“The soul is the birthless, deathless, changeless part of us. The part of us that looks out from behind our eyes and has no form. The soul is infinite so there is no in or out of it. It is everywhere. There’s no place that it is not.” -Wayne Dyer
Here are a few definitions from cosmic anatomy:
- Infinite Soul- the eternal and divine light that was never created and will never be destroyed.
- Individual Soul- the way that eternal light expresses itself through your bodymind. This reminds me of a filtration process. The eternal light gets squeezed through your bodymind (ego included) and comes out as your individual flavor of the eternal.
- Ego- the part of you that believes it is separate from everything and everyone. Ego is like a bunch of ideas tied together to form a stream of “I.” Ego literally means identity maker.
All parts of you are equally valid and not separate although some beliefs (thoughts that have become mental constructs) that you formulated about yourself and the world around you may not be in alignment with truth. Truth here being something that is factual in all times, places and spaces regardless of who perceives it. Many beliefs are formed in the preverbal stage of life. What we experience and perhaps what is passed down through DNA can shape our belief structure. Can DNA assist the human in formulating beliefs? Bruce Lipton says that DNA does influence our beliefs and also our beliefs can influence our DNA.
Your soul is the part of you that is eternal. If anything needs healing, it is your thoughts and your belief in your thoughts.
Without a doubt, beliefs that are based on preverbal and early childhood experiences are not a sturdy foundation for adult life. Doing some inquiry into the nature of your mental processes will help in dissolving layers of unstable thought patterns and belief systems. Meditation is an amazing tool as well as questioning your foundational mental constructs.
Soul Retrieval in Shamanism
In neo-shamanism, there is a technique called soul retrieval. I had a series of these from a local shamanic practitioner who I was studying with in 2014. From my perspective, she did psychic work and then talked to me about what she observed in my field. Then I had new choices to make given this new perspective. This was truly amazing and I recommend this if you have experienced trauma or the term “soul healing” sounds enticing to you. In soul retrieval, you are going to (perhaps) an unconscious place in your psyche and remembering, recapitulating, or recognizing a moment where you lost power. In going back to that place, you can use your current self (with assistance from your guides and the shaman) to gather up energy in many different ways.
Ross Heaven has a great book that teaches more techniques beyond soul retrieval and got me to explore more of my unconscious mind. Parts of my psyche were still attempting to understand and integrate traumatic experiences. Relationships with other people, food, drinks, and other parts of my daily life had become the integration playground. By bringing my awareness to these places and allowing energy to move, I experience a surge of power as my own energy gets recirculated. When you do this work, you may be enticed by the stories around the stagnate energy. Be with the raw energy, not the story. Any story that needs to be unveiled will be without your grasping. Allow energy to flow.
To call this or any other work soul healing would imply that the soul is damaged, lost or somehow imperfect and that is just not possible. Your relationship between your ego and soul may benefit from some nurturing and deeper inquiry into their true essence, but your soul will remain with you, stainless and whole.
Some people are not going to like this because the exploitation of vulnerable people pays their bills. Others, because they have built up an idea that they can’t get better because their soul is somehow flawed and have become accustom to a helpless state of victimhood. I have to break this illusion by declaring that SOULS ARE NOT FLAWED.
“Michelangelo said when he got a statue that he would go to the quarry and get a big piece of marble and the way he imagined it, God had already created the statue and his job was just to get rid of the excess marble. So that’s what we’re like. Inside is the being that God has already created. Some call it the Christ, the Buddha mind, the Shekinah, the light, the soul. And our job is to get rid of this excess, useless fear, thought forms of the world that actually hide the light of the soul.” Marianne Williamson
