My clients come to me for many reasons but one of the things I hear most often is, “I feel disconnected.” For many years, before I began to study and practice shamanism, I felt the same way, so I get it. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe. The best way I can put it is that you feel cut off from your self, the world, even your loved ones.
Often this feeling comes with a flattening of the emotions. I have had clients describe feeling “dead inside.”
So what’s going on here, from a shamanic perspective? Also, is there anything that can help?
As I remind my clients, shamanism is a wonderful tool for addressing the spiritual components of illness or dis-ease. It does not take the place of medical help or psychological counseling.
With that in mind, it bears getting symptoms of any kind checked out by your provider. A shamanic healer can certainly help the healing process. And sometimes there may be no apparent physical or psychological cause a provider can find.
What’s the diagnosis?
In any healing session, I always begin with what’s called a diagnostic journey. This will tell me what work is in my client’s highest interest on that particular day. Many clients come to me asking for specific ceremonies. Sometimes they’re right about what they need, and sometimes they need some preliminary work before that can take place.
This complaint about the feeling of disconnection, more often than not, indicates to me what we call soul loss. Soul loss usually happens as a result of trauma in our lives, although there are a few other causes.
With soul loss, part of the soul breaks away to remain safe from what’s going on. That part can get lost and not come back. If you have ever had a shocking experience where time seemed to slow down, or you felt outside your body, or you felt like things weren’t real - this is what you’re experiencing.
How can shamanic healing help
Since soul loss is something that has occurred throughout human history, shamans all over the world have developed a technique for healing it. That technique is called soul retrieval.
Soul retrieval reunites the parts of the fractured self so that the client can re-integrate them. With re-integration, there can be a much greater sense of connection, joy, and completeness.
Many clients come to me specifically asking for soul retrieval. I still always do a diagnostic journey for them first. It’s quite possible that other work needs to happen for the soul-essence to feel safe enough to return.
I like to think of these soul parts as a fraction of ourselves that is stuck in the time it got lost. If you had soul part lost when you were 8 years old, that part is still 8 years old. It can’t grow and mature on its own, disconnected from the whole.
So we have to make that part feel safe to reintegrate. It might take a few weeks after a session for the part to completely settle in.
Once a part has been returned, however, it can bring significant power back. Imagine if you had lost your sense of smell when you were 12, and then it was suddenly returned. The world would seem richer, food would taste better. A similar thing happens when a soul essence returns.
I’ll never forget a client who, at the end of a session, excitedly told me, “I actually feel joy! I forgot what that was like.”