“If there is something hauntingly beautiful or impressive in your dream, just honor it, respect it, recall it, sense it with your body. More will come.”
Unfolding Deeply Expanded States: Practicing Dreamwork and Journeywork
Are you ready to bring your coaching to the leading edge? The psychedelic renaissance is already transforming the fields of coaching and personal development in powerful ways. Now more than ever, coaches are being called to skillfully work with deeply expanded states—unlocking new possibilities for growth, creativity, healing, and transformation.
Whether you chose to work with psychedelics or not, it is increasingly likely that your coaching clients will be. Experiences of deeply expanded states can catalyze profound psychological insights, prompt major life transitions, and create spiritual awakenings. Your clients will want to explore what opens for them in deeply expanded states with you, their coach. Therefore, it is imperative for all professional coaches to understand how to skillfully work with deeply expanded states. Today, professional coaches must not only be trauma-sensitive, they must also be psychedelic-informed.
This course, Unfolding Deeply Expanded States: Practicing Dreamwork and Journeywork, equips you with the skills to integrate Dreamwork and Journeywork, including Psychedelic Work, into your coaching practice, guiding your clients toward profound realizations and embodied transformation.
The Role of deeply expanded states in Coaching
A state of consciousness is a way of experiencing and understanding reality. In an ordinary state of consciousness, you navigate what is commonly referred to as “consensus reality”—the shared, socially agreed-upon version of the world. But what happens when you land in an altered or non-ordinary state of consciousness? In these states, the usual ways of orienting to reality are temporarily suspended, opening the door to new ways of being, perceiving, and knowing.
Not all altered states lead to profound insights and transformations. There is a subset of these states, called deeply expanded states, that more reliably generate profound and sustainable transformations. As a coach you can learn to work with dreams and inner journeys, including psychedelic journeys, in coaching conversations as a catalyst to generating powerfully transformative deeply expanded states.
The Power of Dreams and inner journeys in Coaching
Dreams and inner journeys are a rich, untapped source of embodied transformation, yet they are often overlooked in traditional coaching methodologies. They often:
Heal unresolved experiences and wounds.
Open new pathways for personal, professional, and spiritual unfoldment that prompt major life decisions and transitions.
Reveal untapped reservoirs of inner resources for navigating complexity.
Clarify the realization of self-arising wisdom, useful for expressing nuanced responses to challenges.
Amplify access to the creative imagination, which is useful for both innovators and artists.
Catalyze profound shifts in one’s sense of self and reality.
Dreams and inner journeys are not just stories to interpret—they are living, dynamic experiences that can be embodied and unfolded. By incorporating Dreamwork and Journeywork into your coaching, you poses powerful leading-edge ways for helping your clients cultivate creativity, navigate challenges, and access deeper dimensions of themselves and reality.
What Is Aletheia Dreamwork?
When you fall asleep and dream, you enter a world filled with characters, events, and emotions—a realm of possibility and transformation. Aletheia Dreamwork is a unique methodology that works with the content of dreams as gateways to powerful unfoldment.
Unlike approaches that seek to interpret dreams, Aletheia Dreamwork focuses on embodying dreams and allowing them to unfold naturally. Through this process, clients can:
Revisit dream experiences, embodying the felt sense of the dream.
Metabolize unresolved emotions or experiences held within the dream.
Access various imaginal perspectives and explore the dynamics between them yielding fresh insights.
Work with active imagination to continue unfolding dreams.
Dreams often reveal qualities of Presence and innate resourcefulness that can guide clients to address their current challenges in life, work, and relationships in new and effective ways.
The practice of Dreamwork helps coaches and clients learn to navigate imaginal space with skill and effectiveness in ways that enables them to approach Journeywork with more competence and confidence.
what is aletheia journeywork?
An inner journey can be catalyzed in many ways: music, extended meditation retreats, intense breathwork practice, shamanic drumming, fasting, vision quests, use of various psychedelic medicines, and other ways. Journeywork can be applied in every case.
Aletheia Journeywork is a framework that enables the coach and client to work with inner journeys in an unfolding container through preparation for the journey, the experience of the journey, and its integration. Journeywork integrates conversational unfoldment from ACP Level 1, somatic unfoldment from ACP Level 2, and Aletheia Dreamwork. Participants who have also learned Nondual Work in ACP Levels 3 and 4 will also find ways to integrate that into Journeywork.
“During a recent ayahuasca ceremony, I used Aletheia to explore a deep feeling of powerlessness that I’d been working with for years. What amazed me was how cleanly and completely this pattern released once I was able to identify the part and use the methodology to work with it. The physical changes have been remarkable - chronic tension has dissolved, I feel more space in my body, and I’m much more attuned to physical sensations, especially around eating. Beyond the physical shifts, as this old sense of powerlessness melted away, I found myself naturally seeing solutions to challenges that had felt stuck before. The clarity and resourcefulness that emerged has been incredible. I’m blown away by how simple yet powerful the Aletheia methodology is – it helped me achieve profound shifts that I hadn’t been able to access before, even with years of medicine work.”
The “psycho-spiritual mechanism” of psychedelics
There is a fast growing literature on the neurobiological mechanisms of psychedelics. While this information is fascinating, it is often hard to apply these findings in a practice setting. In this course, you will learn about the “psycho-spiritual mechanism” of psychedelics and deeply expanded states overall. This framework is the key that allows you to integrate what you already know, as an Aletheia Coach, about creating the conditions for spontaneous unfoldment to help your clients unfold and integrate their psychedelic experiences.
Aletheia Meta-psychololgy articulates Four Styles of Transformation: 1) transmutation, 2) transparency, 3) transfiguration, and 4) transcendence. Each style has certain strengths and weaknesses that are addressed by the others to form a comprehensive and complete approach to ego transformation.
The course will help you understand:
As a support for transmutation, how psychedelics can soften and relax layers of psychological defensiveness. This grants more access to previously exiled emotions and traumatic experiences in a way that can support the client’s healing journey.
As a support for transparency, how psychedelics can enable you to see through various constructions of self, others, and the world into the underlying unconstructedness of True Nature.
As a support for transfiguration, how psychedelics can enable the transformation of the Survival, Sexual, and Social instincts from supporting ego identification to supporting Nondual realization.
As a support for transcendence, how psychedelics can open you to realizations of ultimate freedom beyond any dichotomies: duality/Nonduality, existence/non-existence, finite/infinite, form/formlessness, etc.
A journey can be an important support to addressing recurring breakdowns through catalyzing depth work in what we call vertical threads. Working in a vertical thread enables the client to access and embody inner resources like qualities of Presence.
What You’ll Learn in THIS Course
In this course, you will learn how to:
Practice Aletheia Dreamwork by flashing back into dreams, embodying their felt sense, and unfolding them through the Depths of Parts, Process, and Presence.
Facilitate dreamwork with clients, helping them metabolize dream content and access new possibilities for unfoldment, including how to work with nightmares.
Create an unfolding container for working with inner journeys, regardless of how they are catalyzed.
Prepare clients to approach inner journeys in an unfolding way. How clients can approach inner journeys in a way that they feel empowered by them no matter what unfolds.
Incubate dreams and inner journeys by planting seeds in the imaginal consciousness to invite dreams and journeys about specific circumstances or questions.
Recognize and work with various dynamics between imaginal perspectives. This includes how to work with opposition, enantiodromia, holding dichotomies and paradoxes, and others.
Support clients during journeys, if you are present. Various considerations will be discussed about options for holding space and whether and how to interact with clients currently in an altered state. The ethics of working in non-ordinary states will be explored in depth.
Customize your approach to the integration of inner journeys. Various considerations will be discussed about options for integration focusing on how to utilize and integrate the wide spectrum of approaches in the Aletheia ecology of practices.
Integrate dreams and journeys through three phases of integration: 1) immediate integration just after a journey, 2) unfolding integration in the first days and week, and 3) redesigning life through an extended series of journeys.
Help clients who experienced traumatic inner journeys, often called “bad trips.” When held in an unfolding container and worked with through Aletheia Journeywork, even so-called bad trips can unfold profound treasures.
Use dreamwork and journeywork to cultivate creativity and imagination, vital capacities for navigating today’s complex challenges.
View life more like a dream or a journey in which you can utilize what you now know about navigating imaginal space in everyday life.
Who Is This Course For?
As an Aletheia Coach, you are already well-positioned to offer powerful support for integrating psychedelic journeys. This course is ideal for:
Coaches, therapists, and change-makers who want to integrate advanced practices for working with expanded states of consciousness in an unfolding way into their work with clients.
Individuals looking to deepen their own creativity, imagination, and spiritual transformation.
What are the prerequisites?
Completion of the Advanced Coaching Program Level 2 is highly recommended for this course but it is not a requirement. Completion of the Advanced Coaching Program Level 1 is the required pre-requisite. The experience of past participants has demonstrated that Unfolding Deeply Expanded States is a helpful bridge into the practice of Nondual Work in Levels 3 and 4 as well as a deepening integration of previous levels of the curriculum.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
FAQ
Is use of psychedelics required in this course?
No. Journeywork can be catalyzed in many ways, psychedelics being only one of them. Several options other than psychedelics will be suggested and practiced within the course by all participants. Use of psychedelics remains illegal in many parts of the world. However, they are legal in a growing list of countries throughout the world. Many coaching clients are traveling to these locations to partake in legal ceremonies. You can, by your own decision, choose to work with psychedelics during the course and you can to decide what level of disclosure of this feels safe to you.
Is Experience with psychedelics useful for the application of what is learned in this course?
Yes. If you want to support clients to integrate psychedelic experiences, it is ideal to have your own first-hand experience with psychedelics. What you learn in this course will enable you to support the unfoldment of altered state experiences with your clients. However, direct experience with psychedelics is required for you to hold the open and allowing stance required to practice Psychedelic Work with skill.
Can you apply Aletheia Journeywork to inner journeys not catalyzed by psychedelics?
Absolutely. This is precisely why our framing of the practice is broader and more inclusive than just work with psychedelics.
WHAT IS THE STRUCTURE OF this course?
This course is composed of:
Twelve Sessions: Twelve 2-hour sessions held approximately every 3 weeks. These will include meditations, teachings, demonstrations, and discussions on the course content and practices.
Twelve Practice Pod Exercises: Between sessions you will practice dreamwork and journeywork with your practice pod and post experience reports and questions to the online platform for discussion with other participants and the faculty.
Six Home Group Meetings: Six 2-hour meetings with other participants designed to deepen the sense of community and customize the course in ways that fit your learning style and needs.
Four Private Coaching Calls with Faculty: These calls can be used to receive coaching or coaching supervision from the faculty to support your learning and integration of these practices.
WHAT IS THE COST OF this course?
The fee for this course is $3,699 USD. After completing the application and being accepted, you can pay for the course at the online store.
WHEN DOES THE NEXT COHORT START?
Please look at the schedule page on this website to find out the application deadline for the next cohort and all session dates.
WHAT TIME OF DAY ARE THE SESSIONS HELD?
Each cohort is offered in two sections, 10A-Noon and 4-6P Pacific Time allowing participation from around the world in different time zones. A typical cohort will include people from Asia, Australia, North America, and Europe.
WHO TEACHES THis COURSES?
The primary leader for this course is our founder, Steve March, the creator of Aletheia Coaching. Steve has been coaching since 2000. He started mentoring coaches in 2003 and teaching coach training programs in 2006. He has held senior faculty positions since 2009. Steve launched Aletheia in 2013 as a platform for creating and offering a next-generation approach to coaching and development.
Steve apprenticed in dreamwork with Jungian Analyst Robert Bosnak, who created Embodied Imagination. He has also completed professional training as a psychedelic guide and has been offering support for the integration of psychedelic journeys with coaching clients since 2013.
WHAT IS THE TIME COMMITMENT OF this course?
The typical time commitment is ~3-4 hours per week.. This time is spent participating in online sessions, practicing meditation and other bedtime practices, keeping a dream journal, practicing with your partner, and studying materials.
WHAT IF I NEED TO MISS A SESSION?
We ask that you do your best to attend each session. However, sometimes you may need to miss a session. All sessions are video recorded. If you can’t attend in person, you can catch up on your own time by watching the video.
Please contact us with any questions about the Unfolding Deeply Expanded States course.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”