Soul Retrievals for Soul Loss

I deeply believe that whenever we suffer an emotional or physical trauma a piece of our soul leaves the body in order to survive the experience. Soul could be defined as: life force, or the part of our vitality that keeps us alive and thriving. The types of trauma that could cause soul loss could be any kind of trauma/abuse: sexual, physical, or emotional, and early developmental trauma, or complex PTSD. Other causes could be any type of traumatic accident, war, a natural disaster (a fire, hurricane, earthquake, tornado, etc.), surgery, addictions, divorce, or death of a loved one. Any event that causes shock might cause soul loss.

Soul loss is usually a necessary survival mechanism. It is how we manage to survive during a traumatic event. If I were going to be in a traumatic accident the last place I would want to be is present in my physical body, so I would likely dissociate and leave my body. Mentally I could not endure that kind of suffering and pain. So our bodies employ this unconscious mechanism wherein a part of our soul/self consciousness leaves the body so that we do not feel the full impact of the trauma.

Psychologically we talk about this as dissociation. But in psychology we don’t talk about what part of us dissociates and where that part goes. This is a place in us that cannot be reached through talk therapy – words cannot speak to this place inside of us. In shamanism we know that a piece of the soul leaves the body and goes to a territory in what shamans call non ordinary reality where it waits until someone intervenes in the spiritual realms and facilitates its return.

Although soul loss is a survival mechanism, the problem from a shamanic point of view is that the soul part that left usually does not come back on its own. The soul might be lost, or stolen by another person, or the soul doesn’t know the trauma has passed and it is safe to return. When we experience symptoms of complex PTSD, we often don’t realize why we are feeling what we are feeling – we are triggered and physically and emotionally re-experiencing the trauma in the present, without being able to make the connection to the actual trauma.

It has always been the role of the shaman to go into an altered state of consciousness and track down where the soul fled to in the alternate realities and return it to the body of the client.

There are many symptoms of soul loss. Some of the more common ones would be dissociation where a person does not feel fully in his or her body. This might manifest as feelings of depersonalization or derealization, generalized anxiety, OCD, and other symptoms of anxiety. Other symptoms include depression,  autoimmune disorders, and complicated bereavement. Addictions are also a sign of soul loss as we seek external sources to fill up the empty spaces inside of us whether through substances, food, relationships, work, or buying material objects.

Soul Remembering

Soul remembering is a vital follow up to Soul Retrieval. It is human nature to project our own internal worlds and self states onto others. don Miguel Ruiz calls this process “domestication” in family systems. These projections of our families, our teachers, and society of who we are, of who we are supposed to be, can result in a loss of our connection with our own soul journey, our developmental trajectory, and our own energy source. In Soul Remembering, the energy and purpose that we brought into this lifetime at birth, that was domesticated out of us through projection and the judgment of others is retrieved and restored, along with vitality and sense of purpose in our lives.