On Soul Retrieval

I’ve experienced many soul retrievals in my life.

Some were intentional—like the first time I got Lyme disease and did a journey to recover the part of myself I had lost when I fell sick. I found her, covered in dirt in a hole in the prairie. She had been waiting for me to come and tell her I still loved her.

Others were spontaneous—like the three-year-old struggling with the changes in her family who started talking to me when I began therapy. Or the creative, dreamy high schooler who came back one lazy sunny day after she hid up in the clouds during these years when I was pushing her, relentlessly, to get straight As.

Soul retrieval sounds like it’s intricate or esoteric. But it’s neither—it’s as natural as an ecosystem repairing itself after a storm.

In shamanic understanding, soul loss happens when a situation in life is just too overwhelming for that part of our soul to stay present in our bodies—including times of shock, abuse, and trauma.

To be honest with you, I’ve never loved the term soul “loss” because it doesn’t capture what is actually happening. On the level of our soul, we are whole and entire, always. No part of us can ever actually be lost. When these moments of separation occur, however, what does happen is that a part of our soul leaves our present-moment body and goes deeper into the spiritual world in order to protect itself.

Soul “loss” is actually a soul safety mechanism—and a brilliant one, at that.

Like the child who hid in the coat closet while her parents were fighting. A part of us needed to step away from the intensity of that moment to preserve its own safety, well-being, and intactness.

And yet—if we continue on the rest of our lives without retrieving these hidden pieces, it’ll feel as if all of us never left that closet. Like we are waiting there, still, for our lives to begin, for things to feel safe again, for someone safe and kind to turn on the light.

The beautiful part is we are that safe and kind person now. And we have the ability to turn on that light now.

I remember when I first read about the symptoms of soul loss. I scanned through the list and thought—wow, our entire world is suffering from soul loss. It makes sense—humans have lived through many hells on Earth. And with the loss of our connection to the living world, many of us also lost access to the everyday practices of soul healing and reunion that would once have been a natural part of our lives.

It’s no wonder our modern world naturally contains so many of these symptoms of soul loss, including emotional numbness, depression, aimlessness, exhaustion, unexplained ailments, memory gaps, addictions, phobias, the inability to move on, and simply the sense of something missing.

Soul loss can feel big, but it can also feel really subtle—an inability to start that project you’ve been dreaming of for years. The tears that come when you’re by yourself after you drop the kids off at school. The way part of your heart feels unmoved by that bank of pink roses you know would have astounded you at another point in your life.

The most miraculous part of soul retrieval, however, is this—that it’s possible. That it was designed into the ecology of being embodied. We do not have to wait until the end of our lives to gather up every part of ourselves and feel entire, together, and whole again.

We can do this now. We do it by taking the leap to create, by allowing the tears to fall, by forgiving ourselves. We do this by mothering our children differently than we were mothered, by looking in the mirror and saying something kind, by letting ourselves rest when before we would have continued to push.

And we can do this intentionally, by journeying into the spirit world and bringing them home.

For anyone who is interested in this kind of guided experience, I’ve created a 30-minute Soul Retrieval Meditation here beneath the paywall. In this month of soul retrievals being on offer, it felt like a potent time to finally create this after years of people asking me to—and to share it here with you. It’s $5 to access the meditation, plus all my other paid posts here.

I’d love to hear who returns for you.

Because, ultimately, these parts of us want to come back. They want to help us remember who we are. They want us to live in our fullness, and experience life’s fullness again.

Like going out into the garden of your life and bringing an armful of roses back into your home, soul retrieval can bring untold beauty to your life. These parts, when they return, come back with gifts, with talents, with energies and powers we have forgotten. They come back with a perspective that helps us glimpse, once again, the true potential for our life—and the wonder of what is still to come.