SOUL RETRIEVAL

by Michael G Millett Dip.CHP, MNCH(Reg), MHRS, PNLP, PLH, MNACHP 

Soul loss is a spiritual illness that causes emotional and physical disease. We all spend a tremendous amount of psychic energy looking for lost parts of ourselves.  We do this unconsciously and we do this in many ways - generating dreams and day-dreams, experimenting with various spiritual paths and creating relationships that mirror back to us our missing parts, to name but a few. Many of us today don't feel totally whole, don't feel as if we are all here. Few of us live as fully as we could. 

Techniques exist for dealing with this common human situation, but these methods have either been almost entirely forgotten in modern society or people are unaware of their existence.  For tens of thousands of years a practice known as shamanism has brought healing to people in many cultures around the world.  According to the shamanic perspective, one of the major causes of illness is this soul loss. 

Today we often find soul loss as a result of such traumas as abortion, abuse, accident, addiction, illness, incest, loss of a loved one, miscarriage, surgery, or the stress of combat. The basic premise is that whenever we experience trauma, a part of our vital essence separates from us in order to survive the experience by escaping the full impact of the pain. Soul loss can be caused by whatever a person experiences as traumatic either in this life or a past life, even if another person would not experience it as such.  The shamanic belief is that this part of our essential life-energy can split off and become lost in non-ordinary reality. 

The shamanic practitioner will travel or journey for the client in an altered state of consciousness where he or she enters non-ordinary reality in pursuit of these lost soul parts. The shaman will then retrieve the lost soul parts from these non-ordinary worlds and return them to the body of the client.  It is important to note that non-ordinary reality is different than and not the same as the unconscious mind. In formal past life regression therapy, the practitioner retrieves the separated (dissociated) part(s) of the past life character and integrates it (them) into the past life character as well as into the client during the healing process.  In transpersonal therapy and transpersonal inner child work, the separated parts are again integrated into the client during the healing.

Examples of soul loss are when a beloved spouse, child, or friend dies, and we also 'deaden' for a while, we feel as if the light has gone from our world, as if we are sleepwalking.  Or we return from having major surgery and do not feel as if we have come fully out of the anaesthesia.  We also might have been involved in a serious car accident and report feelings of being “spaced out”.  We may be involved in an abusive intimate relationship and be aware of being locked into destructive patterns but feel too fragile and powerless to move on. Or in leaving or having left this relationship, we might feel as if something would or is left behind with our partner. 

Another sign of soul loss can be a gap in memory to avoid pain. The soul may also leave a child who does not feel loved, or who feels abandoned, by his or her parents. Being sickly as a child or suffering serious or chronic illness can often indicate this soul loss.  Chronic depression is another symptom of soul loss. A soul might leave the body to survive physical or sexual abuse.  In each of these cases, the traumatized person literary escapes to survive the ordeal.  Shock is the word usually used to describe this condition. Shock is a normal reaction in itself and no cause for alarm.  But often, for reasons we don't fully understand, the part of the self that left fails to return and that is a predicament.  Often this fragmentation or loss of a persons essential being keeps him or her from being able to create a path of love and joy and move on in life. 

Using hypnosis to access these fragmented parts through past life healing and transpersonal therapy, the practitioner firstly accesses the inaccessible parts of our unconscious mind and then our subtle energy which is non-physical and part of overall consciousness, the corona of energy around living beings. This is similar to, parallel and part of the shaman's spirit world (non-ordinary reality). 

This corona of subtle energy holds a great deal of information, well-being or disease, emotional states, mental attitudes and past lives and are often where our lost parts go. Through hypnosis, we can access this etheric blueprint or body  to retrieve these separated parts and through the various healing processes integrate them back into the client. 

Shamanism and past life healing and transpersonal therapy provides not only a diagnosis and description of these widespread problems, but also acts as a powerful intervention and treatment.