What is Soul Retrieval?
Soul retrieval is the shamanic healing method used by a shamanic practitioner to restore missing parts of a person's soul. To perform a soul retrieval, the shamanic practitioner journeys to the spirit world and locates a particular missing soul part. The shamanic practitioner then brings the missing soul part back, restoring it to the person whom it belongs.
The experience of being human is not always easy. Life can involve facing a lot of adversity. While it's true that personal challenges, difficulties, and misfortunes ultimately represent opportunities for spiritual growth, it's hard to see things from that perspective when we're going through tough times. Some experiences result in trauma that continues to affect us even after an experience is over.
Trauma can cause disruptive stress on many levels: mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical. All of these levels are interrelated and affect one another. When an individual human experiences severe or prolonged trauma, the disruption may cause soul loss.
Soul loss is an automatic spiritual protective mechanism. In order to save itself from significant damage, the soul fragments into parts. Some of these soul parts then escape, seeking refuge in the spirit world. The soul uses this strategy to help preserve its overall integrity, but it then becomes incomplete.
Over time, an individual can experience soul loss more than once. A number of different soul parts may be missing simultaneously, and some of them may be more significant than others. For example, it is common for profound childhood trauma to result in a very significant portion of the soul going missing.
The symptoms of soul loss are varied, but they commonly include dispiritedness, vulnerability, lack of focus, lack of motivation, lack of fulfilment, unresolved grief, insufficient spiritual power, low energy, and chronic exhaustion. People suffering from soul loss often report feeling that something is missing, but they aren't quite sure what.
In addition, missing soul parts create holes in the soul that make attractive homes to external spiritual intrusions. These produce undesirable effects, like illness, disease, and personal difficulty. Any intrusion must therefore be removed before a missing soul part is restored.
It's important to realize that missing soul parts are not "damaged goods." They have fled to the spirit world, where they exist in parallel to the soul from which they came. They're still connected to an individual, but they're also distant and inaccessible. A missing soul part may have a pleasant, but illusory and incomplete, experience. Alternatively, it may be trapped and afraid.
In some cases, missing soul parts may return on their own, perhaps because they sense that circumstances have changed, and there is an opportunity for reintegration. In other cases, however, assistance from a shamanic practitioner is needed to help the soul part return home.
To perform a soul retrieval, a shamanic practitioner journeys to the spirit world on behalf of a client in need. The shamanic practitioner has spiritual vision, and the assistance of spirit helpers. These allow the shamanic practitioner to locate missing soul parts in the spirit world. The shamanic practitioner can then interact with the missing soul parts, releasing them and guiding them back to be restored with the soul to which they belong.
After soul retrieval has been performed, a client will experience a reintegration period. The process may take days, weeks, or even months. During this time, it is normal for a client to feel emotional "echoes" of the experiences that originally caused the soul loss. It is helpful to allow these emotions to flow freely, so they may be released. As the reintegration proceeds the client will increasingly feel renewed, more whole, and ultimately more like their true self.
The word "heal" comes from the same root as the word "whole." Healing, then, can be thought of as a return to wholeness. The profound positive effect that soul retrieval has on an individual's overall state of health and well-being is a perfect example of this.
Robbie Priestley - May 15, 2022
Further Reading
Additional relevant information about soul retrieval can be found in the following blog posts:
