Advanced Seminar in Applied Shamanic Practice (In-Person Only)

The Advanced Seminar in Applied Shamanic Practice is an in-person-only shamanic seminar held over a weekend at Sacred Stream Center in Berkeley, California. It is offered by the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, a school for consciousness studies, and is meant for people who want to deepen shamanic practice in a room together rather than through a screen. Unlike many of the school's offerings, it is not streamed and has no distance-learning version.

What to Expect

The seminar runs across a Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with each day running from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. That makes three full days of study and practice in one place, with the same group of people throughout.

The seminar sits within a wider body of shamanic teaching at the Sacred Stream. The school's course list includes The Shamanic Journey, Soul Retrieval and the Guiding of Souls, Power Retrieval and the Middle World, Working with the Weather Spirits and the Elements, and an annual meeting of a Circle of Shamanic Practitioners. The "Advanced" and "Applied" in this seminar's title point to practice: working with shamanic methods rather than only learning about them.

About Isa Gucciardi

Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D., is the Founding Director of the Foundation of the Sacred Stream, the non-profit school in Berkeley that hosts this seminar. She founded it in 2002. She is the creator of Depth Hypnosis, a therapeutic model, and the author of the book Coming to Peace.

Her path into this work began early. She spent most of her early years in other countries before moving to the United States as a teenager, and 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 came as 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.

The Setting

The seminar takes place at Sacred Stream Center in Berkeley, the school's own home and the site of its in-person courses, drum circles, sound healing meditations and meditation retreats. Because this seminar is in-person only, everyone taking part is physically present at the center for the full three days.

Before You Go

This is an advanced seminar, so it suits people who already have some grounding in shamanic work. Participants who have taken courses such as The Shamanic Journey will find themselves in familiar territory, and anyone unsure about their readiness can ask the Foundation of the Sacred Stream directly.

Plan to be present for the whole weekend, since the days run from morning to late afternoon. After registering, you receive an automatically generated confirmation email with further information. If it does not arrive, check your spam or junk folder. Class dates and times can occasionally change because of unforeseen circumstances, so it is worth reading that confirmation carefully before you travel.