When we undergo a traumatic event in our lives, we can feel like we've lost our vitality or our power, and we can even become physically ill and/or emotionally dissociated after this happens.  From the shamanic point of view, we have lost a piece of our souls.  The healthy soul part that has left us has left in an attempt to protect itself.  In some cases pieces of our soul can be given or stolen from us by others.  Most of the population is in need of a soul retrieval in which the soul part is brought back to the client and then the client reintegrates the soul part into their energy body.  Sometimes these soul parts have been gone for so long that they feel alien to us when they are returned.  The shaman journeys to the soul part, discovers what the original woundings were (usually metaphorically), breaks and rewrites old contracts that keep the soul part lost, and then returns the soul part along with any gifts or power animals that will help the soul part reintegrate.

Many times someone who has undergone a trauma will be in therapy for years, but will improve only to a certain degree.  They may understand intellectually what their issues are, but not seem to move past them.  From the shaman's point of view, this person is first in need of having the traumatic imprint cleared from the energy body.  Then, the shaman retrieves the part of the soul that left so that it could survive the original trauma.  When this part is brought back, the person now has new consciousness and resources that she or he did not before, because the soul part was gone.  The effect of a soul retrieval can be so profound that the client may not even notice that they are behaving differently, although their loved ones are flabbergasted at the switch.  Sometimes physical conditions are also helped by soul retrieval as a side effect.

As a simple example of a basic soul retrieval, one of my clients has never been able to feel at home in any place she has lived since she moved away from her beloved childhood home where she had been the happiest.  The move occurred over twenty years ago, but she has not been able to get over this feeling.  She's always wanted to return back to that time, as if some part of her were missing.  When we did the soul retrieval I found the healthy happy soul part still having a wonderful time being a happy child in the old house.  For this soul part, time had not passed.  I negotiated with the soul part, explaining that my client couldn't be happy without her, but also that my client was willing to provide the same type of happy home but even better than before, since my client was now an adult and had more control over her life.  The soul part agreed to come back if this was the case.  As long as my client does the work of providing the same sort of happy environment, her childlike nature will return, and she will feel at home once again.

In my own life, I had been unable to truly embrace the fun part of life and relax into enjoying the life that my husband and I had worked so hard to create.  I had always felt like it was dangerous to be alive, and I had suffered from plain old anxiety about being here at all.  Before my soul retrieval I had dreams of being pushed into a car against my will, and of no one helping me to get away.  When a soul retrieval was done for me, my shaman journeyed and discovered that my original wounding was about being pushed into a body when I didn't want to incarnate.  The contract I had written about being alive was that birth meant suffering and death.  My shaman turned that contract around to say instead that birth was a celebration of life.  She returned to me the soul part that could enjoy life and had a wonderful time embracing life.  She also returned to me power animals in the form of twin bear cubs.  The playful bear cub energy was the instinctual energy I needed to reincorporate into my energy system in order to fully embrace my returned soul part.

Integrating the new soul part can be quite a challenge.  For myself, I was angry at this soul part for leaving in the first place.  Without it I had experienced what I saw as a lot of unnecessary suffering and I irrationally wanted to punish it.  But, over the next month or so, as the soul part settled into me, I began to identify with it so much that I truly dropped into fully enjoying all the parties for friends that I threw, and my playful nature expanded.  What was very interesting to me is that I realized the anxiety about being pushed into a body against my will had manifested in my life metaphorically as a fear of taking trips, especially if it involved getting on an airplane.  My fear of travel and flying completely disappeared with the soul retrieval, and on top of that, I started planning trips all over the place, where I would have never considered it before.

Sometimes when I do soul retrievals for my clients I discover that they are under contracts which haven't been written by them, but have been written by members of their family.  To learn more about these generational imprints, please click here.