No matter your healing style, you can better serve your client by understanding and employing a few of the concepts involved in soul healing. As I shared in my last article ("Soul Healing," May/June 2019, Massage & Bodywork), every healing modality is rooted in shamanism.

Shamans believe that a client's soul has experienced several incarnations leading to their current one, lingering in ethereal domains between lifetimes. To truly benefit a client, says a shaman, it's vital to assess their soul. Part of that comes from an assessment of the soul's karma and dharma, but there are other steps a shaman often employs.

Soul Repair

Soul repair recognizes that a soul can become injured but can also be restored. This statement applies to wounds incurred in this lifetime but also those carried in from prior existences. Basically, asserts a shaman, when a soul is in a body, everything that happens is imprinted within it. When the soul exits at death, it gathers the echoes and imprints of that particular lifetime and brings them into the great beyond, only to transfer these memories into the next new body; the cycle then starts all over again. Good and loving remembrances are recorded, but negative events and dysfunctional beliefs seem to dominate.

Shamans believe that to help a person heal a physical or psychological problem in the here and now, they have to look inside the soul to perceive the causative damage from this or previous existences. Ultimately, they are looking for a spiritual malady, something making the soul believe it's separate from the Divine.

In the modern world, soul repair is still a spiritual endeavor, but you don't need to sound spiritual, New Age, or religious to perform it. Everyone has suffered from feeling separated: abandoned by a parent, rejected by a friend, too different to be acceptable. Many shamans—and even a good number of therapists—believe all illnesses, pains, emotional disorders, and the inability to recover from trauma come from believing oneself to be detached from a necessary source of kindness and compassion. By offering a client empathy and care, you assist them in healing their soul. You connect with them and better enable them to connect with their own sense of a Higher Power.

Soul Retrieval

Soul retrieval describes the rejoining of a part of the soul to the greater soul. Most shamans believe soul retrieval is needed when a soul undergoes an event so traumatic that it breaks away and hides. Shamans peer through the veil of time to search for the concealed soul.

Most likely, this idea of psychological fragmentation is already familiar to you. For the past few decades, many therapists have employed principles from a form of psychotherapy called "family systems therapy" to explain the damage of neglect or abuse. Basically, when we undergo trauma, that injured part of us splinters off. When the conflicts occur in childhood, the resulting sub-aspects are usually called "inner children" or "wounded children." The disassociated self becomes stuck, but the rest of the self continues to progress.

It's not your job to play psychotherapist, unless you are one. But you might recognize the signs of a fragmented client. Most typically, the "disconnected self" locks into some part of the body, where it can cause numbness, pain, or stiffness. While a mental health professional would assist a client with replaying the event that caused this detachment, a bodyworker can simply use their tools of the trade, such as encouraging a client to sense whatever feelings or memories are locked into the affected body area. The client doesn't even need to talk, merely feel.

Soul Exorcism

What is a soul exorcism? The term exorcism recognizes that a soul can be occupied or imprisoned by a negative force or entity. The age-old idea of "spirit possession" fits into nearly every spirituality and religion across time, most of which recognize the presence of beings like angels and spiritual guides, but also demons and harmful types of interference.

The Catholic Church still performs exorcisms, but what other contemporary modalities suggest such an activity? From a therapeutic perspective, a negative entity or force is comparable to a destructive belief system, which can overtake a subject's thoughts and trap them in dysfunction. For instance, a father's cruel voice can continue to influence his daughter long after she's left home. Other parallel examples include feeling overbonded to an abuser or afflicted by a detestable job.

Soul Restoration

Distinguish Between Conditions

From the shamanic viewpoint, and within the realm of your energetic practice, first get a sense of which of the three conditions might be affecting your client. Signs include the following:

• Need for a soul repair—The client might express the sense of a deep injury (or block) and be unable to figure out the cause. They might also be afflicted by a self-perpetuated negative behavior, such as participation in an abusive situation or an addiction.
• Indications for a soul retrieval—The client might present as spacey, powerless, and unable to make logical connections, especially in relation to their challenges. You might sense that they are partially unavailable or "missing in action." The client might even say that they don't always remember all of their actions or that they often feel disassociated or "elsewhere."
• Could benefit from a soul exorcism—The client might report that a negative energy (that isn't their own) is affecting them, keeping them from healing or remembering the cause of their problem. They could report the presence of a spirit, ghost, or voice that makes nasty comments. More "normally," they could complain of being constantly afflicted by negative thoughts, mental chatter, an illness that won't leave, a repetitive feeling, a pattern that won't clear, or some other indication of a cyclical problem they can't break.