So we are here at the Sacred Stream Center in the garden with Isa Gucciardi – the founding director of the Sacred Stream Center. Welcome! Thank you! It’s wonderful to be here with you. I am really looking forward to this, and I wanted to ask you, what was the impetus of bringing shamanic healing techniques and the shamanic journey into therapeutic practice? Well, when I started working in a therapeutic setting, one of the things that I saw was that people were having trouble accessing different parts of themselves that had answers to their issues, and one of my philosophy is always been that people actually know what they need, they just can’t find it within themselves. So working with an altered state generally is a really good way to get beyond the conscious mind to find answers to conundrums or problems that people are dealing with on a daily basis. And people who try to meditate in order to calm their minds, in order to be able to look within often gets stuck on trying to get their minds to settle, and you can spend months and months trying to get your mind to come to an even place so that you can actually use your mind to look within in order to discover that which lies there within to help you. And one of the things about the journey is that it is quite focused and if you are working with it in a disciplined way, you can bring that discipline into the focusing of your intelligence into the deeper parts of yourself in a very practical and dynamic way. And so working with the journey, developing a question that has a particular connection to the conundrum at hand, keeping your mind focused on the question as you go into this inner world that all journeys traverse is a very practical and useful way to work, and it helps people access deeper wisdom at a very actually easy way. And you have actually kind of pioneered a way of working with the journey and the therapeutic practice. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yes, you know when I was learning how to journey, there was really not like this big idea about what you are actually doing with that information. You are journeying as shamanic practitioner always have from millennia to connect with power in the form of nature, but there really wasn’t an idea about what you would do with that power. You know you would connect with the teacher, connect with the guide in the form of nature, and in shamanism this is often called a part of the self that has wisdom or part of the self that has some kind of helping attitude, and in traditional shamanic practice, this part of the self is often referred to as a spirit, and in modern times, of course, that idea of spirit is a little bit hard to digest for some people. And so staying with the idea that you are connecting with a part of the self that has wisdom is a very helpful way to work. So, when you started working with the journey in your therapeutic practice, it’s quite some time ago, and how was it received? How were people thinking about that when you started to introduce that? Well, people were not crazy about using the journey therapeutically. As I said, people thought about using the journey to connect with a teacher or a guide with… you know perhaps the guide will help you solve a problem or help you gather power, which is, of course, the more traditional way of working with the journey, but there isn’t this idea that you can work with the journey in order to develop self-awareness, and I really felt that we could combine some of the processes that you find in meditative practices with the journey in order to create a very dynamic and catalytic way of self-transformations, so you don’t have to spend all the hours and hours in shamanic meditation in order to be able to move into possum of meditation. We can simply work with focus, discipline with the question of going into the journey. So we worked with the journey in a way that develops self-awareness, and we worked with the journey in a way where we built question upon question based on the answers that we receive from one journey, and we take that question into the next journey. And so we create sort of a process of repelling into an issue with the journey that brings quite a bit of deep insight into a particular issue that might be blocking one’s awareness. And I guess specifically I wanted to know how shamanic practitioners were responding and how therapists were responding? Most shamanic practitioners did not think it was a good idea; I was actually warned off by some very well-known shamanic practitioners. They were actually afraid of bringing this into the therapeutic setting because they felt that this might be considered to be practicing medicine without a license or something like that. And therapeutic practitioners were definitely not interested in working with the journey at the beginning because they felt it was outside of therapeutic process, and they really didn’t understand how the journey was going to be able to support therapeutic process. And I think it’s really just a matter of not understanding what the journey was, and how to work with it in a way that I was working with it. So now things have changed quite a bit, therapists… you actually train therapists to work with the journey and other methods that you have developed and your therapeutic model Depth Hypnosis. Can you talk a little bit about what inspired you to put Depth Hypnosis together? Well, one of the things that I saw as I sat down to work with the straight ahead hypnotherapy with people was that there wasn’t enough catalytic process to change the negativity that people were dealing with, and in shamanic practice, you have the work of soul retrieval, the work of power retrieval, the work of soul part exchange – these are catalytic processes that are generally mediated by the shaman, and what I wanted to do is I wanted to make the client their own shaman. I wanted to bring the power of process to the client, so the journey is a very good way to do that, and also what I did was, I adopted the journey into a hypnotherapeutic process so that the client could be guided and assisted in a way that they are not normally assisted by a person in a body in the journey, and this made all of the difference. It made all of the power of shamanic healing almost immediately available to clients, and I was able to really create a much deeper process which is why I called it Depth Hypnosis because it goes… you are able to go deeply within the self. You wrote your doctoral dissertation on dreams, and you have a really unique perspective on dreams, and I am wondering if you can talk a little bit about how how dreams kind of intersect with the shamanic journey or shamanic practices? Well, in traditional setting shamans are often recognized as shamans because of their capacity to dream. So dreams in shamanic practice has always had a strong connection. Again, in shamanic practice there is not an emphasis on self-development, and in the dream work we do in Depth Hypnosis, the dreams are all about receiving messages that help with increasing self-awareness, and so what we do is something that is quite unique, you don’t see this in other shamanic practices or in any other therapeutic practice that I know of, where you can actually begin to work an issue, so you start looking into a question… let’s say you have a question on you know what’s keeping me from feeling as motivated as I need to be in order to be able to accomplish this goal, so that would be a question that you would start with in the journey, you would go in and establish a relationship with the helping spirit or a guide within yourself, and then you would go in and ask this question – what’s keeping me from being motivated? You get the answer. You get some interesting answers. You know there could be that you are waiting for someone else to do it for you. It could be that you are afraid of failing. It could be you are afraid of succeeding. It could be any answers that you might get, then you take that question into your dream life, and as you are going to sleep at night, you check in with your guide, and you are asking, can you give me some perspective on this issue? What is the basis for this fear of success? So you might have a dream where you have some kind of information that comes through on a time where you saw someone who is very successful, and they had a lot of people who were envious of them and they… and you saw what kind of trouble that brought them. And so that’s part
of what’s inform… you know then you realize that you are analyzing the dream – oh, this is keeping me, this fear of
jealousy is keeping me from being successful. So then you could go back to the journey and say, what can I do in order to feel more capable in dealing with other people’s jealousy? And so you see you are moving right from this… you know
you have the question that takes you deeply in with the journey, you get more insight it from the dream and you are able to bring the insight that you
have from the dream back into the journey, and pretty soon you have a deep and robust understanding of this issue of lack of motivation that was completely
inaccessible to you before you were working in the altered state in these two dynamic ways. So somatic therapy is something that’s become more and more popular in recent years, and that’s something that you very naturally incorporated into Depth Hypnosis, can you talk a little bit about that? Well, you know at the time when I was developing Depth Hypnosis, the idea of mind body therapy was really new, and there was a lot prejudice at the time in therapeutic circles about
the body… you know what is this mind body thing? What does the body know? And it became really clear to me as I working with people in an altered state that the body had a tremendous amount of information, and we needed to develop a way of accessing the body's wisdom that was not necessarily through some kind of message or body work, where people would be able to use what they could find in their bodies or be able to learn from what their body had to show them, and be able to translate that into some kind of conceptual understanding, and so part of the processes is that we work with in depth hypnosis are to help people really begin to focus inward and discover their body, and actually in the regression work that we do in depth hypnosis, the body is actually the doorway into the parts of experience that are usually quite separated from the conscious mind, and so we totally recognize the body as the teacher of the body, as the holder of experience that our mind may not had access to, or want to have access to, and so when you are working in altered state, and you are using the body as a portal, you are working somatically, and I have to say, we were doing this a long time before I even heard that somatic, the word somatic. I was like somatic, oh! That’s what we were doing, you know. So, yeah that’s how we worked with somatic aspects of therapy and depth hypnosis. Okay. Now you mentioned you used the term altered state
and I have heard you talk about altered state work and I know that you consider the shamanic journey working in an altered state and meditation as even an altered state, can you talk a little bit about the altered state
and the importance of working in that state? Well, the altered state is a very important process… attaining the altered state is a very important process
because we do tend to get a little bit stuck in our conscious mind, and our conscious mind is great. We need it to help us navigate this really complex reality, but we really do have a lot more to us than the conscious mind, and this can be threatening at first. People can be, oh!
What is that? What else could there be? But everyone dreams, so everyone knows
there is something else in their experience that is beyond the conscious mind, but we have to learn how to work with the dreams in a very precise and clear way. We have to learn language of the dreams,
which is what we do in depth hypnosis. We can work with the meditated state to help a person drop out of an over active mental state to help them drop into their bodies, and we do work with the journey as I mentioned
to go kind of repel deeply within the self to in gain wisdom, and we also have ways of working with guided imagery that also helps people access aspects of themselves that are actually surprising for them. So when we are talking about altered states, we are really
just talking about anything that is little bit outside of the conscious mind, and we have many pathways, many different
types of altered states that we work with in depth hypnosis. And how have you seen sort of the attitudes towards working with altered states, bringing say meditation into a therapeutic environment, or the shamanic practices and things like that; how is the attitude towards working in the altered state changed over the years? It’s changed dramatically. You know I think… you know you had Freud... first, you had Freud experimenting with hypnosis, and he got a little bit scared off. He kind of waited into some places where he really didn’t know how to swim, and Yun kind of picked up the standard there and was able to go a little bit further in, and you know we had Ericson in the mid centuries of the mid 1900s working in the altered state, but people were not really working in the altered state until you had a little bit more interest in the 17s… the 16s and 17s especially with Stanislav Grof with Holotropic Breathwork, and of course there was a lot of work that was done with LSD for instance before it became illegal, where they were trying to understand what kind of worlds the altered states were bringing forward, but of course, the research’s were not necessarily always working to understand the therapeutic value of that. They were sometimes working with other intentions in mind [laughing]. Well, it’s interesting that you mentioned LSD, and this idea of substance as altering state because I think that’s what most people think of when they hear of altered state therapies, so it’s nice to hear that meditation is really working in an altered state and that you can access that on your own, but my question is more to this idea that has as shamanism has become more a popularized in contemporary culture, where finding the use of plant medicine Solas Iban, or peyote, or ayahuasca – those kinds of things becoming much more popularized
and I am wondering what your thoughts are on that? Well, I think of course it’s important to remember that shamans have worked with plants from millennia, and they have found a great deal of wisdom in working with plants in a particular way. The particular way is always in approaching the plant with respect and understanding that the plant has intelligence and wisdom to share, and I think that one of the things that can happen in the modern times is that people are not really approaching the plants with the amount of respect that might be needed,
or they are not even recognizing that these are plants with particular kinds of intelligence, and I think if you are working with altered state and the substances that produce those altered states, it’s important to work in the proper setting. Probably not a great idea to be in a place where there is a lot of clashing, experiences, angry people – that can be really traumatizing, and if you approach the plants after you have prepared the area where you are going to be working when you are going to be ingesting the plant, and if you have prepared yourself with a particular intention where you want to ask the plant for guidance on a particular issue, this is very helpful. And also if you have a guide who understands the way that the plants work. And now we have many organizations that are recognized legally and are able to use plants as part of the sacrament of their particular religious’ belief, and I think that this is a very good way to work for people because you are working for so legally, and second of all you’re working with people who understand the plant, and one issue that you have in these organization is that while you have the set and setting kind of brought together in an organized way, one of the things that happens is that the people who are running this circles and acting as guides with the plant medicines often do not understand the therapeutic side of it, like they don’t know how to help the people really process what their experiences and apply that experience to their own self-transformation and to the therapeutic processes that are held in self-transformation. So this is where depth hypnosis really comes in in a very useful way because depth hypnosis, of course, recognizes that there is a great deal of experience beyond the conscious mind. We have many processes for helping people understand that information and that material that is behind the conscious mind or beyond the conscious mind, and so when people have these openings through working with plant medicine, depth hypnosis is right there offering understandings, offering context, offering paradigms, and helping people really integrate and digest this information that is coming through in the altered state processes that are produced by plants. It's interesting how you mention depth hypnosis has a way of assisting people who are working with plant medicine, and I do think that there are a lot of people who are actually very conscious about how they approach working with the plant,
they actually do have respect for the plant, and there are these larger and larger circles of shamans coming up from Peru and from other places working with circles, but what I am finding in talking to people who do this has said that there is this great opening but not much are the ability to process everything, and I am wondering how depth hypnosis helps with that, or what’s your thoughts are on helping people integrate their experience that they have using plant medicine? Well, one of the thing that I always say is that the plant will open a window, and it will open a window onto some area of wisdom that is very helpful for the person, but if you don’t do the work after the experience of ingesting the plant to learn how to hold the window open yourself, you have kind of lost a lot of wisdom that would have been accessed later and in a more integrated way. So depth hypnosis because of its extensive work in the altered state is able to help the person go back into the experience that they had in the presence of the plant, and to be able to understand perhaps the way in which the plant was working with them and also to be able to integrate what the plant was showing them. One of the issues that people have is they don’t understand the language of the plant, and this language is actually the language of dreams, it’s the language of the shamanic journey, and I actually like to call it the language of the soul. And one of the things that I try to help my students do in any of the classes – the dream classes, the shamanic journey classes, or in session where I am integrating… helping people integrate what they have learned in a plant medicine process is how to translate what is being shown? And you know I have spent many years as a language translator and interpreter, and so I am pretty good at interpreting, and it’s not just my idea of interpreting. There is definitely a way to open the images, definitely a way to understand the energetic patterns that are being brought forward by the plant, definitely a way to understand the metaphor and the similes and the way that the plant works because plants and plant medicines generally work in a very consistent way, and it’s a matter of understanding what the plant is pointing to, and helping the person be shown how to take what the plant is pointing to and apply it into their everyday experience, and that’s the way they keep the window open because it’s not like, oh, I had this experience over there, and now I am living my life here. It’s like you are working with depth hypnosis to bring the two experiences together so that you have a deepened experience of your everyday life,
it’s not that you just have this thing that you do, and then you live this life as just kind of dull and uninteresting. You are kind of bringing the two together, and
you are deepening your experience and your capacity to be able to listen to all of the plants
that are all around us all the time offering us information like we have here. [Both laughing]. So thank you so much. It’s really fun interviewing you. Well, thank you so much for interviewing me.
it’s wonderful being here in the garden with you. Thank you.
