Library
Video: Past Lives and Soul Mates with Isa Gucciardi: Past Lives and Karmic Patterns
In this series of talks, Isa Gucciardi draws on 25 years of clinical experience and research to help you understand your relationships in a new light. She explores patterns of relating that can repeat themselves from relationship to relationship and looks at Buddhist understandings that might offer insight about why this happens. She defines soul mate relationships in a new way and offers tips on how to recognize a true soul mate relationship. She shows how expanding awareness to include the possibility of past life connections with friends, lovers, and family members can inform current relationships. Join her in this wide ranging exploration of relating! Visit sacredstream.org to learn more.
Blog: Excerpt from “The New Return to the Great Mother”
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Open. Open. Open. This is the clarion call of the midwife to the birthing mother as she is encouraged to surrender to the new life moving through her. Childbirth is a sacred initiation that requires our full participation, mind, body, and spirit. We will meet ourselves completely—the parts we like and those we try to hide away in the shadows. But we are far from powerless in this process. In fact, there is a deep and unbroken source of power we can align with for support: the power of the Great Mother.
The Great Mother is the essence of all generative and creative power. Such power is perhaps most evident in nature, where the cycle of life and death is constantly in motion. This is why the Great Mother is so often depicted as an earth goddess. From Pachamama, the earth and time goddess of the Andes Mountains in South America, to the ancient Australian aboriginal mother goddesses Kunapipi and Eingana, and even the relatively modern Mother Mary from Christianity, we have been personifying and revering this great source of feminine power for centuries.
Video: Past Lives and Soul Mates with Isa Gucciardi: Karmic Patterns in Soul Mate Relationships
In this series of talks, Isa Gucciardi draws on 25 years of clinical experience and research to help you understand your relationships in a new light. She explores patterns of relating that can repeat themselves from relationship to relationship and looks at Buddhist understandings that might offer insight about why this happens. She defines soul mate relationships in a new way and offers tips on how to recognize a true soul mate relationship. She shows how expanding awareness to include the possibility of past life connections with friends, lovers, and family members can inform current relationships. Join her in this wide ranging exploration of relating! Visit sacredstream.org to learn more.
Special Announcement: Sacred Stream’s Laura Chandler Featured in Redfin Article: Why Your Home Doesn’t Feel Zen and How to Fix It, According to Experts
A comfortable, serene, and zen home is a place we all want to retreat to after a long day, especially during these times. We all want rooms filled with calming hues and simple, streamlined furnishings to add to that serene aesthetic, but did you know that there are little mistakes that could be preventing you from experiencing that tranquil, peaceful feeling in your home?
Creating a zen home with a relaxing atmosphere can be achieved by correcting a few key components to help infuse your surroundings with positive energy. To help make your home a peaceful sanctuary, Redfin reached out to experts, like myself, from Los Angeles, CA all the way to New York, NY to share mistakes that could be preventing your home from feeling zen and creative solutions to solve them.
Video: Past Lives and Soul Mates with Isa Gucciardi: What is a Soul Mate?
In this series of talks, Isa Gucciardi draws on 25 years of clinical experience and research to help you understand your relationships in a new light. She explores patterns of relating that can repeat themselves from relationship to relationship and looks at Buddhist understandings that might offer insight about why this happens. She defines soul mate relationships in a new way and offers tips on how to recognize a true soul mate relationship. She shows how expanding awareness to include the possibility of past life connections with friends, lovers, and family members can inform current relationships. Join her in this wide ranging exploration of relating! Visit sacredstream.org to learn more.
Podcast: Episode 70: Spring Washam: A Fierce Heart
On this episode, Spring Washam joins Laura Chandler to talk about her book, A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Courage, and Wisdom in Any Moment. Spring is the founder of the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, CA, and Lotus Vine Journeys, in Costa Rica.
Spring is focused on bringing mindfulness-based healing practices to diverse communities and she is a member of the teacher’s council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California. Spring has practiced and studied Buddhist philosophy in both the Theravada and Tibetan schools of Buddhism for the last 20 years. In addition to being a teacher, she is also a shamanic practitioner and has studied indigenous healing practices for over a decade. To learn more about Spring, visit springwasham.com.
Video: Past Lives and Soul Mates with Isa Gucciardi: Introduction to Soul Mates and Karmic Patterns
In this series of talks, Isa Gucciardi draws on 25 years of clinical experience and research to help you understand your relationships in a new light. She explores patterns of relating that can repeat themselves from relationship to relationship and looks at Buddhist understandings that might offer insight about why this happens. She defines soul mate relationships in a new way and offers tips on how to recognize a true soul mate relationship. She shows how expanding awareness to include the possibility of past life connections with friends, lovers, and family members can inform current relationships. Join her in this wide ranging exploration of relating! Visit sacredstream.org to learn more.
On the Air: Blossom Your Awesome Podcast: Episode #5: Isa Gucciardi and the Divine Feminine
In Episode #5 of the Blossom Your Awesome Podcast, host Sue Dhillon talks to the one and only Isa Gucciardi – Buddhist practitioner, author, speaker, and Founding Director and Primary Teacher at the Foundation of the Sacred Stream. They discuss her forthcoming book, The New Return to the Great Mother, an exploration of our relationship to the divine feminine and how to tap into the energy of the Great Mother during the birthing process.
Blog: The Hidden Messages in Water
By Clementine Moss
I recently read The Hidden Messages in Water, Dr. Masaru Emoto’s account of analyzing the effect of the energetic environment on crystals in water. If you haven’t seen these studies, you can pull up the images online and see the beautiful snow flake patterns of the sentiments “I love you” and the song “Amazing Grace,” and the chaotic, disrupted patterns of hate and negativity on the water crystals. The take-away is how we experience a direct response to vibration and frequency, and how our physical being, seventy percent water, might cultivate protection against disruption of our crystals.
One way to guard against this disruption is through gratitude. This information has created new rituals for me around the house. “Thank you water! Thank you! I love you!” now happens before every hydration. “Thank you water! Thank you for keeping Henry healthy!” as I refill the pug’s bowl. I try to remember to do the same for my food, too. Suddenly, a little “thank you” before eating takes on new meaning, as I imagine the molecules arranging themselves into patterns of love as they lift to my mouth.
Article: Book Review: A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives
By Barry Lipscomb
Reading A Fearless Heart was a very powerful, transformative, and healing experience for me personally. This was heightened by reading the book the same week I began the Sacred Stream’s Applied Buddhist Psychology 1: Entering the Stream class, and started practicing Shamata meditation. It seems my heart is breaking open and expanding in new directions, as if compassion and loving-kindness is the last frontier.
I find myself already genuinely wanting other beings to be free of suffering, spontaneously doing small acts of kindness with the recognition that, just like me, all beings want to be happy. By the middle of the week in which I was reading the book, I began a new practice of engaging someone from work each morning by text or Slack, to just say hello and ask how they are doing. It was only later in the week that I connected this new practice to my reading of Jinpa, and my morning Shamata meditation.
Podcast: Episode 69: 2020: A Retrospective
2020 was a year filled with unprecedented events, from political and social unrest, to a pandemic that has changed how we live our lives for the foreseeable future. On this episode, podcast host Laura Chandler takes a look back at the year, re-visiting highlights from past interviews. We’ll hear from bestselling authors Carol Klein, Gay Hendricks, John Perkins, Dena Merriam, and Rachel Harris. Our featured music is also from these past episodes and includes Lisa Lynne, Aryeh Frankfurther, Mia Pixley, Jaya Vidyasagar, and the Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble.
Article: Book Review: Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Matthew Fox’s new book, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic is educational in many ways. Not only is it a revelation about a female Christian mystic whose wisdom should be more widely known, but it is a window into the history of 14th century Europe, and the long-lasting effects the bubonic plague had on society and culture. This book could not be more timely.
Reverend Fox has been an ardent preservationist of the mystic streams of thought within Christianity throughout his long career. He has kept this esoteric philosophy front and center in popular discourse in a way that has served thinkers from all traditions. He wrote the first modern book about Hildegarde von Bingen, the 11th century Benedictine nun who founded her own abbey and infused the work there with the fruits of her visions, her poetry, and her prophesy.
Like Hildegarde’s contributions, Julian of Norwich’s work informed Christian thought in ways which have not always been fully acknowledged or appreciated by the church. Both women’s offerings receive the attention they deserve through Fox’s efforts. In spite of the fact that Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving book by a woman ever published, it is not widely read. Yet, her writings about her visionary experience and the ecstatic relationship with the Divine are still as profound, fresh and universal today as when they were written. We are lucky to have Fox point our attention to her reflections on her life and the times of plague through which she lived.
Blog: Like Rays of The Sun, Radiating Outward: How Our Personal Work Affects the Collective
By Elizabeth Brinkman Day, Ph.D., CHT
“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” These iconic words from Emma Lazarus’ 1883 sonnet, “The New Colossus,” gracing the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, are far from actualized in our country. The day before the Statue of Liberty’s inauguration in October 1886, the New York State Woman Suffrage Association met, agreeing that the statue was a symbol of hypocrisy, given that the monument was representing Freedom as a majestic female in a State where women were not yet free to vote.
Article: Bridging the Worlds between Life and Death with Shamanic Practice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
As part of Tarka’s “On Death” issue, I have been asked to speak about the approach to death that my tradition, that of shamanic practice, follows. Some of the questions I have been asked to address are: What is death from the perspective of your tradition? What transmigrates, if anything, from the perspective of your tradition? What key text, verse, or poem offers insight or clarity around the experience of death? How has an experience of death in your life informed your teaching? What is a practice that directly addresses our relationship with death? I have tried to address all of these questions in this short exploration of the shamanic worldview regarding death.
In his book about the Australian Aboriginal experience, Voices of the First Day, Robert Lawlor offers a statement regarding Aboriginal views about death which are reflective of a larger, more general shamanic worldview. He says, “Death, in the Aboriginal view, is not a termination or a dislocation from this world to another; rather it is a shift of the center of one’s consciousness to invisible, subjective layers that are substrate to, and involved within, the natural world of mind and matter.”
Blog: Finding Light on the Winter Solstice
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
The wind is cold and biting. I hear the neighborhood kids playing in the fallen leaves all around the Sacred Stream Center as the late afternoon sun is setting far too quickly. I rarely put the electric lights on in the Sacred Stream Sanctuary, because the room has stained glass windows on the eastern, southern and western sides of the wood paneled space. Throughout the day, I know what time it is by gauging where the light is falling in the room. Now, it is fading fast behind the 100-year-old arched stained glass that engulfs the western wall.
This is the fourth time in the solstice calendar that we have cancelled our quarterly drum circle. We have come together to mark the solstice or equinox since 1995. When the spring equinox circle was cancelled in March of this year, it was jarring to realize that our traditions could so easily be abandoned. Now, with the winter winds, it does not seem surprising at all that anything we may have planned does not occur as we thought it might.
As we look into the darkening nights, we are all facing obscurations on so many levels. The pandemic promises to continue to break infection records. Our political landscape both nationally and internationally is fraught with so much danger. The climate crisis deepens as our fellow creatures continue to withdraw from the earth. Since human time began on earth, the winter solstice season has been a time when people have looked into the yawning darkness and wondered if the light would ever return. We still ask this same question, and its import is multiplied across the many layers of complexity we are facing.