Book Review: Soul Retrieval, Mending the Fragmented Self

Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self by Sandra Ingerman (✭✭✭✭✬, 4.5/5)

I decided to read this book after reading Lupa's book review where she gave it "Five pawprints out of five" and concluded:

While there are occasional things I personally disagree with, overall I think this is a great text. Once I’m ready to do soul retrieval in practice, this will be an invaluable guide.

This piqued my interest enormously. I had seen this book on Amazon before, but given that it is from a Core Shaman perspective and I don't currently do soul retrievals I didn't pay much attention to it one way or the other. After some recent events have lead me to think that I have some soul fragments I will need to retrieve and after reading Lupa's review, however, I decided to go ahead and read the book.

I am extremely glad that I did. The content is well laid out and excellent. Safety and ethics are both discussed, and at no point does the author treat this as safer than dreaming, conflate it with guided meditation, or treat it as something that can be learned in a weekend workshop. She also addresses topics such as soul theft, rape, and incest and how soul retrieval works/can help with these.

She goes on to say that:

Learning to do shamanic healing takes time, lots of practice, and experience. I will share the details of my work to demystify it for you as you read on. I do not intend to teach you how to do soul retrieval in this chapter--that, I believe, is unethical. And I feel it is just as unethical for one to try soul retrieval after just reading this book.

If we truly want to honor the spirits and use the ancient ways in a powerful way, we must maintain integrity in the work at all times. Please do not dishonor yourselves, the people who are important to you, or the spirits by trying soul retrieval without the appropriate training.

Suffice it to say, after growing a little fed up with one of the most difficult techniques in shamanism getting relegated to being trained in weekend seminars, it was extremely refreshing to see this in front of the chapter on technique.

The book is spread into 11 chapters split into three parts:

• Part I: The Soul and Soul Loss
  
  
  
  • Chapter 1: Soul Loss
    
  • Chapter 2: Soul Retrieval
    
  • Chapter 3: Tracking Lost Souls
    
  
  
• Part II: The Search
  
  
  
  • Chapter 4: A Question of Technique
    
  • Chapter 5: Classic Examples of Soul Retrieval
    
  • Chapter 6: Community
    
  • Chapter 7: When Souls Have Been Stolen
    
  
  
• Part III: Welcome Home, Healing Through Wholeness
  
  
  
  • Chapter 8: Effects of Soul Retrieval
    
  • Chapter 9: Relationships and Sexual Issues
    
  • Chapter 10: Life After Soul Retrieval
    
  • Chapter 11: Preparing for Your Own Soul's Return
    
  
  

The first part deals with the nature of soul loss, what soul retrieval can look like, the nature of the worlds, and the tools that a spirit worker might use in their practice. It provides an effective demonstration of the concept of soul retrieval, without requiring a detailed knowledge of existent jargon. I believe this book can be effectively read by someone who has just heard of it and is considering it as an option, as well as someone who is considering performing it in the future. There is something of value in this book for both groups, despite that soul retrieval is one of the more difficult areas of shamanism.

The second part goes into more details about the process of looking for souls, and goes into more depth with the mechanics of Ingerman's practice in this field. She also gets into examples of things that cause people to lose parts of their soul, including soul theft and the loss of community.

Part three talks about the repercussions, positive and negative, of soul retrieval and gives advice on what to expect from soul retrieval. She emphasizes the need for people to do this in their own time when they are truly ready for change in their own life.

Spread throughout the book are exercises designed to help with your own healing and understanding of shamanic practice, along with copious case studies derived from her own practice. In a sense, I feel like this was the book I was looking for when I read Gagan's Journeying: Where Shamanism and Psychology Meet. Something filled with case studies that focuses on how this helps along with some psychological theory, rather than focusing on where the issues come from that shamanic practices might be able to help with.

On the issue of reality in this practice, Ingerman states that:

As you read this book and wonder whether or not what I am talking about is real, I ask you not to enter into a battle between the right brain and left brain. Simply read the material and experience it. After eleven years of working with the shamanic journey I know nonordinary reality is real. But I don't intend to convince you of that. For me, the big questions are these: Does the information that comes from a shamanic journey work? Does this information make positive changes in a person's life? If so, who cares if we are making it up?

Suffice it to say, given my own perspectives on the subject, this does it work attitude is something I am thrilled to see in well-regarded books on the subject, especially those published in 1991.

Conclusion

In aggregate, I felt that this book is excellent. I have some disagreements with the author, but they don't really detract from the usefulness or power of the book. She doesn't flinch for describing things as real, including interactions with power animals and the goddess Isis. My only real issues with the book are a lack of an effective index and that, while it discusses illness from a shamanic perspective, shows a lack of analysis on when soul retrieval might be counter-indicated despite a client's insistence of wanting to continue (admittedly, this latter is a difficult and somewhat fuzzy category, and likely beyond the scope of the book).

These, however, are functionally minor points. Highly recommended.

Mundane vs. Occult

When reading Bear Heart's memoir, The Wind is My Mother one of the things that gets repeatedly emphasized is the importance of what most people would call "mundane" skills. He talks about the importance of noticing your environment, learning to move your eyes first to look at something rather than your head, and other things along those lines. While it is clear that he is capable of both sensing and manipulating energy (and medicine men doing such things as moving feathers with their mind).

What struck me is that just about everything he talks about "energetically" is, at its core, an extension of skills that--on the surface--have nothing to do with energy. It seems that most modern books on occultism reverse this: they start by talking about sensing and manipulating energy, rather than sensing and manipulating the environment around you and your own mind.

It was noted by Dion Fortune and has long been recognized by occultists that astral/energy constructs degrade in this plane unless they are anchored to something relatively tangible. Similarly, there are a lot of things that energy may facilitate, but you should start learning how to do it energetically by learning how to do it physically.

If you want to lose weight go ahead and say the appropriate incants, visualize yourself as thinner in a mirror, but combine it with diet and exercise. If you want to get a job you might be able to help by lighting a green candle and channeling energy to it, but that won't mean much if your resume is poor, you aren't a good fit for the job, or you don't look presentable.

Virtually everything we do with energy can be enhanced by studying related things that, ostensibly, don't involve it. Not that energy work and shamanism cannot help or augment the work, but frequently one should start learning the energy work components by learning the non energy work components.

Too often in the modern occult community, however, I see people who neglect the physical to learn the energy. They want to burn little slips of paper or purchase spells of ebay instead of working out, going through a Dialectic Behavior Therapy workbook, or seeing a doctor.

Want to learn how to use glamours to project an image? Work on your posture, mastery of facial expressions, confidence, and emotional control. Work on posture mirroring and study communication. Get your clothes tailored, hair cut, nails trimmed, etc.

Want to learn how to heal? Study trigger point therapy, shiatsu, and deep tissue massage. Study medicine or psychology, or learn herbalism. Study how the body feels to the touch when it is suffering certain ailments and when it is healthy, and how different people's bodies feel. Study how the body works, how it fits together, and what happens when various things go wrong.

Want to learn how to perceive energy around you? Start with perception of the world around you. Learn to not just passively observe the world and let it pass unnoticed, but to truly see the world and to remember what you see. Extend it beyond your sight: What do you hear, what do you feel? Can you separate out your perceptions from your feelings?

Are you sick? See a doctor (or psychotherapist, depending on the form of the illness). Don't just pray, burn slips of paper, and hope everything gets better: go see a specialist, ensure you are getting proper nutrition, etc.

On the flip side: There is nothing wrong with studying energy work to get better at a craft you are already practicing. The point is the need for understanding of the balance, and how one leads to the other. One can learn to perceive energy by learning to pay attention, and can learn to pay attention as part of learning to perceive energy.

You can also see a doctor while visiting an energy worker or shaman--it is like receiving two different forms of treatment, and those forms can be complimentary--though it is generally best if one knows about the other. This is especially true with things that affect your own mental health or which involve your own mind. It doesn't have to be one or the other, and frequently things in one area can be made stronger by work on the other.

To summarize, as the saying goes: Pray to God and row for shore.

Further Reading

• Where Shamanism and Psychology Meet
  

Link: On Shaman Sickness

Moonvoice has written an amazing piece on Shaman Sickness titled Shamanic Pathways 07 - A wounded shaman(ist)?.

I have some of my own thoughts to add to this, but I haven't been able to get the essay written, so I'll just provide the link that inspired such for now and write more on it later.

Book Review: Journeying, Where Shamanism and Psychology Meet

Journeying : Where Shamanism and Psychology Meet by Jeannette M. Gagan (✭✭✭✬✩, 3.5/5, 13 June 2009)

One of the key areas of interest to a lot of spirit workers, myself included, is the link between shamanism and psychology. The role of a shaman, be it core or traditional, is service to the surrounding community, frequently in the capacity of a healer. Raven Kaldera states that, since putting out his shingle as a "Shaman," "health" has become the #1 issue that people ask about (as opposed to love or work, the other two frequent topics for readers). Harner states that the purpose of Shamanism is healing.

Given this association, it is natural that psychotherapists are starting to take an interest in Shamanism, and specifically in journeying, as a mechanism to encourage healing in their clients. Outside of some of the resources provided by the Institute of Shamanic Studies, there simply aren't all that many good, published resources on the relationship between Shamanism and Psychology. Especially not from the psychotherapist side.

Journeying: Where Shamanism and Psychology Meet is an initial attempt to bridge this gap. After reading the effusive praise of the book Amazon, most of it from the point of view of a psychotherapist approaching shamanic practice, that I was eager to read it from the perspective of a spirit worker.

This book is not--and does not claim to be--an introduction to how to incorporate journeying in a psychotherapeutic context, nor is it in any way a "how to." Really, there are many books out there on that already, and so this book is attempting to enter a much-needed void: discussion of the actual link between them, and discussion of how one can facilitate and help the other.

The chapters of the book are as follows:

• Chapter 1: The Apple and the Orange
  
• Chapter 2: Shared Slices
  
• Chapter 3: How the Cradle is Rocked
  
• Chapter 4: Little Red Riding Hood Meets the Wolf
  
• Chapter 5: The Alchemical Connection
  
• Chapter 6: The Meeting Place
  

The sequence starts by showing some of the history of Shamanism and Psychotherapy, and then slowly working their way together over the following chapters. The final chapter, The Meeting Place, attempts to draw a synthesis between the two.

History

From the standpoint of introducing people with a psychotherapeutic background to journeying, this book is reasonably good. It attempts to present the argument that there is a missing core of a "Soul" from Psychology, and establishes through some discussion what role this concept of a "Soul" has had in the history of Psychology and Psychotherapy. It describes Psychology as a navel orange, with no clear center and with a vestigial second "fruit" inside--representing the role of the soul--and a variety of clearly delineating slices representing different schools of thoughts.

Shamanism, on the other hand, is compared to an Apple--with a central set of core techniques, concepts, and practices. Very different on the one hand, and the author is attempting to establish that they are basically both forms of fruit.

To do this, it launches into a discussion of third and fourth force psychology, transpersonal psychology, and covers the history of psychological thought including some notes for Aristotle, Freud, Descartes. She goes on to discuss Jung's Collective Unconscious, the role of visualization in both physical and mental health, and how Altered States of Conscious (ASCs) can be used as part of the healing process.

While generally interesting, during this discussion the author's inherent biases come out. I expected a Core-Shamanist Perspective with an emphasis on psychological healing via journeying (as the title suggests, and as opposed to other things that Shamanism can and has been used for over the years), what I didn't expect would be that the author would be unable to separate her own cultural biases, which appear to be based on her Christian background. These show up in several places throughout the book, but nowhere more clearly than when she discusses maladaptive ASCs, where she states that:

The emergence of unconscious conflicts may also be acted out in insidious rituals of possession, witchcraft, or other power-laden altered state ordeals; in life, as in fairy tales, such activities hint at evildoings and can elicit a sense of foreboding.

While it is easy enough to filter out the author's own biases in these situations, it makes me want to say "Really? You could shift your mind far enough to accept journeying, even as practiced by tribal shamans, did you really have to throw out other things practiced by traditional shamans in the process?"

How Journeying Can Heal

Later chapters the author starts to talk about the origin of psychological distress and how journeying can help. This, which to me should represent the core of the book, instead ends up as the weakest part. The author spends an inordinate amount of time talking about childhood sources for these problems, which I feel is less important for the purposes of journeying and shamanic healing than that the problems exist.

My own bias in these things is that I tend to be relatively pragmatic: understanding the source of the problems can help tremendously in finding a cure, but the source of such problems can be (and is already represented as) numerous other books, and the solution frequently works independent of the precise source. We don't really need a discussion of all of the various ways that these problems can and do form in childhood, we need a discussion of how journeying and shamanism tie into the therapy of the conditions regardless of their source.

Here, I feel it would have been better if it had taken Emotional Alchemy's approach and acknowledged the source, but then moved on to how journeying has been used to treat it, or a Shamanic view on the treatment of the problem.

To this end, I really wish the author had included more case studies and talking about specific circumstances where journeying has helped someone, rather than front-loading with the potential origin of psychological conditions, and then a couple of illustrative case studies on the topic.

Containment

The final chapters present a synthesis between shamanism and psychology and represents the strongest--and most useful--part of the book. Here we see the author talk about how journeying helps clients, how it offers a contained, safe, and non-judgmental space in which to work. Here we see the benefit of how journeying helps keeps the transference from happening on to the therapist, and situations for which the author says journeying is counter-indicated. This is all excellent stuff, and forms the start of where I want to see research in this field start to lead.

Conclusion

The unfortunate problem with this book for spirit workers and psychotherapists is that most of us are not in the target audience. For psychotherapists who are already using journeying, this book won't give them anything new to work with. For those who are skeptical of journeying, the book doesn't really give anything that might sway them or convince them otherwise even if they have a relatively open mind to the process. For the spirit worker, it might be an interesting read, but there isn't much here that we don't already know and use.

This leads me to think that there are two groups who would benefit the most from this book:

1. Psychotherapists and Psychologists who are curious about journeying and its application for healing, along with some context on it.
   
2. People who have a "TV Shamanism" view of what a Shaman is, and could use a little context.
   

For people in these situations, I can see how it would be a really useful book, and I will keep it on my shelf to loan out for just these purposes. Otherwise it is an interesting read, but I really wish the author had taken it just that one extra step farther and removed some of the less-useful bits about how childhood and other circumstances contribute to our current psychological state.

Further Reading

• Emotional Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal The Heart
  
• Suspending Disbelief
  

The Shaman and the Spirit Worker

In Raven Kaldera's excellent essay Classic Shamanism And Core Shamanism: Basic Differences he defines the difference between Core Shamanism, based on Harner's Way of the Shaman and other work, and what he terms "Classical Shamanism," which represents people who have been wholly claimed and taken by the spirits.

I am not a "Classical Shaman": the gods have not claimed me to that degree and I have not undergone shamanic sickness (at least not yet to the degree discussed), but I also find I have substantial differences with "Core Shamans." As Lupa of Therioshamanism recently stated:

I look at where my path diverges significantly from these two ends of the spectrum. I do experience journeying as being riskier than what a lot of core shamans describe. However, I don’t do the complete submission to the spirits that I’ve seen on the other end. I do my best to not take the spirits for granted, but I also maintain autonomy–as in D/s, I have hard limits to my vulnerability, and ways to enforce them. And that is what has worked well for me, even before I began working with shamanism.

This does not seem to be a binary (or a trinary) system. Some people lean closer to Core Shamanism, others seem to fall closer to Classical Shamanism. Some people who have not been fully claimed as "Shamans" still end up with "Shaman Sickness Light," and taboos can be binding and cause illness. I am not the equivalent of a brain surgeon in performing work for clients (far far far from it), but there are some things in shamanic practice that I believe can be widely learned by seekers who are dedicated and respectful, and that this is one of many paths of service to the gods. Basically landing between "teach anyone who is interested" and to teach spirit work to those "staring down the barrel of that divine cannon." That some things take months or years to learn, let alone master and have potentially severe repercussions (e.g., bloodwalking), and other things the rough basics of can be taught relatively quickly and safely and that a lot of people can benefit from (e.g., grounding), with a lot in-between.

I have to a greater or lesser extent chosen this path, and for a while I think I could have walked away without significant trouble and served in some other way, perhaps not even conscious of my role or task. Now I would have more trouble doing that, and later I might have more trouble still. I am mostly aligned to one tradition, but have debts and associations in several different traditions and have been told to take knowledge wherever I can find it.

I am finding a variety of people in this position. Not quite Core, not quite Classical, but borrowing elements from both. Feeling that Core Shamanism lack of emphasis on safety is worrying at best, that Harner's statement that journeying is safer than dreaming is dangerous (I've been attacked by things that "followed me home" before, and had visible claw marks on my astral body from the encounter), and finding themselves working mostly or entirely in a cultural context, while still not being "tapped" and called to be classical shamans.

I like the term "Spirit Worker," since I think it covers all three of these groups. We're all spirit workers, regardless of whether we are working with landwights, animal spirits, gods of various traditions, or "simply" journeying through the Nine Worlds. It applies to both shamans and shamanic practitioners of various sorts who--for all of our differences--have a lot in common.

One thing I am certain on is that all three groups need to be talking to one another and opening up respectful dialogues of communication. We should be talking about our experiences, about safety, about techniques, and about what each of us can bring to the table. I am also sure that no one's path is "better" and that I make a pretty poor arbitrator over other people's experiences and UPG. Quoting Raven Kaldera in his essay Shamanism and Neo-Shamanism: The Practical Divide:

We need to think about who our allies are, and how many of them we can collect. After all, that’s a very shamanic way of thinking: can I make an ally of that plant? That animal spirit? That piece of woods? That stone? That ancestor? That deity? Unlike the stark simplicity of monotheism, tribal shamans were judged by their having a lot of spirits, not just one or a handful. We can think in the same way for human allies.

What would it take to ally to other communities, even if there are some things we don’t see eye to eye on? Neo-shamanic practitioners? Neo-Pagans? Wiccans? Reconstructionists? Mystical Christians and Jews? New Age folk? Reiki people? Ecologists? Body modification spiritualists? One could spread the net even wider.

Further Reading

• The Pathwalker's Guide to the Nine Worlds
  
• The Way of the Shaman
  
• The Wind Is My Mother: The Life and Teachings of a Native American Shaman