The big question for me is whether it is best to do Soul Retrievals for other people, or help them to do it themselves. And I'm coming down on the side of helping others find their way themselves. Then they keep the power in the relationship and in the process, and they learn something. And if it takes months or longer, that is fine. There is no hurry. This is a slow-burn path.
And what is maybe sometimes missing in our culture is the place of prayer and ceremony also. And that leads on to the part that community can play, maybe needs to play, in healing. Imagine how much more powerful a healing is, if you have a load of people praying for your well-being at the same time as the shaman-guy is doing her wizardry. That is how Sweatlodges often work. Traditionally, you don’t do them just because it is Sunday or whatever, it is for a specific reason, like someone needs healing.
I used to do Soul Retrievals and other Shamanic bits and pieces up until the early noughties, and they were effective. But then people stopped coming, completely. Apart from once a few years ago, someone I knew had been sectioned, I turned up at their request and my helper put them back in their body, and a few days later they were released.
The stoppage wasn't personal, because people were turning up for astrology readings, where my primary function seems to be able to help people through transitions, how to BE in those confusing times where your old life doesn’t work anymore and you think maybe you’re going nuts. Which maybe you are, from a conventional point of view – rather like in American Beauty – but from a real point of view, you’re getting sane at last.
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I
offer Shamanic consultations, usually by skype, in which we can talk
over anything you want to talk over. I may use the Medicine Wheel,
Journeying, Astrology, Tarot or anything that works. And it centres
around listening to ourselves in a deep way. I work on a donation basis,
and I am happy with whatever is easy for you: I love this work.
Contact: BWGoddard1@aol.co.uk
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Anyway, it was energetic - something in me switched off, and has remained switched off, even though I have changed considerably in the meantime. However, if I have led people on their own healing journeys, great things have happened. And that can be through formal journeying, or just talking, and maybe using the directions/elements of the Medicine Wheel ceremonially as places to talk from.
So for me it's been a big message from Spirit not to do Soul Retrievals. (I’m not legislating for others here!) My early experience of journeying in 1997 was of my soul being 'retrieved', or uncovered, spontaneously, with plenty of dismemberment and reconstituting, and it changed me deeply in a short period. So I was doing it myself, in conjunction with the Spirits/the forces of the Unconscious. Even though the guy teaching me this ‘core shamanism’ tried to discount my experience, saying that others had to do it for you. Cojones! But these early experiences are formative, and if someone representing a tradition tells you something at that point, it can take years to fully convince yourself otherwise.
What comes into consciousness in Soul Retrieval isn't necessarily just missing, or repressed, pieces of soul that should never have gone missing. It can also be tied up with the stage we have reached as a human being, it can be also about a further stage of consciousness emerging.
A recent experience of Soul Retrieval was massive for me. This was last June, and it was after 2 Sweatlodges in one weekend. Sweatlodges are often a catalyst for me. I experienced an accession of a feminine side to myself, and it’s probably partly an age thing. I am still processing it 7 months on, in fact it will take years to unfold.
But one of my reflections is that part of it has been yes, stuff to do with childhood, where there was no room to be anything but a one-sided male. But another part of it has been a woman with an earth-power and the sort of wisdom that only comes with age. And who is to say that the piece that went missing in childhood wasn't also part of some necessary bigger picture? Like being part of a family line in order to bring some healing? Or having something difficult to push against?
So 'retrieval' isn't necessarily the right word. The way I was taught it had this emphasis of something having gone wrong that shouldn't have, and that being remedied. And there can obviously be truth in that, but it is also more complex. Our woundings are also a path to our soul, in a strange way we can need them to grow – the cracks where the light gets in - and it can be almost like they were planned. Sometimes. Or it may just be time for a new bit of our soul to come into consciousness, a new round of balancing on the Wheel. The ways of the Spirit, and the pattern of its unfoldment, is a mysterious and long-term thing, and it needs a big perspective.
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