Category: Blog
Blog: Winter Solstice: A Long Winter’s Night
By Laura Chandler
The winter solstice occurs on the day of the year when the earth’s axial tilt is farthest from the sun. Simply put, it is the shortest day of the year. It marks that point in time when the shortening of days changes and then begin to lengthen until the Summer Solstice, June 21st, when they shorten again, like the waxing and waning of the moon. Most westerners are not aware of this phenomenon of the sun. In fact, we are rarely attuned to the rhythm of the sky. Instead, we are focused on the gathering speed brought by the holidays.
Blog: Lori Nairne and Homeopathy Part 1: In Memoriam
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Lori Nairne, a homeopath, emergency room nurse, social justice activist, and adjunct instructor at Sacred Stream, was beloved by many in the community. She passed away in late August. In the falling light of an early November evening, many of Lori Nairne’s friends, students and colleagues gathered at the Sacred Stream Center to honor the life of a remarkable and wonderful person. The following is an excerpt from the homily I offered about her life, work and influence on those around her.
Blog: Finding Your Spiritual Path Part 4: Intention and Motivation
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
After we realize that our trust has been betrayed, we may be thrown into a state of crisis. One of the gifts that can emerge from this experience, as we touched on in a previous post, is the opportunity to re-examine — or perhaps to discover for the first time — our intention, in the first place, in placing our faith in the person or organization that betrayed us.
Blog: Finding Your Spiritual Path Part 3: Personal Responsibility
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
In the last blog post in this series, I had mentioned how important it is not to rush to forgiveness in response to betrayal. Generally speaking, when we have been wronged or betrayed we have a lot of internal experience that we need to explore before we can even think about forgiving another person. Therefore it is important not to be rushed by anyone to forgive until you fully understand what work you have to do to get to the place where you can forgive truly and cleanly.
I also talked about how people who have been disillusioned by authorities that they placed trust in often experience an internal process of blame. This can look like self-questioning such as, “Why did I ever trust that person in the first place?” Or, “What did I do wrong to deserve this?” These are not helpful questions to dwell upon, because by their very nature, they imply a sense of self-blame.
Blog: Weaving Worlds at Menla
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
The wind at Menla arises in its own particular way at any time of the year. But in the fall something very special happens when you least expect it. By October, the leaves have begun to change. The sumac is brilliant scarlet, the ash trees are a deep vermillion and the catalpa trees are inexplicably brighter green than they were all summer. In the midst of all these hues, the wind arises.
Blog: Finding your Spiritual Path Part 2: Forgiveness, Blame, and Shame
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
My previous post began to address the spiritual crisis that many people experience when a spiritual or religious leader has harmed people and broken their trust. Those who don’t abandon their spiritual paths entirely are faced with the challenge of trying to incorporate the experience of betrayal into the way that they hold their faith or their trust. One challenge people face in this situation is that the spiritual authorities that harmed others are not always willing to take responsibility for their actions. They feel they cannot move on until the issue is resolved through those who have generated the betrayal taking responsibility and asking for forgiveness. Fortunately, even when spiritual authorities refuse to take responsibility, it is possible for the spiritual seeker to engage in an internal process of forgiveness.
Blog: Finding Your Spiritual Path Part 1: Understanding Betrayal
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Since the movie Spotlight came out in 2015, more and more people have come to our classes at the Sacred Stream looking for a different path to spiritual understanding. Spotlight is about the efforts of a group of journalists from The Boston Globe who were directed by their editor, Marty Baron, to investigate accusations against John Geoghan, a Catholic priest who had been accused of molesting young boys in different parishes during his long tenure as a spiritual leader in the Catholic community. The movie focused not only on these distressing events but also on the way the Roman Catholic Church tried to keep the truth of these events from the public. The investigation revealed a massive cover-up at the highest levels of the Church of the effect of Geoghan’s actions, and pointed to similar occurrences and cover-ups over the course of many years by the Church.
Because Sacred Stream has long been known for its non-dogmatic, inclusive approach to the world of spirit, it has been a safe place for people to explore their difficulty in incorporating these events within the context of their faith.
Blog: The Shamanic Journey: Companions on the Path
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
I have often been asked why, after having studied so many spiritual traditions, I have found shamanic practice to be one of the spiritual paths that is so helpful. For me, as for many people I have spoken with, it is a joy to find a path that leads directly into the heart of nature and provides a vehicle for establishing a nourishing and dynamic relationship with it. The shamanic journey opens a world of possibility to understand the intelligence of the natural world better. In his book Animal Speak, Ted Andrews describes the way these possibilities opened for him. And in their book Awakening to the Spirit World, Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman describe the way the world of the unseen aspects of nature emerges through shamanic practice.
But there is another aspect of shamanic practice that can be profoundly meaningful: the relationship that develops between the journeyer and the guides — the aspects of nature that emerge from the processes of the journey to offer teaching, guidance, and wisdom.
Blog: Buddhism in Action Part 2: A Depth Hypnosis Case Study
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Most of us are very attached to having what we want happen and preventing what we don’t want from happening. But when we try to create a life in this way, we develop misconceptions about ourselves and the people and world around us. In the Depth Hypnosis method, when considering the issue a client presents and their emotional history, practitioners draw upon this Buddhist idea that we suffer when we are unaware of the way our attachments and aversions drive our behavior, or when we have misconceptions about what our life presents to us and about what that might mean for us.
Blog: Buddhism in Action Part 1: Depth Hypnosis and Buddha Nature
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Depth Hypnosis is a spiritual counseling model that integrates many principles from Buddhist thought and practice with hypnotherapy, earth-based methods of healing, and transpersonal psychology. The Depth Hypnosis methodology rests upon the understanding that all imbalance is simply information about the way the person has twisted away from their essential nature, or what is known in Buddhism as Buddha Nature. And this is true whether the imbalance arises on a physical level as an autoimmune problem, on an emotional level as a depression, on a mental level as an anxiety or on a spiritual level in something like a “dark night of the soul.”
Blog: Insight Inquiry: Calling Forth Inner Wisdom
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
In the therapeutic model I developed, Depth Hypnosis, one of the processes I created for working with clients is a method of asking questions that I call Insight Inquiry. From the point of view of the practitioner, the task in working with Insight Inquiry is, in essence, to ask questions only about the issues at hand that are based on the answer to the previous questions. This process helps clients to discover themselves at a deeper level.
Blog: Thinking about Grief
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
When I first read On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the early seventies, I was thrilled that someone was actually talking about death. I had just moved to the United States, after having spent most of my early years in other countries. As I was trying to orient myself to the American culture, I had become acutely aware of the way no one around me really wanted to talk about things that I thought were pretty important – death, for example. I had resigned myself to watching television just so I would have something to talk about with the other teenagers at school, but it was not really that interesting to me.
Blog: Managing Initiation
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
In traditional cultures, the way a culture meets and manages the initiatory processes of its individual members is one of its defining qualities. The management of these initiations is generally accomplished by helping the initiate move through a ritual of some kind. Initiatory rituals can be very elaborate and well defined. In fact, anthropologists generally learn about a culture through the study of initiation rituals.
Rituals and culturally defined structures are good management tools to direct and hold the power of the initiatory process. However, a significant drawback to many rituals and cultural structures is that they have been designed to direct the power that is released in the initiatory process into the society’s structures, rather than dedicating it to the initiate.
Blog: Awakening the Wisdom of Ancient Hawaii
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
While Laura Chandler and I were in Iowa during the past week on our book tour for Coming to Peace, I found myself talking more about my childhood in Hawaii than I normally do as the friendly and curious people in Iowa asked questions about the history of the book. Everyone was interested in Hawaii and the ancient Hawaiian practices that are discussed in the book.
In August, I will be teaching a workshop on the Big Island of Hawaii called Huna: The First Psychology. As I answered questions about the workshop, I was reminded of Max Freedom Long’s reports on his research in the Hawaiian Islands in the early part of the 20th century. His book The Secret Science Behind Miracles offers a peek into the experience of the Hawaiians after a century of colonization, and his reports on his research into the body of work he named Huna is very compelling.
Blog: Buddhist Perspectives on Grief and Loss
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
In Robert Thurman’s prelude to his translation of Bardo Thodol, commonly translated as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, he takes to task scientific materialists’ perspective that death is a terminal state, a state of nothingness where life is destroyed. He points out that these materialists “have never observed even one material thing become nothing. Why should the energy reality of a state of awareness [life] ……be the exception to the law of physics that energy is conserved and only transformed?”
I have always appreciated Dr. Thurman’s willingness to take on monolithic prejudices, in the name of science, in response to spiritual questions. I have always felt the wholesale rejection of notions such as the possibility of life after death and the existence of spirit was highly unscientific. In order to step into the universe of life beyond death from the Buddhist perspective, we have to allow ourselves to be disabused of the ways in which we may have unwittingly digested the viewpoints of scientific materialism on these subjects simply because they dominate in our education system.