The podcast of the Sacred Inclusion Network Angelo John Lewis

Restorative yoga practioner Jennifer Piercy explains the philosophy of yoga nidra, leads participants through a yoga nidra session, and answers questions about dreams, sleep and rest.
This is a recording of the 11/19/22 Sacred Inclusion Network Managing Dark Spaces exploration. 
The yoga nidra practice starts about 16:14, goes for approximately a half-hour, and is followed by questions and answers.
Piercy’s sleep meditation tracks on the Insight Time app have been played more than 21 million times. An experienced Restorative Yoga Practitioner, she’s studied with Dr. Rubin Naiman, a pioneer in integrative sleep and dream medicine, and has spent thousands of hours in her 16+ years as a yoga practitioner guiding people in the impactful and neglected art of slowing down. 
Links:


Piercy's site Article on yoga nidra Podcast interview with Jennifer Recommended resource (see Chapter 15, Dreams and Multidimensional Reality) Sacred Inclusion Network Sacred Inclusion Network's Facebook Group Sacred Inclusion Network's YouTube Channel --  Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!

Integrative restoration and dream educator, and yoga facilitator Jennifer Piercy here talks about yoga nidra, the importance of sleep and restoration practice, and the "wake-centric" bias of contemporary culture.
Rather than view sleep as a necessary evil, Piercy suggests approaching it as a kind of spiritual practice and an invitation to explore the unknown.  
"Part of being at home in the unknown is that we literally need to practice being at home in the dark. And sleep and rest are both literally and metaphorically inviting you into that. I think of it as a superpower that people forget they even have," she says.
Piercy's sleep meditation tracks on the Insight Timer App have been listened to more than an astonishing 21 million times.
Piercy is on a kind of mission to help people view sleep and restoration in a more holistic light. 
One of her favorite quotes of from Dr. Rubin Naiman, a pioneer in integrative sleep and dream medicine, and the man who coined the "wake-centrism" term.
"We are oblivious to a profound and pervasive bias in our perception, that waking is our sole, primary form of consciousness. Consequently, we tend to view sleep and dreams as secondary, subservient states of being. Wake-centrism is a kind of flat earth consciousness that discourages us from approaching the edges of our awareness. It is not a blind spot but a loss of peripheral vision. Wake-centrism is not a way of seeing, but a way of NOT seeing the bigger picture — the world behind the world," Naiman wrote.
In this podcast, Piercy talks about the path that led her to become a restoratation and dream educator, shares some practical suggestions for those struggling with sleep issues, and talks about the dangers of an overly medical approach to sleep disorders.

Piercy will facilitate the Sacred Inclusion Network's 11/19/22 event, Navigating Dark Spaces. 
Links:
Piercy's site Article on yoga nidra Recommended resource (see Chapter 15, Dreams and Multidimensional Reality) Piercy's 11/19 Sacred Inclusion Network event Sacred Inclusion Network Sacred Inclusion Network's Facebook Group Sacred Inclusion Network's YouTube Channel --  Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!

Marques Redd on African spirituality, the lure of Egypt, and what to expect during the 10/15 Sacred Inclusion Network exploration.
Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/BHlxqvV6iac
Marcus Redd's site Sacred Inclusion Network

African cosmologist, independent scholar and multimedia artist Marques Redd discusses African spirituality, the legacy of Egypt, and the tradition of the gatekeepers.
Redd here explains he first became interested in African spiritualty, his academic studies on the influence of ancient Egypt on Plato's philosphy and 19th century literature, and how these studies became the basis for his intellectual, artistic, and spiritual work.
"The reason why I'm attracted to African spiritual systems is that within them you can still see the remnants of these early understandings of what it means to be human, and conceptions of the Divine that, in a deeper sense, made us human, and made us into the beings and creatures that we are today." he says.
Redd will facilitate the Sacred Inclusion Network's 10/15 Online Community Exploration, in which he'll provide a map for activating ancient Egyptian rituals that can be used in one’s individual practice. The workshop will be grounded in guided meditations and an exploration of how to use hieroglyphics as shamanic tools.
For more information about Redd's work, visit https://marquesredd.com For information about the 10/15 Activating Egyptian Spirituality event, visit https://egyptian-spirituality.eventbrite.com. For information about his 10/21-10/23 Esalen Institute workshop, visit https://www.esalen.org/workshops/harnessing-the-power-of-creation-through-african-ritual To learn more about the Sacred Inclusion Network, visit https://sacredinclusion.com

Within the halls of academia, the exploration of paranormal activity is for the most part off-limits to serious scientific inquiry. There are a variety of reasons for this, says religious scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal: the rise of behaviorism; the belief that the brain is in essence a biological computer; and the concurrent belief in physicalism - that there is nothing over and above the physical dimension of life.
Kripal here explains why he’s devoted his professional life to taking this phenomenon seriously. He’s one of a small, but increasing number of scholars who believe it’s as important to look at reality from the inside out as it is to examine it from the outside in.
Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, is the author of eight books, including Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred.
Here he explains his latest project, Archives of the Impossible, which is both an actual archive of paranormal materials and a March 2022 Rice University conference.
He also details the evolution of his own interest in the paranormal; his view on the importance of the humanities; and what-he-calls “the flipped” experiences of materialists who changed their perspective to embrace the view or that mind or consciousness is primary and the material world is secondary.
The plenary speakers at the March 2022 Archives of the Impossible conference include Jacques F. Vallée, PhD, the founder of Documatica Research; Leslie Keen, author of the best-selling Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife and UFOs; Whitley Strieber, author of Communion and many other books; Diana Pasulka, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington; John Phillip Santos, Rhodes Scholar, writer, journalist, and documentarian; Edwin C. May, president and founder of the Laboratories for Fundamental Research, Palo Alto, California. and Sebastiano De Filippi, Italian-Argentinian musician, author and scholar.
Links:
Archives of the Impossible (conference page) Kripal's website Sacred Inclusion Network Sacred Inclusion Network's Facebook Group Sacred Inclusion Network's YouTube Channel --  Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!  

The sacred pipe, the Raven, and a peyote ritual were three touchstones of the path of Dr. Apela Colorado, traditional cultural practitioner and indigenous scientist of French and Oneida descent.
In this podcast, she shares stories of how each of these elements formed an essential part of her journey, from growing up as a mixed-race child in rural western Wisconsin to founding in 1989 the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network (WISN).
As she relates in this podcast and in her recently published book, Woman Between the Worlds, she as a teenager followed her grandfather’s advice and attended college, an action that rare for native women at the time. But while climbing the academic ranks and eventually attaining a Ph.D. from Brandeis University, she always remembered another part of her grandfather’s counsel: “Remember the pipe,” he told her, another way of saying “remember your roots.”
In this podcast, Colorado relates milestones from her remarkable journey, from her involvement in Indian Movement, through her encounters with indigenous elders in the south of France, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Central Asia. She also sheds light on native ritual and symbolism, such as the role of the sacred pipe in ceremony.
She also shares some lessons she learned from elders along the way, and mystical encounters with real and allegorical ravens, and how a peyote ceremony transformed her perception of life. 
Dr. Colorado is in equal measure shaman and academic, and her accomplishments are many. She's a Ford Fellow, who in 1982 received a PhD from Brandeis University, and went on to create the world's first doctoral program in traditional knowledge at the California Institute of Integral studies. She also directed the Indigenous Mind Program, which for 20 years taught students into ways of exploring their ancestral and earth-based holistic consciousness within an academic framework. 
Links:
Worldwide Indigenous Science Network (WISN) Woman Between the Worlds Amazon page Sacred Inclusion Network Sacred Inclusion Network's Facebook Group Sacred Inclusion Network's YouTube Channel --  Like the podcast? Support us on Patreon!