5-Week Online Course and Workshop with Live Sound, Meditation, Past Life Regression, and Séance, led by Clinical Hypnotist and Regression Therapist Daniel Ryan and Digital Health Technologist Virgil Wong with Guest Presenters

Dates: Tuesdays, April 25 - May 23, 2023
Times: 6:00pm - 8:00pm EST
Admission: $125 for Patreon Members / $155 for General Admission

PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make this time

Elevating your Health, Habits, and Creativity through Non-ordinary Experiences

Near-death experiences, past lifetimes, parallel incarnations, Bardo states, dream spaces, shamanic journeys, séances, and other "non-ordinary" events can all have a transformative impact on our mental and physical health. For skeptics and believers alike, these experiences can happen and often do. Through mindful explorations of these phenomena, we can yield unique insights about ourselves, our ways of life, and our communities.

This course will formulate a sequence of these experiences into a guided structure, illuminating common narratives and directed with a therapeutic orientation. The five-week journey will be an unfolding exploration at the emerging intersections of:

Digital technologies: Virtual reality, computer-generated imagery, and artificial intelligence.
Mental models and tools: Hypnosis, past life regression, and other shared and guided thought experiments.
Breathwork and liminal states: The breath as the catalyst for shifting physiology and the liminal states between being asleep and awake we pass through every day.
Non-ordinary experiences and cathartic healing: Examining the potential for transcendent release and relief from unexpected sources.

Over the course of this class, we will examine how these experiences can potentially ameliorate stress, anxiety, and grief. Through theory and direct practice, we’ll observe how these tools and their convergence offer us the opportunity to reorient our understandings of life and death. Our primary focus will be making the material as useful as possible, grounding these extraordinary experiences into our everyday lives.

SCHEDULE

WEEK 1 - Near-death Experiences and Virtual Reality

Guided in-class experience: Near-death experience in virtual reality with Virgil Wong.
Simulations to treat stress and anxiety; VR of pain, death, and afterlife; time travel visualizations.

WEEK 2 - Drugs, Medicines, and the Next Wave

Guided in-class experience: Hypnotic exploration of altered states with Daniel Ryan. For those who have had psychedelic experiences previously, hypnosis as an integration tool.
Psychedelic experience as the compressed cycle of depression, the importance of consent.
Ketamine research, psychedelics for prolonged grief disorder. Resolving fear of death and easing passage.

WEEK 3 - Language, Exorcism, and Communication Beyond the Veil

Guided in-class experience: Séance with Vaydra Snow Alexander.
The non-ordinary, supernatural, superstitious, pseudoscientific, occult, mystical, and magical. How do these currently function in tech? What trends are forming already?

WEEK 4 - Hypnosis and Past Life Regression

Guided in-class experience: Past life regression with Daniel Ryan.
Direct experiences of cycles of rebirth in our own lives. Metaphors for rebirth and renewal. Trance states and their role in exploration beyond the veil.

WEEK 5 - Breathwork, Cyborgs, and the Anticipation of Web3

Beginnings, Endings, and Presentations. Students are encouraged to share a creative response to the material in this course, such as a sketch, painting, short video, poem, or song.

PRESENTER BIOS

Daniel Ryan has maintained a private practice in New York City since 2012 offering meditation, hypnosis, and past life regression to individuals, businesses, and groups. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emerson College in the early 2000s and has since received board certifications in Hypnotherapy, Regression Therapy, and Neuro-Linguistic Psychology. He is currently at Columbia University pursuing a Master of Science where his research is focused on Narrative Medicine. He trained in the art of guiding and receiving meditation and received his mantra at The School of Practical Philosophy in NY where he studied from 2007 to 2014. He co-founded the Center for Integrative Healing in Chatham, NJ in 2012. From 2014 to 2020 he was the director of The Center for Integrative Hypnosis in Manhattan. Daniel is one of a few second-generation hypnotherapists and regression therapists in the world. Hypnosis and Past Life Regression are his family business. With decades of experience using guided therapies, meditative practices, and narrative journeys in hypnosis, today Daniel champions education and ethical practice alongside thought leadership and exploration into new territory.

Virgil Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Medical Avatar LLC, a digital health company that creates time travel simulations in virtual reality for immersive patient education, chronic disease management, and end-of-life planning. Over 15 years, he led the interactive division for Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, building websites and applications to support patient care, research, and education. Virgil was co-chair of the Clinical and Translational Research Science Center (CTSC) Cross-Institutional Web Portal Working Group. The CTSC leverages new technologies to make advanced biomedical research available to patients as rapidly and safely as possible. As an independent artist and filmmaker, Virgil has shown his work at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival; the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan; and Deitch Projects in New York, NY. Since 2000, he has also been an adjunct professor in The New School’s Masters in Media Studies Program. He teaches virtual reality, photography, film, and interactive media. Virgil is a recipient of The New School’s Faculty Mentorship Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Images:

Virgil Wong, Virtual Death and Transformation, 2023. Digital composite from AI-generated imagery.
Alexandru, Life After Death, 2022. AI-generated artwork.