Ariella Dal – Dream Weaving With Nature Spirits 2022

During this 7-module heart-centered course, you’ll:

• Understand that when we heal ourselves, we heal the Earth, and that when we heal the Earth, we heal ourselves
• Generate a sense of profound interconnectedness with all of life
• Explore how dreams function as a bridge to the hidden realms where you can retrieve guidance and healing for yourself and your community
• Rediscover your sense of belonging in the web of life
• Address the personal and collective grief of living through globally uncertain times
• Discover how your dreams can contribute to healing the Earth
• Meet and dream with your personal nature spirit guide
• Use mythopoesis (mythmaking) with your dreams to create your own mythopoetic life
• Understand your personal medicine for the human and more-than-human world

In this healing journey, you’ll learn tangible ways to communicate with the more-than-human world and spirit guides — to help you discover the potent insights hidden within your dreams.

Ariella will share her wisdom like drops of nectar that will help your dreams bloom — through myth, story, experiential ritual, and meditation — so that you can feel a deep sense of belonging here on Earth. You’ll come to recognize your longing for connection and know your medicine — so you can share with the world beyond yourself and your dreams.

We are the Earth dreaming. When we heal ourselves, we heal the Earth; when we heal the Earth, we heal ourselves.

In European Bee Shamanism, we speak of a dreaming weave or web that surrounds the Earth, composed of the dreams of all beings on Earth. This same web of life can be felt during profound and subtle encounters with the more-than-human world. As dreamers, it is our privilege and our calling to dream not only for our own lives, but as dreamers within the web of life, fully aware that as we dream, we are being dreamt. Indeed, we can dream with the very soul of the Earth, or what psychologist Carl Jung called the Anima Mundi.

In this first module, you’ll learn why Earth Dreaming is both your inheritance and your legacy. At a time of such tremendous planetary pain, ecological strife, and uncertainty about our future, you can turn to dreaming and dream activism as potent tools to bring healing, vision, transformation, transmutation, and spiritual knowledge.

Ariella will share some history on the dreaming temples of Ancient Greece and help you prepare for your own dream incubation. You’ll also learn about European Bee Shamanism as the framework for this 7-module journey — why bee shamanism isn’t just about bees, why spirits are viewed as benevolent and tutelary, and how the body is the alchemical laboratory for transformation.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover the benefits of Earth Dreaming and how you are essential to dreaming a better world into being
• Understand what animism is and why it’s important today
• Learn about Asklepions — the dream healing temples of Ancient Greece — and how to use their age-old process for dream incubation
• Understand key concepts in bee shamanism and how they relate to healing and seership
• Discover your own moments of encounter with the divine in nature, and how they might support your dreaming
• Start a dream-mapping journal to track your dreams and your waking encounters with the more-than-human world

There are many ways to encounter Spirit. You may be familiar with static meditation and shamanic journeying, but movement meditation may be new to you. In this session, you’ll learn a practice called the Lemniscate Volatus — or Infinite Flight — which will take you into an altered state where your imagination can commingle with Spirit.

You’ll use the Lemniscate Volatus, the primary pathway of discovery in bee shamanism, to both discover and construct your own Earth Dreaming temple. You’ll also discover how to tend your dreams, work with fallow periods (times without dreams), and address doubts about personal abilities.

In this session, you’ll:

• Use the Lemniscatic Volatus to find your own Earth Dreaming temple
• Understand the meaning of seership and divination and how it relates to Earth Dreaming
• Explore ways to physicalize and ritualize your dreaming temple in waking life
• Learn how to work with fallow periods and doubts in your dreaming and seership abilities
• Discover self-care rituals and boundaries for practicing dreaming and dream prescriptions

The sacred is that which evokes the depths of wonder.
— Thomas Berry

Nature holds the keys to enchantment. Think of any moment of wonder from your life and you will remember what it is to be enchanted. Enchantment is when the song of your soul harmonizes with the song of another living being, landscape, or even a star. Enchantment is when a story holds the mythic thread upon which you too are being woven.

In this module, you’ll lean into wonder and enchantment by connecting with a nature spirit. You’ll learn about nature spirits in myth and the collective psyche — from the fae folk to nymphs, devas, tree guardians, and more. You’ll use dreams and the walk of Infinite Flight to develop a relationship with a nature spirit who will become guardian and guide to your dreaming and shamanic work throughout the rest of the course and beyond. Trust that this spirit has been waiting for you, because your song is a song they too are longing to hear.

You’ll also explore the importance of reciprocity and how to make an offering to the spirits of the land.

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn about nature spirits and why they’re important to us today
• Discover how working with nature spirits can help you transcend separateness, alienation, and soul fragmentation
• Explore mythic dreaming and how it relates to working with nature spirits
• Make an offering to the spirits of the land as part of the sacred act of reciprocity
• Meet your personal nature spirit and dream with them
• Begin a land presence practice called Becoming the Earth to feel yourself as part of nature

At the heart of the course, you’ll pause and turn toward your body as a sacred tool. In this session, you’ll receive the map of your interior roses and stars. The Garden of Interior Roses is a system of energy centers that, when worked with, can bring about physical and spiritual transformation. These roses and stars can also align with, or connect to, different plants, sounds, places, and more.

You’ll work with the roses and stars in two ways. You’ll bathe the roses and stars in sound and find your personal Earth roses located across the planet that mirror your own interior garden. You’ll then work with one of your Earth roses to divine why it has come to you and what specific healing, blessing, or offering supports the wellbeing of you both.

In this session, you’ll:

• Connect with the Earth as both the magnetic lover and the maternal mother
• Receive the map of your interior roses and stars and learn how to connect with them for dream-flowering, healing, and vitality
• Learn the technique of bathing your roses in sound
• Be guided to an Earth rose as mirror and ally to a rose within your body
• Perform a ritual healing or blessing for your Earth rose

Planetary anguish lifts us onto another systemic level, where we open to collective experience.
— Joanna Macy

True healing happens when we allow the waters of life to flow. In this session, you’ll work with grief as a way to access deeper parts of yourself and find greater unity with all of life. You’ll start to work with dream prescriptions, using previous dreams to discern messages received within your dreaming temple.

You’ll then take your questions and soul queries to the bees and seek their wisdom as keepers of the hidden library. In European Bee Shamanism, we speak of a hidden college of the Melissae, where pure knowing, wisdom, clarity, and forgotten knowledge can be found. In the second part of this session, you’ll learn a technique to retrieve wisdom from the bees and the ancients.

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn about the emergence of the ecological self (Joanna Macy), and how Earth Dreaming is part of a redefining of the self
• Experience the Walk of Tears as a grief portal for internal and planetary healing
• Discover how to work with honeybees as keepers of the hidden library of wisdom and knowledge
• Learn to discern your own dream prescriptions and apply them to waking life

Every person contains incredible power within. That power is derived from your inherent gifts, and these gifts become the healing medicine you offer the world.

In this session, you’ll begin the process of bringing the medicine home to your community. This time, however, community is not just the people in your life, but all the beings of the more-than-human world that you interact with, both physically and in the imaginal realms.

You’ll step into a wombic field of healing energy to discover all that’s waiting to emerge from within you. To engage with bringing your gifts home, you’ll work with a form of shapeshifting — seeking to connect with the wisdom of one of the benevolent nature beings who has shown up in your dreaming.

In this session, you’ll:

• Explore how Earth Dreaming can reveal your personal gifts, purpose, and abilities as a healer
• Understand the power of boundaries and how they relate to working with the spirits of nature
• Work with the wombic field to discover what’s waiting to emerge from within you
• Learn to shapeshift as a way to receive messages and bring more of yourself into balance and connection with the web of life

We can not solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
— Albert Einstein

Every honey bee is an individual, and yet the bee is also part of an entire organism we call a colony. The bee cannot survive without the superorganism, and in many ways, she is an extension of the body of the entire being.

When we consciously dream into the greater field of the dream weave, we are like the hive of bees, creating ambrosia from the gift of the flowers. We can tap into the dream of the Earth and become part of the collective hive dreaming. In doing so, we are capable of transcending the seemingly fixed storylines of our lives and the planetary devastation we’re all facing. We can dream a different reality into being, using the tools of imagination and relationship to spirit.

These tools are what give us the ability to think (or dream) outside the box and to create new neural pathways as we imagine a life and a world that’s vibrant, abundant, and in flow. When we choose to dream with the Earth and with Spirit, we learn that everything is mutable, and even the most rigid, seemingly fixed parts of our lives can miraculously transform. We can make the impossible possible.

In this session, you’ll experiment with collective dream messages from the Earth and learn a dream-weaving technique for divining the messages of your dreams. You’ll walk away with tools for continuing to dream and be in relationship with the beneficial energies and spirits of the more-than-human world.

In this final session, you’ll:

• Uncover how your dreams can guide you into living a mythopoetic life
• Experience a demonstration of dream coagulation, where your collective dreams are transformed into a message from the Earth
• Dream-weave a series of dreams as an act of divination for deeper understanding
• Integrate and continue to stay open to the messages of the Earth and Spirit