The shaman's diagnosis of our existential complaints: soul loss

The greatest contribution of the ancient shamans to our medicine and healing today is the understanding that in the course of any life we are liable to suffer soul loss - the loss of parts of our vital energy and identity – and that in order to be whole and well, we must find the means of soul recovery.

     On a visceral level, we all know how soul loss comes about. We suffer pain or trauma or abuse, we are overwhelmed by grief or guilt or shame, and part of us goes away because it doesn’t want to stay in a world that seems so harsh and cruel. We are compelled to make a wrenching life choice, leaving a partner or a job or a home, and part of us resists that choice and parts company with our dominant personality, clinging to the old relationship or the old place. Soul loss deepens when we fall into depression or addiction or make compromises with the world as we understand it, giving up on our big dreams of life. Lacking the courage and confidence to make that creative leap, or to trust ourselves to love, we wimp out – and part of our bright spirit, disgusted with us, goes away.

     Good analysts and therapists can help us to recognize parts of ourselves we have repressed and denied, including the famous Shadow, the term especially favored by Jungians for what we have tried to relegate to the basement of the personal unconscious because we would rather not own it as a part of ourselves. The shamanic concept of soul loss reaches further. It recognizes that soul healing is not only about identifying and integrating aspects of the self that we have buried or denied; it is retrieving pieces of soul that have literally gone missing and need to be located and persuaded to return and take up residence in the body where they belong.

    In my own practice, I have come to distinguish five forms of soul loss or disconnection that call for healing. I have yet to encounter a human being who is immune to any of these.

Loss of vital energy

You suffer from chronic fatigue. You find yourself torpid and listless, reluctant to get out of bed. Your days seem drab and gray and joyless. Your immune system in blown and you seem to pick up every passing bug. There is something missing in you and you try to stuff the whole with sugar or booze.

Loss of younger selves

You have lost younger versions of yourself – the young child with abounding energy and that beautiful imagination, that fine romantic who was hurt or betrayed as a teen, that inner poet or businessman who wanted to make different life choices from the ones you made. These younger selves have gifts and energy you can use in your life today if only you can find out where they are and discover how to bring them back.

Loss of animal spirits

Indigenous and ancestral shamans know that we are all connected to the world of the animal powers, and that by recognizing and nurturing our relation with animal spirits, we find and follow ther natural path four eneries. Yet many of us have lost this primal connection, or know it only as a superficial wannabe symbolic thing that we look up in books and medicine cards without feeding and living every day.

Loss of ancestral soul

This is a two-edged affair. When we live oblivious to the fact that we are always in the presence of the ancestors – those of our bloodlines, those of the land where we live, and those of our spiritual kin in a broader sense – we are likely to be the plaything and even the tenement for entities we don’t necessarily want to have near us. When we awaken to ancestral soul, we become ready to claim the connection with wisdom-keepers and protectors who can help us to re-establish heathy psychic boundaries and clear out what does not belong with us.

Loss of connection with the Greater Self

Ultimately we can only make peace between the many aspects of our selves, and follow a path of true spiritual evolution by opening or re-opening a direct and conscious connection with the Self on a higher level – the Self that is no stranger. When we clear the right space within our embodied selves, we may be ready for the deep and beautiful act of soul growing that I call spiritual enthronement, bringing a part of the Higher Self to live in our bodies and infuse our lives and our life choices with its radiance.

I have learned that dreams often show us where soul had gone, and offer paths by which it can be reached and encouraged to come home. Through the techniques of Active Dreaming, we can learn to help each other to become the shamans of our own souls and the healers of our own lives.

~

I wrote this article early in 2011 and then expanded it into key chapters of my book Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole (New World Library). The original article elicited a tremendous response; this feels like the right time to share it again.

Art: Edvard Munch, "Lady from the Sea" (1896)

Active Dreaming to rescue soul and community in scary times

I received this message from a friend:

"Robert; I am experiencing soul loss after the last presidential election...are you? I am working on it."

I responded:

Our everyday practice of Active Dreaming has become absolutely essential. I do the dreamer's equivalent of "chop wood, carry water" every day, and I recommend this for all dreamers. Write in your journal, the secret book of your soul. 
    Find someone with whom to share dreams and life stories by our Lightning Dreamwork process. Seek or create a circle of active dreamers, raising vital energy and helping each other to remember and act upon the secret wishes of the soul.
    Dream with the Speaking Land, conscious that you walk everywhere in a forest of living symbols. Hug a tree, renew your connection with the elemental powers.
    Remember that your dreams and the play of synchronicity give you sources and resources beyond the obvious. Keep your direct line to the sacred and the God/Goddess you can talk to open.
    Find a way, every day, to entertain your spirits and make a playground rather than a prison in this world. Never forget that in any situation you have the freedom to choose your attitude, and that this can change everything. Choose the day.

My book Active Dreaming contains much guidance on dreaming with and for communities. It explains how to create and maintain an Active Dreaming circle, and how Lightning Dreamwork, as group practice, is a model for enlightened community leadership, as each participant takes turns to play the role of speaker and guide.
    Community, as Peter Block defines it in a provocative  book, is about the experience of belonging. To belong is to feel at home, to know you are among family or friends. When something belongs to you, you are an owner; you have a stake in something. Playing with the word, Block notes that belonging evokes longing to be - to come fully alive, to embody fully a deeper purpose in life.
     The model leader in this kind of community  is one who can bring the right people together in the right way, name the right questions for group exploration ("what can we create together?") and listen as others find their voice and their power. Such things are best done in small groups, which Block promotes as the best agents of transformation.
     Groups that share dreams the right way are now at the vanguard in developing the kind of social space that Block advocates. Dream groups are typically small (six to twelve people) and establish a different kind of space, and a deep sense of belonging to an intentional community. They are circles in which each member receives the gift of deep listening, the chance to play leader or teacher, and the opportunity to tell their life stories and re-vision those stories.
     In Active Dreaming circles, we recognize the need for strong leadership to provide the structure and dynamic within which extraordinary group experiences can be shared. This includes selecting and defining a safe and protected physical space. It means gently insisting on time limits (dreamers can get things done on time), building and maintaining circle energy and keeping everything moving for the two or three hours of a typical session, and making sure that everyone feels at home and that everyone's voice is heard.
    Part of the leader's job in an Active Dreaming circle is to ensure that a lively alternation of discussion, movement and conscious group dream travel keeps everyone alert and engaged.     

    Above all, the leader will enforce simple rules that ensure that no one present - least of all the leader herself - will try to claim authority over anyone else's dreams or life story. We are only permitted to comment on each other's material by saying "if it were my dream" or "if it were my life." In this way, we offer associations and suggestions while encouraging the dreamer to claim the power of her own dreams - and to take the necessary action to embody their energy and guidance in the world. Finally, the leader of an Active Dreaming will give her power away repeatedly by inviting others to take charge in leading the processes.

      In these ways, we fulfill Block's definition of the mode of leadership required to restore and re-story our communities: "Perhaps the real task of leadership is to confront people with their freedom."

Quotes from Peter Block are from his book, Community: The Structure of Belonging (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

Play first, work later (and delight your inner child)

Like puppies or lion cubs or dolphins spinning silver lariats of bubbles, children play for the joy of playing. Young children are masters of imagination, since they know the magic of making things up. Our first and best teacher of conscious living is our inner child.

     But that inner child may have gone into hiding, under a glass dome or in a room in Grandma’s house, because of shame or abuse, ridicule or loneliness, because the world wasn’t safe or it wasn’t fun. If we have lost our dreams, if our imagination is stuck in a groove, it’s because we have lost our inner child. To live as active dreamers in everyday life, we have to bring that child home. This requires a quest, a negotiation, and fulfillment of a promise.

     The quest will lead us down halls of memory to a place and time where our wonder child went missing. We can embark on the quest as a guided journey to a real place in the imaginal realm, or through the portal of a dream or memory from childhood.

     The negotiation requires us to convince our child selves that we are safe and we are fun to be around. Fulfilling the promises we make will require us to remember to play without scheduling it.
     Play first, work later, our child selves will insist. The cautious dutiful adult self will protest. But if we are to keep our inner children at home in our bodies and our lives, we’ll need to fulfill our promises to be fun as well as safe. If we play well enough, then before we quite know it, we’ll fall in love with our work because it will be our play. 

Adapted from ActiveDreaming: Journeying beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Art: "Bathers" by George William Russell (AE).

Time and the Corn Maiden

Gore Mountain, New York

Look: you have new eyes to see.
Eyes of black owl, eyes of white owl.
Don’t be scared when they sear your soul
and clamp strong talons on your shoulders.
Let them lend you their wings,
their ability to see at many angles.
Let them take you to the place
you did not expect in this, your only, time.

Sun on your face, you part the high grass
to the field of grain on the steep hillside
where beans and squash sprout among the corn
in the old way. You feel her, the woman
whose body is the fertile earth
and gives birth ceaselessly to the three sisters
from her belly, her breasts, her blood.

Why are you here? Climb the slope
to the cabin in the woods. Don’t run away
from the shadows and husk things along the trail.
Show respect for the grandmothers
as you enter from the sunrise side.
Be patient with the girl they have sheltered here
for all these years, until you were ready for this.
She comes and goes like a cat, until drawn
to you by the brightness of your tears.

Don’t be ashamed that you forgot her.
She forgot you in her world of love and magic,
where time follows the law of eternal return,
the phases of the moon, the cycle of seasons,
not the logic of clocks. Stand tall now.
Show that you have ripened into a woman of power.
Drum for the grandmothers, and the corn maiden.
Let her follow you home on your heartbeat. 

Plant beans and squash in your garden.

Braid cornhusks, blackened and bleached,
in the code of all life. The old ones taught you
that dark and light must always contend,
in every created thing. Without contraries,
there is no creation. Black owl, white owl,
Whirlwind and Sky Holder. End their struggle
and you roll up the game of the world. So:
Every day, renew the balance of order and chaos.
Each day, with corn maiden singing in your heart,
throw your arms up to the sky and shout
Yes to life. Birds will take flight from your hands.

- Gore Mountain, November 3, 2013

This poem was inspired by a shamanic journey for soul healing that led deep into the landscape and mythic imagination of the Longhouse People of the Northeast. 

A physician seeks wholeness in the reflecting pool

photo (c) Jerry N. Uelsmann

In my conversation with Cecile Carson M.D. in my radio show today, we talked about simple, non-nonsense ways about bring ancient modes of soul healing into modern medicine.
    She delighted me, and will hopefully inspire others, including clinicians, with a couple of examples from her personal practice of how to make room for soul in the midst of a busy modern practice.
    She told me that, whenever possible, she would take a little quiet time, before a meeting with a patient, to offer a silent prayer. She asked that she might be guided to name what needed to be named in the right way, to understand what was truly going on in the life and the body of the person she was going to help, and "to help myself get out of the way" of the deeper process of healing.
    She spoke of clearing and maintaining the right space for healing. In that cause, she explained, she would often turn her eyes to an extraordinary photograph by Jerry Uelsmann that she kept in her office. It shows a twisted and blighted tree, stripped of foliage, seemingly dead and deformed. Yet in the pool before the tree we see the reflection of a tree that is vibrantly alive, erect, with all of its needles. Contemplating this image, Cecile would picture the wholeness and healing she wished her patient to claim. She kindly sent me a scanned version of the picture, which you see here.
    She talked with moving passion about the "yearning" of physicians to help the patient, and become healers of the whole person as well as fixers or palliators of symptoms. To move towards healing on the level of soul, Cecile offered, is "an opening to the mysteries".
    The Fox was in play today, producing a communications glitch that resulted in Cecile and I only sharing the last segments of my "Way of the Dreamer" radio show, which you can access in the archive. She'll be back to share more of her insights on the necessary convergence of ancient shamanic practice and contemporary healthcare.

What is at stake is something I discussed earlier in the show: You cannot heal the body without healing the soul." The statement enters the literary record in a dialogue of Plato (Charmides) where the fuller version reads as follows:


“You ought not to attempt to cure the eyes without the head, or the head without the body, so neither ought you to attempt to cure the body without the soul….If the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul.”


Plato attributes this declaration to a "Thracian" military physician who reports that this is the teaching of the "god-king" of his people, Zalmoxis, who has created a school for soul healers. For "Thracian" read "Dacian"; the Dacians were an ancient people of what is now Romania, and Zalmoxis was god-man who was born from a cave, like a bear. I'll be leading an adventure in shamanic dreaming and dream archaeology near his legendary birthplace, in the Carpathian mountains in October.