Category: Blog
Blog: Insights Gained on the Path of Service as a Depth Hypnosis Practitioner
By Sasha Star Goclowski
I have gained many insights, as well as a sophisticated form of mind-body wisdom around the nature of human consciousness and healing from facilitating Depth Hypnosis sessions. I receive this wisdom through a felt sense in my body, through the voices and energetics and visual guidance of my guides, and through my clients as they speak and heal in real time as I bear witness.
In the process of practicing Depth Hypnosis I have received the following insights:
• We heal together.
• We heal through facilitating and holding others in their healing.
• We hurt in relationship, and so we heal in relationship too.
Blog: New Beginnings, New Potentials at the Spring Equinox
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Since December’s winter solstice season, when the days were shortest and the nights the longest of the year, the days have been growing steadily longer and the nights shorter. Now, at the time of the spring equinox, they are of equal length. The spring equinox is always a time of renewal and rebirth as the earth reaches this point in its relationship to the sun.
In the Sacred Stream Center garden, there is new growth – and new members of the plant community. We have several new pitcher sage plants which are known for their powerful healing capacities in restoring health and well-being. Their beautiful purple flowers are always at the height of their bloom during the spring equinox season. This year, we celebrate their coming as we celebrate the renewal of the year along with the new moon which dawns just after the equinox on March 20.
Blog: Plant Medicine: Moving Between Worlds
By Sebastian Segovia
In 2005 I turned eighteen. My parents were getting divorced. We were about to lose our house with the bank and I was finishing high school and starting university. I was beginning to experiment with alcohol and recreational drugs. That is when my mom decided to take me to an Ayahuasca ceremony as my birthday present. This was the moment my world open to the sacred world of plant medicine.
I first studied plant medicine with the Kofan tribe of Putumayo, in Colombia. We have had an ancient tradition of plant medicine in our country for centuries, and this indigenous community was the first to share ayahuasca openly with non-native people, long before the plant became mainstream. Taita Querubín Queta Alvarado—108 years old now—was the first shaman (“Taita” in Spanish) I received yagé (ayahuasca) from. His lineage made it possible for ayahuasca to travel all over the world back then, and it was from his hands that this medicine touched my heart for the very first time.
Blog: Sacred Space on the Winter Solstice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
One thing I do know is that the building has held sacred space for all of us during this complex time of change, dissolution and challenge. As I have continued to teach out of the sanctuary on Zoom, I have felt the power of this sacred space infusing the teachings and supporting students all around the world. In some ways, its role as a refuge and a reminder of the sacred has expanded. As I see all the notices for new condo developments about to rise just blocks away, I feel even more committed to safeguarding and cultivating the peace and heart of the land here.
With so many of the ways we find meaning challenged over the last few years, the importance of cultivating and understanding what is truly sacred to us has been highlighted. Everyone finds meaning in their own ways and everyone encounters the sacred on their own terms. The task is to seek that meaning and that encounter. Even though this is largely an internal exploration, we need reminders, touchstones, in the everyday world to point us inward. Churches and temples provide this.
Blog: Healing Post-War Anxiety with Applied Shamanic Practice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
A young man named Jared had recently returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He was having trouble sleeping and felt anxious most of the time. Jared didn’t like talking about his experience overseas. He felt embarrassed that he was having such a hard time reintegrating into civilian life.
In working with him, I learned that Jared had some problems with anxiety before going to the Middle East, but they had gotten much worse since his return. He had tried a series of medications, but they made him feel “weird,” so he didn’t like taking them. The anxiety made it hard for him to focus. I suggested starting off with a more traditional approach.
Blog: The Lessons of the Equinox, the Earth, and the Sun
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
The fall equinox this year occurs just before the new moon, marking the end of a cycle of growth as the agricultural growing season comes to an end. This year, the growing season ends just as the new moon begins a new cycle of growth. The equinox, of course, is the moment in the year when the day is as long as the night. Just as the moon’s influence begins to expand toward fullness, the sun’s influence wanes as the days become shorter. The sun continues on its path toward the winter solstice, the shortest day.
The dance between the moon and the sun at this fall equinox is one of growth and completion, increase and decrease, promise and reflection. The complexity of this dance is something we must all learn to hold in our awareness if we are to understand what the Earth might be trying to teach us through the complexity of this moment. We are challenged to understand the duality each celestial sphere expresses in relation to the other as we seek to find the moment of balance between them.
Blog: The Light of the Summer Solstice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
The sun is strong in the garden now, as it is everywhere else. It remains directly overhead for most of the day, leaving the stained-glass windows in the sanctuary to sparkle their own colors without the sun’s influence. From the depth of the blue, to the heat of the sun, everything is intense right now. The COVID surge here in the Bay Area is at its highest since the pandemic began. The news from Ukraine tells us that the fighting is at its fiercest since the Russians began bombarding. Political polarization is at fever pitch over the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court. For a time known for the vividness of the light that comes with the longest day of the year, this year’s summer solstice seems to be providing us with more intensity than usual.
Blog: The Shamanic Journey and Metaphor
By Clementine Moss
I understand metaphor. I have been blissfully falling into the written word since See Spot Run or something similar. When I learned to read, I remember the rising images from the page, pictures becoming alive because of what the words were spelling out.
When I learned to journey, I began to understand the symbols of my inner world.When we recognize that our stories are not our full identity, then we can release them from ruling us, along with the patterns and behaviors that weight them. I found Eastern meditation practices and discovered my identity beneath stories. I found Shamanism and learned to sneak up behind the stories, unravel them in a way that allows me to clear my perception and experience life, each moment, more fully.
Blog: Thoughts at the Spring Equinox
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
As I was untangling the new prayer flags to put up at the Sacred Stream Center for Losar, the Tibetan new year, I realized that the spring equinox this year falls right between the Tibetan new year in early March and the Khmer new year in mid-April.
Both of these celebrations were originally harvest celebrations in Tibet and Cambodia. They were also a time when people made offerings and affirmed their connections to the natural world and its cycles of time.
Within the rhythm of nature’s time, the spring equinox is the moment when the nights and the days are of equal length. It is a time when the sun rises directly due east and sets directly due west. It is the time of the year when the sun rises most quickly and sets most quickly.
Blog: Reflections on the Winter Solstice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
As the nights have been growing longer as we approach the winter solstice, I have been reflecting on the relationship between light and darkness from a new perspective. We often think of light and dark as being opposite of one another. In some cases that is true. From one point of view, the light of day is the opposite of the dark of night. But from another vantage point, dark and light are moments of the same cycle of change. That cycle of change determines our experience of reality in utterly fundamental ways. The sun rising and setting is basic to our experience on earth. Yet, we don’t often think about the fact that the sun rising and setting dictates when and how we do almost everything we do. We may not often think about how our lives might be structured without this baseline rhythm the play of light and dark creates.
Blog: Reflections on the Fall Equinox
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Around the fall equinox of 2018, as I was doing the fall garden clean up, I realized that a small California Live Oak had planted itself in the center of the garden at the Sacred Stream Center. I was very excited to have the oak choose our garden, but everyone else was worried that the oak would get too big and block out the other plants. I knew there was no way I would interfere with the oak’s plans, as we are visitors to its habitat – not the other way around.
Only 200 years ago, the land on which the Sacred Stream Center sits was covered in California Live Oak. The hills throughout California were dotted with these majestic trees, which can indeed grow very tall and spread their canopies widely. An oak taking up residence in that patch of ground would have had the flowing water of Strawberry Creek nearby and lots of laurel and bay trees keeping it company.
Blog: Lessons of the Manzanita Tree
By Clementine Moss
North Fork, California is the site of the gorgeous Vipassana meditation center at which I have spent a couple of 10-day retreats. On foggy mornings at my home in San Francisco, I often think of the early morning walk to the meditation hall, and the faces of the single yellow daffodils lining the path up the hill.
In one of the retreats, I became fixated on the manzanita trees, their dark red spindly trunks, the light green color of the leaves, the pink hanging bouquets of flower. It is inevitable that the senses become more vibrant when meditating for ten hours a day. The contrasting colors of the manzanita were almost too much to bear.
I fantasized about having a garden of manzanita one day, how it would be to set out a picnic among such a gorgeous color combination. I wanted to wrap myself in these colors and shapes. I guess, really, I was longing to be a bird.
Blog: Summer Solstice and the Light of Potential
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
It seems fitting as we approach the longest day of the year that an opening into larger possibilities might be extending toward us. This is particularly true because of another celestial event that is happening in the sky this week. This is the moment in its orbit when the planet Venus is closest to the sun. Venus is the planet of beauty, love and possibility in western astrology, With the potentials of this influence enhanced by its proximity to the sun, we soon may be able to step into a new collective experience, beyond the constrictions of the pandemic.
This new potential has certainly been evident in the sanctuary at the Sacred Stream Center. Thanks to donations from last year’s fund drive, we have been able to begin the restoration of the three stained glass windows that grace the room.
Blog: My CBD Story
By Valerie Burke
Imagine trying to swim across the English Channel wearing a space suit with one arm tied behind your back. Wearing snow shoes, blindfolded and drugged.
Towing a small submarine.
Before finding CBD, that’s what my life had been like when it came to my health.
As far back as I can remember, my life has been riddled with an endless string of odd and seemingly unrelated symptoms. Hormone imbalances. Chronic pain. Relentless, intractable headaches. Weird and unexpected reactions to things. Weight gain.
I don’t ever recall being healthy – at least for very long.
My childhood was marked by frequent colds, infections of one kind or another, and mysterious aches and pains for which there was never any medical explanation.
Prevailing medical opinions: “It’s all in her head.”
In the 1990s, I had a total hysterectomy for chronic ovarian cysts and endometriosis that no hormone regimen could control. They found massive abdominal adhesions that wrapped around my insides in a tangled, angry web.
The diagnosis of “fibromyalgia” was the best they could come up with.
By my early 30s, I had also developed osteoarthritis resulting in three orthopedic surgeries by the age of 40 – one hip and two knees.
I DID feel like my head was exploding, and it wasn’t just the migraines. Just nothing made sense.
Blog: Equinox, Equipoise, Equanimity
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
The evening of the spring equinox, as I watch the shadows lengthen across the room, I reflect on how the magic of this play of light is around us everywhere, all the time. Many of us take for granted the sunrise and sunset. Indeed, we may not even notice the incremental lengthening of light throughout the late winter that brings us to this moment, where the day meets the night in equal measure.
On the equinoxes, the idea of balance always seems emphasized to me. How do we find our way to this moment of fleeting equilibrium each spring and fall? How well do we hold center in the tension of opposing forces around us at this moment of equipoise? These questions seem to take on more import now, when many of us are striving to counteract the effects of polarization that have increased in almost every aspect of our lives since the last spring equinox.