Category: Isa Gucciardi
Video: Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.: Reading Thangkas: Avaloketishavara and the Images of Compassion
Thankgas are paintings on fabric that often depict meditational deities or subjects. Popular throughout the Himalayas for centuries, they have provided a teaching and practice tool to help students deepen their understanding of a particular deity or subject. There are many images of Avaloketishavara or Chenrezig as they are known in Tibetan.
In this talk with the San Francisco Dharma Collective, Isa Gucciardi explores these images of compassion and the wisdom of the deities depicted therein.
Video: Shamanic Journey Introduction with Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
In these challenging times, a strong connection to inner guidance is more important than ever. The Shamanic Journey is a method of accessing inner wisdom through a meditative state. The Shamanic Journey has provided a path for shamanic practitioners to establish relationships with the unseen powers of nature for millennia. We can adapt this method of going inward to gain insight about our current situation.
Listen: The Doorway Between the Worlds: Medium and Oracle Traditions in Shamanic and Buddhist Traditions
Shamanism is a form of spiritual practice based in earth-wisdom traditions whose practices rely heavily on the practitioner’s capacity to form oracle relationships with the unseen powers of nature. The Mahayana Buddhist tradition also contains oracle systems that have guided the course of the tradition and have even helped with the establishment of new schools of thought. In this talk presented by East West Bookshop, Isa describes the experience of the altered state of awareness that is common to both Shamanic and Buddhist oracle traditions.
Blog: Liberation through Song: The Activism of Miriam Makeba
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Miriam Makeba is perhaps one of Africa’s most famous musicians. I became aware of her when I was about eight years old. I was growing up near Honolulu as Waikiki was becoming a destination. In the evenings, as the sun was setting, all the hotel bars along the beach had musical shows, many of them right on the beach. Invariably, the person who was supposed to be watching me started having cocktails at about 5 o’clock at one of these bars. This meant I was free to cruise the different hotels along the beach, watching the shows.
Most of the hotels featured hula dancers and Hawaiian music, but one hotel had a band that also played African and Caribbean music. They almost always played Harry Belafonte and Miram Makeba’s recorded music before the live show. I loved the songs they sang together, and I always made a beeline to the beach in front of that bar to hear them in the evenings.
As I got older, I learned more about how Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba worked for social justice. I learned that Miriam was famous for her resistance to the social system of apartheid in South Africa. It was through her music that I learned about apartheid, which segregated whites and blacks and kept blacks in poorer, often substandard living conditions. I was appalled to learn about apartheid, and as I followed Miriam’s life, I struggled to understand how it persisted the way it did.
Video: Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.: Tsongkhapa: A Buddha in the Land of Snows
We are lucky to be living in a time where we have so many erudite scholars to help guide the course of Buddhist thought. Principal among them are His Holiness, the Dalai Lama and his main English language interpreter and translator, Dr. Thupten Jinpa. Jinpa has recently written a book about perhaps one of the greatest scholars in Tibetan Buddhism, Je Tsongkhapa. Tsongkhapa lived in the late 1300s and inspired a renaissance in Tibetan Buddhist thought, founded the Great Prayer Festival and established the Gaden Shartse monastery.
In this talk with the San Francisco Dharma Collective, Isa Gucciardi explores Jinpa’s new book, Tsongkhapa: A Buddha in the Land of Snows, which so skillfully brings Tsongkhapa to life. The book offers a unique lens on Tsonkhapa’s relationship to Manjushri, the Buddha of wisdom, which is the focus of this talk and meditation.
Blog: Reflections on the Spring Equinox
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
On the day of each equinox and solstice, I make a point of spending some time alone in the early morning hours at the Sacred Stream Center in Berkeley, CA. The center was the home of a Lutheran church for almost one hundred years. It has beautiful stained glass windows and large open wood-paneled spaces carefully crafted by Finnish carpenters in the early 1900s. The sun always rises through the arched stained glass behind the main altar, illuminating the room in a spray of rainbow light.
This morning on the spring equinox of 2020, I am here to check on the center to make sure the repair on the roof is keeping out the rain. We are almost a week into the Shelter in Place Order due to the coronavirus pandemic. It is always quiet in the sanctuary in the early morning, but this morning it is especially still. The usual sound of starting cars and people heading off to work is absent. There is no laughing or singing from the neighborhood children who often pass by as they walk to the school down at the other end of the street.
Blog: Resisting Fear: Courage and Determination in Hard Times
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
These are difficult times for many people. Many of us have been increasingly distressed about the political situation, the destruction of the natural environment, the deterioration of social networks, and increasing financial insecurity. Now we have an invisible threat to our health in the form of the coronavirus that is spreading rapidly around the world.
Given all of the conflicting information about the virus, we are trying to discern what is real and what is not. It is difficult to make decisions about daily activities because the presence of the coronavirus and its effects are so unpredictable. It is in times like these that a spiritual practice is especially helpful because it provides a compass that is not dependent on external opinions or other people’s fears and hopes.
Video: How the Shamanic Journey Illuminates the Inner World
In this talk from Embodied Philosophy’s Virtual Empowerment conference, Isa Gucciardi describes the role of the shamanic journey in traditional contexts and how it can be adapted into the modern therapeutic setting to transform inner experience.
Blog: How Integrated Energy Medicine Heals
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Integrated Energy Medicine is the most subtle aspect of Depth Hypnosis, and also one of the most important features of the model. In addition to providing access to information about subtle experience influencing presenting symptoms, it is an important tool in healing.
With Integrated Energy Medicine, fields of light and sound can be focused by practitioners and guides to help clients move through resistance and blocks. These fields are used to support clients working at any level. They are especially helpful for those who are venturing into new and sometimes uncomfortable spaces within themselves for the first time. They can also be used to reconfigure and retrain patterns of experience and behavior arising from the deepest levels of the psyche.
Blog: It Takes a Village
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
When I received an invitation to give teachings at a local dharma center, I was happy to accept. The center had faced some difficult times, and its members were trying to navigate a major reorganization. I hoped our collaboration might help them as they began charting new territory.
If you have ever walked into a room where people have been arguing, you might have felt uncomfortable – even if the argument is over and the people have left. This can happen because there is an unseen, but felt, imprint of the emotions and experience expressed in the argument. Imprints like these can stay in spaces for long periods of time after events have happened.
Article: The Language of Image in the Clinical Setting
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
The language of image is one we speak every night as we dream. It just takes a little prompting for us to be able to develop our latent facility with this language. Simple questions, such as “What does this image remind you of?” open the messages in the images in powerful ways.
People who listen to the images of their dreams find this out very quickly. In traditional societies where the journey was practiced, the journey practice was often paired with the practice of listening to dreams.
Blog: The Inspiring Activism of Rigoberta Menchu
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
I find inspiration in the stories of people who have seen a need and tried to meet it. Be they healers, activists, politicians, leaders, or every day people who do the right thing in a difficult situation. These are people who stand up to oppression, or try to bring justice to places where none exists. For that reason, I have decided to create this series on Inspiring People.
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is an activist for indigenous rights in Guatemala. She was born to a poor family of K’iche’ Maya descent in rural Guatemala at the beginning of the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. She became an activist against human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan armed forces during the war.
Blog: Reflections on the Winter Solstice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
I have what has become an annual ritual. I arrive at the Sacred Stream Center close to dawn on the morning of the winter solstice, after the longest night of the year. As I enter the garden, I see the silhouette of a great redwood tree. I remember the long, hot summer days and fogless nights where I fretted about its well-being and offered it water and prayers. The last of the leaves from a Japanese maple fall before me as I push the gate closed and start down the stone path to turn on the fountains. Immediately, hummingbirds arrive for their winter bath. Not far behind them is a mother raven with her beak full of dried bread, looking to soften it in the fountain’s waters. The light is dawning, and it touches the fat rose hips and the ripening lemons around me, a dance of pink and yellow in the semi-darkness.
Article: Interview: Plant Medicine as a Spiritually Transformative Experience: Challenges to Integration in the Modern Context
ACISTE recently had an opportunity to interview Isa about her views on the use of psychotropic plant medicine for psychological and spiritual transformation. Given the recent resurgence of clinical interest in the use of psychedelics for treating mental health concerns, we hope this two-part (Feb/Mar) interview will encourage therapists and others to further educate themselves about the unique integration needs of those who choose to engage plant medicine for healing and guidance.
Article: Book Review: Tsongkhapa, a Buddha in the Land of Snows
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Tsongkhapa, a Buddha in the Land of Snows is Buddhist scholar Thupten Jinpa’s contribution to Shambhala Publications’ remarkable series, The Lives of the Masters, which seeks to memorialize the contributions of some of the most important thinkers in Buddhist philosophy. Tsongkhapa, who lived from 1357-1419, is considered one of the greatest Buddhist philosophers and teachers that ever lived.