Category: Empowered Living

Blog: Repatterning Life Transitions and Initiations

Blog: Repatterning Life Transitions and Initiations

By Isa Gucciardi PhD

Within each of our lives, we have important moments of transition, which we experience in our bodies, that can be understood as initiations into a new way of being. Birth, death, puberty, the sexual encounter, becoming a parent, and for women menstruation, menopause, and giving birth, are all potent initiations we experience in our lifetimes. Each of these initiations holds powerful information and the possibility of transforming long held patterns that no longer serve us.

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Blog: Safeguarding Birth, Invoking the Sacred

Blog: Safeguarding Birth, Invoking the Sacred

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

From the moment we are born until the moment we die, women are constantly engaged in the processes of creation, creativity, and change. For much of our lives, through our monthly cycles, our bodies create forms to prepare to receive new life, and if that new life is not received, a process of destruction of those forms takes place.

When we give birth, in the process of becoming a mother, our old sense of self as an independent being falls away, and, in defining ourselves, we include the needs of another in a very real and intimate way. As a woman goes into labor, however, the new definition of self as a mother who includes the identity of her child as part of her own self-identity has not quite gelled, and the old definition of self as a single, unitary being is challenged. As this challenge occurs, the power that was binding together the old form – the independent woman – is released. This power is then available to create the new form – the mother.

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Special Announcement: Upcoming Courses for Parents at Sacred Stream

Special Announcement: Upcoming Courses for Parents at Sacred Stream

Sacred Stream is committed to supporting parents in bringing greater consciousness into their relationships with their children, their partners, and themselves. All of our Empowered Living courses are designed to help you get the most from your everyday experience.  Several upcoming courses are especially helpful for parents.

Conscious Parenting will help you connect more deeply with your intentions and values as a parent and respond to whatever arises with greater self-understanding and grace. Tracking Spirit in the Birth Environment provides an opportunity to connect to powerful resources for giving birth or integrate the birth experience you already had. The Path of Service strongly connects you with your own needs and how to address them so that you can maintain your energy level while caring for others. And if you find, as you parent your children, that how you were parented is coming up as something you would like to understand better, Relationship and Karma will help you do that.

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Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 5: Interview with Joanna Adler, Psy.D.

Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 5: Interview with Joanna Adler, Psy.D.

Editors’ Note: We’re delighted to publish this interview with Joanna Adler instructor of the Conscious Parenting workshop that will be offered at The Bodhi Center, Bainbridge Island, WA on April 28 and 29. Joanna Adler is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified Depth Hypnosis Practitioner. She has studied extensively in the fields of Depth Hypnosis, Buddhist Psychology, Shamanism, and Energy Medicine at the Foundation of the Sacred Stream. We asked Joanna about how she helps people with the dizzying array of choices parents face on a regular basis, what the word “discipline” means to her, and what interests her most in her work with families.

Q. How do you work with parents that may be struggling with knowing how to best support their children when there are so many choices, so many potential ways to respond in a given situation?

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Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 4: Cultural Context

Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 4: Cultural Context

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

In the first post in this series on conscious parenting, I touched upon how important it is for us, as parents, to know what we value, because our values become the structures within which our children learn to express themselves. Then I discussed how we can foster the authentic expression of our children’s highest potential and how to get out of the way of this expression. Because the cultural context can have a significant influence on our children’s expression, it is also important for parents to determine how well this context is contributing to our children’s highest potential. The cultural context, for the purposes of this post, consists of the values and priorities of the society in which you live.

If you have values that are different from the surrounding society, it will be even more important for you to be clear about what your own values and priorities are, and communicate them clearly to your children. If you don’t, your children may absorb the values of those around them by default, and that may put you at odds with your children.

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Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 3: Getting out of the Way

Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 3: Getting out of the Way

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

The last post in this series on Conscious Parenting addressed how to recognize our children’s highest potential and why it is important to move out of the way of its expression. The question we were left with was, “How do I get out of the way?” One of the best ways to get out of the way is to look at your attachments to having your child be a particular way. Those attachments are probably a function of something that did not work in your own childhood.

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Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 2: Children’s Highest Potential

Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 2: Children’s Highest Potential

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

If I had to define one goal that we, as parents, must do our best to attain, it would be to protect and cultivate our children’s highest potential in the world. Naturally, every child’s highest potential has its own expression. Every child has a set of gifts that she brings into the world that resonate with the child’s deepest calling. You will find that I use the phrase “highest potential” interchangeably here with “a child’s deepest calling,” “the child’s most authentic expression,” and “the child’s gifts,” because each of these offers a different view and definition that points to the complexity of the deepest aspects of our children.

But how do we support our children’s authentic expression in the world?

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Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 1: Six Essential Questions for Parents

Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 1: Six Essential Questions for Parents

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

I am a parent of two children, and I have been counseling and teaching families and individuals for more than twenty years. Over the course of the last ten years, I have seen many of the central issues around parenting shift drastically, mainly due to the more central role that technology now plays in the family.

The challenges that parents face today in raising children are very different from the challenges their parents faced. Not only do parents have to figure out how to function on less sleep, they also have to determine the role they want technology to play in their children’s lives. As parents find themselves with less time than they would like to be able to devote to parenting, they have to come up with clear strategies for enrichment, discipline, and many other important issues. This is difficult when people find themselves trying to navigate the issues around work-life balance, and face down issues such as self-doubt and guilt about the choices they must make.

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Blog: Mindful Leadership Part 2: Finding the Leader Within

Blog: Mindful Leadership Part 2: Finding the Leader Within

An Interview with Hal Adler

Editors’ note: Hal Adler is a certified Depth Hypnosis Practitioner and Executive Coach. His daylong workshop on Mindful Leadership will be at the Sacred Stream Center on February 3. In this second installment of a two-part post on Mindful Leadership, we talk to Hal a bit more about his coaching work and the upcoming course.

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Blog: Mindful Leadership Part 1: Leading with Intention

Blog: Mindful Leadership Part 1: Leading with Intention

By Hal Adler

Editor’s note: Hal Adler is a certified Depth Hypnosis Practitioner and Executive Coach. His daylong workshop on Mindful Leadership will be at the Sacred Stream Center on February 3. In this first installment of a two-part post on Mindful Leadership, Hal addresses the relevance of the self-transformation models of Depth Hypnosis and Applied Shamanic practice to people who lead others.

When people decide they want to grow and develop themselves in their careers, the skills they usually start building first tend to be externally focused. People might want to be hirable in new ways or in new industries, and they also may want to help more and be of service more. Eventually, what people come up against isn’t the challenge of the work they are doing but the challenge of themselves:

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Blog: A New Year’s Resolution: Manifesting a Life You’ll Love

Blog: A New Year’s Resolution: Manifesting a Life You’ll Love

By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.

One of the biggest hurdles in manifesting what you want in your life is creating clear intentions. When it comes to setting goals, many people have a conscious yes operating along with an unconscious no. I often find this to be true of people who say they want to be in a relationship, but cannot seem to manifest one. These people spend lots of time and money on self-help books, dating services, even therapy, but still find themselves alone.

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Video: The Nature of Universal Power

Video: The Nature of Universal Power

Isa Gucciardi discusses the differences between universal power and personal power and the interplay between the two. She discusses the play of negative intention and how it impacts the energy exchanges that form the basis of relationships between people. Isa is the author of Coming to Peace, the Founding Director of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, and the creator of the ground-breaking therapeutic model, Depth Hypnosis. This talk takes place at the Sacred Stream Center in Berkeley, CA.

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Blog: Finding Your Spiritual Path Part 4: Intention and Motivation

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.

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Blog: Finding Your Spiritual Path Part 3: Personal Responsibility

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.

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Blog: Finding your Spiritual Path Part 2: Forgiveness, Blame, and Shame

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.

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