posted December 27, 2008 01:48 PM         

From the shaman’s perspective, soul loss is the root cause of much illness and affliction in our lives. We suffer deep grief, abuse or trauma – or succumb to negative habits and addictions – and a part of our vital soul energy goes away. Chronic depression, lethargy, memory gaps, low resistance to illness and emotional numbness are among the most frequent symptoms of soul loss.

Soul retrieval is central to shamanic practice. It involves four vital processes. (1) The shamanic practitioner makes a conscious dream journey to locate aspects of the client’s vital soul energy that may have gone missing. These are often perceived as younger versions of the client, stuck in a scene from the client’s earlier life or in other locations in nonordinary reality, even the Land of the Dead. (2) The practitioner consults with spiritual guides – her own and those of the client – on what it is appropriate to bring back. (3) The practitioner effects an energy transfer to bring the recovered soul-parts back to the client, blowing the energy into the heart, the head, the solar plexus or other centers of the body. (4) The client receives guidance on integration; living with that boisterous three-year-old you left behind all those years back may require some practice!

I can tell immediately when a soul retrieval has been successful, by the energy lift, the return of lost memories, appetites and joie de vivre, and above all the brightness of spirit that shines from the eyes.

I have introduced physicians, nurses and therapists to the soul retrieval journey and quite a number of them tell me they have been able to integrate this powerful healing art into their mainstream practice, with wonderful results.

Our dreams can tell us which parts of ourselves may be missing, and when it is timely to bring them home. Recurring dreams in which we go back to a scene from our earlier lives may indicate that a part of us has remained there. Dreams in which we perceive a younger self as a separate individual may be nudging us to recognize and recover a part of ourselves we lost at that age. Sometimes we do not know who that beautiful child is – until we take a closer look. There is a marvellous story in my book Dreamgates about what happened when a woman went back into a dream of a beautiful five-year-old in a red coat, and found herself fusing at the heart, in a blaze of light, with the part of herself she had lost at age five through family trauma.

Unfortunately, a common effect of soul loss is dream loss. Indeed the absence of dream recall is often a primary symptom of soul loss – as if the part of the sufferer that knows how to dream and travel in deeper reality has gone away, out of pain or disgust. It is fascinating and deeply rewarding to observe what can happen when people who have forgotten how to dream start dreaming again. This can amount to spontaneous soul recovery.

A middle-aged woman recently approached me for help. She told me, "I feel I have lost the part of me that can give trust and know joy." As preparation for our meeting, I asked her to start a dream journal, although she had told me she had not remembered her dreams for many years. When she came to see me, she had succeeded in capturing just one tiny fragment from a dream.

She remembered that she was standing over a table, looking at three large-size "post-it" notes. Each had a typed message. But the ink had faded and she could not read the messages.

Slowly and carefully, I helped her to relax and encouraged her to try to go back inside her dream. Quite quickly, she found herself inside a room in the house where she had lived with her ex-husband prior to their divorce, almost twenty years before. Now she could read the typed messages. The first read in bold capitals, "YOU CAN DO IT." They were all about living with heart, and trusting life.

She realized that she had left her ability to love and to trust in that room for nearly twenty years. I asked her what she needed to do. She told me, "I need to bring my heart out of that room and put it back in my body." She gathered up the messages and made the motion of bringing them into her heart. As her hands crossed over the place of her heart, we both saw a sweet and gentle light shine out from her heart center. She trembled, eyes shining, and told me, "Something just came back. Something that was missing for twenty years."

As this story suggests, while soul retrieval may require shamanic intervention, soul recovery can be a gentle and spontaneous process, midwifed by dreams. In the most literal sense, dreaming can make us whole. It not only connects us with lost or buried aspects of ourselves. It connects us with our larger identity – our Higher Self – and our larger purpose.

posted January 03, 2009 01:21 AM         

I was not familiar with the shamanic perspective on this issue, but Robert Monroe did the exact same thing using the out-of-body experience, and it just makes so much sense ... becoming whole by collecting/acknowledging/incorporating those bits of ourselves which have become "stuck" in space-time to some particular experience, be it of this life or of past lives.

Thank you for posting the article! Robert Moss is great.