In many individual difficult experiences, as in tragedy or trauma, a person may lose part of himself as a survival mechanism to withstand the emotional or physical hurt. In shamanic terms, this process is called “soul loss.” In psychology, it is called “dissociation.” Psychology does not ask where the lost part goes and how one gets it back. In the practice of shamanism, when a piece of the soul or energy leaves, it goes into another reality and is lost from the person. A void then exists in that person’s soul. Think of the soul as a giant jigsaw puzzle. When you experience a trauma, a piece of the puzzle is lost, leaving an empty space in the puzzle. When this soul loss occurs, a soul retrieval is necessary to restore wholeness. In a process called journeying, a shaman is trained to enter an altered state of consciousness and travel into different realities to find and retrieve the lost soul parts. The shaman then literally blows these parts back into the client via the heart and the top of the head, restoring wholeness to the client.
Soul Retrieval is a shamanic technique that is believed to be the oldest known healing procedure on the planet. I have written about this subject many times because it is central to my healing practice and teaching. I have dedicated my professional career to this process and have done over 3500 soul retrievals. That amount of experience has given me literally thousands of case studies from which to learn more about the human condition and how we can benefit the healing arts by integrating ancient traditions into our contemporary healing practices. I feel that with every soul retrieval I learned from the spirits vast amounts of information about life, past lifetimes, karma, the power of words, humans’ energetic systems, empowerment/disempowerment, self-care, wellness, the death process, discarnate beings, the value of relationship, why we incarnate, and love, love, love!
Soul retrieval in its most basic form is simple to understand. Shamanically speaking, all things are energy. The movement or the transmutation of energy is part of the healing of the soul, which is itself energy. In a healing, the shaman moves out the energy that does not belong to a person and refills him/her with the divine energy that is the essence of that person’s true soul. The theory behind soul retrieval is that there is soul loss when one experiences painful or traumatic situations.
However, soul retrieval in practice is far from simplistic. The human psyche and the powers that oppress us are powerful in their effects on our minds and bodies. To best comprehend these consequences of difficult experiences on individuals, I believe that examples would better serve to assist in understanding and to better realize the positive results that are possible. I plan to give several examples in the next few articles to help readers understand what is available and achievable. There is much to learn and I do believe I have only scratched the surface of possibilities, even with 3500 case studies.
A Case Study
My client was a woman in her forties who came to me because of great sadness, despair and hopelessness. Confronted with any choice, she could not make any decisions for herself. Even trying to decide what way to prepare her eggs in the morning for breakfast was excruciatingly difficult for her.
During her intake, I asked for some of her history. She explained that she seemed happy enough as a child. She came from a good home. When she was in high school about sixteen-years-old, she met her current husband. They both felt cosmically drawn to each other and married as soon as they graduated. However, there was never passion in the marriage; in fact, it seemed dull and unfulfilling. She felt like she was just going through the motions of romance but felt compelled to marry him, never fully understanding where this compulsion was coming from. She then struggled with getting pregnant. She was overwhelmed with the desire to have a boy. She kept miscarrying. She developed huge fibroids and eventually had to have a hysterectomy. She and her husband decided to adopt children but only boys.
What the soul retrieval revealed.
I asked the spirits to take me to the root of her problem. What was causing my client this intense sadness, despair and hopelessness? I asked to be shown why it was so difficult for her to make decisions for herself, even causing her pain and agony.
In the journey, I was taken to another lifetime expression of my client. In shamanism, we don’t view lifetimes as past lifetimes; shamanism looks at existence as a hologram where everything is happening simultaneously in different dimensions of time. Thus, any healings that we do in another lifetime expression can resonate into this timeline dimension and create healing here in this moment.
In this particular lifetime to which I journeyed, my client was born into royalty. As a young woman, her marriage was arranged for an alliance not love. She was viewed as property of the country where she lived and was barred from individual choice. In fact, to choose differently could cause death for herself and others. As a young woman, she ached for true love and passion. She desired to be loved for who she was and for another to have intense feelings of love for her. She wanted a reciprocal love that was true and real. She found herself fighting against these feelings of personal need because she knew that satisfying her needs might bring harm to others. Her birth determined her destiny and she did what she did for the sake of her family. Her marriage was arranged and her decision was not true to her heart.
In this lifetime, her vows were taken at the marriage ceremony binding country to country. The royal families gave promises of peace for the countries and bound the families together in this commitment through the marriage of their children. This type of intention and the vow that is involved has enormous import on this life and future lives. This intention energetically carries an enormous amount of power with accompanying repercussions and karma. Vows live on even after death. The more ritual that is put into the vow the stronger and more potent it becomes. Religious rites are hugely energetically binding. They are done in high ceremony with words, natural elements (usually fire), and signing of contracts, which are contractual binding in the current realm as well as in the unseen realms. You literally sign your life over as well as your soul in the contract. Words bind even in the form of a spoken promise, but a sacred vow is an even more potent form of a promise.
Arranged marriages also existed to produce heirs. There was a tremendous pressure placed upon my client in this lifetime to produce a male heir. If no children were produced or if a male heir was not produced, the results of this failure could be life threatening.
The spirits showed me that great fear became embedded in my clients 2nd chakra that resulted not only in a lack of ability to bear children but also, since the 2nd chakra is associated with creativity, with a loss of the ability to create the type of life she desired.
Fast forward to this lifetime.
My client found herself attracted to a man in high school who was the incarnate of the man she had had an arranged marriage with from another lifetime. She married a man she didn’t love but felt that she should. She then became so terrified of not having a son that she developed an inability to have children. She found herself incapable of making even minor decisions as an outcome of not being allowed to have choice in the other lifetime. The consequences of her other life carried great consequences for her in this time.
The soul retrieval for my client had profound impact on her life. The healing that my client received by unraveling the vow and getting back her soul parts altered her understanding of who she was and allowed her to make her soul whole and brought her hope for a new future. This woman is thriving today.
Across the Great Expanse of Time
Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz (1646-1716), a German polymath and philosopher who most scholars believe developed calculus independently of Isaac Newton, wrote more than three hundred years ago:
“This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.”
The true self in its utter wholeness is a reflection of the universe and when it is restored to wholeness becomes as perfect as the universe.
My pod cast October 2 and October 9, 2017 gives many in depth explanations and examples of case studies of soul retrievals. Enjoy the listen.