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In our practice of Active Dreaming, we have learned that
when we help people to open the dreamgates, work with the spontaneous gifts of their
dreams and travel consciously into the dreamspace, we often facilitate soul recovery.
Shamans understand that soul loss is the root of much illness and confusion in our lives.
It may be caused by pain or trauma or heartbreak, by wrenching life choices, or by wimping
out on our best and bravest dreams. It can reduced us to the condition of the walking
dead, passionless and dreary, forever trying to fit in with other people's needs and
expectations, lost to our own deeper purpose.
Soul retrieval is a shamanic operation in which the practitioner
journeys to bring back lost soul-parts and puts them into the client's body (typically by
blowing into one or more of the energy centers, most often the heart or the crown of the
head). Soul recovery is a practice in which we help each other to become self-healers and
function as our own shamanic practitioners - to gather and integrate our own families of
selves and bring wholeness and vital energy into our lives. Dream reentry frequently opens
the road to soul recovery, because our dreams show us where our missing parts may have
gone, and invite us to reach in and bring them back. When we dream again and again of the
"old place" (maybe a childhood home, maybe a space we shared with a former
partner) we may be learning that a part of ourselves - a part scared away by trauma, or a
part that resisted a choice we made - is "stuck" in that place, or went missing
at the time we lived there. By going back inside the dream of the "old place" we
may be able to locate that lost aspect of our own identity and energy and find the way to
bring it back into our hearts and our lves. Typically, soul recovery of this kind will
require reassurance and negotiation. Our younger self may need to be reassured that she is
not going to be hurt in the way she was hurt before. She may need to be convinced that we
we will include things in our lives that she will enjoy and will engage her passions.
In the practice of soul recovery, we support each other without
necessarily playing shamanic practitioner for each other - since, again, the heart of this
practice is to assist everyone who is able to become a self-healer. The core technique is
Dream Reentry and Tracking, with the focus placed on locating and reclaiming lost aspects
of soul energy that may have surfaced in a dream or a life memory. The tracker may be
required to play an activist role - for example, by helping the dreamer to move beyond a
fear, by running interference if there are negative entities in the field, by bringing in
the tracker's own animal guardians, or by negotiating directly with some of the dreamer's
younger or "other" selves. Before undertaking the soul recovery journey, dreamer
and tracker should try to reach a clear agreement on how far the tracker shoud go (or not
go) in assisting the healing.
What do we do for a person who has suffered soul loss and does not
have a dream? This is of course a common condition. The Iroquois say that if we have
lost our dreams, we have lost our souls - at least, the part of our soul-self that is the
dreamer and remembers the deeper life. Dream Transfer is the core technique to practice
when we are trying to help someone who has lost their dreams. We journey for them and grow
a dream for them that they can be helped to enter and can provide an authentic portal for
self-healing.
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