We often look for sleep outside of ourselves. In a world where our prosperity and happiness appear to be outside our decisions and instincts, can sleep actually be as simple as it seems?

First day in Greece I go to the Acropolis as soon as the sun is up. 7 AM, I’m searching for a morsel of reality. I’m looking for a clue to who we could be without the artifice of human impotence.

If reality is a reflection of our internal world, imagine Athens. Boasting 15 meter Greek gods. And watching, lazy, seductive alley cat overlords.

My architectural context for Athens is Vegas casinos.

Thousands of tons of white marble are below my feet. Rising above me, marble. My lucid dreaming energetic body is a dragon surrounded by Doric columns.

The Parthenon and Temple of the Olympians are so tall, they design the blue sky above Athens.

The wind god is sailing through the negative space in silence. His friend is the goddess of light pouring between columns.

The blue sky space in the absence of construction around the marble gives room for me to grow.

I’m a dreamer.

If we try to lucid dream, or simply pay attention to our body as we fall asleep we notice sleep lives in our body, not the mind or screen.

Believe me, I’ve played the Screen Dream Sleep Game.

Sleep lives inside our gut. In my work with people as an Intuitive Guide, I call it Earth Perception.

Our gut is the home of our intent. Intent makes things happen. The ancient shamans of Mexico called Intent a force.

I have trouble turning off my conscious mind at bedtime.

Finding sleep can be a process of shifting consciousness, from conscious to subconscious. This is a gift to help us understand how to use other sense perceptions.

First, we must heal our unconscious.

We heal our unconscious by going into our blood via the dream dimension and removing unconscious obstacles to our creations on a cellular level. Our cells live in multiple dimensions.

Now we call it quantum healing. Ancient shamans of Mexico called it healing the dream body.

Ecstacy is part of our spiritual experience. This is another shift in perception.

Our sexual energy simply expands our energetic body while dreaming.

I figured out using our chakras (rotating spirals of light in energy centers in our body) we can use our transformational sexual energy to lucid dream. That’s one aspect of shifting our perception.

Recently, Earth Perception gave me the opportunity to go to Greece. I made one of my dreams come true.

As a girl I loved Greek mythology and dreamt of Odysseus sailing from island to island.

My own small boat was a ferry filled with babies, animals and smoking Athineans.  No sirens in sight, yet like Odysseus I was searching for adventure and a way home.

I teach and use ancient practices to heal the energetic body from trauma or sleeplessness. Always, the goal is self-actualization.

In shamanism we teach how to heal oneself. Reclaiming power over our lives is the most healing aspect of the discipline in shamanism.

Using the Toltec tradition (I’m Mexican, but I was taught my mom’s hippy-dream-journal-astral-projection-self-hypnosis version) I create an energetic double to become a magnificent sleeping beast who looks like the Griffins outside of the oldest cemetery in Athens. #dragons

I breathe fire onto my past and plant seeds for the future (shamanic tip #1:  transmute your sexual energy into cleansing fire which lives inside your chest. Sometimes called love. Tip #2: Burn all negative childhood memories).

I create my own dream body to cross time. I’m a mythical creature with a slow heart rate (shamanic tip #3: slow your breathing and heart rate to fall asleep). I’m verse incarnate, from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras 1.36, ‘the mind is calmed by the supreme effulgent light within, beyond all sorrow.’

A flying dragon living in the conscious and unconscious realms. I am lion maned, crocodile clawed, iridescent coyote feathered, eagle winged and snake skinned. I consume my own dreams of powerlessness.

Most people don’t remember their dreams. They only know they can’t sleep. Sometimes we get glimmers of a stress dream, sex or being chased.

The beauty of overcoming sleeplessness by becoming a lucid dreamer is you also become a creator. Not one created.

Since I’ve strengthened my energetic body, my good dreams like traveling to Greece have begun to come true. My teacher Xolotl in Mexico says all our dreams, good and bad, come true.

Love in the form of faith. Love in the form of peace of mind is what prevents me from sleep.

The ancient Greeks put their faith in Athena. Ancient shamans of Mexico put their faith in intent. I put my faith in my intuitive Earth perception.

My friend Dimitris in Athens, a handsome, tan, curly haired sailor says, “I don’t want to fall in love. Love makes you need.”

I sit on a ton of red marble smoothed down by 2500 years of butts.

June midday the white marble slab is cool. Skinny cats invite me to sit down and lazily ponder democracy.

A 13 story sculpture of the warrior goddess Athena must be imagined in the Parthenon. Feminine perseverance, feminine grandeur, feminine divinity.

All citizens could go to the Acropolis. Citizens being men and non-slaves. In a culture intending to define itself in war, they chose a female god.

The warrior goddess Nike Athena is said to have young female warrior virgins. Each virgin warrior as valuable as 1,000 soldiers in battle.

I imagine a hundred sex-crazed young women in hair-spray and matching outfits screaming bloody murder and running into battle with spears and shields. Undeniably, terrifying.

I’m reminded of my 13 year old BIG HAIR self listening to my friend Janna’s gang-banging Latin King BF Tony I-can’t-remember-his-last-name, muttering through a sewed jaw shut from a rival gang’s bullet, saying, “You know, Pussy bro.” He used Pussy like a noun.

The corrugated Dorian columns of the Acropolis were built at a slight angle. Parental marble columns rise like a silent divine scream for 5000 meters. Finally creating an invisible pyramid in the lithosphere.

As I travel through Greece, Saturn squares Uranus. Venus moves into my own sign Leo. I crave love. I shift my perception because I can’t sleep.

Perception shifting takes an ability to hold two, or three, pov’s simultaneously. I perceive from my gut. From my center I am the earth. No more global warming. My will is my mind.

Less thoughts, more intuition. I am held up by the planet below me.

Ancient Greece was riddled with war. A giant statue of the goddess with her head chopped off from war with Sparta is imprinted in me.

Athena surviving the raids, the wars, the fires feels like teeth biting into wood.

People put their faith into Athena.

For the sleepless, faith is ephemeral. Even for those who can sleep faith is not something we focus on in our daily lives. Faith is important in the modern. We have big goals with little support.

We need faith that people love us. Faith that we won’t end up homeless. Faith that we will make it. Faith we will have love until we die.

We live in a world without assurances.

Is it any wonder that 50 to 70 million Americans suffer from some sleep disorder? As a professional insomniac since infancy (a child who lays awake in bed in a pantsuit), I dislike the permanence of the word disorder. The ability to sleep comes and goes.

I’m interested in helping people take back their power over sleep.

Have you ever had a night where you felt as if you watched screen after screen, hunting for sleep? Or enough G-Rated distraction to put you under?

I invite you to do something radical.

Begin by turning off the lights at sunset. Play classical music and light candles.

Open a book with only pictures in it. Screens, naw. Light incense and allow yourself two hours of romantic candlelight.

You’ll find you have less to do. It’s dark! You’ll feel relaxed. You’ll enjoy the music. You’ll feel sexy. And best of all, you will have prepared yourself for a good night’s sleep.

When my mind wanders on all the tasks of the day, and I’m anxious at night, I stare at the candlelight. I stare into the fire and burn my past with my dragon’s breath.

If all the energy is running in circles, I remember where my ignition lies. My fire lives in my sex and my heart. I open one, or two, or both.

I allow the endorphins to release and lay down. #wink

I think there’s a reason Nike Athena, the virgin warrior, was deified. Our sex, when used as the engine of our body can create and achieve many things, including sleep.

In further articles I’ll discuss how to use sexual energy for lucid dreaming and astral projection.

For now, enjoy a good night’s sleep.