Shamanic Soul Retrieval Sure Beats a Trip to a Therapist
That time Egyptian goddesses and fairies reunited me with my inner child
It was early in the morning of January 10th, 2014. I’d just woken up for this Skype appointment to hear what happened during some spiritual work I received while asleep in the preceding hours. I sat listening in wonder to this self-described shaman on my laptop screen — a middle-aged white woman with a blue scarf wrapped around her head, sipping a glass of orange juice, elaborate cat trees lining the wall behind her somewhere in the UK.
A couple years earlier I had experienced a spiritual awakening that smashed my atheistic worldview to bits in the time it takes to watch a documentary. After that turning point I greedily consumed as much material about spirituality as I could — books, blogs, videos, podcasts — like a starving person presented with a scrumptious buffet.
My first exposure to the concept of soul retrieval had occurred as I read Kira Salak’s spellbinding article for National Geographic Adventure, titled “Hell and Back,” about her experience with ayahuasca — the psychedelic brew traditionally used in the Amazon for shamanic healing purposes. That article was one of several factors that sent me winging to Peru for my own ayahuasca adventure in the late spring of 2013 (a story for another time).
Much to my disappointment, my own experiences with ayahuasca turned out not nearly as coherent, psychologically healing, and movie-worthy as Salak’s — though in hindsight I can now say I received exactly what I needed during that month spent deep in the jungle. (Here’s a secret: This is always the case in life, even though we can’t see it at the time.) So at that point, while living in northern Virginia and half-heartedly trying to start an art career, I still sought the satisfying healing experience that I believed ayahuasca had promised but not delivered.
Here’s what Salak wrote of her encounter with a child aspect of herself during one of her ceremonies:
We begin the ceremony, drink the ayahuasca. I’m hoping to find myself in some heavenly realms this time, but again, as usual, the darkness. With disappointment, I find myself entering a familiar tunnel of fire, heading down to one of the hell realms. I don’t know where I’m going, or why, when I suddenly glimpse the bottom of the tunnel and leap back in shock: Me, I’m there, but as a little girl. She’s huddled, captive, in a ball of fire before those three thrones of the devil and his sidekicks. As soon as I reach her, she begins wailing, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” It’s heartbreaking to hear her.
I think this must be a part of me that I lost. Long ago. The shamans believe that whenever a traumatic event happens to us, we lose part of our spirit, that it flees the body to survive the experience. And that unless a person undergoes a shamanic “soul retrieval,” these parts will be forever lost to us. Each one, they say, contains an element of who we truly are; people may lose their sense of humor, their trust of others, their innocence. According to psychotherapist and shamanic healer Sandra Ingerman, author of Soul Retrieval, such problems as addictions, personality disorders, and memory blackouts are all warning signs that a person may have lost key portions of themselves.
“No one will help me!” the little girl wails in my vision. And now she is me — I am wailing. Crying like I have never cried before. I know it as an expression of primordial terror from a time when, as a small child, I felt abandoned, set helpless before the universe. I have never felt such profound fear. How did this happen to me? the adult me wonders with fury. And why?
“The darkness was so heavy during your childhood,” a spirit voice says to me, “that your soul splintered beneath the weight.”
I have an awareness of having lost so much of myself. Who will I be when all the parts come home? I feel a hand on my back: Hamilton’s. “I’m here to help you,” he says. Suddenly, the flames trapping the little girl disappear. Everything is covered in a freezing white frost. I shiver from the intense cold.
“Julio and I have frozen the devil,” Hamilton declares. “You can pull the little girl out now.”
Salak’s soul retrieval ends in a lovely reunion and a lifting of her low-grade depression. Since I already suspected that so many of my problems as an adult could be traced to childhood, I longed for a similarly magical (and, frankly, easy) resolution.
So, in the first few days of 2014, while listening to a spiritual podcast about a UK-based shaman who does soul retrieval work, I remembered Salak’s article — and I contacted this very shaman to make an appointment for a healing session. She would work in the early morning hours while I was still asleep, meeting with an aspect of my multidimensional self on the astral plane. The work might include a soul retrieval depending on what she discovered I needed.
I recorded the shaman’s report during our Skype meeting and later transcribed it verbatim (with the exception of words I couldn’t fully make out, in brackets). Following is the transcript.
I made contact with you on the astral, which was very easy and very fast. I saw that you had a lot of dark area in the torso — it looked like the aura was running out, like wet ink runs out. I made a mental note that we have to have a look at that area. I took you to the healing temple and spoke with the goddess Isis, and her sister Nephthys was also there. It’s unusual for Nephthys to be there; she’s the dark sister of Isis.
We laid you down on the treatment area — a big stone slab, like a marble bench. [Above that] was a very big crystal, and I asked the crystal to emit the color that you need, and this particular ray of color was green. We gave you the Water of Life to drink, which we always do at the beginning.
And then I started scanning your body using the Web of Life. I start from the top of the head and take out any impurities and small negative entities before taking out any demons. Anything the size of a beetle or more will have to be extricated in a different way. As I was clearing this there was dark energy around the head but it cleared up nicely. Continuing down you had a lot in the torso. I had to clean down the arms including the hands as well.
I noticed some things at your hips but I didn’t get to your legs because once I got rid of the clouds around you, I noticed that you really looked like you had been gutted on the astral, like you had been slit open from your heart down to your belly.
I’ll tell you very honestly, and I’m not making this up because I want to impress you or get money or anything, but my opinion is this would have been fatal in the long run. When I saw this it was like a long slit and the wound was black inside, like dark, dirty astral energy. Isis explained that you had experienced an astral attack in your sleep a long time ago. That cut was bad enough but it was getting worse. I started healing it up from the bottom with my Atlantean healing spells, up to where the breastbone starts — but then it wouldn’t close.
Something was in the wound and it seemed to me there was an eye in it looking at me. It was something dark and bulbous. I started using the extraction spell and it came out.
It was an entity of a type that I had never seen. Most entities are like snakes, eels, worms, spiders, jellyfish, octopus. This one had arms and legs like a man, but the head was very round and bulbous like a melon. It was brown and mottled grey and had something a little bit amphibian about it — protruding eyes. It was about two feet tall and very, very nasty.
I asked the goddess what it was and she said it was a “grok.” I thought that was a funny name and I had never heard it before. She said the entity was feeding on you and it attacked people in their sleep. It was disgusting, to tell the truth; I got nausea when I removed it. You must have had a feeling of nausea in the heart? The energy of this thing was toxic and it made me feel like I wanted to vomit — not because it looked ugly (I’ve seen a lot of ugly things), but it was disgusting. And Isis said that it had already laid eggs and made three young ones.
So we took that thing and we blasted it with energy and it disintegrated into atoms, so it’s not coming back — it’s not even dust or ashes. We pulled the young ones out, too — and that’s when I got really disgusted; they made this sucking sound as we threw them in a bucket. They were slimy and I hate slimy things.
Then we had to clean out all the residual dark energy in the wound. Then we put in a spiritual sterilizer, which looks like liquid mercury but it works just fine. Then I closed up the wound completely.
The nasty entity had basically destroyed your heart chakra, so we needed a new one. That’s not a big deal — in fact the new ones are always better than the original, because you get them from the gods and they come in a crystallized form, about two to three inches tall, depending on how much the person can handle. People who can’t handle much energy get smaller ones, but yours was about three inches tall.
And then we used the activation mantra to activate it, and you could see the energy coming out and spreading through the chest and down the arms and everywhere. Also, when I started using the Web of Life to skim off negative energy on the astral, you started crying and I knew there was a lot of heavy emotional energy trapped.
Then I asked the goddess what we should do next because I didn’t know how you had the vulnerability in the first place so that you got attacked so badly. And she said that we needed to do a soul retrieval.
So I went with my other guide, the Celtic god [Connacht?] and he likes to do underworld work, mostly. So I asked him to help find the most important lost soul piece, because often you lose more than one piece but if you find the most important everything else falls into place, usually.
I went with him into your underworld and we did start off going into the collective underworld and then we opened a passage, a portal, and suddenly we were in this wonderful mysterious place and the first thing I thought was, this is not looking like an underworld, because in the underworld there are no man-made structures; it will be only nature. You won’t see bridges or artificial ponds or a house or anything like that. There were unbelievable flowers and a little stream, and there were tiny, little, almost Japanese-style bridges going over it, and there were waterfalls — it was like something from a total fantasy. So I asked about the little bridges here, and then my guide said, ‘You know we’re in the fairy realm.’
But why is a soul piece in the fairy realm? That is kind of rare, even though we have stories about the fairies stealing one. So I was looking and I saw a little girl, but she had blonde hair, and I thought, “That can’t be Jennifer.” I double checked though, in case you’re looking different on the astral.
And [my guide] said, “Jennifer’s over there.”
I said, “Where? I’m not seeing her.” I was looking for a little girl with dark hair.
Then I saw one of the fairy beings, a female. And she was standing with her back towards me. She turned around and in her arms was a baby — a tiny, teeny little baby.
And my guide said that was you.
And I said, “How did she lose her soul piece so early on?” And I was told that your soul was not welcomed properly by the parents. That actually started in the womb, that you weren’t wanted. Then the fairy woman explained that your soul didn’t come in fully; one part of your soul split off even before birth.
At this point I told the shaman that I had been born prematurely, and she responded:
So in some way that’s why you were born prematurely, because something was already wrong. It might have actually been an attempt of the soul to just abort the whole action and you’ll be born to other parents. But these things happen for a reason and even the ones that are involved, like the parents, they can also learn through these things. Quite often they only understand the lessons when they finally die.
Anyway, you weren’t welcomed in, so your soul felt unwelcome, and a part of you split off. You lost the more magical part. And the fairies kept you safe. So you weren’t in a dark region where evil entities were feeding on you. But you were in an absolutely beautiful place and taken care of. And this wouldn’t happen if you didn’t have a connection to the fairy and the nature realm. So you must have been there before; you have a connection with the fairy realm.
The fairy realm is a parallel dimension. It’s very real, only the fairies aren’t like in the cartoons with the little wings. They can be the same size as us, sometimes taller. They don’t necessarily have wings; I have not seen one with wings. Sometimes they look beautiful, sometimes they have little horns or pointy ears or some parts that are more like animals or plant-like things. But they are very friendly and they took care of you all these years and kept that part of you safe.
So I thanked them and I took the little baby you and we teleported back in the healing temple, and then I handed the baby to Isis and she took it and put it in your heart and it [blended its energy body with you]. And at that moment there was an explosion of a white light that just went through the whole room almost — it’s like we put a nuclear generator back in you.
This was the part that was missing from the start and that’s why you didn’t have full protection and that nasty entity got you. That entity eventually would have eaten all your energy and killed you. And that’s why the cut in the aura was bad enough, but that wouldn’t necessarily have had such disastrous effects. It was an entity, and because it had already spawned the small ones, that would have led to some very serious problems down the line.
And you should get a major improvement now. You should start to feel healthy. [You are more connected to the] divine blueprint that reminds yourself and your whole body how it should be, and basically rebuilds it from the original blueprint, not from the deviated one that had been through whatever trauma, bad diet or whatever.
And then after that I asked the guide for whatever recommendations — that’s what we always do, ask for recommendations — and quite often I’ll be told a crystal or an herb to benefit the people who shifted around. There were two recommendations, and the first one was you need to be in nature more, you need to connect with the nature realm again. And the second one was to harness the healing power of music, and you should go for more classical and calming, and avoid chaotic music. These were the two things.
Isn’t it interesting how our first questions when hearing stories like this typically are of a rational nature, e.g., Was it real? Did they just make it up? I’m more inclined these days to check in with my intuition and ask, “How did it make me feel?” (Over the moon, in case you’re wondering.) But for those who need something like proof, here are some interesting synchronicities:
- The shaman said that during the body scan, “I noticed some things at your hips . . . .” I hadn’t told her of my congenital hip disorder (femoral anteversion) and how, despite corrective surgery, still have some residual deformity and pain in that area.
- As the shaman spoke of the entity in my chest, she asks, “You must have had a feeling of nausea in the heart?” In my early thirties I developed a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung) that nearly killed me. It overtaxed and enlarged my heart, causing me to faint twice on a city street before an ambulance took me to a hospital. But on an emotional level, I’ve always felt heartsick. The metaphor I often imagined while severely depressed was a hand grasping my heart and pulling downward.
- At the time there was nothing about my childhood on the internet and I hadn’t told the shaman anything about myself beforehand — so there was no way she could have known my troubled beginnings in life, i.e., how I sensed I was conceived at a time when my parents couldn’t handle me, leaving me feeling unwanted or at least in the way as a child. When she said that a part of my soul had split off before I was born and appeared as a “tiny, teeny little baby” in the fairy’s arms, it made sense for my soul fragmentation to occur that early, given my stressful gestation and premature birth.
- I did indeed have a very strong connection to nature as a child (playing in the woods; making decorative things like flower crowns and crafts out of sticks and shells; attending to dazed birds that had slammed into our windows; reading about foraging wild foods and remedies, which — although our family didn’t do such things — oddly appealed to me). I cared so much about nature that I eventually went on to study environmental science and management in college — though during that time I never enjoyed the great outdoors myself beyond walking through campus to and from classes. Plus I loved leafing through the books we had at home about fairies — at least while I was a kid. As I later learned, it’s common for many of us as we grow into adults to abandon interests we had as children, only to return to them much later in life.
We humans are quite used to pressing our noses against the metaphorical glass wall of a movie screen or book as a fantasy tale unfolds that we can only witness from the outside, but never experience for ourselves as true characters in that story. I won’t deny that being in the audience carries its own special magic, especially when we lose all self-consciousness to the story. But eventually we leave the theater or close the book on what amounted to just a diversion from our tasks and troubles, what we think of as real life.
But my shamanic soul retrieval experience opened up another possibility. I admit loving how this fantastical story centered on me as the concern of some powerful, magical figures I had, to this point, only known through the glass walls of myth, legend, and forbidden history.
Undergirding this sense of awe is the idea that maybe the mundanity of our waking lives isn’t the only reality we humans occupy, that there are other pieces of us on other planes, adventuring with beings we’re falsely told are just fictional characters.
The winking, subversive message here? There is more to the self than we’ve been led to believe — and humanity is now entering a time when we can access more of who we truly are as glass walls between realms, erected by our cultural conditioning, thin and shatter.
Did my health conditions magically clear up? Did my emotional problems disappear? Nope, they sure didn’t. But I was growing to accept what I gathered was true for my difficult case and for many others: there are no instant solutions, and there’s a lot of deep inner work to be done that one can’t wish away with the wave of a wand. I didn’t really care, though; I was riding the high of discovering this whole new dimension of my own story.
The magic of my soul retrieval continued to echo throughout the next 24 hours, as evidenced by my journal entry the following day:
1/11/14
Last night was the first night following my soul retrieval. I dreamed that I was walking in what looked like a downtown area, and as I was looking in a shop window I noticed in the reflection a small child standing beside me. I turned and saw that the child was wearing a winter coat with a hood that fit snugly around her head. She had a very babyish face. On top of the hood were attached little fabric teddy-bear ears, and I thought that was cute. We walked out of the town and into the countryside, and as the child walked a little ahead of me on a lane that curved to the right, I heard her singing. Her voice was incredibly beautiful and surprisingly mature-sounding for such a little kid. I tried to imitate her but my voice didn’t sound as good and I was embarrassed about that.
Was my dream in fact a visitation by my own baby-soul fragment that the shaman and her guides helped me to reintegrate? Was she telling me that all I needed to do from now on was to follow her, and she’d lead me to places out in nature she knew we’d both love? And maybe someday she would teach me to sing — even if just metaphorically — as beautifully as she did?
I really like to think so. But more than that, I feel so.
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