Show Notes
Charna Cassell: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome back to LaidOPEN Podcast. I'm your host, Charna Cassel somatic therapist, sex educator, and a guide through the tender terrain of healing and intimacy and regaining vitality after trauma. Before we dive into today's episode, I wanna offer a gentle trigger warning. This is part two with Ariella Daley. In this second part of the episode, Ariella shares her experience as a survivor of sexual assault, and the creative healing process that follows. Please take care of yourselves as you listen. Pause when you need to, and know that you're not alone. There are also gonna be resources listed in the show notes.
Today's guest is Ariella Daley. She's a dream worker, animist and beekeeper. With over 15 years of experience tending hives and teaching others how to approach bees nature in their own lives through intuition, animism, and ecological care. Welcome, Ariella
Charna Cassell: [00:01:00] i'm so glad to have you here.
Ariella Daly: Hi. Thank you Charna. I'm really happy to be here as well.
Charna Cassell: I know that there's also, there's a, a more recent experience that you went through and that dreaming has been able to be a resource for you and [00:02:00] helping you heal through.
Ariella Daly: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think that, you know, I'm very grateful to the tools in my toolkit and to dreaming and, you know, as I say, my, my dream work came through nightmares and I just, there are so many tools act there out there to actually work through nightmares where you don't have to analyze 'em necessarily, but like converse with them.
Mm-hmm. You are gonna hear me say this in so many ways. We're relating how to be relational with how to converse with. Nightmare or the aspect of the nightmare that needs to tell you something.
Charna Cassell: Yeah.
Ariella Daly: And you know, we can do that after the dream. We don't, it's not, dreamwork isn't just about the dream itself, but then we can also set the intention to heal.
So as you know, as, as many women and, and humans, all humans experience, but unfortunately many women and trans people experience, I was in a relationship with somebody very [00:03:00] short-lived. It was a reconnection with a very old friend, someone I had been really close with in high school. And, you know, we weren't as close over the years we've reconnected and sadly I experienced sexual assault. And as a woman in her forties who spent her whole life, you know, my whole adult life healing from something, I didn't think it was possible. I thought I had so many, like my radar was keyed into this stuff, but it was. It was possible. And it was that, that was very shocking for me to find out that, actually you, you can still be assaulted at, at this age by someone who you thought you trusted.
And of course, again, we know, yeah, that a lot of rape and sexual assault comes from people we are close to and people we know.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: But it's very different listening to the STA statistics and then becoming a statistic. And so [00:04:00] I, of course, I, I have been in therapy for right away, pretty, pretty much right away.
I, I it took, you know, some like strange moments of like. Randomly shaking in the kitchen, being like, what is going on with me to, to finally seek therapy. So a couple of months, but I got on it right away. I ended it immediately. I have, I have a child. Like there was a, like, absolutely not, but it, it was an assault and it was violent.
And, um, and it was somebody I, I really thought I knew. So it's all very shocking. And what I found out about the person afterwards was even more shocking. And my dreams of course became dark. You know, I had to deal with the trauma. I had to had the nightmares. Mm-hmm. And so in this way, it wasn't that I didn't wanna have the bad dreams, but that I was really making a commitment to moving through the material, [00:05:00] not just getting stuck in the loop.
Hmm. And so I really tracked my dreams rather than turning again. Rather than turning away, I turned towards them. Yeah. And I asked for help. So I really brought the bees in. I do a meditation all the time where I'm going into a hive and I'm held by the hive sisters as I'm going into deeper work, even if that's, I'm seeking a dream about like honey and abundance. But what was important for me was that I rewrite my relationship to my eros because sexual eros is my, it, it is a through line in my life. I claim it. I love my sexual energy. I love Eros, EROS, Eros as it moves through all things. And I connect with sexual energy through nature. Yeah. And we're very erotically tied to nature.
So, you know, the breeze, the, the feeling of the sun, the warm fire, the openness of a landscape [00:06:00] can all make me feel very alive and aroused. When you get assaulted, that's sort of, you get robbed of that for a little while. Yeah. And so I used my dreams to intend to reconnect with my erotic self. Free of, of him.
Charna Cassell: Yeah.
Ariella Daly: And I watched myself heal over time. Of course, it's the trauma I, I'll be working with this for my whole life. But, I watched my dreams shift and that's the key is to watch for the shift.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: So for instance, to just be able to handle, touch in a dream, like that's telling me that something's healing.
Yeah. And each layer, I know I'd have a bad dream, I'd work with it, and then I'd, I'd keep working it until I was able to have a dream that I would say was either neutral or actually a reclaiming. Because we can only do so much reclaiming in our heads. The rest has to happen in our bodies where I felt [00:07:00] experience and for me and my dreams.
Mm-hmm. Where I'm able to dream freely.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: Not to be pursued. So, and a lot of that meant like dreaming where I stand up to him and send him away, all of that. But then for me, it's really about can I get to that place where I can experience eros, erotic connection, pleasure in my dreams. Mm-hmm. Because especially if you're not partnered, or even if you are partnered, your dreams can be one of the most profound places to experience sensual life.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. God, there's so much in what you just said. 'cause There's so many directions I wanna go in. First of all, I'm re, you know, I, I, I resonate with this notion of, oh, I'm so, I'm, I'm attuned. I know signs, I may even be alert but embodied. So feel safe enough to, to, and I trust myself in terms of choosing [00:08:00] partners and all of that.
And then to be so caught off guard and how, how scary and how unsettling. Yes. And so just, I'm really, I'm really sorry that happened.
Ariella Daly: Because it shakes that trust that you've developed and you've worked on for so long. That's the thing that embodiment that trust. So yes. Thank you. Thank you.
Charna Cassell: Yeah. That trust with yourself and you know, yes, there's trust with others, but that trust with yourself and then like, how do I trust myself?
And then that piece, that is so important and I, I love that. And I love that you're out there as a resource guiding people through this process. Um. I spent a couple months at one point tracking all of my dreams and like titling them and then noticing what are my reoccurring dream symbols. And that was one of the most profound things for me was tracking.
So my stepfather was one of my abusers. And tracking, seeing the themes that would show up in my dreams, and then also seeing how my relationship to the symbols changed.
Ariella Daly: [00:09:00] Yes. Right. And that's, that's where the work part comes in. It's that that's where I've worked my dreams. Yeah. But they are changing. And that means to me, when I see that, oh, the healing is happening.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: And every once in a while you'll have a really profound dream that then ripples out into how you're able to walk through life.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: Sometimes they're like, okay, and now she's ready.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: And you do the thing, or you confront the thing, or you have the transformation.
You have the death and rebirth in the dream world, whatever it is. And then something shifts.
Charna Cassell: Right. And so moving from, for instance, like being frozen or not wanting to be touched, as you said, to like you having a voice and confronting...
Ariella Daly: Yes.
Charna Cassell: a threatening symbol.
Ariella Daly: Mm-hmm.
Charna Cassell: One of my reoccurring dreams. I'm very curious. I've Google, I've tried Googling it and haven't had a satisfying answer. I wake up an hour after I go to sleep. This is a reoccurring experience. It doesn't happen all the time. [00:10:00] The first time that I was very aware of it was actually, felt like a profound breakthrough.
It was at a silent retreat.
Hmm.
And I woke up and there was a man who was on my, my, um, my work duty. He was in my work duty group. We washed dishes together at, at Spirit Rock. He was standing over my bed and I screamed, no. And I got up and I. Went to the door and I woke up and I was holding the doorknob.
I dreamt, I walked in my sleep and it was a silent retreat. And so the, the woman on duty came in and was like, are you okay? Like, what's happening? You just screamed. It all happened in my sleep and I'm pretty convinced his, his spirit was in my space. Mm-hmm. But I have this reoccurring dream of, it's a, and it happens an hour after I go to sleep and there's a male figure over my bed or at it coming into the [00:11:00] room.
And it feels so real. And I've learned to not be panicked by it. Like I can just go, you know, I go back to sleep. But it happened again on a silent retreat, same thing. And I thought that was actually a good sign. 'cause I, I broke my, I broke silence, right? I literally screamed or said no. But the, the one hour after is really fascinating to me.
And I wondered about is it's like pre REM?
Ariella Daly: Yes. So to, to your listeners, there's, there's a sleep cycle, right? So we have that first, we have, we have many sleep cycles throughout the night. And the REM cycle is the last of the four stages of sleep. The first stage we're light sleep, we're drifting, then we go into the next stage deeper.
And then the third stage is deep sleep where we're restoring our organs. And then we come back into REM sleep. And as the night goes on, the REM sleep periods get longer and longer, you know, usually [00:12:00] starting in about 10 minutes to getting up to maybe even like, just like 40 minutes or something like that.
I can't remember exactly. So you're, you're not supposed to wake up right away in the early parts of the night. 'cause that's when you're doing your, your deeper restorative sleep, that's when your organs are replenishing themselves. I closed my eyes when I was listening because I, I, I teach a practice called Dream Mirroring where I, I go, you know, I went inward just to hear the dream in the dark as a, as rather than just thinking about it.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: And in my immediate sense was this, this feeling of your, your body, this, this, this, there's, there's a connection. And since you have shared with me what that you did experience trauma at a young age from your stepfather, there's the, the sense is like there's something, your body, it, it was almost like I could see this healing process taking place in your sleep, and then like it hit this pot [00:13:00] spot in the body and triggered the wake up.
That's like, there's, it's still, it's there. There's a just, I, it's almost like if I were, if I was. If I was working with you, I might do a series of let's dream with your different organs. And just see. Like, what is your liver wanting to share with you? What do your kidneys have to say? Like, what's stored so deep that it's actually in the interior processes and is ready to come out?
Because when you're waking up like that, it's, to me, that's the signal, like ready to come out and you're doing it, you're screaming, you're saying no.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: And so there's this like, uh, no, no. Like, I will, I will. It's, it's, doesn't feel so much like, um, I mean, yes, we, we might, we do have night terrors when we've gone through PTSD that that happens.
That's similar, but I would just be so curious about like, [00:14:00] mm-hmm, deeper inner processes that are in their healing, your body's healing and you just, there's like a point that wants attention.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: And again, I would say that without having any sense of like, there's something wrong with you. Yeah.
That's not at all. Yeah. But I'd be curious about places that are harder to access with our mind. 'Cause like, how do we even concept, like we can conceptualize the heart, but how do we conceptualize the liver or the kidneys or the spleen? He is like this. Something that's like deep regenerative energy.
Charna Cassell: Yeah. Totally. I wanna put a plug in for Qigong, which, you know, the, I I imagine you've, you've... Yeah. These practices of like going into the organs and like smile, like smiling and Yeah. Listening and, and, and feeling. And I can totally, I I do actually contact my organs. I've been spending a lot of time contacting my, my heart and my esophagus lately.
Because you know, in Chinese medicine how different times of night different [00:15:00] organs are, are more active and they will just wake you up. Like I used to wake up at three or four.
Ariella Daly: Yeah, exactly.
Charna Cassell: It's like, oh, my, my lungs are needing to process something.
Ariella Daly: Exactly. Yeah. I forgot all about that. That's true. That is a Chinese medicine thing, and you know, it, it helps. I'm never one to discount the biological processes like that, that, you know, there is a thing that happens where we, we wake up earlier in the night when that, you know, those can, you know, range in terms of from nightmares to night terrors, which people don't remember.
In this case you are remembering it. There are processes happening, but you're asking like, what is it about this one hour in and this deep process? My intuitive sense would be to not try to figure out who he is or what's waking you like to, to go into the body process.
Charna Cassell: Yeah. I love that. Thank you.
Ariella Daly: Mm-hmm.
Charna Cassell: I'm curious about the work that you do with [00:16:00] dreamers and if you do any group dreaming processes and 'cause thinking about like dreaming for self, but also dream dreaming for the collective.
Good dreaming to heal the earth. Dreaming to heal, you know, atrocities that are happening in other places. Yeah. And how we can collectively come together and do that work.
Ariella Daly: Yeah, absolutely. I perceive the earth as conscious and us as an extension of that consciousness. So we are of the earth and stars just as much as a rock is, just as much as a squirrel is.
So we are all of the earth and we are these expressions of the earth made manifest and we are able to reflect on our existence as the earth, as expressions of the earth. And [00:17:00] we are tied to the energy field around the earth. And I, I believe that one of those things that, that where we can touch those connections, that intricate weave of life force
is through our dreams. And that in our dreaming, as I've already said, reality becomes immutable. Where we can change the outcome, which is again, something I might reflect back to. The dream you just shared is there's something that's ready for a change and you've, it's like, it's almost like you've got part one and part two is just on the way, like you said, no, but there's one more piece.
It's still coming. And my senses, you're gonna get you, it's just gonna come, it's gonna come through the work you're already doing, but there's this, this place in the dreaming where we might, as an example, sort of infuse or strengthen a tie or strengthen a connection or strengthen the pattern. Right now, the pattern is, is [00:18:00] pretty intense to look at, you know, there's a lot of suffering happening.
There's a lot of climate change, there's a lot of biodiversity loss and human suffering and atrocities, and we can get stuck there and overwhelmed by that and fall into the apathy that the beautiful late, ancestress, Joanna Macy spoke to, so, so well. She just, just passed recently, but she spoke of this apathy and how we have to move past the apathy into the grief, and then into the healing.
So in terms of collective work,
I, I think that we can seed our dreams and thus our reality. And so by choosing to dream together, we're strengthening if we dream the same intention on the same night, everybody's strengthening each other's ties and connection and weave. And when we do that, it's like an acupressure [00:19:00] point. It's like a beacon.
So let's say we are dreaming for messages. I'm actually actively doing this right now with a, a group of women I dream with, every two weeks dreaming for messages from the spirit of water. Towards what we need to know or how we can actively help heal.
Ariella Daly: And, and then collecting the dreams and seeing what's the greater message, treating all the dreams, like one great dream.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: And let me tell you, it's addictive. You start to see like, oh, whoa. Like we are all dreaming, like it is coming through. Like you know, I give an example, like, Let's say either, you know, someone's dreaming of a postal worker and someone dreams of wings and someone else dreams of.
Um, writing, you know, writing [00:20:00] messages and, and together it all starts to feel like, oh, the messenger, God, you know, the mercury, the messenger God is coming through as a, as a, an example of a deity. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. it might not seem like it at first, but when you to look, there's this collective weave happening.
And to me it reminds me of the work you've seen people do, like with the power of water, where you all pray over water and watch the molecular patterns change in the water.
Same idea. The earth is very receptive. Receptive to our dreaming toward active change. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The one caveat I'll say to that is, I don't do that with this sort of spiritual bypassing, I'll just dream and that's enough. Yeah. It's more of a, How can I be in right relationship with, how can we be in concert with the earth and hear and listen and then affect change.
Mm-hmm. Both through actively dreaming, just like the spontaneous healings we hear about and the Philippians and through receiving messages and, [00:21:00] and treating them like prescriptions. Here's what you do.
Charna Cassell: Right. and directives like requests. Correct. Yes. Being able to hear the requests if you listen.
Ariella Daly: And sometimes they're quite literal and physical and other times they're more esoteric or metaphysical and
Charna Cassell: mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: And that can go down to the macro, you know, I've worked with a single beehive and had multiple people dream about it to find out what it needs.
Charna Cassell: Yeah. So beautiful. So I love that you are actively doing group dreaming.
Ariella Daly: Yes.
Charna Cassell: So good.
Ariella Daly: All my dreaming classes are group dreaming classes. Mm-hmm. As a, and, and we do talk about dream activism, as I call it, dream activism. One of my favorite things also is every, every Christmas I do 12 days of Yule, and I give a, a dreaming theme for each night for anybody who wants to do it.
But then I have everyone send in their dreams for two of the nights. And we synthesize them as a collective dream. So one of the nights is called Mother's Night, which is the night before, solstice, or [00:22:00] the night before Christmas Eve, depending Christmas. So Christmas Eve. But it's this idea of dreaming with the ancestral mothers, and it comes from Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian traditions, but it's beautiful to see what the collective brings in.
And then I, I turned it into one, what you could say, like oracular transmission and give it back to everyone.
Charna Cassell: Mm. I love it. Yeah. That's so good. That's so, yeah. Oh my God. And there's sensory recapitulation. Is is a practice that you mentioned that, perhaps you could guide us in a little exercise.
Ariella Daly: Oh, certainly.
Right? Yes. Mm-hmm. I'd be happy to. Hmm. So where to start with that sensory recapitulation. Recapitulation is this idea of going back over. So it's a great way for [00:23:00] memorizing information, for instance, to to play it back over in your head to commit it to memory. And you know, people who, work with, remember like I used to do this a lot with remembering conversations throughout my life.
Our body is also experiencing, you know, we're having, all our senses are experiencing our day and experiencing our dreams. So sensory recapitulation has two parts to it. The first is to go back over your day at the end of your day when you're going to bed. And this is going to train you to pay attention to your day, but through your senses.
And I take people through what I, I work with seven senses in this case. So of course your five senses and then, and then two others. I'll do a very brief version of this to follow up, but that would be through your day. So you're going through your day and you're noticing sound, you're noticing scents that you experienced, and no judgment, just, you know, different scents, [00:24:00] different sounds, uh, of course a touch and being touched, texture, that sort of thing.
The feeling of the air, heat, cold. Sight. And I always approach sight as, what did you witness? What did you behold? If you were to go back in your day and just pause and stop and watch and be present to, what would it be? Because we're so visual and we see our day. So what would it be? Where would you pause, stop, witness, uh, and then taste.
I think I haven't said taste. And not just food, but like the taste of the air. The taste of, you know, taste, and then the emotional ranges and cadence of our day. Not just did you have a good day or a bad day? Mm-hmm. But what was the range of your day? Where did you feel different things? Yeah. And finally, were there any intuitive moments?
Intuitive hits, knowings. And I love to give the example of just that feeling of I should call someone.
And then they're like, oh my gosh, I was just thinking about you. You know, we, we, most people have had something like that in their life. Oh, the synchronicities. [00:25:00] So look for the synchronicities.
Look for the intuitive moments. Look for the part of yourself that said, you know, I really shouldn't go on that trip. You overwrote it. Come back to those moments, check in with that intuition. And then here's the fun part. When you wake up in the morning, you do it with a dream. So if we have time, I'm gonna do a very, very brief version of this, but I want you to, do you have a dream?
Can you think of a dream from recently? Just take a second. I want you to go ahead and close your eyes. If we had a little bit more time, we'd probably do like a, a longer drop in. But for now, we're just going to close our eyes and grieve, be with breath.
Nothing to change about your breath, nothing to fix or augment, just to be with breath.[00:26:00]
Breath is a spirit that has been with you since you left your mother's womb. So constant,
this force of life, this soul, wind, pma, breath,
and there your feet, there is your spine. There's the earth beneath you.
There's the earth rising up to meet you exactly as you are.
Breath, earth [00:27:00] and darkness giving way to your interior landscape.
I here, I just want you to play the dream over, even if it's just a fragment, to replay it, to see it, to remember it. You are watching. And wanna pause the recording and read the dream again, and then close your eyes if you wrote it down, for instance.[00:28:00]
There is your dream, there's the earth, there is your breath, and you're going to revisit your dream. Now, through the sense of sound, what were the sounds of your dream conversations? Was there anything that stands out or anything that might have been. For you to revisit this place, what could it have been?
The sounds moving through [00:29:00] and fluidly moving from sound into taste and scent. Were there any tastes? Were there any scents? Could there have been taste and scent in your dream?[00:30:00]
We're just gonna keep going, thinking this is a brief scan moving to,
to the sense of touch, texture, heat, cold, rough, smooth, soft, hard, the sense of texture, touch, and being touched.[00:31:00]
Noticing how your body feels as you go through this, as you see different aspects of your dream and as you come to the points of your dream that you or the dream itself is asking you to witness, what does the dream want you to see? What does the dream want you to see and notice how your body receives that seeing.[00:32:00]
Continuing to move along. We're going to ask, how did you feel? How did you feel in the dream? How did you feel on waking? How did you feel? What were your emotions in the dream? Don't try to make sense of anything, just noticing.
Again, we're gonna keep moving just for the sake of the exercise, knowing you can stretch this out anytime. And lastly, you're going to ask two questions. The first is, when you first woke, [00:33:00] or even in this moment, was there anything that you feel you know about this dream, what we might call a gut feeling, an intuitive hit.
Second is to frame it similarly, but a little bit from a different angle, and ask the question, what does the dream want you to know? What does the dream want you to know?[00:34:00]
Bringing that all back down, as if gathering in the threats of your dream and asking where does the dream want to settle to rest to be integrated into your body? Where can your body lovingly hold the dream?
Without needing to change it. Just noticing where can your body hold the dream.
[00:35:00] And when you feel that that has settled, that the threads have arrived and settled, and come back into the space and into the light, knowing, noticing if there's any new information you gathered from your dream by visiting it through your senses.
Charna Cassell: Thank you.
Ariella Daly: It was a bit quick, but... podcasts.
Charna Cassell: It was beautiful. I love how, how somatic it is, you know, this is basically any of my clients listening. You can use this as a daily practice, right?
Ariella Daly: Yeah. And slow it down.
Charna Cassell: And it goes into, you know, it's like the, the quality of being, being capital, BEE, beingness.
And that, that if, like you said, if you know, slowed [00:36:00] down, you get to savor the experience of existing and being, and there's so much information.
Ariella Daly: Yeah.
Charna Cassell: In each one of these senses.
Ariella Daly: Yeah. And I find sometimes people don't have any connection to scent.
But you never know. There might be, you know, like a good example is like mm-hmm. In the dream, what you remembered was that, oh, I was God, I was in the Arctic and I was in the, I fell in the ocean. And that's, that's the story. Oh God, what does that mean? Mm-hmm. I know what that means, but what about if you go back and visit the Sunset experience and suddenly you realize, well, when I found the ocean, the ocean was quite soft and warm.
Mm-hmm. Now it's a different piece of information coming your way.
Charna Cassell: Mm-hmm.
Ariella Daly: So, yeah, it can be really helpful to check in with the body.
Charna Cassell: Beautiful. I feel like I could talk to you forever. I know. We have to wrap it up.
But I would love to continue these conversations with you in some other way. And how can [00:37:00] other people, how can the listeners find you.
Ariella Daly: The two main places are my website and my social media, so i'm on Instagram @beekeepingandskirts. And then my website is HoneyBeeWild, BEE honeybeewild.com.
I teach dream classes and beekeeping classes and long form beekeeping apprenticeships for women. So, yeah.
Charna Cassell: Amazing. And you're located in, are you in Santa Rosa or where are you?
Ariella Daly: I'm in Santa Rosa. Most of my classes are online, but occasionally I do immersions here and retreats.
Charna Cassell: Thank you so much. This has been really beautiful.
Ariella Daly: Thank you so much as well, and thanks for the rawness and vulnerability of the content and the questions and the full range that you hold.
You clearly can hold. A very full range of life's experience and let it still run through you and bring that life force to everyone who you encounter. It's beautiful to be a part of. Thank you.
Charna Cassell: Mm, thank you. I would love to go into this more deeply in other time, but I [00:38:00] just love how you brought your healing and your relationship to the earth and to your body back to Eros like you, you healed back through that.
And that just takes a level of, of, commitment to beauty and to presence and to feeling and that, you know, a lot of us can harden and not wanna go there. And, and I love that you just like keep turning towards. And, and peeling the layers back. So that's just really beautiful.
Thank you so much for listening and tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, like rate and review it and share it with your friends. And if you wanna stay connected, you can find me @laidopenpodcast on Instagram, L-A-I-D-O-P-E-N-P-O-D-C-A-S-T, or on Facebook, under LaidOPEN podcast, you can [00:39:00] also check out more about my work at passionatelife.org and charna.cassell.com is where you can find my course, my workbook, as well as listen to episodes and read my blog. So I look forward to next time, and thank you so much for tuning in.
