Barbelith Underground > Temple > Soul retrieval and mental health

I'll happily second the recommendation for the Ingerman book mentioned above. I read it a few years ago and it's generally excellent, she has a lot of experience and there are some occasionally fascinating diversions. Plus lots of accounts to go on.

In many ways conducting a soul retrieval requires not so much a high level of power or skill as it does the most thorough and wise ethical approach (although I’m not suggesting that you don’t need power and skill – you need a lot). You might have some success in approach it as though it were a manner of mores and etiquette, but in the long term this has to be internalised into a loving and wise system, that also has the strength to be firm and know which battles to fight. If you go with any practitioner to conduct your soul retrieval make sure they can be trusted. Make sure they’re good hearted.

Soul retrieval is a process of permissions, cautious approaches and exceptional manners. You negotiate, you seek consent, you bargain. You attempt to come at all matters with a sense of honesty, and if you’re going to take a risk or gamble you need to have enough of a sense of the impact of what you’re doing to respect the ecology of the situation, while knowing that it’s rare that you can completely know an entire situation. And if you choose to fight you need to know exactly why you’re doing it and what the objective is, and what the side effects of that fight might be.

Fragmented and lost soul parts can sometimes come back of their own accord. Sometimes they might need reassurance. Sometimes they will refuse to come back, as they prefer where they are. They might decide that they will come back based on conditions that they set, and will only reintegrate when changes are made to your life. They might have chosen to come back a long time ago and become lost, and so the journey back might be crucial to their restoration. Often these subtleties are exactly why having a trained and experienced practitioner is required. What happens when a fragmented part of yourself refuses to speak to you personally? You may require an advocate.

Sometimes it is possible to do this work yourself. Sometimes in the course of examining and changing your life you will unwittingly set the conditions that lead to the return of the soul fragment, and it will return of its own accord when the time is right. You might find a lot of useful progress can be made yourself in pursuing it through your own skill, but I’d definitely err on the side of having an experienced practioner at least as a sounding board or consultant.

There’s a lot about soul retrieval that reminds me of parts therapy (I may have some NLP resources on this somewhere). From my own experience when the self fragments it can be difficult to register to begin with, as each individual part may seem to be a fully functioning personality in its own right and will have as diverse an array of moods and aspects as any person you might know. Just because you consciously characterise a lost part of yourself as angry doesn’t mean it will simplistically always show up as angry when you encounter it, as though it were Grumpy Dwarf. You might find your angry manifesting in sadness, or in pain, or in a sense of principles and righteousness, or in an apparently calm manner. The part will likely reflect the whole but may have leanings in one or more directions. This is another reason to have someone else do the work for you: things aren’t necessarily what they seem, and we all have our own preconceptions of ourselves born out of the assumptions about what we think we know of ourselves. An external perspective may not be fooled as easily.

And then there are the strange beasties, other personalities/entities and landscapes/settings you might come across during the work, whether you believe these things are yet more parts of yourself or possibly things outside yourself, or on the periphery where you border with the rest of what’s outside you. This is a shifting world of hidden meanings and potentially deliberate obfuscation, and you’ll need all your wits, wisdom and discernment about you.

That’s a woefully inadequate primer to this area from my own experience and what little I’ve been able to piece together from other people I’ve observed and accounts and ideas I’ve read. At no point is it necessarily declaring that soul retrieval or the shamanic process is right for you and your situation, and at no point do I want to predispose you to think that your possible retrieval may go down any of the paths I’ve mentioned, as it could be remarkably different again from anything above. I think its an amazing technique accompanied by principles that you should live your life by regardless of whether your in an ecstatic state or not, and that if it is a metaphor that allows a user interface to be built on top of the machine code of our unfathomable psychological depths then it often seems to be a wholly beautiful, resonant and penetrating metaphor.