Dreams and Visions: Cultivating Joyful Effort — Monthly Sessions

Dreamwork and body-mind practice · a monthly online series with Katherine Bell and Henry Kandel. Wednesdays, 7:00–8:30pm ET (4:00–5:30pm PT), on Zoom: December 9, January 13, February 10, March 10 and April 14. The series opens with a free introductory session on November 11.

A dream can be meaningful even if you don't know what it means. This series pairs Katherine Bell's Experiential Dreamwork, twenty-five years of dream groups and the principle that only the dreamer can say, with the body-mind practices and psychedelic yoga of Henry Kandel which include breath, awareness in the body, and simple daily rituals that carry the work into waking life and back into the night.

Who it is for. Folks entering a dream practice for the first time and experienced dream-workers. Folks interested in exploring the body-mind connection to dreaming and other non-ordinary states. And folks engaging with psychedelic healing, who see dreams as connected to that pursuit and dreamwork as a fertile path of integration.

What you take away. A deeper connection with your own dreams, and a deeper connection with life in general. Energetic and creative balance and flow. A sense of creative empowerment. Awe and wonder as more reliable visitors in the course of the everyday, through an appreciation of the mystery of conscious experience. And methods — ones you can personalize, refine and expand — to support life, dreaming, and psychedelic healing, if that is part of your path.

How a session runs. We open with a short guided body-mind practice, built up gradually over the series: a check-in with the body, one full breath with attention to the surrender of the exhalation, awareness resting at the heart or wherever your dreaming lives. Then Katherine leads the work with dreams and visions — guided for the whole group, followed by small breakout groups where you share what happened. When there is time, one volunteer's dream is explored in the round, with everyone else supporting. We close with the practice you will carry into the month: a personal somatic check-in, a minute or less, designed by you.

Between sessions. In the morning, palms at the heart, one full breath, and an intention set as an invitation rather than a demand: may I engage with my dream journey today. During the day, three brief check-ins — stop, take in the whole scene, one breath, one word. Before sleep, bring those moments back as vividly as you can, which trains the same recall that brings dreams back in the morning. The ritual is yours.

Topics across the series. Non-interpretive work with images: basking, or savoring, in a dream or vision. Finding meaningfulness in our lives and our dreams. How images reveal the way consciousness is shifting. How rituals create containers. Dissociation: its value and its downsides, and how dreams and visions help us work our way through it. Thoughts and feelings, and how images address them. Lucid dreaming, as one module along the way rather than the point of the series. The order and emphasis will follow the group.

$30 per session, or $100 for all five with the Five-Session Pass. If cost is a barrier, write to us.

More about the series: psychedelicyogaresearchcollective.org/dreams

This series is educational and experiential. It is not therapy, and it does not replace it. Please have your own systems of support in place.

Katherine Bell is the founder of Experiential Dreamwork, host of The Dream Journal podcast, and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Henry Kandel is the founder of the Psychedelic Yoga Research Collective, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit at the intersection of yoga, contemplative practice and psychedelic healing. He has taught lucid dreaming and Tibetan dream yoga methods for years.

Presented by the Psychedelic Yoga Research Collective.