Innovative Healing Arts 

Soul Retrieval

 “Only by knowing all the ways you have lived and died do you exorcise the death that lives inside you.” Alberto Villoldo, Mending the Past and Healing the Future with SOUL RETRIEVAL

Whenever one experiences pain and trauma and is unable to process it, especially in early childhood and even in the womb, wounding occurs that results in soul loss. At the time of any injury or trauma, all a child understands is that he or she is frightened and the world has become a dangerous place. Our wounds, while often stemming from different types of abuse, including neglect, are not always the result of an actual event. Often, a wound results from the way things were perceived through the eyes of a child. This perception is very irrational, while at the same time, very powerful.

An example was given to me by a woman facilitated healings while seeing ‘movies’ of a client’s life. She described working with one woman and seeing a young girl, hiding in a closet with a male hand reaching for her. I immediately thought, “Oh my God, I don’t want to hear this; it’s got to be child abuse.” I was wrong. The woman continued, explaining that the mother, during her recent pregnancy, had often cautioned both the little girl and her siblings to ‘be good so that nothing bad happens to Mommy’. Well, the baby was still born and naturally, the little girl had not succeeded in being on her best behavior during the entire nine months of her mother’s pregnancy. She now believed with all her heart that she had killed that baby. It was her fault. She was guilty. She proceeded to hide in the closet, not wanting to go to the funeral. Her father reached in to gently pull her out and encourage her to ‘come along’, having no idea of the trauma inflicted by her self induced guilt.

Wounding is what keeps us mired in depression, stuck in unhealthy and abusive relationships, too afraid to leave secure but boring jobs that rob us of creative pleasure. We feel that we’ve been banished from our Eden, so we spend our lives trying to mask or ease the pain that we received during that fall from grace.

We bring with us wounds from earlier lives. We may have died alone, been tortured and killed by those who feared and hated us, unwittingly caused the death of or suddenly lost loved ones dear to us, been abandoned or banished – instilling unresolved psycho-spiritual dynamics that become imprinted into our present lifetime and predispose us to unique “fateful” experiences, much as our childhood traumas do.

According to Alberto Villoldo, in Mending the Past and Healing the Future with SOUL RETRIEVAL, “We can also suffer from ancestral wounds that have been passed from one generation to the next – perhaps endured during the Holocaust, the Great Depression, or a revolution. No matter what the cause, we inherit a set of beliefs from our wounded ancestors that we take for our own. Negative attitudes about abundance, scarcity, success, failure, security, sexuality, and intimacy can all come from this ancestral wounding. When this kind of generational soul loss is handed down, children are plagued by issues they didn’t even experience in their own lifetimes, yet they end up suffering from despair and self-judgment as a result.”

According to Alberto, our Original Wounding is the loss of the sacred feminine, resulting in our collective soul loss as human beings. Our divorce from the feminine is the deep, primitive wound we all bear. “So it’s very important for us to address our soul loss now, before our original wounding is passed on to our children, or to the person we’ll be born as in our next life.”

The final phases of the regression process involve adopting a wider perspective than that of any one past-life personality. As the spiritual self displays the various parallels between events, emotions and attitudes of the past-life characters and those of the current personae, support is given for releasing pent-up judgment, guilt, hate and denial. By understanding the reasons bad choices were made during times of stress, acceptance and forgiveness of the self and others is possible and integration finally occurs. Forgiveness of the self allows the working through of guilt, which has been the cause of continued patterns of distress and failure.

This integration is the basis of soul retrieval. To the extent with which we stop identifying with the unresolved issues from this and other lifetimes, we are now able to live joyfully and fully in the present, secure in the assumption of a benevolent, supportive universe. A shadow figure becomes integrated, a split is healed, a lost part of the soul is redeemed through love and acceptance.

  Recommended Reading

 Life Between Lives, by Michael Newton, Ph.D.

Soul Retrieval, Mending the Fragmented Self, by Sandra Ingerman (Shamanic)

Mending the Past and Healing the Future with SOUL RETRIEVAL, by Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D. (Shamanic)

Dave began: “I’m a witch again. I’m in prison for witchcraft, sentenced to be torched and burned and my family, also... nooo… pain; they are hurting me through my family and body. I feel the rats eating me. My family is watching. They’re in pain, too. They’re being tortured for my mistakes. Ohhh, my daughter won’t live through this…”

            “I studied the teachings of the Goddess of Nature, healed people, was a midwife, brought beautiful children into this world, only to be looked down upon. (I’m) female. My husband turned us in and then he just left. (For) money from the church, his church, not mine. Protestant or Catholic; I see the white robes of their uniforms. They say that Christ died on the cross and then they torture me.”

            “Look in their hearts. They say I’m a witch but they do the same thing. They want the power for themselves. Witchcraft; it is salvation if the church does it.”

            “But somewhere in jail, or on the stake, they ask me for a last statement: ‘I will never have a family again, never have people who can betray me, never have children who can die at the stake with me.’ They are screaming for me to save them. I can’t do this again." (Rapid Eye Technology initiated at that point to release the vow and the pain) How do you feel now? “I feel hatred. Am I wrong to go with the Goddess? It’s right. They just don’t understand yet. Through every lifetime, they’ve gained some. They have more light now than they ever have. We are the guides. We have to guide them through their trauma.”

            I instructed her (Dave) and her children to release themselves from their earthly bodies before the pain of the fire set in as they were being burned at the stake. The room instantly became charged with glowing energy we could both feel! I then ended Dave’s past life regression by returning him to the present time and ordinary reality of May 6^th, 1997. As my good friend started to leave, he paused at the door, turned to me and said, “While I was on the cross, I looked into the eyes of one of my children and they were yours.”

Printed with Client’s permission

 A quiet young woman entered my office and settled down to experience a regression. Every journey is unique and many offer glimpses of lost or unknown history. Some even prove startling, as did this client’s session:

What do you see or sense? “Cobblestone road with buildings on each side. I’m wearing a dark brown skirt, deep blue wool shawl, white blouse. I’m 19.” Your name? “Mary. It’s 1895, England.” Do you have family? “Mother, younger brother and sister.” Describe one day in your life. “Going to the market place for eggs and bread.” Describe your home. “Dirt floor, fire over in the corner, Mother’s in the kitchen, it’s dark in there.”

Move forward in time… “I’m 22, in a dark room inside a building with gray stone walls; I think it’s a dining hall. There’s just one other person, he has long, dark hair, with curls at the very end. He’s sitting at the head of the table with his hand around a crystal glass, his other hand is at his mouth, looking at me. I’m sitting at the other end. He’s my lover. I think we’re going out hunting.” Describe the hunt (I was assuming a fox hunt, perhaps). “When it’s completely dark out, we go walking the streets, looking for people to seduce, then we take their blood.” How? “Biting their neck, or slitting their wrists. They don’t mind; we put them in a trance. They don’t know what’s happening.” Do you drink the blood? “Of course!” How did you become a blood drinker? “Joseph turned into a vampire – the man I’m with.” Are there other vampires? “Yes.” History thinks vampires are a myth. “History is wrong!”

            Move forward again… “I’m in a cathedral, hundreds of candles are lit. I’m walking down the aisle towards the front, where there’s an altar, with a dagger in my hand.” Are other people there? “In the shadows. There’s a bound man on the altar. He is mortal, he’ll be a sacrifice.” Where is Joseph? “He’s there, waiting for me. It’s an initiation of sorts. The man was an offering to the dark gods… but people burst in, everyone takes off running. I was grabbed by two men, Joseph and I were separated. They left me right there. They used me like a whore, then they killed me; I see my body lying there, drained of its blood, Joseph about five feet from me.”

            Advice for present incarnation: “Be careful of who you are friends with. I have been one (vampire) before, I’ll be one after.” Do you enjoy that? “Yes, usually. Vampires are humans, not immortal; we’re like everyone else. We have darker tendencies.”