Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D., holds degrees and certificates in Transpersonal Psychology, Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Religion, Hypnotherapy and Transformational Healing. She has spent over 25 years studying spiritual, therapeutic and meditative techniques from around the world, working with master teachers of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Sufism as well as expert shamanic practitioners from the traditions of Hawaii, indigenous North and South America, Siberia and Nepal.
Dr. Gucciardi is the founding director of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization and resource center whose mission is to help individuals create their own pathways to wholeness. To that end, the foundation teaches workshops in a number of innovative healing methodologies, including Depth Hypnosis, the groundbreaking therapeutic modality developed by Dr. Gucciardi herself. By synthesizing key principles of shamanism, Buddhism, energy medicine, hypnotherapy and transpersonal psychology, Depth Hypnosis brings the ancient healing wisdom of many cultures to the unique imbalances of contemporary Western society – providing a vehicle that relieves suffering, engenders transformation, and profoundly alters peoples’ understanding of themselves.
Dr. Gucciardi was interviewed on a plane en route to Kona, Hawaii, where she was scheduled to teach a weeklong workshop on traditional Hawaiian shamanic techniques -- adapted, in Gucciardi’s inimitable way, to address the needs and perspectives of contemporary non-Hawiiians. As the plane took off, we settled back in our seats to discuss her perspectives on inner and outer experience, transformation and healing.
Why and how did you develop the therapeutic model you call Depth Hypnosis?
Gucciardi: I’ve always had an unquenchable desire to understand the mystery of what the self really is, and what suffering is, and how it can be transformed. That’s the holy grail I’ve pursued throughout my life, and it led me into an intensive study of different cultures and religions -- because each one offers a different prism through which to view reality and the self.
On a personal level, I was struggling with my own pain coming out of a tremendously dysfunctional childhood, and finding that traditional psychotherapy wasn’t working for me at all. In fact, staying in the realm of the conscious mind seemed almost completely useless to me, because so much of my experience lay beyond what my conscious mind could understand or even conceptualize.
As part of my search for methods to relieve my own suffering, I discovered hypnotherapy and found it helpful -- because of how it used the mechanism of an altered state to tap into information held in deeper parts of the self. It was a mode of therapy which went beyond the purely cognitive. Yet its also struck me as limited, because it was essentially using the principles and understandings of the cognitive mind in order to modify the other levels of the being; essentially, it seemed to me like behavior modification for the subconscious mind. I found myself rebelling against the controlling aspect of the hypnotic suggestions and Ericksonian techniques. I knew I wanted a therapy that would bring me back into contact with my authentic self, rather than merely masking or manipulating my symptoms.
In my academic studies in Anthropology and Comparative Religion, I was seeking to understand the human condition, and in particular, the way in which acculturation patterns take people away from knowing who they are. Through working in those fields I developed a lot of tools for distinguishing between cultural overlay and authentic individual experience. Studying so many religious and spiritual traditions deepened my understanding of what I call the “sacred stream” – the mystical current underlying all religions. It’s amazing how much commonality you find across diverse spiritual traditions, when you dig deeply enough. Yet I also found that most religious frameworks had such a strong cultural overlay that their ability to help lead people back to themselves was severely limited.
Out of everything I studied, Buddhism and shamanism seemed to me to offer the clearest paths to the self. So as I developed Depth Hypnosis, I made use of key components from each of the helpful systems of thought and techniques I had encountered. Basically, I drew energy management techniques from shamanism, an understanding of the nature of suffering from Buddhism, and techniques for altering the state of consciousness from hypnotherapy. Along the way I went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology; then I used that field as a bed in which to seat the therapeutic technique.
It sounds as though both your personal and professional backgrounds made you uniquely suited to develop a healing modality like Depth Hypnosis. Could you talk a little more about your early influences?
Gucciardi: There were two very strong early influences in my childhood. One of those was the complete and utter dysfunction of the family I was born into. My birth family situation was like a university of suffering. It taught me a tremendous amount about how far people can be twisted away from who they really are, how much misery is created when people have lost contact with their own authentic expression, and how much damage they can do to other people as a result.
The other strong influence from my childhood was that I moved around almost constantly. By the time I was 18 I had lived in Hawaii, Mexico and Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, as well as various parts of the continental United States. And as I moved from country to country and culture to culture, I couldn’t help noticing how arbitrary the rules, regulations, traditions and expectations about social conduct really were. That observation helped me hone my sense of the aspects of experience – and of the self – that are authentic and consistent across different cultural, linguistic and conceptual boundaries. Although different people and cultures have different ways of perceiving and describing it, that authentic experience is what I would call the mystic stream – that aspect of being that runs through everything, and connects everything.
As a young child I understood myself to be connected to this stream, and I found it enormously rich and sustaining. It was a great mystery to me – both what the stream was, and why other people didn’t seem to feel it. This curiosity led me to want to explore different internal realities, just as I was exploring various external realities by living in so many parts of the world. Studying religious and meditative traditions became a way of traversing a wide variety of internal realities – I could look through each one like a different prism on reality, and then feel inside myself to see what they were speaking to - where they were touching into my inner experience.
Can you describe what that inner experience was like?
Gucciardi: I felt an unshakeable resonance with nature, and a deep longing to go more deeply into that resonance. I also had experiences where time would shift, objects in the external world would shift – there would suddenly be this sparkling light everywhere. I spent a lot of time alone outdoors as a child, and most of my interactions were with plants, trees, and the earth. I became aware of what other people call the spirit world – though I didn’t have that word for it at the time -- through entering into the vibrational fields of the plants, and coming into contact with spirits that had lived on that land at other times. I actually felt more at home with them, and with nature, than I did in the company of humans. Nature provided me with a solace to the emptiness, unhappiness and suffering that was all around me.
Did you grow up in any particular religious or spiritual tradition?
Gucciardi: My family was Episcopalian, and in every generation in my bloodline there’s been a priest in the Anglican or Episcopalian tradition. But I felt no spiritual or mystical understanding in that tradition; what happened there felt completely and utterly irrelevant to my inner experience.
How does Depth Hypnosis work to support clients’ inner experience?
Gucciardi: In my opinion, one of the best things about Depth Hypnosis is that it doesn’t require people to accept any belief system or dogma – it’s purely experiential. The Depth Hypnosis practitioner never imposes a framework on the client; we’re always following the client’s own process, working to help the client’s own experience open up, deepen and expand. When we do what I call the First Trance – where the practitioner leads the client through a process of making contact with their inner guidance, which I define as “that part of the self that has only your highest good as its sole intent,” – people have a tremendous variety of responses. One person’s guide might come in human form; another person might experience the guide as an angel, a dragon, a wolf, a frog, a ray of sunlight filtering through trees, or the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz. The form each person perceives is a product of their own cultural and personality filters. But the interesting thing is that beyond that overlay, I’ve observed peoples’ guides working with them in remarkably similar ways.
How do you work with clients who don’t believe in spirit guides, or who have no spiritual framework at all?
Gucciardi: The vast majority of my clients – probably 95% - have never even considered the concept of a spirit guide. I think it’s important to emphasize that the concept of a guide is really just a reference to an aspect of the self which is larger than, and generally escapes the purview of, the conscious mind. It’s just the vehicle through which the client comes into contact with higher consciousness.
The reason why it doesn’t matter how the client conceives of their inner guidance, or what beliefs they do or don’t hold, is because the Depth Hypnosis practitioner is always seeing the client through the lens of wholeness. The practitioner understands that no matter how broken someone appears, no matter how hidden their source of life energy is, that source is still alive at their core. So in essence, what we are working to do is locate that source within the person and draw it forward, so that the client has a personal, visceral experience of it. We help create an energetic bridge between the intact place in someone, and the broken places. The client may not know that this place of wholeness exists inside them, but because of the training the practitioner has undergone, and the personal work they have done, their faith in it is unshakeable – and we see it proven time and time again. I’ve never worked with anyone who could not ultimately access this aspect of the self, no matter how hidden, buried or layered-over with negativity it was.
What kinds of clientele seek out Depth Hypnosis? And how does the therapeutic process work?
Gucciardi: Most people come into Depth Hypnosis because they’ve grown frustrated with the limitations of other modalities, like “talk therapy.” In Depth Hypnosis, the use of a hypnotic induction to induce a light trance -- basically a state of alert yet focused relaxation -- is key to the therapeutic process. This kind of altered state is nothing like most peoples’ stereotypes about hypnosis, where someone appears to be asleep, or gives their control over to the hypnotherapist. In Depth Hypnosis people are still fully conscious; they’re just in a state where many of their defenses relax, enabling them to move into areas of the psyche that would otherwise be inaccessible.
The most basic catalytic process in Depth Hypnosis is using that light trance state to re-enter a situation, time or place in which trauma occurred. The conscious mind usually spends a lot of time avoiding, suppressing or reacting to those traumas, and while each of these strategies can be useful in certain ways, they ultimately make it impossible for people to heal. In Depth Hypnosis we help people change their relationship to the trauma – not only cognitively, through a technique called Insight Inquiry, but also on a more visceral, experiential level. We’ve seen over and over that when there is a change on this fundamental experiential level, the external symptoms of the trauma will also shift.
For example, a person might seek out hypnotherapy in order to stop smoking. But in Depth Hypnosis it’s understood that the smoking is usually the tip of the iceberg, part of a larger imbalance held more deeply within the self. So the Depth Hypnosis practitioner uses Insight Inquiry to learn more about what function the smoking plays in the client’s life – asking about when they began to smoke, what they feel about smoking and about themselves as smokers, what they would feel or experience if they didn’t smoke. In this way the practitioner follows the client inward to the place of energetic imbalance within the psyche. Then, using hypnotherapeutic and shamanic tools like age regression, soul retrieval, power retrieval, past life regression, prenatal regression, and dream work, the practitioner helps the client effect a change in their internal environment, which will inevitably lead to a change in the external behavior as well.
How does the Depth Hypnosis model differ from traditional psychotherapy?
Gucciardi: Traditional psychotherapy posits the relationship between the therapist and client as the source of healing, but here, the significant relationship is between the client and his or her deeper self. In Depth Hypnosis it’s understood that in some part of their being, the client knows everything – and it’s the practitioner’s job to discover and help reveal what’s there. The Depth Hypnosis practitioner is a conduit for transformational or healing energy, rather than the generator of it.
This gives the Depth Hypnosis practitioner a different kind of responsibility. The preparation and training process is much more focused on removing personal obstacles, so that the practitioner can be as clear a channel as possible for information coming through them -- rather than being the holder of rational empirical models, labels and diagnoses.
The dynamics of projection and transference that you find in traditional psychotherapeutic settings are diminished in this model. It’s also understood that the client is responsible for their own healing – the practitioner is there to help, but never to take responsibility for anyone else’s process.
You mentioned past-life regression. How would you work with someone who didn’t believe in past lives?
Gucciardi: Once again, the concept of a past life simply points to a larger breadth of experience than what is commonly held by the conscious mind. You can look at a “past life” as a metaphor which holds certain emotions and energies that the person is not in contact with, or doesn’t identify as belonging to them. Even if someone doesn’t believe in reincarnation, the past life scenarios that emerge provide a way for them to enter into aspects of themselves which they had denied or forgotten – to touch into emotions and mental concepts that they’ve ignored or overlooked, but which may actually be running their experience in their daily lives. I’ll give you an example – I had a client who was a very proper, prim, well-behaved, well-put-together woman. She did a lot of church work, and felt she was on a spiritual path of goodness, kindness and light. But she got these terrible migraines, and that’s what brought her to me. When we entered into a Depth Hypnosis process to get to the root of the migraines, she was brought into a past life situation – which at first she didn’t recognize as such. She gradually realized that she was in a scene in a Victorian parlor, where she was one of two brothers in love with the same woman. The woman was announcing to my client that she was going to marry the other brother. The brother whom my client felt herself to be then flew into a jealous rage and tried to murder both of them. As my client went through this experience, she was feeling the jealousy, hatred and powerlessness that her self-concept – on a conscious mind level – would never allow. Because she had touched into these emotions, she was later able, in an age regression, to establish where she had felt similar feelings in her current life experience, which was a situation that she had long denied and completely forgotten.
In subsequent sessions we were able to change her relationship to that situation, and her migraines disappeared. So, was the “past life” real? Or was it a theater piece formulated by some other level of the self, as a way to lead my client toward the suppressed emotions that were making her sick? From the standpoint of Depth Hypnosis, it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter whether her memory of the situation we revisited in the age regression was completely accurate. What matters is that she had shut away certain feelings and aspects of her being – she had absolutely no conscious access to them – and being cut off from herself in that way was doing damage to her. And by reconnecting with herself, through the work we did, she could heal.
Could you talk a little more about how Depth Hypnosis draws from Buddhism?
Gucciardi: Buddhism understands that all suffering arises from desire, ignorance or aversion, so in Depth Hypnosis the practitioner is always tuning in to see what clients are desiring, what they are unaware of, and what they’re avoiding. The Buddhist concept of fierce compassion is also very important to this work. Depth Hypnosis provides a compassionate holding of all phenomena – but also an understanding that each person is completely responsible for the reality they’re living in. The “mind only” school of Buddhism holds that our personal realities are literally generated by our minds – we create and experience exactly what we believe and imagine. So you have to understand your own mind, in order to understand how you generate reality – and if you want your external reality to shift, you have to start by shifting your internal experience. If you have the power to generate a negative reality, you also have the power to generate a positive reality.
But then how do you explain the challenges and traumas people face in childhood – like your own childhood, for example? How did you “create” the negative reality you were born into?
Gucciardi: There are various ways to think about this issue. From the perspective of spiritual growth, I would look at the difference between the needs of the personality and the needs of the soul. On a personality level, things happen to each one of us that absolutely should not have happened. On that level, there is no justification for abuse, neglect and cruelty. But on a soul level, there are always lessons to be learned. People who hold the paradigm of multiple lifetimes might argue that each time around, our soul chooses or creates a given set of circumstances, in order to keep working on those lessons.
But even without adopting that kind of expanded framework, it’s important to look at the realities that people are creating for themselves now. Most of my clients in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond are still generating realities based on their earliest painful experiences within their families. So it often seems to them as if that reality is the only possible experience they can have – and that isn’t the case at all. When the Depth Hypnosis practitioner helps them unblock the energies which have coagulated into those old patterns, their inner and outer lives can change dramatically.
What techniques does Depth Hypnosis use to “unblock” those energies? Is that where shamanism comes in?
Gucciardi: Yes – because shamanism provides ancient and very powerful methodologies for transforming and catalyzing stuck energy, as well as ways to infuse the psyche with energies that create benefit and positive change. In shamanism, it’s understood that all of the “symptoms” people experience – whether they manifest on a mental level, like phobias or compulsions, on an emotional level, like depression or anxiety, or on a physical level in the form of illnesses – are caused by imbalances. And all imbalances arise from three basic causes: soul loss, power loss or energetic interference. So the Depth Hypnosis practitioner is always looking for the situations or circumstances in which any of these conditions may have arisen; then they can be addressed through soul retrieval, power retrieval, and energetic extraction.
Tremendous numbers of Americans suffer from having a harsh “inner critic,” or a pervasive feeling of self-hatred. What do you think accounts for this phenomenon, and how does Depth Hypnosis work with it?
Gucciardi: We tend to think of ourselves as a single unit – “me” -- but in fact we’re made up of a lot of different energies and facets. This becomes immediately obvious in the kinds of statements people make, like “I don’t like myself,” or “I don’t treat myself very well.” Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I immediately want to look to see who is the “I” in the statement, and who is the “self” that is being disliked or treated poorly.
I remember hearing an interview with one of my personal heroes, the translator for the Dalai Lama. He was asked what had been the most difficult concept for him to translate from English into Tibetan, and it was the concept of self-loathing. When he tried to translate it, the Dalai Lama couldn’t understand it - he kept trying to correct him, saying it was impossible for the self to loathe itself. I think the fact that this man who is one of the most erudite men on the planet, couldn’t understand this concept which is so familiar to Westerners, actually shows just how far the Western mind has gone in its attack on itself.
Depth Hypnosis offers many ways of working with this issue; there’s no cookie-cutter answer, but we always start by following the self-loathing deep into its lair in the psyche, so we can understand and transform it at its source. One thing the practitioner does is establish a means of interacting directly with the “inner critic,” to gain insight and understanding about what it’s trying to accomplish, prevent or achieve. Often its original purpose turns out to be quite different from its current expression; for instance, in many people this kind of pattern began as a way to protect themselves from a parent’s anger or judgment, but by the time they come to therapy it’s become as bad or worse than the parent ever was. Very often it’s a key part of the defense system people have set up around their core wounding – like a dragon guarding the moat around the castle. Once we understand what role it’s playing, it becomes much easier to either transform or release it, whichever is most appropriate.
Since we’re talking about the psychological maladies so prevalent in the West at this time, I also wanted to ask you what you think about the widespread use of antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, and similar medications.
Gucciardi: I think antidepressants can be helpful in stabilizing a person if they’re really out of control, but I believe they should be used sparingly and only in situations where someone can’t get at their issues otherwise, because of the level of panic or anxiety they’re experiencing. Currently, antidepressants are being prescribed far too frequently. I think there may be situations where there really is a chemical imbalance which can’t be affected by a catalytic therapeutic intervention like Depth Hypnosis, but if those cases exist, they’d be a very small minority. Candace Pert’s work on the molecules of emotion indicates a stronger and stronger link between the ways we think, and the chemicals we produce to run our physical systems. If we’re out of balance chemically it’s likely that that imbalance, in most cases, can be affected by a change in the way we perceive and generate reality.
The other thing, of course, is that ultimately, the depression, panic or anxiety is an important symptom people need to pay attention to in order to find their way back to themselves. So the danger of using these types of medications long-term is that they mask the symptoms, the psyche’s cries for help, and make it more comfortable for someone to live a half-life.
I think prescribing antidepressants for children is unconscionable; it’s the medical establishment’s way of supporting dysfunction within families and allowing parents to evade responsibility for the fact that they’re not giving their children what they need. The respected psychiatrist R.L. Moscher resigned his membership in the A.P.A. in 1998, citing what he called an “unholy alliance” between psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies. I’m very concerned about that alliance, and where it’s taking us as a culture.
Someone I know told me that early on in her work with you, you regressed her back to a childhood scene in which there was an emotionally incestuous dynamic with her father – although no overt abuse occurred. What was most striking to her was that in the weeks that followed, all of the sexual fantasies she had had for many years suddenly lost their charge. Even though the fantasies hadn’t been about her father, and she had not had any agenda around changing the fantasies, her visceral experience of what “turned her on” had actually changed. How would you explain this?
Gucciardi: I think most of us don’t understand how connected our internal and external realities are. We generally think there’s a big wall between what happens inside us and outside us. Most of us also don’t understand the power of our fantasies, and the ways in which our fantasies keep alive energetic patterns, mental concepts and emotional responses, the source of which may be long forgotten to us. In the case of this client, her fantasies had been keeping alive, without her realizing it, the patterns held in that emotionally incestuous situation. She had not consciously connected the two, but the connection was there. So when she dealt with the situation and shifted the energy in that, the fantasies were no longer needed – because there was no more need to keep those responses and concepts and energetic patterns alive.
Essentially, what’s going on almost all the time, with almost everything we experience, is a way in which one part of the self tries to remember what another part of the self is trying to forget. This is because there is a relentless drive toward wholeness inside every one of us. So, one function of fantasies is to keep certain aspects of the self alive, which are not allowed to express externally. Dreams are very similar in this way. Many Jungians tend to get hung up on the symbolic meanings and intellectual interpretations of symbols in dreams, but I actually think they’re more efficiently read and understood by looking at the underlying energetic patterns they reveal, and the responses they evoke. We’re often very disturbed by our dreams because they evoke things we’ve tried to forget. But if we can enter into the energetic fields these dreams or fantasies point us toward, and follow them to their root, a great deal of healing can take place.
Can you tell me a little more about the Foundation of the Sacred Stream? Where does its name come from, and what does the foundation do?
Gucciardi: The name, the Foundation of the Sacred Stream articulates the purpose of the foundation, which is to reveal the mystic stream at the heart of all spiritual traditions.
Initially I created the Foundation as a vehicle for teaching Depth Hypnosis to other people, because I was drowning in my client load. Even if I saw 30 people per week, I generally had 40 to 50 per week who wanted to come. I realized if I taught other people how to do this, those people could be served. Then as I started to teach the basic techniques, I realized there was a lot more to what I was doing than I had articulated to myself – so the Depth Hypnosis Certification Program grew from a basic course to a much more comprehensive program of study. I also realized I needed to teach much more about core shamanic healing techniques, because those techniques catalyze so much of what happens in Depth Hypnosis. Then I realized that practitioners needed to be able to understand the deeper level of the imbalances at work, so I created the Energy Medicine program to help give people a jump start on the information it had taken me years to glean through my work with clients.
Currently the Foundation offers four main training programs – Depth Hypnosis, Applied Shamanism, and Integrated Energy Medicine and Buddhist Psychology Studies in addition to several Destination Studies programs – where we study the traditions of Huna on the Big Island of Hawaii and pre-Druidic knowledge bases in Orkney, Scotland.
The Depth Hypnosis program is the most comprehensive, and incorporates many aspects of the other two programs. We also offer various free lectures, and host a free quarterly drumming circles in San Francisco. Basically, we’re trying to provide a variety of different ways for people to tap into these transformational methodologies, at whatever level of commitment they choose. There’s a growing demand for our programs; we recently became licensed to offer continuing education units (CEUs) for Marriage and Family Therapists, social workers, and drug and alcohol counselors in California, so many mental health professionals are taking our classes and incorporating our work into their existing frameworks. I’m also starting to teach in Canada and on the East Coast. I’m committed to teaching these techniques to as many people as I can, because there’s so much suffering on the planet right now, and so much work to be done.
Another one of the Foundation’s stated missions is to host guest teachers from other traditions. It’s very important to me personally to be able to expose people to teachers who I feel genuinely articulate a vision of the mystic stream that runs through all artistic, therapeutic and spiritual traditions. Recently we hosted Lama Lobsang, a Tulku from Tibet who is also a doctor of Tibetan medicine, for his first teachings in the United States.
Tell me about the people you’ve trained as Depth Hypnosis practitioners. What kinds of people choose to study this kind of work? And how can people operating in a mainstream context make use of these techniques?
Gucciardi: Most people who are drawn to Depth Hypnosis as practitioners have been exposed to other therapeutic models – whether as practitioners, clients, or both - which have had limited success. They are generally people who have a strong desire to understand themselves at a deep level, to try to give meaning to their experience no matter how difficult it may be. They are often people to whom service is important, who are seeking more effective ways to help create change in the world, as well as in their own lives. Many of my students take Depth Hypnosis techniques back to their own professional modalities, whether in a therapeutic paradigm, a teaching paradigm, or any other helping profession. My students range in age from their early 20s through their 70s; they’re men and women, people from a wide variety of different professions and life experiences. For instance, in recent classes we’ve had quite a few therapists, but we’ve also had a high school teacher, a professional musician, a college professor, a business consultant, a computer programmer, a retired law enforcement agent, a retired high school administrator, the head of a prison education system, a web designer, an attorney, an air traffic controller, a management consultant and an accupuncturist. Many people enter into the Depth Hypnosis Certification Program even if they’re not planning to become hypnotherapists, because of the depth of transformation that occurs as part of the program. Essentially, the program teaches people how to change the way they perceive and create their own reality – so as you can imagine, this has far-reaching implications for all the different aspects of peoples’ lives.
It sounds like from an early age, you accessed some fairly unusual perceptual abilities. How is it possible for you to teach Depth Hypnosis to people who don’t share those abilities?
Gucciardi: Depth Hypnosis is based on a way of understanding the world, and of looking beneath the surface to see the underlying energetic patterns in peoples’ lives. These perspectives and skills can be effectively learned by almost anyone who wants to learn them.
As we’ve already discussed, Depth Hypnosis understands that the client already has everything he or she needs in order to stop suffering. It’s not the practitioner’s job to come up with the solutions – regardless of whether those solutions come from textbooks or from psychic abilities. Instead, the practitioner’s job is to create a context and a means for the client to explore aspects of themselves that they may have been unaware of – to help them open up those territories of the self where the answers will be found. So the practitioner doesn’t need to be “psychic,” they just need to be able to listen and question attentively, and follow the trails which are revealed.
Tell me about the course you’re on your way to teach right now.
Gucciardi: I’ll be on the Big Island of Hawaii, teaching a class on the Huna tradition, the original shamanic tradition of Hawaii. We’ll be looking at the energetic processes that go on beneath the level of physical manifestation, learning how to perceive and alter them so we can understand and change the way we generate reality. The reason why I teach this in Hawaii is because the traditional Kahuna (Hawaiian shamans) were masters of manifestation. But one of the major aspects of the tradition is its strong emphasis on forgiveness as a method of transformation, and we’ll be exploring that, along with doing some work on lies, judgments and truth-telling. We’ll also be doing shamanic journeys – active meditations – at sites around the Big Island where Kahuna have traditionally gone to learn directly from the spirits of nature. So the class is both physically and internally a return to the source of experience.
Given the dark times we are living in, politically and socially, how would you respond to critics who might say that any form of therapeutic work is basically navel-gazing – that we need to be working to change things on a social level, instead? What do you believe is the relationship between individual healing and transformation, and social transformation?
Gucciardi: In a recent interview I read with a leader of the Sufi order in Iraq, I was impressed with his response to a question regarding whether or not the Sufis would fight in a war. He said, “The only enemy we fight is the enemy of the ego.” And I think Depth Hypnosis is engaged in that same fight. I believe that an internal revolution must occur before there can be an external revolution. People who are all twisted up by their own denied, distorted jealousy, rage and fear can’t lead societies toward peace, no matter how well-intentioned they are on a conscious level. So what Depth Hypnosis provides is a dynamic and direct way of transforming our core negativity, so we can begin to generate external reality in a different way. All the wars and starvation and torture that are taking place are a result of what goes on on an internal level, inside peoples’ minds. If people were generating a more peaceful internal reality, the external reality would become more peaceful – there’s no way that could fail to happen, and there’s no other way it can happen. The Dalai Lama speaks to this very clearly in his lectures, where he talks about how an external peace is predicated on an internal peace.
One of the main reasons I started the Foundation of the Sacred Stream was to help Depth Hypnosis and related work reach more people who need it – because I feel it can provide a very valuable service to the world, especially in times like these. This work is not in any sense disengaged from the world. We’re engaging with peoples’ negativity in a very real and uncompromising way, to help people change the way they create their lives.