Here is a piece I wrote to honor Mary Jo Heyen, a Natural Dreamwork practitioner, who passed away this summer. Learning about myself through bi-weekly dreamwork sessions with her was lifechanging. I wrote this piece to help put into words the kind of relationship that grows between dreamer and their dedicated spiritual companion and dream-guide. The link below takes you to the Natural Dreamwork website and blog, where you can read my writing and many other interesting pieces by other members of the Natural Dreamwork group.
Meeting Each Other in Soul – for Mary Jo Heyen
Posted September 4, 2022 by Liza HyattCategories: dreams
Dreamwork: Learning to Feel the Difference between Making Progress and Being Born
Posted July 10, 2022 by Liza HyattCategories: Uncategorized
Soul desires in every moment to be born…
Source: Learning to Feel the Difference between Making Progress and Being Born
Dreams Never Abandon Us in Our Grief – Interview with Mary Jo Heyen
Posted June 6, 2022 by Liza HyattCategories: art therapy, dreams
I am sharing a link to a podcast interviewing Mary Jo Heyen, the wise woman with whom I engaged in dreamwork for the past 4+ years. The healing of personal trauma and deepening of spiritual life given by a long-term relationship to dreams with the help of a trained dream practitioner is profound. Mary Jo passed away yesterday, June 5. I met with her every two weeks by Skype. I never met her in person. But she met me in soul in every one of our encounters. I hope her interview inspires you to begin or deepen your own journey with dreams. Please consider my July workshops, described in my post right before this as a way to help your dream life flourish.
Natural Dreamwork Events Summer 2022
Posted May 14, 2022 by Liza HyattCategories: dreams, embodied spirituality

Some members of the Natural Dreamwork team of practitioners are offering workshops and groups this summer. These offerings provide both in-person and online opportunities to learn about the Natural Dreamwork approach to healing through the sacred encounters in our dreams. Here is a link to the events page of their website: https://www.thenaturaldream.com/natural-dreamwork-events/
Included in these events some online workshops that I am offering, including an Introduction to Natural Dreamwork, and Introduction to Expressive Arts and Dreamwork, and a Dream Sharing group for those who want to explore their dreams collaboratively. You can find information about these programs through the above link, through the Upcoming Programs page of this blog, or below:
Introduction to Natural Dreamwork:
July 13, 2022
7-9pm ET by Zoom
Learn how exploring your dreams with commitment and companionship can help you find healing, increased vitality and self-compassion. Through this introduction to Natural Dreamwork, participants will explore how to approach dreamwork as spiritual practice. Examples of Natural Dreamwork approaches to specific dreams will be provided to illustrate the basic concepts within Natural Dreamwork. Participants are also invited to share a recent dream and engage with it through the Natural Dreamwork process.
2 CEUs are available for art therapists, mental health counselors, and social workers.
Fee: $60, or $90 if you sign up for both this workshop and the Expressive Arts workshop below
To register, contact Liza at lizahyatt@gmail.com
Natural Dreamwork and Expressive Arts:
July 20, 2022
7-9pm ET by Zoom
For those already engaged in Natural Dreamwork, or who complete the Introduction to Natural Dreamwork course above and want to dive deeper by learning how to connect expressive arts practices to enhance the dreamwork experience. This workshop will explore how to use the Expressive Therapy Continuum model to more deeply engage with the healing medicine in the images of dreams.
2 CEus are available for art therapists, mental health counselors, and social workers.
Fee: $60, or $90 (for both Intro to ND and this workshop)
to register, contact Liza at lizahyatt@gmail.com
Natural Dreamwork Dream Sharing Group:
6 months on the 2nd Wednesday every month for 6 months
August 10, September 14, October 12, November 9, December 14, January 11
7-9 pm ET by Zoom
Explore your dreams with other dreamers in this monthly gathering facilitated by Natural Dreamwork practitioner Liza Hyatt. For those new to Natural Dreamwork, completing the Introduction to Natural Dreamwork workshop on July 13 is recommended.
Fee: $25 per session, or pay in full for all 6 for $120
to register, contact Liza at lizahyatt@gmail.com
Becoming an Earth Monk
Posted April 30, 2022 by Liza HyattCategories: dreams, eco-spirituality, embodied spirituality, liminal space, new monansticism, Uncategorized
I haven’t been active on the is blog for several months because I have been writing chapters of a book whose working title is The Dark Night of the Earth and the Earth Monk’s Vigil. I am now ready to share here what my writing and research are enlivening for me.
Like many people, over the course of the past few years, I have felt growing despair for what is happening on our Earth and to our Earth. I feel a deep need to be with others who feel the same despair – and the hope that humanity can mature through the dark times ahead and learn to live more compassionately with each other and with reverence and caring for our local ecosystems and the planet as a whole.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction to The Dark Night of the Earth and the Earth Monk’s Vigil:
As a young woman, I hoped that our collective transition away from the Earth-destroying culture we currently inhabit and participate in, toward new, sustainable, more just and compassionate systems, would be completed in my lifetime, with a relatively brief and collectively chosen period of transformation. Now, I grieve for how we are only just entering what must be an extremely complex, dark, painful, disordering, chaotic, conflict-filled, multi-generational liminal expanse, from which a radically altered, profoundly humbled human culture might emerge – into a very different kind of rebirth than the world-conquering Renaissance of the past – if we don’t render Earth uninhabitable along the way.
Now, as a woman entering my crone stage of life, I am starting to see that I will live my elder decades as a participant within a time of global descent into disorder and confusion, revealing that what we have lived through in recent years has been merely the beginning ripples, the early distant rumblings of the much larger storm of change, struggle and painful psychological and spiritual initiation necessary to make us surrender our old familiar ego-centric cultural systems. The transformation that we must undergo will be humiliating in the truest, root sense of the word – a process in which we are brought low, back down into the earth, into the humus nature of being human, a return of Adam to adama – the clay, the earth to which we belong and must be real stewards of. Initiation, the soul’s process of ripening us, is humiliation of the ego, rendering us more in service of community and of the needs of soul. Only through such an initiation will humanity learn again to live in relationship with earth and each other. I do not expect this human-humus initiation to be completed in my daughter or granddaughter’s lifetime. Perhaps my great-grandchildren, and even more fully, my great-great grandchildren will be born in a truly Earth-stewarding culture.
At the same time as I’ve been stripped of my younger naïveté, which hoped for an easier transition and an easier era in which to live the second half of my life, my soul life and spiritual love has grown and deepened. This is a love that encompasses the whole Earth, humanity, and the sacred web of interconnected relationships within which we are woven. The spiritual formation through which this love has expanded gives me strength, courage, groundedness, and personal commitment to living as one engaged within present and future suffering, complex and scary as it will be. I want to be as present as I can, in deep relationships with people around me, witnessing and staying awake, keeping vigil throughout what is to come – the collective dark night of both the human soul and the planet itself.
The state of being in vigil is a state of being liminal. Of opening to silence, unknowing and darkness. Of suffering and lamenting and witnessing the pain within our depths. Of meeting our own demons, which we created in fruitless effort to be in control. Of surrendering to waiting in prayer dark for dawn.
More than anything, the Earth needs us to enter this state of vigil. To stop doing what we have been doing, to surrender our being in control, to face the demonic mess we have made of things, to meet the trauma we have inflicted and carry within us. To grieve, soften, and acknowledge the collective pain in which we live. And to wait, learning to listen to nature itself for what will heal us, and for the real work that is needed of us.
To grow capable of such vigil, we need to learn to be more patient within the liminal. We must be willing to become monks – Earth Monks born from the spiritual and communal needs of our era, committed to living in service of healing the collective trauma of humanity and our planet.
I hope this post finds its way to many others who are also called to become Earth Monks. In the coming year, I will continue to post excerpts from my book project, including suggestions of practices to help us unlearn the conditioned behaviors of Western society and its colonizing and consumerism. One of the key wounds to our soul-life in this society is the impairment of imagination, without which we cannot experience the world as alive and sacred. Therefore many of my upcoming posts will be about ways to heal our relationship with the imagination, first through the primary imagination that we encounter in our dreams, and later through the secondary imagination found in contemplative art making practices.
Poem of the Month
Posted June 18, 2021 by Liza HyattCategories: Uncategorized
Song of the Cicada
What will you do,
you, who have endured
month after month,
year after underworld year,
in a dark silent place
and now wake to a strange new strength
and the desire to unbury yourself
with which you squirm free
and emerge
into a world
of sun and thunder,
catalpa flowers and bees,
birth upon voice upon song?
Join us,
the other ecstatic souls
who are already here celebrating.
Grow gold wings,
devote the rest of your life to love-making,
and raise an irresistible ruckus.
Tending Dreams through Art Making
Posted February 10, 2021 by Liza HyattCategories: art therapy, dreams
Here is a link to an article I wrote for the Natural Dreamwork blog and newsletter. Much healing can come from exploring our dreams and the images saturated with emotions which they bring us nightly.
Tending Dreams through Art Making: Part Two, Perceptual and Affective Pathways
Art
Poem of the Week – January 24, 2021
Posted January 24, 2021 by Liza HyattCategories: Poetry
In the wake of battles and inauguration at the Capital, as I looked through poems written in the past 4 years, this one spoke to me and my hope for all our healing:
Where to Begin Yes, there is too much hate. Near, far, so many people fighting each other. And in my heart? Not just a seed, a full-grown weed camouflaged within a righteous garden of white flowers, fiery flowers, conviction, feels-so-good zeal, unquestioned. The inner root grows deepest, is hardest to see, and is unbearably painful to pull with my own loving hands from my own frightened chest.
Poem of the Week – January 17
Posted January 16, 2021 by Liza HyattCategories: Poetry
After a few weeks break during the holidays, here is a new offering. This one was created through a "found poetry" technique of cutting random words from magazines and arranging them until they surprised me. I often turn to this technique when I am troubledor grieving. I am always surprised how the poem responds in a healing voice.
Carry On, Says a Voice in the Dark Carry on, says a voice in the dark, if possible, all the way to the forgotten measure of limestone tears, cave pearls. Sometimes I hear children playing or the call to prayer, sometimes, the forest coming back. It is hard to imagine how much hope, regret, fear, hatred, hunger, pain and dying are experienced in this place. Making the story even more interesting: we don’t want it to end.