In shamanic terms, soul loss is the main reason that people become ill. It is believed that when a traumatic event happens in someone’s life, it is possible for a fragment of the soul to leave. Each and every time another trauma occurs another piece can leave causing the body to become depleted in energy and susceptible to illness. This occurrence is called soul fragmentation or soul loss.
Soul loss can occur due to major operations, addiction, sexual or physical abuse, being bullied, a shocking betrayal, the death of a loved one and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The loss can happen from childhood experiences that may not even be recognized by the parents, yet the child can be affected by the experience well into adult life.
As an example, when I was five years old, I lived on a farm and watched a bull be born. I named him Blue Boy and he became my playmate and best friend. As he grew up we played tag in the yard and I told him all my secrets. To this day, I keep a picture of the two of us playing together on my refrigerator. I suppose I was told that one day he would be killed yet as a young child, I don’t think this really made its way into my consciousness. One day, while I was in the house, I heard a gunshot and was told by my oldest brother that they had just killed Blue Boy. I was overcome with emotions! I couldn’t believe that my best friend had been killed! I remember flying out of the house but don’t remember what happened after that. As an adult, I realized that I most likely had gone into shock. I do remember that every time we had meat at a meal afterwards, I asked my mom if it was Blue Boy. My guess is that it was. We lived on a farm and this is the way things work on a farm.
When I became a shamanic practitioner, I finally dealt with this event that had caused me to have some major trust and abandonment issues throughout my life. During a journey, I met up with Blue Boy’s spirit and finally came to peace with that experience by concluding that he had sacrificed himself so that I could eat. He told me to think about it as having taken him in as the sacrament of communion. His body and blood became one with my body and blood. We became one in spirit and that enabled him to become my Spirit Guide! That journey was a huge spontaneous soul retrieval for me. I am so grateful that I now am able to facilitate soul retrievals for others.
There are other ways to lose fragments of our soul. For instance, when a car accident occurs, the moment of impact creates an enormous energetic explosion. During that moment, the jarring sensation that erupts can very well cause a piece of one’s soul to leave their body. Afterwards, the person may leave the scene thinking that they are intact, yet they don’t feel quite the same. Most likely, they figure that it’s because they have just been in an accident, are perhaps in shock and leave it at that. Chances are, they feel different because they have lost a part of their soul and there is now an empty space inside them where that fragment existed. They no longer feel whole. Something is missing. That soul part could very well be locked in the impact of the incident and is unable to return to the body.
In September 1991, I was in a serious car accident. My car was totaled around me after begin hit sideways on the driver’s side door by a woman who drove her car through an opposing red light. My car then spun to the right, slammed into the center guardrail of a bridge that ran perpendicular to the street on which I had been traveling and then spun again in the opposite direction hitting the same guardrail a second time finally bringing me to a crashing halt! Hearing a loud hissing sound coming from under the hood I forced myself to get out of the car because I thought it was going to explode!
By this time, many others had come and were helping me. I could hardly speak! Try as I might I couldn’t tell anyone how to contact my daughter to tell her that I wouldn’t be picking her up as planned. My mind wasn’t working. I was in shock. The EMT’s arrived and put me on a stretcher telling me not to move. It was then that my body began to shake all over and continued to do so constantly for the next four or so hours.
Years later, I learned that one way the body works in order to move us through a traumatic experience is to shake. Unbeknownst to me, my wonderful body was doing exactly what it needed to do to recalibrate me energetically. When you’ve been really upset about something, has anyone ever said to you, “Just shake it off”? Whether or not they consciously realize it, what they are saying is, let it go or move on. Or have you found yourself shaking your hand after hurting it? Shaking can actually block the major sensations of pain and reduce anxiety. It is a natural defense mechanism.
Have you noticed that animals ordinarily shake after a dangerous or life-threatening situation occurs? Several years ago, a deer ran out in front of my car, hit the front of it, bounced off and then left the scene. But, before it ran away, it physically shook its whole body. It literally shook off the experience so that the energy of the impact would leave its body.
In Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine with Ann Frederick, Levine states that, shaking helps to rebalance the body after stress. He says, “To complete its biological and meaningful course of action, the organism requires the spontaneous shaking and trembling that we see throughout the animal world” (38). In other words, shaking assists in bringing closure to an incident. Shaking it off is a natural way to dis-spell a trauma.
However, when we are stopped from the natural process of rebalancing due to drugs we may be given or the shaking doesn’t occur at all, there is a higher tendency for the energy of a traumatic experience to 1) become lodged in our cellular memory and 2) cause soul loss.
If I hadn’t shaken it off after the car accident, the chances are high that the energy of that accident would have been lodged in my cellular memory and could have caused me emotional or psychological damage down the road. PTSD often occurs after such an incident. The chances are also high that fragments of my soul would have left at the scene of the accident. While I am quite cautious at intersections to this day, I don’t experience any residual anxiety or panic over that experience and that’s a good clue that all was worked through and that closure occurred.
Another aspect of soul loss is that it can play havoc with our energy system and leave us vulnerable to foreign energies or “wandering beings” that may be looking for a home or host. Taking on misplaced energy or entities isn’t as rare as you may think. It is wise for us to pay attention to our bodies and to notice how well, or not, we are functioning in life.
The following list of Soul Loss symptoms is important to share with you at this point. They could be clues as to what you may be dealing with without even realizing it. I invite you to read them with an open mind. You can find these and other symptoms at: http://www.sandraingerman.com/soulretrieval.html.
- Feeling beside yourself: Not feeling solid in your body, as if some part of you is missing.
- Loss of memory: A part or parts of an incident or your life can’t be remembered.
- Feeling disconnected from life: Lacking emotional connection with people and events.
- A sense of betrayal: Personal betrayal that shakes your very foundational beliefs in life, justice, love, protection, etc.
- Chronic illness: Constantly dealing with low energy due to multiple illnesses.
- Chronic mishaps or “bad luck”: Believing that the world and people are always against you.
- Addiction: Filling the empty spaces inside with substances or activities. These may include food, drugs, sex, work, shopping, and cigarettes among others.
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Ongoing and debilitating mental and emotional stress including sleep disorders and vivid recall of traumatic events.
- Ongoing grief: The inability to move through loss.
- Suicidal thoughts: Wanting to escape inner suffering through ending life.
How did you feel while reading this list? Do any of them seem to pertain to you? While there are many symptoms of Soul Loss, it is also important to know that there are ways to heal from what can cause us so much suffering. The healing techniques in this article have been used for eons to address these illnesses.
Soul loss illness can present in two different or opposing ways. We can actually lose fragments of our soul due to traumatic incidents and we can also take on energies or even entities due to traumatic experiences. In Part 2, we will talk about Shamanic Extraction, a modality for eliminating energies from the body that don’t belong to us that we may have taken on without realizing it. In Part 3, we will talk about Compassionate Depossession work, a format for working with disembodied “Suffering Beings” that attach themselves to the living. We will also begin the discussion of Soul Retrieval, used to bring back parts of the soul that have left during traumatic life events. And, in Part 4, we will go over the Soul Retrieval process and I will teach you a way to hide a part of your soul for the purpose of temporarily putting aside certain emotions or thoughts in order to perform an important or challenging life event. This technique is called Hiding the Soul.
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