A PAEN TO THE SOUL
Beautiful Child, lone and lost –
Protecting your innocence,
Surviving, but at what cost?
Frightened of joy, life, and passion
Hiding, that none may hurt you,
Paralyzed with inaction.
You desire to be free –
I hear your call, Beautiful Child
And will answer your heart’s plea.
Home is where I will bring you –
In your body you are free,
Alive, joyous, loving, true!
Shamanic ceremonials and healings carry strange-sounding titles to them: Spiritual Parasite Removal, Toy-Ahn-Ah-mé, The Journey of Mén-zu, Release from Purdah, Soul Retrieval and the like. How would you know if any of these even apply to you, if you don’t have a clue as to what the titles refer to in the first place? I fully understand! That is why I am offering, here, a common-sense down-to-earth talk about one of these: Soul Retrieval.
Why Soul Retrieval?
I’ll start with a metaphor. Imagine that you have a potted plant that is not doing well, its leaves are yellowing and it refuses to flower. You could cut away the damaged parts of the plant, douse it with fertilizers and shock the plant into a new growth cycle. Or, you could look at the plant as a whole, and seeing that the roots are crowded, give it a larger container. While you are at it, you might seek a better soil mix and put some companion plants in or next to it, thereby providing the plant with what it requires to flourish.
The first option is akin to the psychotherapeutic process… cut away what does not work in your life, add in a bunch of aphorisms and ego-encouraging affirmations, and hope to shock the system into a more positive attitudinal approach to life.
The second option is akin to feeding the Soul, bringing to it what it needs by listening to the Soul, rather than forcing it to perform according to mind/body/societal expectations.
In a Soul Retrieval, we recognize that the Soul of the person… ok, wait, what is the Soul of a person, anyways? Perhaps another metaphor is required:
The structure of our genetic hard-wired instinctual mechanisms, such as the brain/biochemical hormonal systems, can be viewed as a machine, say a computer. Call it the Body and the Brain specifically.
Our learned behaviors, thoughts, and emotions are the language system of the Brain/Body. Call it the Mind and Emotions. It is confined to the functioning capability of the hard frame of the Brain/Body machine itself.
These two, the Body/Brain and the Mind/Emotions are like a computer hooked up to the internet, with all its nascent capabilities: emails, posts, and pics that are able to be sent back and forth between two or more parties. Call that our body language, words, and gestures. Call that the contextual format.
That which is communicated by means of the emails, posts, and pics is the content, and this content delivers the essence of the intention that we desire another to receive. Examples may be words/images that evoke within the intended recipient the feelings of being loved and cared for, or anger and disappointment, or joyful celebration, etc.
It is this elemental core of our character, comprised of our non-verbal essence, that both intends and evokes through the means, mechanics, and contextual formatting of the Body/Brain/Mind/Emotions. This, my friends, is the Soul. The nature of the Soul is that it intends and evokes commune with the Souls of others.
Ok, got that? Good, let’s move on…
In a Soul Retrieval, we recognize that the Soul of the person has experienced a cleaving away of an intended commune of some aspect of its essence and that this shunting away was done in order to protect that disengaged quality of essential character in order to ensure that no further damage occurs to that expression of the Soul. Whew! That was a mouthful, even for me! Time for an example:
A child is innocent, trusting, and feels safe in his or her environment. If that child were to have those qualities of character denigrated, abused, or injured, the Soul of that child will disengage the essential qualities of trust, innocence, and acceptance of the world as a safe place…not as a denial of these attributes, but in order to protect them from further assault and injury.
The consequence of this dis-integration of these qualities of the Soul from the rest of the functioning essentials of the child’s life is that the child will grow into a person who does not have those qualities readily available to them, if at all. Such a person’s experience will be that they will mimic what it looks like to trust, but they just do not ‘get it’ from the inside. Instead of being lovingly trusting and discerning, the person, as an adult, is suspicious and judgmental, on the one hand, while also being very gullible and susceptible to manipulation on the other. Innocence, having been shattered, is replaced with the poor substitute of aloofness or of being snide. The world, to such a person, just does not feel safe. Rather, the world seems to be out to get them, or they are always looking for the set-up, believing there to be a lesson in each and every mishap of life, and if they were to only be able to ‘get’ that lesson, they would be safe, fulfilled, enlightened or free. Of course, it never happens, because that person is always on to the next lesson of life to be learned if they are only smart/good/spiritual enough to learn it.
Understand… this is only one example of someone whose innocence, trust, and safety had been threatened in life. I am not even addressing the damages wrought by sexual and/or physical abuse, abandonment, rejection, betrayal, demeaned, shame, and… well, you get the point.
So… why Soul Retrieval? Because that is the method by which we, as Shamans, send our Spirit (no, Spirit is not the same as Soul, but that must be another article another time) into the realm of the Soul of the person who has been so injuriously harmed and there goes to seek, find and return the essential aspect of their Soul that has been disengaged, locked away, for safekeeping. Simply stated, the Shaman will go in quest of the person’s Soulful qualities of trust, innocence, and sense of safety (for example) and reintegrate these qualities back into the person’s Body/Mind/Emotions so that the person once again has full and free access to these essential elements of their life’s capabilities.
The results brought forth in the person’s life are the reclamation of feelings, clarity of mind, and stability of emotions; in short, the evocation of passion and stepping forth into life with ease. As the person follows through with the suggested steps and activities to aid in the full integration of their retrieved Soul, a maturity that comes with the grace of fully functioning character traits results.
This writing addresses the “Why” of Soul Retrieval. It does not get into the “How” to do a Soul Retrieval. That takes thorough and experiential training with compassionate oversight and guidance. Yeah, I offer that training. If you are interested, look for further announcements of when and where, but those questions are not the topic of this article either.
If, however, you recognize, from what I have written here, that you yourself are in need of a Soul Retrieval, then please follow through by going here: Full Moon Soul Retrieval Service
