[Survey] - ongoing dream practice group

Dream Cohort: A Dance of Sun & Moon

Hello all, here in Portland we are getting that pre-spring equinox snowstorm that happens almost every year that always fills me with a sigh of dread LOL

besides that, I’m on a new asian herbal formula mixture that seems to be functioning and helping my brain work better than it has in years.

(For those who are new here, my health tanked after getting the covid vaccines due to immune overwhelm, viral loads and cytokine spike, which undid my years of work to recover from a myriad of life-threatening and debilitating illnesses in my youth and young adulthood.)

I’m still a normal middle-aged animist anarchist loser though, so don’t worry — no bizzarro roman emperor delusions of grandeur as is the trend for many middle-aged males.

I’ve been tinkering in the shed (really just my living room that is required to be the everything all at once room) - around how to move forward with my business and art in 2025 and not exhaust myself with capitalism issues. One thing that I’ve wanted to do is an ongoing dream course that is based on Liu Ming’s dream teachings but with my jazz improv neuro-decolonial animist pedagogy of the oppressed style.

I have a good idea on how I can do this in a soft, careful, month-by-month way without doing “hard launches” or “limited time online course” vibes. I don’t want to do the intensive, 5-full-weekends-a-year thing the way this material is usually taught, with cohorts that evaporate after doing an intense thing together for a year online.

I also want to be able to do the “dream sanghas” that Ming talked about that were never recorded, so that people can oscillate between lecture/theory/Q&A and embodied social praxis sessions. I also don’t want to have to have a “deadline”, and I want people to be able to keep attending as long as they want, or to quit at any time. I want to model it more like actual indigenous/animist teachings. Not “products for neurotics” or “CEUs for clinicians” which I can’t offer anyway.

What I am caught up on is where and how to host this new offering as it would need to be off substack.

I have found a low up-front cost host called Payhip, that handles recurring subscription fees and hosts a patreon-like member portal. For me, low up-front cost is necessary, and i can’t handle the higher end cost structure of a platform like Mighty Networks.

However, it has some limited functions in comparison to other higher priced platforms like Mighty Networks or Thinkific or Kajabi, in that members cannot make posts, they can only comment on posts that the facilitator makes.

As I’ve been emailing with payhip’s customer service, they said:

“If you’re looking for a way to encourage interaction within your membership, you could:

• Use the comments section under posts for members to share homework, feedback, or discussions.
• Link to an external community platform like a private Facebook Group, Discord server, or Slack channel for more interactive engagement.
• Use a form submission tool (such as Google Forms) to collect homework and responses from members.”

Well, I don’t want a goddamned facebook group, noisy discord channel, or cumbersome slack channel as that just creates too much tech-distraction. And I fear that having to collect things from google forms, then format and post them is also too much work.

So basically, I may just use my own patreon to do this (not the animist arts patreon) and create some different tier cost levels. Because payhip doesn’t seem to really add anything extra than patreon as far as I’ve seen for what I’m trying to do right now…

I wanted to throw it out there in case anyone has any other ideas in terms of platforms that have low front-end costs but allow private members to make posts, etc. I don’t want to spend an eternity nit-picking over these digital handcuffs, and I just want to be able to start the oral telling process as that’s where the real nourishment lies.

My fingers-crossed-but-have-to-keep-divining impulse is to soft launch around the spring equinox.

Please add and comments/questions below if you feel called. I may not be able to answer everything, but I do want to gauge interest.

For price ideas, which could change, i am considering 3 monthly price tiers: $150, $100, & $75. This would include at minimum, two 2–3-hour sessions per month, with one being teaching/Q&A and one being “dream sangha”. I am very much an “under-promise but appropriately over-deliver” kind of facilitator.