Laura Smith-Riva
Laura Smith-Riva is a certified practitioner of Natural Dreamwork and practicing Druid of the Green Mountain Druid Order. She offers one-on-one dream consultation to individuals in the US and abroad and is a mentor for Natural Dreamwork Practitioners and student Druids in training. Laura is on the faculty for The Studio for Movement Arts and Therapies in Bangalore, India and for the Green Mountain Druid School in Worcester, Vermont.
Laura practices Natural Dreamwork through the cultivation of a dream practice based on the natural healing qualities found in dreams inherent in the sacred objects, symbols, creatures and archetypes that populate the dream landscape. She compassionately creates space for the dreamer to delve deeply into the images and feelings of the dream to find their authenticity, voice, passion and creativity. Laura brings her personal experience to support individuals in the areas of queer/trans identity, addiction recovery and adoption related issues and firmly believes in the dream’s ability to help us with core wounding and trauma.
Laura lives in the mysterious Green Mountains of Vermont with her partner of 27 years. Outside the dream realm, you can find her painting or writing in her studio, connecting to the healing energy of the earth, or engaged in laughter and general mayhem with her friends and family on various parts of the globe.
She regularly blogs about her journey through dreams and vision work on the dream blog In Search of Puella and her dream-inspired art work and writing have been featured in several publications and e-zines.
Blog Posts by Laura Smith-Riva
Let Your Dreams Set The Agenda
I’ve often heard folks say that they struggle with some therapeutic processes because they feel like they always have to “start over” or go through all the childhood and family of origin stuff or that the therapy they are doing places a structure or system into the process which they find too prescriptive. When I hear this, I always think about how one of the reasons I love dreamwork so much is that the dream sets the agenda for us!
Bringing The Unconscious Conscious
Recently someone posited a question on a depth psychology Facebook page asking how does one let the unconscious become conscious. My immediate thought was Dreamwork. Dreams being a portal into the unconscious, our nightly reveries leak into our awareness the very images, gestures and feelings that support that process. A preceding question might be, why would we want the unconscious to become conscious?
The Importance Of Working With Conditioning
Dreams want to help us get to our soulful nature, the part of us that can feel deeply and know our own intuition by virtue of a strong connection to our felt experience and an openness to our vulnerability through those feelings….