day or two-day workshop for your women's group or organization or perhaps for you and your friends.