Tayria's journey is as rich and textured as my young dreams, filled with the promise that there is more connective tissue between our slumbering minds and what most call the real world. What I admire most about Tayria is her willingness to kindly walk with others along the vastness of their dreamscapes, acting as a type of dream sherpa, bringing all her experience to each space or plateau.
To me, she seems to stands on many layers at once, with an ability to perceive the overlapping slides between individuals and their personal dreams, as well as their experiences, looking for collective and synchronistic lock-ups that may hold greater meaning for everyone on earth.
While our visit is about the layered worlds of visions and dreams, it is also grounded in very real experiences that play out in our dusty, ordinary lives. As you listen to my conversations with Tayria, I feel strongly that you will sense that firm tether to this realm of the real, and that you will find a great treasure, as I have, in getting to know Tayria Ward.
TAYRIA WARD
Tayria Ward has a Ph.D. in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. After 30 years of living in the Los Angeles area where she raised her family, working for 20 years as a minister, and later as a professor at the undergraduate and graduate levels, in 2004 she moved to the ancient mountains of Western North Carolina to found Bridging Worlds Mountain Retreat Center.
Tayria’s doctoral work led her into a passion for the study of the ways of sensing and knowing carried by indigenous peoples past and present. Her dissertation is entitled Reawakening Indigenous Sensibilities in the Western Psyche. In the last centuries’ thrust toward modernity, as tremendous as it is and has been, much has been left behind. As humans in many ways we threw out the baby with the bathwater. Our connection with the intelligent voices of the non-human world and those of the invisible world have been undervalued, often severed, to the detriment of our health psychologically, emotionally, physically, socially and environmentally.
Tayria’s work is to help recover this health. One of her major tools in working with individuals and groups is focus upon the messaging system in the dreams of the night. She has written down her own dreams and worked with them consistently since the age of 24. She studied the worlds religions avidly for many years, has worked intensively with shamans from Africa and a variety of other traditions, has studied the theories of Carl Jung for decades, including completing her doctorate in Depth Psychology, and worked for many years in analysis of her own dreams with some of the finest Jungian analysts. She is uniquely qualified to assist persons on an in-depth spiritual and psychological quest.
Tayria conducts private sessions, retreats, dream groups and offers vision quests. She is available for classes and lectures.
BRIDGING WORLDS
We humans, as a species, used to participate fluently in what eco-theologian Thomas Berry refers to as “the great conversation” – the dialogue that is taking place at all times among the elements of the natural world. We listened and understood the languages of plant, tree, rock, river, bird, animal, soil. This connection kept us in a healthy relationship with the delicate balance of nature. At some point in the course of history we stopped listening, began overvaluing the human, talking only amongst ourselves, mistakenly believing that earth’s other systems existed to be subservient to our wants and needs, without rights of their own. Emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and ecologically, humans are in peril if we do not make a heartfelt effort to re-establish these necessary relationships. We cannot afford to remain in denial any longer. Recovery is still possible. It begins with individuals, one by one, who are willing to reawaken. Bridging Worlds is committed to assisting in this endeavor.
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-Brother Oran Parker
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