Category: Empowered Living
Article: Ho’oponopono: Making Right
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Ho’oponopono is a Hawaiian word which refers to a process of mediation which has been used to bring peace among family and community members in Hawaii for centuries. Ho’oponopono is a key component of the larger school of psychology and healing called Huna.
Huna is a very ancient psychology, which has roots in mystery schools beyond the Hawaiian Islands. Many of the important elements of these mystery schools were relatively well preserved within the shamanic practices of Hawaii until the arrival of Christian missionaries in the early nineteenth century.
Podcast: Episode 14: Aligning Personal Will
Aligning personal will with the field of universal potential means being open to what is happening, including some things that are difficult, that you might not have wanted to happen, that you would have fought strongly against and resisted. But fighting strongly separates you from the support you would receive from being part of the larger creative potential. In this episode, Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. discusses the nature of personal will and the power that comes from aligning the will with universal potential.
Podcast: Episode 12: The Role of Healer and Universal Flow
In the training programs offered by Sacred Stream, healers are shown how to get their own personal energy system configured so that it can participate as fully as possible in the larger universal flow of experience which is all around us and in which human beings’ experience exists. In these two excerpts from talks given in Rhode Island in July 2010, Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. discusses the role of healer and the nature of universal flow, how healers can work with it, and what people need to do in order to align with it.
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: How to Prepare for 2012 and Beyond
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
As 2012 approaches, more and more people are wondering what is needed to be able to meet the demands of the changes that are prophesied for the winter solstice on December 22, 2012. This date refers to the time when many ancient calendars either run out, or have a shift that creates a dramatic change to the world as we know it.
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.
Podcast: Episode 04: Understanding Dreams
Dreams serve many different functions in an individual’s psychic life, and many theories have been put forward as to what those functions are. Carl Jung points to their function as a field of transformation of the self. Dreams are at the heart of the processes in the Depth Hypnosis model. When a person comes into counseling in Depth Hypnosis, one of the first things that might be asked of them is that they keep track of their dreams. The dreams will generally give the practitioner information about where the person needs to go or how the person is approaching the work. In this excerpt from a 2009 lecture on dreams, Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. discusses dream interpretation, with a brief overview of the history of how ancient cultures viewed and worked with dreams.
Podcast: Episode 02: Rituals: Understanding and Application
Rituals provide pathways between one world and another, often through transitions, access, or a change in the environment. Regular practices that many of us do after waking up–for instance, putting on glasses, drinking water, or putting on a robe–are rituals that help us transfer our consciousness from sleeping to waking. There are many kinds of rituals, and ways to use them. In this excerpt from a 2009 talk, Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D. gives an overview of the nature of rituals, their significance in contemporary Western culture and how to work with them in your own life.
Podcast: Episode 01: The Nature of Relationships
It is through our relationships that we come to know who we are. One of the principles of Depth Hypnosis is that we are all teachers to one another; all of our interactions with others reflect our relationship to our deeper self. Most of us come into this life with misconceptions about the nature of who we are and disruptions in the relationship with our deeper self and with the universal flow. By engaging in relationship with others we come to see where these disruptions are. In this excerpt from a Relationship and Power workshop, Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D., offers examples of hidden aspects of relationship that lie beneath more obvious relationship dynamics. She also discusses co-dependence.
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.