Category: Shadow (Jung)
Blog: Exploring the Unknown: Dreams
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
I have been a guest lecturer in the Integral Medicine class at the University of California at Berkeley every year for the last ten years or so. Sometimes I lecture on alternative therapies like Depth Hypnosis, and sometimes on methods of healing that are found in shamanic cultures. During the past few years’ lectures, the students have really perked up when I have talked about the way in which dreams are viewed in shamanic cultures. The students are always surprised to hear someone actually talk about their dreams as being an important aspect of their experience.
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.
Article: Opening the Doors to the Self – Habits
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
Given the few opportunities to experience ourselves authentically at a soul level in most modern Western cultures, where are we to find an opening to the pathways to the sacred experience of ourselves? The doorways which hypnosis opens for us to begin the journey to the experience of ourselves at a soul level are numerous. They are most often found in unexpected places: in “bad” habits, phobias, panic, compulsive or imbalanced behaviors, and even physical pain.