Hi Reader,

I want to tell you about something that sort of blew my mind.

Last summer, I was in Southern France, as part of a research team of both indigenous and western scientists. Our research zone: the famed Paleolithic painted caves of the Dordogne. We were conducting ceremony in the ancient caves, using our voices and ancient instrument to pray and to commune.

As the resident phenomenologist, I was charged with cataloguing participants’ moods and experiences. While this research is still being analyzed and not ready to discuss just yet, I can comment on something profound that I experienced one day in the caves.

We were in Cougnac, a cave of unparalleled beauty, full of crystalline stalagmites, still pools of reflective water, and of course, ancient paintings, some of which are thirty thousand years old.

The paintings often include abstract images like boxes and lines, and animals like bison, ibex, and mammoth. In one image, jagged lines surround a human’s body, like a cosmic egg, radiating power. Some of the human figures have animal-like characteristics, like tails, hooves or antlers.

I thought—These images are so similar to accounts of lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences.

At the very least, they share the same cosmos that we can access in visionary dreams: soul flight, abstract geometric light and vortices, and transforming into new people, and even animals.

When I spoke of this insight to others in our group, they agreed. We also noticed that when we spend hours in the caves, we don’t seem to remember our dreams that night as much. Someone said – "it’s because we are doing our dreaming here, in the lower world."

And I got it, in my bones.

The cave is not a “place” for journeying, due to its acoustic properties, or the darkness and silence and profound human prehistory there. It is not a venue, but a living container.

It is a portal.

To enter the cave with this ceremonial attitude is to dream with your eyes open.

And that is the best way I can describe what lucid dreaming really can be too.

Lucid dreaming is not just about “knowing” you’re dreaming but—in its full development—about truly belonging in the dream, in a sacred moment. The lucid dream itself is a portal to other realities.

As modern dreamers, being able to experience lucidity in a dream doesn’t make us shamans—but it means we have the same ability to shift into those same states of consciousness that our deep ancestry did for healing, for spiritual discernment, and for accessing uncanny information.

We are standing in the shallow end of a very deep pool of sacred wisdom.

Shamanic lucid dreaming is not a closed practice. Nor do we need to move into the shaky realms of culturally appropriation, doning others’ cultures as our own.

Each of us has a deep ancestral mind operating under our conditioned and domesticated life.

The possibilities are not so much endless—as we’ve been told—but eternal.

It is accessible.

Our ancestors have been here before.

So how can we deepen our shamanic lucid dream abilities, safely and sustainably?

With the right training and perspectives, we can learn to move into these magical spaces ourselves, from the comfort of our own home. No caves needed, nor any 12 hour flights across an ocean.

That’s what my upcoming training is about: Lucid Ignition: the Shamanic Edition.

This is a 4 week live online training with weekly classes and check-ins.

The program is perfect for people who want to workshop their lucid dreaming as a spiritual life practice. And it’s especially built for lucid dreamers who've hit roadblocks in their dream practices and have been burnt out and frustrated before.

We will travel together into the three tiered cosmos of our deep ancestral mind. Each of these worlds brings its own gifts – and its own initiations.

Once initiated in lucidity, we move into emotionally transformative places, healing spaces, and expansive realms of nonduality.

Learning to navigate these cognitive worlds is key to truly mastering lucid dreaming and visionary experiences of all kinds.

With this training and support, it’s possible to:

• Invite lucid dreams and “big” dreams when you are ready for them

• Harness repetitive dreams for big self-knowledge breakthroughs

• Discover effective intentions that are easy to remember

• Learn to surrender and trust the dream’s process

• Heal old wounds and regain confidence

• Apply that hard-won dream wisdom to waking life

​Here’s where to learn more about Lucid Ignition.

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We begin Tuesday, June 3^rd.

Yours,

Ryan

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