Category: Birth
On the Air: Kindred Media: The New Return to the Great Mother with Isa Gucciardi
In this interview, Kindred Media’s editor, Lisa Reagan, talks with Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. about the seven life initiations needed to move into our full state of wholeness and our full potential for thriving – and what happens when these initiations are broken, interrupted, or culturally unacknowledged. Isa shares her considerable insight into how we are thwarted from completing our seven initiations, and how we can reclaim, and even heal, our innate paths to flourishing.
On the Air: Birth Ease Loss Support Podcast: Episode 24: Grief, Loss, and The Great Mother with Isa Gucciardi
In this interview with Birth Ease Loss Support Podcast host Michelle Smith, Isa Gucciardi provides insights from her over twenty-five years of experience in supporting the bereaved. She shares the initiations that women experience throughout their lifetime which include our own birth, puberty, menses, the first sexual experience with another person, giving birth, menopause, and death. Isa explains the Great Mother as a source of wisdom, creative intelligence, and nurturing that can bring comfort and healing into the journey and complexity of grief. Isa and Michelle also discuss holistic ways to support the grief process such as plants, herbal sprays, homeopathic remedies, and meditation.
On the Air: Our Birth Journey: The New Return to the Great Mother
On the Air: Our Birth Journey: The New Return to the Great Mother In this conversation with Our Birth Journey, Isa Gucciardi discusses the topics covered in her newest book, The New Return to the Great Mother, which include understanding birth as an important initiatory moment and understanding the importance of a connection to inner […]
On the Air: APPPAH Monday Live: The New Return to the Great Mother with Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
APPPAH Monday Live host Catherine Lightfoot is joined by Isa Gucciardi to discuss Isa’s acclaimed book, The New Return to the Great Mother. Offering a fresh perspective on birthing as a sacred initiatory process, The New Return to the Great Mother confirms the healing implications of this viewpoint with inspiring true stories, and offers up helpful tools and exercises for connecting with the wisdom and power of the Great Mother.
On the Air: Well, Actually… Podcast: A Conversation About The New Return to the Great Mother with Author Isa Gucciardi
Isa is the author of The New Return to the Great Mother: Birth, Initiation, and the Sacred Feminine and I had her on the podcast to share more about how we might implement these incredible tools and perspectives into the work we are doing as mothers, doulas and midwives. Join us as we explore Isa’s background, including her experience during the ’70s and ’80s during the renaissance of home birth, her birth experiences as a medical interpreter, and how her meditation for connecting with The Great Mother has impacted many thousands of women already. I am really excited to have her book to hand out to clients at the first visit, so that she can come to her second visit ready to more explore her relationship with her body, her spirituality, and the initiations she has already been through. All so that we can help her ready and steady herself as she prepares for BIRTH, one of the most intense initiations of all.
On the Air: The Birth Ease Podcast: Episode 100: The Great Mother with Isa Gucciardi
In celebration of the 100th episode of The Birth Ease Podcast, host Michelle Smith and Isa Gucciardi discuss Isa’s new book, The New Return to the Great Mother: Birth, Initiation, and the Sacred Feminine. Isa shares about her experience of meeting the Great Mother while giving birth to her child and how she became an early advocate for birthing women.
Isa’s passion is to help women understand that birth is one of many biological initiations that she goes through over the course of her life. These initiations include our own birth, puberty, menses, the first sexual experience with another person, giving birth, menopause, and death. Birth is the movement of the seen and the unseen and the Great Mother mediates all creative processes. Isa explains how everyone can connect with and perceive the Great Mother as this source of wisdom, creative intelligence, nurturing, and healing and bring this awareness into everyday life.
Podcast: Episode 74: Isa Gucciardi: The New Return to the Great Mother
On this episode, Laura Chandler is joined by writer, teacher, and co-founder of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, Isa Gucciardi Ph.D., and they are talking about her latest book, The New Return to the Great Mother: Birth, Initiation, and the Sacred Feminine. The book is an updated and expanded version of Isa’s acclaimed book, Return to the Great Mother. In this new edition, Isa offers a fresh perspective on birthing as a sacred initiatory process. She takes the reader on a journey to rediscover the transformative feminine power at the heart of childbirth and teaches methods of tapping into this ancient wellspring of power to create a birthing experience that is deeply intuitive and empowering. The book is filled with inspiring true stories, and helpful tools and exercises for connecting with the wisdom and power of the Great Mother.
On the Air: Chitheads Podcast: Episode #133: Isa Gucciardi on Birth & Initiations
In the mid-nineties, Isa Gucciardi began developing Depth Hypnosis as she entered into clinical practice. Her studies, both in academia and in the field of cultural and linguistic anthropology, comparative religion, and transpersonal psychology formed the basis of her approach with clients and students. As the body of work that grew out of her clinical practice became larger, she began teaching others so that more people could benefit from the techniques she had developed. In order to accommodate the number of classes that grew out of this process, she co-founded the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, which is now a school for consciousness studies in Berkeley, California, serving hundreds of students each year. Isa teaches and speaks nationally and internationally, and she has published numerous articles, podcast episodes, videos, and the books Return to the Great Mother and Coming to Peace. She maintains a private practice with institutions and individuals in Depth Hypnosis and Coming to Peace processes. Isa speaks five languages and has lived in eleven countries. She is the mother of two children and lives with her partner in San Francisco.
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.
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: Overcoming Denial: Part 2
By Denise Colby
If we have been in deep denial about some aspect of our experience, the revelation of truth will at first be a painful one. Truth will make its entrance in ways that will seem quite disturbing—intrusive thoughts, nightmares, innocuous interactions producing strong emotions, or a general feeling that one is “not OK.” It is at this juncture that we come to a choice: we can stay in denial and find external reasons to justify our internal experience, numbing and modulating using whatever coping mechanisms we have, or we can claim our internal experience as something uniquely personal and get very curious about it.
There are many roads out of denial, but at some point we will have to choose to validate what our body and reactivity is saying over the story we’ve been telling ourselves. This breaking down of an old story — the acknowledgement that we’ve been telling ourselves a false story our whole lives — provides the crack where the light of truth can finally break through to our awareness.
Blog: The Great Feminine: An Excerpt from Return to the Great Mother
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
The concept of a Great Feminine principle is common to many cultural and religious traditions. The icon of the Great Feminine is viewed in these traditions as the generator and caretaker of life. The images of the Great Feminine vary from tradition to tradition, but the values and qualities of these images are surprisingly consistent. Whatever her form, she is always considered a protector and guardian of life.
Article: Who is Tara?
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
One of the oldest Stone Age artifacts that has been recovered is a small statue of a full-bodied woman carved from limestone. The statue was named the Woman of Willendorf, after the small village where it was found in southern Austria, and is estimated to be around thirty thousand years old. Many similar statues dating to the early Stone Age have been discovered throughout Europe and beyond. Expressions of the feminine have been found in the art, mythologies and spiritual practices of many ancient cultures, often represented in the form of female deities and goddesses.
Ancient images of Quan Yin, the goddess of mercy, have been found in China, Korea, Thailand and throughout southern Asia. Pachamama, the goddess of the Earth and time, has long been depicted in the traditions of the Andes Mountains of South America in stories and art. Long before Mary, the embodiment of the great feminine in Christianity, Middle Eastern and African cultures revered Isis, who presided over the other gods, life, and death. Images of Kunapipi and Eingana, the mother goddesses of the Australian aboriginal cultures, have been found in rock art dating back at least ten thousand years.
Article: Mothering and Matriarchy
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Matriarchal societies are organized by maternal priorities, meaning all members are cared for in a nurturing and supportive way. To create communities rooted in these values, both men and women must change their fundamental relationship to mothering and motherhood.This shift must go beyond the rhetoric of early feminists who decried the second-class position mothering placed on women, and who sought to liberate women from the prison of the culturally-defined institution of motherhood. Instead, we must recognize the power of motherhood independent of any cultural value systems where mothering becomes a pawn of dominance and ownership. To do this, we must understand how our inability to nurture ourselves and others has weakened us, both on a societal and an individual level.
Blog: Encountering the Great Mother in the Birth Environment
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
To understand the essence of the Great Mother, it is helpful to look to the earth. From the moment we are born until the moment we die, we are held in the earth’s embrace, and it has many valuable lessons to offer us about motherhood. The earth is abundant, nurturing, unyielding, and adapting. The Great Mother is the embodiment of these qualities, offering us tremendous teachings about the mutuality of experience in the natural world.
You can find the power of the Great Mother expressed in the many mother goddesses appearing in different cultures around the world — Pachamama in the Andes, Tara in the Himalayas, Quan Yin in China, Isis in ancient Egypt, and Hera, Thera and Athena in Greece and Rome. There is a widespread understanding among different cultures about the importance and necessity of being in alignment with the power of the Great Mother, not only to bring forth life but also to nurture life in a way that is beneficial for everyone.
Despite a lack of understanding about mothering and matriarchal priorities in the west, the power of the Great Mother is accessible to women in the modern time. By connecting with this power, women can sustain themselves no matter what is happening in their birth process. Women can use their connection with this power to receive guidance and to understand the deeper meaning of their experience.