As a result of the traumas and stresses we experience in our lives, a spiritual illness is created which can manifest into either physical or emotional “dis-ease”. What has usually happened is that a piece of our “soul” has been fragmented or broken off. Consider this to be a part of your vital force having gone missing.
The traumas we experience take tolls on us, and the effects of trauma vary from individual to individual. In our current society, we often use psychological methods to deal with most traumas and feelings of incompleteness. Whether it’s someone who has been in an accident, lost a loved one, been in an abusive relationship, has huge memory gaps of a part of their lives or any one of a thousand other things, we often dissociate a part of ourselves, most often as a mechanism of protection. If you’ve ever felt incomplete, it’s because your intuitive self knows that a part of you is missing.
Soul recovery is about journeying into other forms of reality in order to bring back the broken pieces and reintegrate them into our selves. It’s a shamanistic tool, because generally what sets the shaman apart from other healers is the journeying that he/she does. Healing shamanistic journeys have been conducted in most cultures and in all parts of the world from Siberia to South America and from North America to Australia.
Soul recovery is a means of finding and reintegrating those dissociated pieces. There are many other forms of reality in which to find the missing pieces as well as various methods for their recovery. Although someone else finds your parts for you, it doesn’t mean that you have no responsibility. Once the pieces are found, it is up to the person who has suffered the trauma to keep the reintegration process going and ensure those parts stay integrated.
You may wonder how you know if you’ve suffered soul loss and what the steps are for a soul retrieval journey. Some of the signs that may point to soul loss are depression, the inability to ground oneself, feelings of detachment, chronic illness, addictions, inability to let go of certain things in your life, a sense of emptiness, etc.
When you have found a shamanistic facilitator you want to work with, he/she undertakes a journey, based on a specific ceremony, on your behalf to other worlds or dimensions where these pieces are. With the help of a guide, the shaman can bring back a certain number of the pieces. For the next month afterwards, it is up to you to communicate with these pieces, to listen to what they have to say and to help them reintegrate into who you are. After a few months, you may want the shaman to undertake a second journey to see if there are more pieces ready to come back. The more traumatized pieces often do not return on the first journey. It’s as if it’s understood that the reintegration of all the pieces takes time and can require a slow adjustment period, and so the pieces come back in an order from least traumatized to most traumatized.
The purpose of the journey is to find and help heal these fragmented pieces of your soul. The shaman will tell you about the journey, explaining the pieces, the circumstances and what was required. In some instances you will know exactly what he/she’s talking about, and in some instances you will have to think about what the events may represent. They may be clear as glass or they may be couched in allegory.
The recognition of where and how the fragmentation took place can accelerate the reintegration process. You may be in a much different place now from when the piece dissociated, and the integration can be smooth and effortless. Each piece and each person is different. During the reintegration time, you listen and converse with the returned pieces, and continue to accelerate your own healing. You open yourself up more to the various means of communicating which you have with your higher self and get greater insights into your true self and your soul.