Practice Circle with Erik Davis and Jennifer Dumpert

Given the success of the first Practice Circle this January, Jennifer Dumpert and Erik Davis will again create space for folks to enagage and talk about “practice.” The term lies at the heart of how many people live their spiritual lives, but what do we mean by it? How does “practicing” meditation or yoga relate to other forms of practice, like practicing the piano, or practicing being a nice person? What makes psychedelics a “practice” and not just a trip? Are practices “tools” or something more transformative? The Circle makes room for practitioners to individually and collaboratively reflect on the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice—issues like commitment, belief, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, mixing and matching, trust.

For this gathering, we will be emphasizing on the challenges and opportunities of practicing together, whether in sanghas, larger collectives, or informal groups of friends or fellow practitioners. We will also continue to discuss ways to craft our own personal and group practices, and to further dedicate ourselves to our existing commitments.

Jennifer Dumpert is a San Francisco-based writer and lecturer. She is the author of Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep and the founder of the Oneironauticum, an international organization that explores the use of oneirogens—anything that promotes vivid dreams, like herbs, roots, and foods—and the phenomenological experience of dreams as a means of experimenting with mind. She also teaches the practice of Liminal Dreaming, which entails surfing the edges of consciousness using hypnagogic and hypnopompic dreams, the mind states between waking and sleep.

Jennifer has lectured and led workshops at festivals, conferences, and venues worldwide. She has also authored numerous pieces about varied aspects of dream work and consciousness. You can read selected pieces and watch videos of presentations at Jennifer’s website. www.liminaldreaming.com. Jennifer posts a daily dream to Twitter as @OneiroFer, and has been doing so since January, 2009.

Erik Davis PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on alternative religion, media culture, the popular imagination, and the psychedelic underground. He is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com), and his next book is Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).www.techgnosis.com

Host or Publisher The Berkeley Alembic Foundation