Category: Empowered Living
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.
Article: Healing and Awakening with Buddhism and Shamanism
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
I’ve been exploring Buddhism and plant medicine and psychedelics for about six years now. One area that I find really absent in a lot of the conversations on psychedelics and spirituality is indigenous shamanism, and it’s hard to find people who know much about that, and also have some kind of Buddhist framework. That’s why I was so excited to hear about your work and listen to some of your talks.
The main question I’m working with in this book is how can we engage with plant medicines as tools or technologies to support awakening? How can we understand the psychedelic experience and also the outputs of psychedelics through a lens that is with the intention of awakening? When I heard about Depth Hypnosis and your work, I thought it would be amazing to talk to you and hear your thoughts on this. You’ve spoken about the catalytic power of shamanic practice and how you feel that there’s potential in that to be harnessed by Dharma practitioners in service of Awakening. This seems to be the focus of your work with Depth Hypnosis, so maybe we could start there.
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.
Article: Tonglen – An Integrated Energy Medicine Point of View
By Joanna Foote Adler, PsyD, CHT
Much has been written on the practice of Tonglen, the Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice of giving and taking. Tonglen is a powerful and important practice in many of the schools of Buddhism. I would like to offer some thoughts to add to this literature from the perspective of Integrated Energy Medicine as it is taught at the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, which will hopefully help to focus this practice for western practitioners in a skillful way.
Let’s start by defining Tonglen. Tonglen is a meditative practice for cultivating love and compassion through giving and taking. The focus in this practice is to embrace (rather than reject) unwanted and painful aspects of experience, and to work to overcome fear and develop greater compassion for others. The opportunity here is to change the attitude towards pain and to open the heart as one visualizes dissolving pain. In this practice, one uses the breath in conjunction with a specific visualization. One visualizes or imagines taking in the pain and suffering of others on breathing in, and then visualizes breathing out love and peace for the other.
Tonglen is a practice said to help develop wisdom and compassion on both the relative and absolute levels of reality as they are understood in Buddhist philosophy. These levels are known as the Two Truths. Talking about these levels of reality gets us into deep philosophical water, but for the purposes here we can understand that the relative level of existence refers to the everyday ordinary world experienced as solid and “real.” The ultimate level of reality in Buddhism points to the understanding that reality is actually “empty” in that it is always changing, and that all things depend on or originate from the causes and conditions that came before them. Tonglen points us towards letting go, towards releasing the clinging to our sense of self and to the attachment held when one believes they are permanent beings. In different ways on the relative and absolute levels, Tonglen practice can reverse resistance to pain and help develop the enlightened mind qualities of equanimity, love, and compassion in the face of suffering. The concepts of relative and absolute levels of reality are helpful here in the exploration of how Tonglen practice works.
As the Founding Director at the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, Dr. Isa Gucciardi teaches courses of study in Applied Buddhist Psychology and Integrated Energy Medicine, among others. She teaches that one way to understand Tonglen is as an energy medicine practice.
Article: The Unseen Teacher
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Teaching and learning have never been separate for me. As a learner, I have always been keenly aware of the fact that I am being taught from within as I try to master a skill. I can feel the internal teaching change me in a different way than the external learning changes me. I remember being taught how to sight read as I was learning to play the piano. My piano teacher taught me the concept of matching the notes on the page with the notes on the keyboard, but when I read the notes on the page, I could feel an unseen teacher aligning me with the music. I was being taught how to play the piano, but I was also learning a new alignment to the world.
The experience of participating in learning in the external educational environment and receiving teaching from within simultaneously is a phenomenon that has revealed itself to me in different ways bit by bit over time. This experience has many facets to it, but it is always present in every teaching situation regardless of the subject being taught or whether or not I am ‘officially’ the teacher or the student.
Podcast: Episode 82: Spiritual Emergency
On this episode, Laura Chandler talks with Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. about Spiritual Emergency, a type of healing crisis that can occur when a person has an encounter with psychological, emotional, or spiritual states that lie outside their usual ways of organizing experience. There is a spectrum of response that people who have with Spiritual Emergency – from a state of collapse to a state of acceleration and everything in between. Based on her years of clinical practice, Isa offers her perspective on Spiritual Emergency, examining its causes, and offering helpful suggestions on how to navigate it. Isa is the author of two books, and the creator of the spiritual counseling model Depth Hypnosis. She is also the Founding Director of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream.
Article: To Weave a New World: Shamanic and Tantric Practice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
To enter the world of Tantra is to enter a world beyond the ordinary. Through a series of catalytic processes, the spiritual seeker is drawn along a path that promises nothing less than the revelation of the nature of reality. This is a promise that also lies at the heart of shamanic practice. Yet the ‘reality’ that reveals itself when the shamanic initiate steps beyond the threshold of ordinary awareness is conceived of differently than that of Tantra.
The reality that is the focus of Tantra lies in the understanding of the human mind. The reality that is understood through shamanic practice emerges through an intimate interface with the unseen powers of the natural world. These two realities are not exclusive from one another, but the thrust and focus of these two practices are at least initially different.
Both systems provide stages of development to educate the initiate as they deepen their understanding about the nature of reality. These stages of development constitute the heart of the practices. Let’s explore these wisdom traditions further and deepen our understanding of how these two paths cross and separate in the process of providing an education about the nature of reality.
Article: Addressing Self-Harm through Depth Hypnosis
By Joanna Foote Adler, PsyD, CHT
As a human beings, it is not uncommon to have experiences or feelings arise that we feel we cannot tolerate. Emotional pain can be incredibly hard to experience, and it is normal to reach for some way to cope in these kinds of situations. When a situation feels intolerably intense, people will naturally look for a way out of their suffering.
There are many ways to cope with suffering. They range from the most positive strategies, such as compassion, skillfulness, and love, to the quite negative, like self-blame, self-judgment, and self-harm. In these latter strategies people may mistakenly believe they are doing something about their experience by punishing or harming themselves. Perhaps they imagine that if they punish themselves enough, they will not continue to make choices that cause pain. Or perhaps they imagine that if they no longer exist in a body, they would be free of suffering. From a Buddhist point of view, this kind of thinking is seen as a fundamental misunderstanding, the kind of misunderstanding that actually leads to more harm and more pain, as negative coping strategies are piled on top of already existing suffering.
I would like to offer a few thoughts that may be able to help in these kinds of situations which ring true in the context of the spiritual counseling model of Depth Hypnosis.
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.