Soul Retrieval is a process where the shaman journeys to the underworld to see the event that sparked the soul contract, destroys that contract, attends to a couple of tasks, and retrieves parts of our soul that were left behind. An important detail to remember is that the story of the event should be let go of and forgotten, so we don’t cling to that injury and continue to meet the conditions of the contract.
Those tangles are events in our lives (current or past) where part of our energetic body gets left behind. A lot of Soul Retrievals lead to children who have no say in what happens to them. They can only learn from the experience, and remember it for next time, if there is one. But a part of us is left behind, a beneficial part of us that left the event in order to survive.
Look at Soso, here. She’s very serious, has very careful ways of doing things, doesn’t socialize, and likes her wine. In her soul retrieval, the shaman is shown a girl representing a midieval version of Soso and her best friend running and playing tag. Little does Soso know, her friend has a heart condition, so while dodging around a bush, suddenly the girl stumbles and falls. The exertion had been too much, and the friend’s heart gave out, and she was dead. Soso believes that she killed her friend, and said “when I play, my best friend dies, so I will never play again!” and enacted the sacred contract.
The soul part that left Soso was the part of her that felt safe laughing and having fun. She left because she felt unsafe with Soso, who kills her friends. That soul part must feel safe with Soso to decide to come back. If Soso stays home and drinks wine alone, the soul part isn’t safe, or even welcome, right? Who is going to laugh and play when there is the deep, abiding sense of guilt and impending doom that Soso feels when she is happy and playful? So that soul part must want to rejoin us, also. It must feel safe and protected from that event ever happening again. We must be willing to do the work to change, in other words. With the fun playfulness back in her heart, and an understanding of why it happened– that it was not a pattern, just a moment in time–Soso is free to feel hope and joy again, rather than fear and dread.
Soul Retrieval can be a very powerful healing experience. Things can shift suddenly, and long-standing problems can vanish as if they never existed. That happens a lot. Other times it takes longer to feel the relief. Sometimes issues are caused by several things, and each of those parts should be healed, or at least the major contributors, for the results to be noticeable among the rest of the tangles. Or maybe we aren’t quite ready to deal with that issue, and we stay shallow in our explanations. We want to heal our procrastination, not the anger that causes it. The process still works, it just takes longer and is less dramatic, if we aren’t really ready. The more we want relief from whatever it is that has us bound up, the deeper we are willing to go. Soul Retrieval can change everything, and it will change something.