San Francisco, Ca: Amazonian Ashuar-Based Indigenous DreamWork

6:30pm–10:30pm
Join us for a special journey into the depths of the heart and soul.
Dreams have long served as gateways into healing, inner development and the mysteries of our relationship with nature. Through them we can become more sensitive to the language of life, a language expressed through metaphor, association, feeling and the archetypal patterns that move through both our waking and dreaming experience.

Amazonian Ashuar-Based Indigenous DreamWork
The Original Language of Being & the Evolutionary Blueprint of Our Lives
4-Hour Experiential Workshop
For the Ashuar people of the Amazon rainforest, DreamWork is not limited to interpreting what happens while we sleep. Dreams belong to a larger language through which human beings have traditionally understood themselves in relationship with each other, the natural world and the living currents beneath appearances.
This experiential workshop is rooted in apprenticeship with Ashuar Indigenous elders of the Peruvian Amazon, brought into dialogue with Jungian psychology and more than two decades of applying this work to healing, self-inquiry and rites of passage.
We begin by exploring the original language of being, including an ancestral understanding of human communication in which our inner and outer landscapes were not experienced as separate. Before increasingly abstract forms of language came to dominate human experience, the natural world provided a shared vocabulary through which inner qualities could be recognized and communicated. Animals, plants, rivers, mountains, weather, light, darkness and the cycles of nature carried associations through which otherwise invisible dimensions of human experience could take symbolic form.
This poetic language of metaphor, symbol and association is still spoken through our dreams.
Learning it is not about memorizing what a particular symbol means. We learn to recognize the energetic patterns beneath appearances and how the same qualities can express themselves through different people, dreams, relationships and circumstances throughout our lives.

Remembrance & the Evolutionary Blueprint
An essential part of this process is the Amazonian practice called Remembrance.
Dreams frequently return us to formative periods where particular energies first became significant. Some reconnect us with fear, grief, rejection or experiences we did not yet know how to integrate, while others bring us back into contact with curiosity, tenderness, creativity, passion and qualities of our nature that became obscured as we adapted to family, culture and the circumstances of our lives.
Rather than attempting to change or endlessly analyze the past, Remembrance brings us back into relationship with the living energy of these experiences. As we recognize how the same energies continue appearing in different forms, we begin tracing the pathways of our conditioning alongside the latent passions, talents and capacities that have been developing throughout our life journey.
When several recent dreams are explored together, apparently unrelated images and circumstances can begin revealing a larger pattern. We may recognize where we presently stand within our hero’s journey, what limitations are asking to be transcended, what remains to be integrated, and which qualities are seeking fuller expression through us.
This is what we call the evolutionary blueprint, an ongoing communication that reveals the developmental movement already unfolding through our lives and can bring us closer to wholeness, our true nature and the activation of our highest potential.
At the heart of this process is a return toward our original state of innocence, recovering the openness, vulnerability, curiosity and immediacy with which we once encountered life, now integrated with the awareness and discernment developed through everything we have lived.

From Dream Language into Embodied Experience
After approximately two hours of teaching, storytelling and experiential exploration, Roman guides a short standing breathwork practice rooted in Indigenous Amazonian tradition.
Breath accompanies us through both waking and dreaming states and provides a bridge into the embodied dimension of DreamWork. Through breath, movement, rhythm and awareness, we engage directly with the energies we have been exploring and prepare to enter the live DreamWork from a more receptive and embodied state.

Live DreamWork & the Collective Evolutionary Blueprint
The final portion of the workshop centers around an extended DreamWork session with one participant who is willing to openly share several recent dreams.
Rather than interpreting each dream separately, we listen for patterns moving through the sequence and explore the dreamer’s associations with the people, places, relationships and circumstances appearing within them. The subconscious and superconscious dimensions of our being communicate through familiar images drawn from our own life experience, and as these associations are followed, connections begin emerging between the dreams, formative experiences and what is unfolding in the person's life now.
Yet the DreamWork does not belong only to the individual whose dreams are being explored.
In traditional Ashuar communities, dreams are shared because the patterns moving through one person can carry relevance for the larger community. We enter the live session in this same spirit. As one person’s evolutionary blueprint becomes visible, everyone listening has an opportunity to recognize how the same fundamental energies may be expressing themselves through entirely different circumstances in their own lives.
The individual dreamer therefore becomes a doorway through which the group can perceive a collective evolutionary blueprint. The session offers each participant an opportunity to recognize the communication of their own soul while witnessing how our individual journeys participate in larger patterns of human development.
DreamWork, or Arutam in the Ashuar language, is ultimately not only about the dreams that come at night. It is a practice of learning to listen to the living current beneath appearances and recognize the language through which our lives are continuously communicating with us.

Facilitators
DreamWork guided by Roman Hanis
With support from Joshua Lundell

Contribution
[rs_pricing]
$30–60 sliding scale