Ø What is soul loss?
When we suffer
trauma or bitter disappointment or violent shock, soul may leave the body, to
escape. This produces the phenomenon that psychologists call dissociation and
shamans call soul loss. It can be seen as a survival mechanism. When you can’t
take any more pain, you go away in order to make it through.
A child who has been abused, a survivor
grieving for a beloved partner who has died, a lover who has been betrayed and
abandoned, a soldier who is
shell-shocked, and the victim of a terrible accident are all likely to have
suffered major soul loss.
Let’s
notice that soul loss need not be major, or the result of violent events. We
suffer a lesser degree of soul loss when we choose one direction in life over
another, or when we put our energy and focus into one thing rather than another
– like holding down the job instead of pursuing a creative project, or being a
mom instead of a lover (or vice versa). Soul
loss may be merely temporary and transitional “soul drift”, as when we are
jet-lagged and it takes a while for us to catch up with ourselves.
Ø What are the symptoms of soul
loss?
Common symptoms
of soul loss include: chronic fatigue; emotional numbness; chronic depression; spaciness;
addictive behaviors; low self-esteem; inability to let go of past
situations or people no longer in your life; dissociation and multiple
personality disorder; obesity or unexplained weight gain; abusive behaviors; absence of dream recall; recurring dreams of locations from earlier
life, or of a self separate from your present self
Ø What is the difference, in a
practical sense, between someone with a lot of soul in their bodies and someone
who does not?
For
people with a lot of soul, or vital energy, in their bodies, most of the
symptoms of soul-loss listed above would be rare, transient, or absent. For
someone who has suffered significant soul loss, three or more of these symptoms
are likely to be chronic.
Ø Why does the soul have a hard
time staying in the body?
We
suffer pain or abuse, grief or shame, and part of us finds the world so cruel
that we want to go away. Soul loss is also caused by wrenching life choices: we
decide to leave a relationship, a home, a job, a country, a lifestyle — but
part of us resists that choice, sometimes to the point of splitting away and
withdrawing its energy from our lives. We also lose soul energy when
we give up on our dreams and settle for a life of dull compromise, refusing to
trust ourselves to love or to take that creative leap.
Ø Where does soul go when it
leaves?
Sometimes
we find that a part of ourselves is stuck
in the old place, in Granma’s house, or in the apartment we shared with our
first love. Sometimes a soul part we lost seems to be living in a separate
reality, like the land of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. When we wish ourselves
dead, a part of our soul may go far way, as far as a Land of the Dead.
Ø Are all aspects of soul
recoverable?
There
are parts that are so damaged we don’t want them back. Sometime they appear
burned or charred, dark or addicted. Sometimes our life choices are so radical
that a part of ourselves simply cannot be persuaded to share our present
situation. My inner businessman is quite disgusted with the choices I have
made, and won’t stay close to me unless I make money more of a priority than I
am likely to do!
Ø What is the first step that
someone who would like to experience more soul in their life to take?
You do
some cleanup, and you ask for help. In my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home, as in my retreats, I offer
practical guidance for psychic cleansing and release. One of my favorites is a
very simple fire releasing in which we cast out any heavy energies that are
holding us back and clear a space for vital soul to come back in. It’s very
important to remember that we have help available, including from our spiritual
allies and our own Greater Self, and that it’s always a good idea to ask for
help nicely.
Ø What role does addiction play
in soul loss?
Addiction
can be both a cause and an effect of soul loss. Part of our brighter energy may
leave us if we fall into habits and company it doesn’t like. When we are
missing a part of ourselves, things come in to fill the gap, and we reach for
things to fill that gap. From a shamanic viewpoint, addictions are often
worsened by spirits of the dead who are seeking to feed their own cravings
through a living person. I have never met a true alcoholic, for example, who
has not (from my viewpoint) been accompanied by dead drunks. In the book, as in
my programs, I offer practical guidance to create healthy psychic boundaries
between the living and the deceased.
Ø What is the
difference between spirit and soul?
We
can’t lose spirit, when the term means mind, higher consciousness or our spark
of the Godhead. But we can lose contact
with it, and block our own access to the Greater Self. Soul is a different matter. Soul is quite
mobile and soul energy is divisible; we can lose parts of it and take on parts
from others that we really don’t want around.
Ø You have developed an original
approach to healing through what you call “soul recovery”. What are the key
elements in this approach?
We use the core techniques of Active
Dreaming to bring more of soul into the body and help others to become whole.
By learning to share dreams with others in the right way, we create a safe
space where our younger and brighter selves can draw closer, and we start to
build communities of soul friends. By learning to use a dream as a doorway
through which we can travel — in shamanic lucid dreaming — into a deeper space,
we can go to the places where lost souls can be found and reclaimed, and we
help each other to do this.
Ø Are there other ways, in
addition to working with our dreams, to experience soul recovery? If so, what are they?
Soul retrieval, as opposed to soul recovery is a shamanic operation in
which the practitioner makes a journey on behalf of a client to locate lost
aspects of soul, brings them back, and transfers them to the client’s body,
often by blowing them into energy centers such as the heart and the crown of
the head. It can be a profoundly healing event. It reaches parts that Western
psychology often does not reach, and may be essential in cases where people are
missing so much of themselves that they are not equipped to become self-healers
until an intervention has taken place. The limitation of this is approach is
that nearly everything depends on the character and skill of the practitioner,
on the reality of his or her connection with spirit helpers, and on the quality
and motivation of those helpers.
Ø You say that dreams not only
show us what the soul wants, they also show us where it has gone. Please elaborate and provide an example of
this.
Our dreams can tell us which parts of ourselves may be missing, and when
it is timely to bring them home. Recurring dreams in which we go back to a
scene from our earlier lives may indicate that a part of us has remained there.
Dreams in which we perceive a younger self as a separate individual may be
nudging us to recognize and recover a part of ourselves we lost at that age.
Sometimes we do not know who that beautiful child is – until we take a closer
look
A middle-aged woman recently
approached me for help. She told me, "I feel I have lost the part of me that
can give trust and know joy." As preparation for our meeting, I asked her
to start a dream journal, although she had told me she had not remembered her
dreams for many years. When she came to see me, she had succeeded in capturing
just one tiny fragment from a dream. She remembered that she was standing over
a table, looking at three large-size "post-it" notes. Each had a
typed message. But the ink had faded and she could not read the messages.
Slowly and carefully, I helped her to
relax and encouraged her to try to go back inside her dream. Quite quickly, she
found herself inside a room in the house where she had lived with her
ex-husband prior to their divorce, almost twenty years before. Now she could
read the typed messages. The first read in bold capitals, "YOU CAN DO
IT." They were all about living with heart, and trusting life.
She realized that she had left her
ability to love and to trust in that room for nearly twenty years. I asked her
what she needed to do. She told me, "I need to bring my heart out of that
room and put it back in my body." She gathered up the messages and made
the motion of bringing them into her heart. As her hands crossed over the place
of her heart, we both saw a sweet and gentle light shine out from her heart
center. She trembled, eyes shining, and told me, "Something just came
back. Something that was missing for twenty years."
Bear creation by Tracy Cunningham. Bear is a great ally in soul recovery.
