#120 Depth Hypnosis: Isa Gucciardi
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Michael Reiley: Welcome back to the show. This is Michael Reiley. Before we begin today's episode, I want to take a moment to mention that if you'd like to support this podcast and the mission of Science and Nonduality, please consider becoming a SAND member. In addition to supporting this podcast and the production of films like Where Olive Trees Weep and our monthly community gatherings, you'll gain access to our SAND member library with hundreds of videos from SAND's 15 year history of conferences.
Webinars and courses. Visit science and non-duality dot com slash join or find a link in the show notes today I'm in conversation with Isa Gucciardi. Isa holds degrees in Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology, Comparative Religion, and Transpersonal Psychology. She's the creator of Depth Hypnosis, a groundbreaking therapeutic model
and we discuss her new book on this topic of depth hypnosis, diving into the concepts of applied shamanism, transpersonal psychology, hypnosis, and Buddhism. All today on the Sounds of SAND podcast presented by Science and Nonduality.
All right, so I'm here with Isa Gucciardi for the Sounds of SAND podcast. So nice to be with you today.
Isa Gucciardi: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Michael Reiley: Yeah it's great to reconnect with you with the SAND community. We were saying before you pressed record, you had been at several of the conferences.
Isa Gucciardi: It was a magical, marvelous time with the conferences that sort of came to an end with COVID.
Michael Reiley: Yeah I hear rumors that they'll come back someday, but in a different form, but after this cycle of films that are going to be coming out this year and next year, I think. I know in person gatherings are in the intention of what Sam wants to do. So
Isa Gucciardi: that's exciting. I hope to be part of it.
Michael Reiley: for sure. Yeah. Nice. So you have this beautiful new book, depth hypnosis, which is a practice that I know you've been doing for many years.
And I would, I'll let you explain it better instead of framing it in a question, but what is the sort of yeah, large overarching description of what depth hypnosis is?
Isa Gucciardi: Thank you for being so careful to say depth, not because a lot of people think it's death hypnosis. And I see that you're pronouncing the P very clearly. So thank you for that.
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Isa Gucciardi: Depth hypnosis is a process of spiritual counseling and inquiry that emerged out of many years of clinical practice and personal practice.
It has many different streams of insight and wisdom that flow into it, and it has become actually greater than its parts. But some of the contributing systems of wisdom are shamanic practice and earth based wisdom practices, which provide the catalytic Healing processes the work.
And they have been adapted into a hypnotherapeutic process. So the work in depth hypnosis is largely done in an altered state of awareness that is induced through hypnotic suggestions. And it also has Buddhist psychology as a ground for understanding the whole process of self transformation and evolution toward a greater level of awareness and consciousness.
And it also works with energy medicine, providing a very deep and Powerful set of tools that help open a person's awareness to their experience and also support the practitioner in working in the field of power that is generated in the depth hypnosis process. And it all in Western practice takes its seat within transpersonal psychology which is something that.
Of course a school of thought that was founded by Carl Jung, who stated that he didn't feel that any process of healing was complete without the participation of spirit. And and so that, that is definitely an idea within depth hypnosis. And it's a process when all of these come together.
It's a process of counseling where people come for help with it. Things such as depression, anxiety habit abatement, phobias eating disorders any type of process where a person has twisted away from their core self. Can be helped through depth hypnosis and almost all symptoms on a physical, mental, emotional level or in a spiritual level are a function of how a person has twisted away from their core self.
So depth hypnosis is broadly applied, can be broadly applied, and people with many different types of problems can be helped with depth hypnosis.
Michael Reiley: Beautiful. Thanks for that encapsulation of the practice and yeah, the book has some really towards the second half is a lot of case studies where you talk about specific applications of depth hypnosis and how these people were helped by this modality. Is that the right word to use? Maybe?
And the book and this process explores altered states of consciousness. And you say that they're essential for transformation. Is that accurate?
Isa Gucciardi: And the reason for that is, as Albert Einstein said, you can't solve a problem at the level where it was created. And when we're dealing with issues such as addiction or addiction, Depression or anxiety, it's usually a function of the way in which we are working with our conscious mind with the, with this level of consciousness that we generally operate in every day.
That's logical, empirical, that is linear. And, the conscious mind is very good at filtering out. Anything that might be disorganizing. And unfortunately much of our experience is disorganizing. We may have had traumatic events that we don't know how to integrate, or we may have emotions that we try to separate from, or we may have relationship issues, which are a total conundrum that we can't.
And so we tend to move away from them and filter them out of our everyday consciousness. But as Carl Jung said, whatever you separate from will control your life. And so then we have these symptoms that come in our everyday experience. So for instance, if we had a trauma when we were a young person and we, don't want to remember it, don't know how to integrate it.
It's there in, in our experience and this being held in this sort of away from the self and there's a deal, a great deal of fear or sadness in it. We will tend to create experiences where that fear and that sadness is evoked. And this is a process which is natural for the psyche because the psyche wants wholeness and it will tend to drive experience until All of the parts of the self that have been involved with any kind of experience have some kind of unity or wholeness or they find their place within the self once more.
So you may have someone who is comes in for a depressed, they're depressed and they don't know why. And they, they, They feel just this, like waking up in the morning, they just feel this sadness and they don't understand it. And so with depth hypnosis, what we might do in that case is to follow, actually follow that sadness through a regression process in an altered state of awareness.
to the place or the originating circumstance where that trauma or that sadness occurred. And then we would work with the different processes of depth hypnosis to help the person shift their relationship to that sadness at that core level, which will then shift their symptoms of depression on the more surface level.
Michael Reiley: In the West, ideas of altered states of consciousness, therapeutic modalities involving plant medicines or psychedelics are starting to become more and more commonplace. Is this particular blending of shamanism, Buddhism, hypnotherapy, energy medicine, are you seeing also more acceptance of these modalities as forms of healing?
Isa Gucciardi: Oh, yes. It's interesting, I started writing this book in 23 years ago and and I started developing depth hypnosis about 30 years ago. And at that time, shamanism was unheard of, or not completely unheard of, but Actually rejected in the therapeutic counseling models. I even, I worked as a medium with Michael Harner for several years.
And, he was very much not in favor of trying to bring shamanism into the therapeutic environment and in the counseling setting. And. It was, it was a really different environment. People were afraid of being, tagged for practicing medicine without a license, or they were afraid of being too altered altered, alternative to be accepted, and people really didn't know what shamanism was.
In the way that they do now. And certainly energy medicine. Like I remember I did a lot of teaching on the East coast in the early two thouSANDs. And I worked with a group of healers teaching energy medicine and they were Trying to get into some of the big teaching hospitals in Providence to do Reiki and energy medicine for people who are recovering from from surgery.
And nobody could mention energy medicine. You couldn't mention Reiki. You could say you were doing therapeutic touch. And so you had to be, and people were afraid, don't say anything about energy medicine. They won't let us in. And I worked in terms of the plants. I, I, one of my first forms of healing that I learned was herbalism.
And that was in the seventies and you could not. Offer any kind of counseling about what herb might be helpful for a particular issue without fearing that you might be contacted by someone with some kind of licensing idea that you were doing something outside of a license.
It was really very different. And in terms of plant medicine, I had worked with the Native American church and, that it was very rare to have the opportunity to do any kind of plant medicine back then. And and people really did not understand, All of the benefits that might come from it because there was a really big clampdown coming out of the 60s when all of the psychedelic work that Stan Groff was involved with all the research got shut down And so it was very like legality issues were huge.
So depth hypnosis was developed in that environment And and even in terms of Buddhism, the idea that you would bring Buddhist principles into a counseling environment was unheard of, and it was not something that was supported necessarily by Buddhist practitioners because they felt that it was something that was taking away from the purity of the lineage lines.
And I felt, I was really, when all of this started, I felt like I was a wolf high on the hill. Oh just Oh, howling to the moon and bringing in this work and offering it. Really in the guise of just typical hypnotherapy, you want to quit smoking. Let me help you quit smoking Maybe you might notice that it could be possible to find out what the roots of your reasons are for smoking that Might have to do with some kind of difficult experience that you might not be in touch with but we're just gonna quit smoking You know, just start there and it's very interesting one of the one of the things that Laura says who is my co author of the book who really helps Make the book more accessible.
She's a really beautiful writer. And I can, I have all the material, but she really helped make it accessible. And one of the things that she said, which I think is really important in her forward is that depth hypnosis is a process whose time has come and, I have had a lot of frustration over the years that I could not, bring this book forward in a way that I wanted to just because of the limitations of my own writing capacity.
I tend to be a very academic writer. And so I write it and it was still too academic and I'd write it again and it was still too academic. And with Laura's help, we've made it much more accessible. And I do think that it is a, This is a time where it can be embraced and accepted in a way that would not have been had I been able to publish it in the early 2000s, the way I had planned.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. I also know people using plant medicine and psychedelics for healing, there's often a lack of integration. And I think the blending of Buddhism, that kind of. Grounding in the felt sense of the body, practicing, as you mentioned in the book, Vipassana and Samatha, different meditation practices to really feel grounded when you're having these altered states of consciousness, which can be very jarring for the psyche on the long term.
You might have this peak experience, but then you go back and you don't know how to integrate it. Was that part of the Let's say the map to, to have a practice that actually you can return to after these altered states of consciousness.
Isa Gucciardi: Yes, absolutely. Depth hypnosis was, as I say, primarily developed before this boom in plant medicine. And one of the, one of the, one of the things that I always say about depth hypnosis is that it is plant medicine slowed down. And so when. You're making a very important point in terms of integration and depth hypnosis is excellent for integration because what you're doing, it has all the tools that you need.
It offers you a way to move into an altered state of awareness so that you can contact the experience of the plant medicine with, within the same state of awareness. It also has the process of helping a person connect with other people. What in depth hypnosis is called that part of the self that has only the highest good as its sole intent.
And this is a connection that is made through a hypnotherapeutic, like a guided meditation process, that is that helps the person connect with their innate wisdom in a very direct way and a very reified way. And so they have that internal support there and that internal guidance that they can work with.
To bring in questions that are coming from the plant medicine experience and then to be able to work with that experience, perhaps going more fully into a difficult experience that they may have had. in the plant medicine and going into that emotionally or mentally difficult place with the help of this inner guidance and with the help of the altered state and with all of the processes of healing that shamanism provides that the plants will often provide without people recognizing, but we can, do bring back parts of the self in a soul retrieval that may have split off that due to some previous trauma and the plant may have.
Pointed to that splitting off, but it may not have provided any kind of context for it or provided any kind of way to integrate those parts back in that the person understood. The plants are generally working beyond our ability to really, understand everything that they're doing. And especially when you're getting triggered into some difficult experience, it's very difficult to track the way that the plants are working.
So within the depth hypnosis environment, we have this, method methods of working. We even work with the shamanic journey to help the person establish a relationship with, for instance the spirit of the plant so that they can work with the spirit of the plant outside of the plant medicine session.
And we at the sacred stream, we have a whole program on plant medicine insight integration, which incorporates the depth hypnosis foundation course, along with other forms of shamanic healing and Buddhist understandings about the evolution of consciousness. So that people are in a very. Good steed in terms of facilitating the integration of the work and also for helping people prepare for going into plant medicine work.
And we have all of these tools that depth hypnosis brings together and which are expanded in the plant medicine insight integration program, which is the crowning jewel of the applied shamanism program, where we really look at. Learn how to do power retrieval, soul retrievals, energetic interference releases, soul part exchanges flushing legacy lines, flushing ancestral lines in a more traditional shamanic way that, and all of those methods are in depth hypnosis, but they're adapted into a hypnotherapeutic process where the client is generally driving and managing their own experience in a more internal way and not necessarily having to key into all of the principles of shamanic practice that include, this larger understanding about the wisdom of the earth and the way in which the plants emerge from that wisdom and the way in which we must approach the plants with respect in order to be able to truly receive their wisdom.
And so there's different levels where people can key into the work within the education at the sacred stream depending on how far they want to go into shamanic practice or how far they want to go into having a a spiritual counseling practice that is more well rounded to working with all sorts of issues.
Michael Reiley: I would like to go deeper on two things you mentioned, ancestral healing and also intergenerational trauma. But before that, I wanted to clarify something with. Because we you've been using the term shamanism and obviously there's issues about appropriation, about lineage and people's Yeah, you know what I'm pointing at this, especially modern day, white people using the word shamanism.
Could you contextualize the types of shamanism and maybe the lineage and the traditions that are included in Depth Hypnosis?
Isa Gucciardi: Thank you so much for that question. I've developed a process of working with shamanic principles called applied shamanism, and it's called applied shamanism because we are taking principles that you find in many different shamanic traditions, and we are applying them to the modern dilemma, which is one of psychological isolation and disconnection from the earth, which is.
A dilemma that people in traditional societies would not necessarily encounter and before colonialism. Who knows, but definitely it would not be the epidemic that it is here now. Now, in terms of lineage and respect for traditions the sacred stream does a lot to support indigenous ways of knowing within their own cultural.
contexts. And we in particular support different Himalayan forms of shamanism and work to help those practitioners keep their traditions alive. And and I've studied with shamanic practitioners in many different traditions and respect those traditions. And I would not dream of teaching anything that is culturally specific to those traditions, to anyone because I'm not qualified.
And I have been, invited and very generously, asked to participate in different aspects of shamanic practices within the indigenous environment. But I would never consider myself to be someone who is, who can teach those kinds of processes to other people. And the important thing for, the important thing to remember is that in all of these different, in many different shamanic practices, that have been on the planet at different times in different spaces.
You find a commonality of practice that is very striking. And there, there are methods, for instance, for for for understanding different types of imbalance, such as soul loss, being a function of having lost a part of the self through trauma and having a, some kind of antidote, such as a soul retrieval to retrieve that part or the recognition of power loss as a result of being exposed to some kind of negative experience over time.
and the antidote of power retrieval, bringing back that power. That, those kinds of those kinds of processes are found in many different cultural contexts. They may look a little bit different because of the cultural setting, but the energetics Of the setting in of the imbalance and the remediation of the imbalance are almost identical on an energetic level. And and one of the reasons why you see differences in cultural practices is because different cultures are arising at different parts of the planet. But all of them are, they have their own pathways to knowledge of understanding the wisdom of the earth within their own cultural context. And the ceremonies that you see practiced and the rituals that you see practiced and the forms of divination that you see practiced, are a function of the wisdom of the earth in that place.
And you have different kinds of cultural different kinds of practices that are emphasized in different cultures. For instance, you have in the northern Arctic areas of Scotland and Ireland, you have a real emphasis on birth and rebirth within the Druidic tradition, which died out many, with the advent of the Christianity in Britain.
But it was a very powerful shamanic practice, which survives in, in remnants today. But and the reason that you have that emphasis on the death and rebirth practices is primarily because of the climate the climb you have half the year you're in darkness and half the year you're in light, right?
So there's a lot of thinking about the birth and death of the sun. And then in other places you have so for instance, in, in Northern Mexico and Central America, you have a big emphasis on understanding in the shamanic practice, understanding the processes of dreams and working with plant medicines as a driver for the And as a central hole for the culture to constellate around.
And that's because there are cactuses that are containing different types of psychedelic substances that are being ingested by the shamans and the people in that culture. So each shamanic tradition has its own pathway to the. wisdom of the earth that they have created through their own rituals and ceremonies.
And we as modern people are able to learn from that process of listening to the earth, but we create our own pathways to listening to the earth through the shamanic journey, through connecting with the spirits of the land where we're working through understanding. The nature of our own imbalances with the help of guiding spirits through creating processes that are, that draw energetically from processes that may be common in other shamanic traditions, but are not in any way culturally identical.
And so why that's why I'm saying that applied shamanism is its own lineage in a way because it is One that respects all of the received wisdom from the earth that has come before respects the earth and her generosity and offering that wisdom to us and helps us listen to try to understand how to ameliorate this disconnection, this psychological the psychological isolation that is, is the terrible malady of modern humans.
And we are working, applying shamanic principles to that issue. And we're not working with any particular cultural practice to do that. We're working with energetic processes that are designed to identify and create, identify imbalance and create wholeness.
Michael Reiley: Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, that comprehensive answer. And it's a,
Isa Gucciardi: maybe it was more than you wanted, but I feel like it's something that really, we really need to be very careful and very respectful of all ways of understanding the wisdom of the earth that the plant medicines are bringing forward in spades now.
Michael Reiley: And that's what I wanted to ask about ancestral healing. So we think about going going to the depths of our of who we are and where that trauma came from, where the pain or the hurt or the fracturing, as you said, has come from. Do you think that can extend intergenerationally and involve ancestral healing with this work?
Isa Gucciardi: It certainly can. It can also with depth hypnosis and I'll talk more to that specifically, but one of the things that one of the aspects of depth hypnosis is the regression work. And so you're working in an altered state of awareness, following a particular emotional experience through the body and moving with suggestions of moving a into the body following this.
emotional experience with the understanding that you're going to be going to a situation, time, or place where you are first or most significantly feeling the experience on the emotional level that is creating the disruption in the particular issue that you're dealing with. And when you're doing a regression process, you don't know where in the psyche you're going to land.
And You may land within this lifetime as, in a childhood situation or in an infancy situation. You might even land in a prenatal experience. Or you might even land in what is understood to be a past life situation. And even if you don't believe in past lives per se, you can use That process of understanding the events and circumstances that seem to be emerging from a past life as an originating source of the issue that you're dealing with, and you can bring that healing, you can heal that past life experience through the processes of depth hypnosis.
And in terms of ancestral healing, often what we refer to as ancestral healing, I think, is the healing of the course of our own karmic patterns. From a Buddhist perspective, we are incarnating again and again, and we are incarnating as a result of the thrust of our karmic patterns, the ways of behavior and response to reality that we have been engaged with across time and space, and we are being impelled into this lifetime through the force of those karmic patterns.
And if we can, if, and so there is this ancestral feeling, this long legacy feeling that is actually quite personal to us, that can be healed, through the processes of depth hypnosis, working with the regression process. So there's that aspect of the ancestral experience, which is actually often more personal.
Now, there's also, of course, the ancestral line healing. And I'd like to tell you a story that from my from my clinical practice that illustrates the way in which ancestral healing can happen in depth hypnosis. And and there's a tremendous amount to be said and learned about this, but this story really illustrates something important.
So I was working with the I was working with a client was Jewish or she was a, she was raised as a Jew. And it's interesting because I'm just going to open a sideboard here, being coming into this realm that Buddhism calls samsara, this realm of suffering, I have realized that I had two remits coming in.
One was to do something about the effect of the holocaust and in Nazi Germany, of course, there's many other holocausts, but I was focused on that one and I've worked a lot with other holocaust as well in the depth hypnosis process, but and also to do something about the negative effect of the Catholic Church through the inquisitions. So I would say of my clients, I've probably worked with, probably 40 percent of the people I've worked with have been either of a powerful Jewish tradition or a Catholic tradition, interestingly. And and I can tell you that when someone, when I know someone's coming in from a Jewish tradition, because we ask, what was your conception of God and the universe?
When you were young and that information about their religious upbringing will come in the initial interview. Whenever it's a Jewish person, I immediately am keyed into what is the relationship of this family to the Holocaust. And I can, I have come to the. place where I can tell you based on the presenting symptoms that the person is coming into the depth hypnosis environment.
I can tell you with some certainty what the response of their ancestors were to the Holocaust. So they may have for instance, someone may have a process where they refuse to engage in the world and they hide out.
And they're having trouble coming, engaging with the world. I would not, I've followed, in that kind of situation, I have followed, and asked about their ancestors and how they dealt with the Holocaust.
And sure enough, they were hiding in the forests outside of Berlin, right? That kind of thing happened, that kind of resonance is reverberating across time, even just in Berlin. In, in, in simple inquiry, but I want to tell you this story of one of my students, she was a client and a student, and she had gone through the shamanic training and the depth hypnosis training to become a practitioner and she had taken in the advanced applied shamanism class.
I work, I teach people how to be mediums and how to channel do different, channel different types of spirits. So that was one of the trainings that she had. So she was, Ha doing her own depth hypnosis session. And she was going in on this grief that she could not shake. She had been working on it for a long time and we had done several other processes around it and we followed the grief and we wound up in a situation and.
in a gulag, in a concentration camp where she had been a rabbi who was trying to tend to the souls of the people, to the souls of the people around her and where she felt all this grief that she was not able to do all of the prayers that she wanted to be able to do for everyone and to do the, all the different Kaddish practices. So then she, so she started saying the Kaddish for, so she was in that environment. So the thing that was going to be healing for her was to be able to say the prayers. So she started saying the prayers and I could feel, so immediately when this started happening, energetically things got very big and very intense.
And so I'm, I'm grounding, I'm holding and she's saying the prayers and then I could feel all of the spirits. of the people who she had been tending, coming through and receiving the prayers. And it was an amazing situation. And then it shifted and her voice shifted and the prayer shifted. And what happened in that experience was another spirit of another rabbi who had been in a similar situation began saying the prayers for all of the people they had been tending to.
And then it shifted again, and this happened four or five, five times. There were five different voices with five different sets of prayers that were said in that session. And all of the different people who they were tending to were receiving the Kaddish at that time. And it was. an incredible experience to be witness to, and to be able to feel the lightening of the grief across all of these people, the rabbis themselves, and the people who had died, and the release.
of that, the place where they had, their spirits had been stuck in this place of grief and sorrow and had not had a process of being able to move on. They had not had the tending to their spirits that they needed. And so through that process, she was able to channel. all of that experience. And I was so grateful for the fact that she had been through all of the training because she understood the dynamics of channeling.
She understood the dynamics of the way in which grief travels across time and space or emotional experience, karmic patterns travel across time and space. And she also had the deep knowledge of the Jewish tradition. And she was able to become a medium for this tremendous healing on this intergenerational level through the processes of regression work within depth hypnosis.
So that's just an example that tells you more about the intergenerational healing that can happen in than me just talking about
Michael Reiley: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's a powerful story. And that's one of the mysteries of depth and deep, if we're talking about, deep listening or deep medicine or, deep anything. We don't, we never really know how deep. It will go . We just opened to that mystery and here you're talking about, five different rabbis and all these intergenerational grief coming through one, one person, one body.
It's
Isa Gucciardi: And the wonderful thing about depth hypnosis, it has, the underpinnings of shamanism and a big part of shamanic practice is the guiding of souls. That is, she had studied the guiding of souls. She understood what that is in shamanic practice. And also within Buddhist understanding, there is this definite.
concept and understanding of the transmigration of patterns across time. And so having all of that knowledge acted as a ground and a basis for her to be able to do all of that healing. And on a personal level, she was transformed. The grief that she had been struggling to, to relieve herself of.
Was very much lifted after that.
Michael Reiley: There's the book that people can engage with. What are some other ways that people can. try depth hypnosis. Is it mostly through Sacred Stream and the offerings that you all have there?
Isa Gucciardi: Yes, we have we have at sacredstream. org. We have lots and lots of resources. There's articles about depth hypnosis. There's lots of videos on our YouTube channel about depth hypnosis. And and we also have a training in depth hypnosis. We actually have the introduction to depth hypnosis coming up in just a couple of weeks because we're getting ready to do a training in depth hypnosis and the foundation course for people who would like to begin to work with other people with this modality as a spiritual counselor in the spiritual counseling model of depth hypnosis.
And also we have many practitioners who have gone through the trainings and at the website depthhypnosispractitioners. org has many people listed if people want to do depth hypnosis on their own in their own, doing their own private work in individual sessions. There's many practitioners that you can look at and look, you can look at their profiles and see who you.
Resonate with. I do one on one sessions. Initial consultation to help people understand, where am I on my spiritual path and what are the next steps I might take through depth hypnosis. And I can offer a sort of a map of what I think they might be dealing with and what might be helpful for them to focus on in the processes of depth hypnosis.
And and so there's and of course the book is here at last and people can read about depth hypnosis and and yeah, so there's lots of ways of engaging and learning about this modality.
Michael Reiley: Yeah, we'll have links to all that in the show notes and It may sound overwhelming maybe to listeners that it's all these different things. But once you read the book, it's it The way you and Laura have laid it out it makes a lot of sense intuitively Intellectually also somatically maybe to some extent just by reading So it, maybe it feels like a lot of things coming together, but it somehow all works and it's somehow all complimentary to, I was amazed at that because I thought, oh, how shamanism and Buddhism and energy but I think you've found a way to weave it a very organic way.
Isa Gucciardi: I'm really happy to hear you say that. And I think that is in great measure. Thanks to Laura, who is such a good writer. And depth hypnosis actually is something that developed in the clinical setting. I was working as a traditional hypnotherapist. And getting my doctorate in transpersonal psychology, and I had been a long time student of Buddhism and of shamanism at that point.
And I began realizing that, traditional hypnosis with suggestions for change, What's not adequate to the task of the suffering that people were bringing into the clinical setting. So I began weaving in and adapting shamanic methods of healing into the hypnotherapeutic process and bringing in understandings from Buddhism about, the understandings of suffering, where's the aversion, where's the attachment, where's the misknowing.
And it began to emerge in the clinical setting, really I really feel very definitely that I can barely take credit for the development of depth hypnosis. Really all I did was to catch it and to try to bring it forward. And it really emerged in the process of meeting people and meeting the suffering that they were dealing with.
And, it, it really evolved over a period of years. And when I realized that I was never going to be able to see all the people who wanted to see me, I had a, I was working six days a week, six hours, six clients a day. And I had a waiting list that I was never going to get to. So when I realized I have to teach other people this modality so that we can serve all the people that need this help.
And it was at that point that I began to try to understand what I was actually doing to, and to try to bring that in and to get it into words. As I say, I tend to. I speak a lot of different languages and actually this whole thing came in another language. So I had to translate it.
And by the time I got it into English, it's very kind of arch language, very, academic arch language and trying to, and then I had to break it down further and Laura, who comes in with her beautiful capacity to write and to make things more simple and to make things more accessible.
Just invaluable because it is a lot. For me, having brought this through in the way that I have. I've been, I feel like I've been on the other end of a fire hose for 30 years. It's just it's a lot, but it's all teachable. And that's the wonderful thing. I feel like one of, one of my gifts, which I'm very grateful for, is that I can teach, and if I can get the right vocabulary and get the right and help and bring people through the process, that is the best learning.
And I feel really grateful to be participating in this enterprise of depth hypnosis, which, is, which, is actually much greater than any of the parts. We talk, I started talking about. energy medicine and buddhist psychology and applied shamanism and hypnotherapy because they were ways of breaking down into modern language and modern understanding what was happening in the clinical setting right and so but it's really this process of depth hypnosis is, it really brings you very deeply into the psyche and touches many different parts of human and spiritual experience.
And yet there is, there are so many doorways where you can walk in. You can walk in through your own suffering. You can walk in through the book. You can walk in through an article. You can walk in through a dream. You can walk through a visionary experience that you've had. There's so many doorways and, people can study this work on their own individual time, in their own individual way.
We have classes that are on demand and then the main trainings are live stream. So we're, we have, one of the sadnesses with COVID in terms of SAND is that we no longer met each year and had this wonderful time together. But on the other hand, it brought us to the world so that we have everything online now.
So we have students all over the world that are working in this model. And and they're, it is very accessible at this point. And I do feel like the book is really going to increase that accessibility. And I can't thank you enough for highlighting the book here on your sounds of SAND podcast, because it really means a lot to me to. for as many people as possible to come out of this suffering that they're dealing with. And we know that the wonderful thing about depth hypnosis is that it works. As the practitioner, you are developed because you have to work with these subtle energies and learn how to direct them. And as the client, you are helped because your suffering is being transformed.
And so there's this beautiful process that happens within depth hypnosis where it's really, and I don't mean to be hubristic in any way, but it is in many ways an enlightenment machine because, The clients are receiving the teachings that they need at the level to relieve their suffering.
The students are learning because they are trying to understand the nature of suffering beyond their own experience. And the practitioners are learning how to transform suffering in a very real way. Having as many people learn about depth hypnosis as possible is very important to me because it really multiplies the benefit of the work across time and space and across the world and across different people's psyches and across different levels of understanding.
Michael Reiley: Lovely. Yeah. And one thing we can all agree on is we need collective healing now more than ever. So thank you for contributing to that healing with the book, with your practice, your collaboration with Lara, Sacred Stream, and this conversation today. So thank you so much, Isa, for being, coming back to SAND and let's do this again.
Isa Gucciardi: Yes, thank you so much, Michael
