Stories

This January, Dr. Elizabeth Day finished her studies at the Sacred Stream Foundation, in Berkeley, and became certified as a Hypnotherapist, Depth Hypnosis Practitioner and Applied Shamanic Counselor. Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D., the founder of Sacred Stream Foundation, a School for Consciousness Studies, draws from transpersonal psychology, applied Tibetan Buddhism, energy medicine, shamanic practices and hypnotherapy in this interdisciplinary healing model.

Describing her healing arts practice, Dr. Day writes, “I work with people who wish to heal on deep levels, change karmic patterns, and retrieve parts of themselves that have been obscured through trauma and everyday living. The process provides guidance and tools to help people relieve their suffering and heal.”

Her specializations include: authenticity, purpose, grief, life transitions, LGBTQ+, anxiety, depression, trauma including sexual and ritual abuse, and addictions.

Dr. Elizabeth Day has been teaching at Santa Clara University for 19 years. She has taught within the Graduate School of Education and the Child Studies Program. As a Markkula Ethics Center Scholar, she wrote a four-year middle school character education and literacy curriculum for at-promise and justice-engaged youth.

Her Child Studies courses include: Cultural Competence and Humility, Technology and Education, Compassionate Leadership, or Urban Education and Multiculturalism. 

Day holds a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Years before she came to Depth Hypnosis, her Ph.D. research, which utilized narrative inquiry methodology, reflected her passion for understanding and leveraging the transformative power of story in our lives. What clients and students especially note is her warmth, her compassionate listening, her acute capacity for drawing connections, and her meticulous attention.

In both her teaching at SCU and in her work with clients, Elizabeth is fiercely dedicated to helping individuals discover patterns, move through obstacles, and reconnect with their inherent wholeness. Her teaching, coaching and counseling practice are grounded in these principles: an abiding faith in one’s higher self to direct and support the healing and learning process; the innate intelligence of the mind-body-soul connection; the power of nature to teach and restore; a commitment to social justice and to dismantling systems of oppression.

She invites students and clients to work with her and experience what’s possible when they take an active and curious role in their own transformative process, nurturing their most authentic, joyful, and embodied self.

Dr. Day is an avid photographer and has been exploring shooting with her macro lens. She likes to begin her day in quiet contemplative reading, and two books she’s turning to on these late winter mornings are Healing with Form, Energy and Light: the Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra, and Dzogchen by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Essential Mind Training by Thupten Jinpa.

As part of her healing arts practice, Dr. Day leads contemplative hikes as well as offers somatic life coaching sessions partnering with horses. For the past three years she has been based in Berkeley, and has been grateful for daily hikes in Tilden Regional Park, developing a deep intimacy of place among the creatures and plants within this foothill chaparral. 

At the beginning of 2021 she moved to the Outer Sunset in San Francisco, two blocks from Ocean Beach, where she is reveling in becoming a close neighbor of the Pacific Ocean. She’s appreciating being able to set out in the morning toward Land’s End to the north, or Fort Funston to the south, learning about tidal rhythms and this vast new marine landscape – and of course, throwing the ball to her golden retriever, Jesse, who never tires of the surf.