Isa Gucciardi

Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D., is the Founding Director of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, a non-profit school for consciousness studies in Berkeley, California, founded in 2002. She is the creator of Depth Hypnosis, a therapeutic model, and the author of Coming to Peace.

Her path into this work began early. She writes that she spent most of her early years in other countries before moving to the United States as a teenager, and that she was struck by how little people around her wanted to talk about death. Reading Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying in the early seventies was a relief. Years of volunteering in hospice settings, including the Zen Hospice Project, led her to a view she still holds: everyone grieves in their own way, and the most helpful thing is often to sit quietly and offer a non-judgmental space.

That approach runs through her Depth Hypnosis practice, where she sits with people facing loss. She has also spent some twenty years working with people who are processing their experiences with hallucinogenic plants, helping them bring the full meaning of those experiences into the context of their lives. She has spoken about the differences between traditional shamanic cultures and contemporary ones in working with plant medicines such as ayahuasca.

Gucciardi teaches in the Sacred Stream's programs, which include Depth Hypnosis, Applied Shamanism, Applied Buddhist Psychology, Integrated Energy Medicine and Empowered Living. She has also taught at Menla, in New York's Catskill Mountains. She writes the Stream of Consciousness blog and appears in talks and radio conversations, including on KKUP's A Meeting of the Ways with Diane Solomon.