New Age, Alternative,
Metaphysical Publication
Aquarius-Atlanta.com

Retrieving Soul

by Judy Winters

The drumming CD hammered my consciousness into something soft and fluid. I had just finished clearing attachments from my client, “Joan,” and now I lay beside her next to my medicine wheel, her right hand clasped in my left. As I began to journey, I saw the horizon fill with billowing clouds, and then out of the haze stepped...Mickey Mouse! At first I doubted what I was seeing and tried to reprogram my mind to move elsewhere, but Mickey was insistent. He waved his large white-gloved hands at me and began jumping up and down shouting, “Take me back!” Reluctantly I allowed him to leap into my outstretched arms. I waited a few minutes more, but when nothing else appeared, I began my return journey. Once back, I gently blew Mickey into Joan's head and heart, ending by integrating the retrieved soul essence into her cells with a rattle.

A week later when I called, Joan was in the middle of a cleaning frenzy. She had been throwing out bag after bag of junk which had been accumulating in her apartment for years. “I didn't tell you,” she confessed, “but I have been clinically diagnosed with 'hoarding and cluttering,' a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. My psychiatrist says it's the way I cope with being a long-term victim of incest.”

A few days later I happened across the old cliche “Mickey Mouse details” and realized that Mickey had come back to help Joan take care of the “details,” i.e., all the material world “stuff” standing in the way of her becoming whole.

Joan had a classic case of what shamans call “soul loss.” Western world urban shamans and indigenous shamans have slightly different views on what soul loss is and how it is to be treated. Sandra Ingerman, a trained psychological counselor and a modern day practitioner of soul retrieval, defines “soul” as those crucial aspects of ourselves that we lose in an emotionally traumatic event, or that we give away, believing that through disowning a part of ourselves we will earn love, banish loneliness or achieve survival in what we perceive to be a hostile world. In her book Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self, Ingerman identifies the following as some ways to determine whether soul loss has occurred: experiencing yourself as if outside of your body instead of inside; feeling numb or deadened; being chronically depressed; having problems with your immune system or gaps in memory; struggling with addictions, or looking to external things to fill up an internal void.