I became interested in the shamanic journey about 35 years ago on training as a medical herbalist and as an extracurricular activity learning to connect with plants on a more intuitive level. A few years later I learned the basics of how to journey with Michael Harner who was one of the first pioneers in the West bringing these ancient ways back. Soon after that I trained in Soul Retrieval and other shamanic healing techniques with Leo Rutherford and Howard Charing.
Soul Retrieval in particular really spoke to me, coming as many of us do from a childhood with its share of trauma, I felt keenly that I did not have the full access to myself that I’d need to really thrive.
As anyone who is working to heal early childhood trauma knows, it’s quite a journey and the more help we can get the better. My experiences with soul retrieval, both receiving it, doing for others and teaching the techniques have deepened my fascination and respect for this practice which I have recently begun to teach again after many years focusing more on plant spirit medicine.
Soul retrieval can effect a big shift or leg up in the healing journey – if parts of ourselves are truly lost to us, we don’t have access to them in order to allow therapeutic processes to really work. Soul loss can be a block to treatment for any healing modality.
I recently taught an experienced and gifted healer this simple technique, and they did a soul retrieval for me. As I lay waiting for her to come back from the journey – she was beside me, eyes closed, travelling in spirit to the sound of a regular drum beat, as her allies and guides showed her what I needed – I had a strong feeling that took the words ‘something in me knows what it is to be with God’. On returning, she blew the energy into my heart and back of my head then described her journey. What was brought back was a wisp of stardust from the outermost reaches, some part of my soul that hadn’t been able to push through all the barriers and resistance to being here. She was very moved by an understanding of all I’d been up against early on, which felt affirming, a blessing of acknowledgment which I was grateful for.
That day I felt wonderful, full of life and joy, that night I dreamt a very powerful dream that I completely remembered. I woke early feeling cold, very cold, and with a lot of grief and almost overwhelming feelings of loneliness rising up in me. I had a day of big crying and gentle holding of myself, feeling as vulnerable as a newborn babe. That night, another big dream, and the following day a feeling of greater solidity and spaciousness within and an almost ecstatic knowledge of what it is to be with God.
I’m very excited to be sharing this beautiful method with a group of healers in January, and if there is interest I will do more of this work in the future. The requirement is to have a grounding in how to do the shamanic dream journey.
Shamanic Journeying is a way of connecting with the energy that is all around us – shamanism is a general term once specific to those tribes from the Russian steppes now applied to the earth-based spiritual traditions of indigenous people.
The shamanic worldview is that everything that exists is made of energy, and that what happens in the energy reality – called non-ordinary reality by Michael Harner who developed this method of shamanic journeying after years of learning various tribal ways from around the world – greatly affects what happens in ordinary reality. Making contact with Allies in the spirit world to effect changes in non-ordinary reality can have powerful beneficial effects on ordinary material reality.
Soul Retrieval uses the shamanic journey by the practitioner travelling in non-ordinary reality to gather energy belonging to another person, taking hold of this energy and bringing it back to ordinary reality.
