Category: Rites of Passage/Initiation
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.
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.
Podcast: Episode 30: Working with Teens
Depth Hypnosis Practitioners approach working with clients who are teens with respect for the initiatory process the teen is going through. In today’s episode, Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. talks about working with teens in this way.
Article: Reflections on Loss at the Winter Solstice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
We are gathered here this evening of the winter solstice. This is the longest night of the year, and it is honored by many traditions as a sacred and rich time. In Latin, solstice means sun set still and winter solstice is the great stillness before the sun’s strength builds, and days grow longer. It is a time when everything lies dormant in the silent night. At this time of year, the earth reaches into the darkness of the winter night and our experience is driven by that darkness. The days are shorter and shorter as the nights invite us to focus more deeply inward, to reach more and more fully into the deepest recesses of our psyche.
Article: Depth Hypnosis: Where Fierce Compassion and the Path of the Wounded Healer Converge
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Dr. Robert Thurman, noted Buddhist scholar, has stated that the future of Buddhism in the West lies in meditational therapies. One such meditational therapy is Depth Hypnosis. Depth Hypnosis is a therapeutic model that incorporates the wisdom of two very ancient healing and spiritual modalities (Buddhism and shamanism) with two more modern approaches (hypnotherapy and transpersonal psychology) to address emotional and spiritual imbalance.
Article: The Path of Service and Initiation
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Thank you for inviting me here this evening to speak to you. I have known about your group for many years now, and I have always appreciated the efforts you have made to change the way women and families experience birth in the Bay Area.
I think it might be easy for us in the Bay Area to take the kind of resources and alternatives to birth that each of you provides for granted. But all we need to do is to listen to the news to understand how women’s reproductive rights are under siege both in this country and abroad.
Podcast: Episode 19: Understanding 2012
In today’s episode, Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. discusses the 2012 era in terms of the evolution of human consciousness.
Podcast: Episode 11: Moon Lodge: The Initiatory Nature of Women’s Biology
The expression moon lodge refers to the emotional and mental space as well as the physical space that women would retire to in many indigenous cultures at the time of their moon, when they were on their period. Often in many cultures that same place was a birthing place as well. It was a place of women’s mysteries and women’s initiations. In this excerpt from a 2010 Moon Lodge workshop, Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. discusses the initiatory nature of women’s biology.
Article: Biology and Spirituality: What a Woman’s Biology Might Be Trying to Teach about Her Spiritual Path
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
What does a woman’s biology have to teach about her spiritual path? What might a woman’s spirit be trying to teach her through her biology?
There are many ways to understand the relationship between biology and spirit. In understanding the self, biology can be defined as the engagement with the material world. Spirit can be defined as that part of the self that is engaged in a larger field of participation beyond the material.
Article: The Use of Altered States in Depth Hypnosis to Break Down Blocks and Resistance
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
One of the most difficult issues a person trying to understand herself comes across is the issue of resistance. Uncovering unconscious blocks to understanding is often surprising and puzzling. On the one hand, we know what is happening in our lives internally or externally is generating pain and would like very much to be relieved of it. On the other hand, we often run into resistance to change even though we suspect that change will relieve of us our suffering.
Article: What is Depth Hypnosis?
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Depth Hypnosis is a synthesis of Transpersonal Psychology, Shamanism, Hypnotherapy, and Buddhism. The following description is especially helpful for those who might be considering entering the advanced training course in Depth Hypnosis.
The philosophy underlying transpersonal psychology – that true healing can only take place when one recognizes one’s place within a much larger context of the shared experience of the soul – is the underpinning of my practice. The techniques of shamanism and hypnotherapy provide the catalysts for healing within that context. The differences between the disciplines of shamanism and hypnotherapy are much fewer than the similarities.
Article: Working with the Shamanic Journey
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Shamanism is the core spiritual and healing practice of most indigenous cultures. The Shaman serves as the medical, psychological, and spiritual counselor of these cultures. One of the primary responsibilities of the Shaman is to interface between the world of the seen and the unseen. As part of the interface between these two worlds, the shaman uses the shamanic journey. The shamanic journey is a term that is used to describe the primary vehicle that Shamans use to perceive phenomena beyond the conscious mind. It is a method of perceiving the psyche and world of spirit, as well as a means of gaining deeper insight into the world around us.
Article: Death, Acceptance, and Grace
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
When a loved one is dying or has died, our defenses to all of the complicated aspects of our relationship with that person are often shaken. If we are lucky, we are less able to keep in place all the unconscious agreements with that person and we are afforded a time to explore those agreements and how they affect our ability to be honest with ourselves. To deepen this process, it is often helpful to use hypnosis and its ability to further weaken the conscious defenses we have to death in order to more fully understand ourselves.
This part of the grieving process, this deeper exploration of the meaning of how death highlights these hidden places in our relationships, is often masked by the homilies of organized religion, the need to save face in front of family members, and the urging by well-meaning friends to just get on with our lives. Even if we find we are able to explore these places, we rarely have the luxury of doing so with the person who is dying.
Article: Hypnosis: The Secular Sacrament
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
I often think of hypnosis as a secular sacrament. At first glance, “secular sacrament” appears to be an oxymoron. How can something sacred, and therefore traditionally a part of the religious community within a society, be the same thing as something secular, and therefore a part of the political and socioeconomic community of a society? This chapter will show how hypnosis functions as a secular sacrament, yet remains outside of the trappings of the larger cultural and social realities.