A closer look at the additional protocols, collateral healing, and comprehensive support that may be woven into my soul retrieval work.
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In this article, I share more about:
In this article, I share more about:- sexual trauma healing protocols
- relationship cleanup and past-life tangles
- energetic repair after heavy drug or alcohol use
- the fire hose of messages and insight that can come through in session
- why soul retrieval can feel dramatic for some people and subtle for others
- support if abortion or miscarriage was part of your path
- the extra healing support that can be woven into a session
One of the interesting challenges I have, being twenty-six years into my shamanic practice and still feeling very passionate about all of this, is that in working with the guides for so long and over so much time, I’m still constantly learning new ways of supporting people with what I would call shamanic protocols.
As a former engineer, I really like a step-by-step process that all works together to provide a very specific result or healing or transformation. I also have a lot of specialist teams of guides that come in. So, for example, if one of my clients tells me they had a severe head injury at one point, I might call in my team of brain-healing guides, almost like a guest star appearance, to do some work on that.
The Challenge of Explaining the Full Scope of my Soul Retrieval sessions
I get to run a lot of these protocols in the $25 rotating healings that I offer on different topics. But one of the interesting challenges is in representing my soul retrieval work to a new person.
It’s hard to give people information about the full scope of what I have to share, and the protocols and the work, in an amount that most people would actually want to read or listen to.
I’m charmed by the people who read everything I’ve written and go through things in a lot of detail and decide something is in alignment. But it’s also lovely when people read the headline, feel into it, and decide to go forward.
My Intention Is to Provide a Comprehensive Healing
What I’m really trying to provide, especially the first time I work with someone one-on-one in a soul retrieval session, is an incredibly comprehensive healing.
That doesn’t mean I can always cover everything. Especially with people who have a particularly intense trauma history or bigger challenges, sometimes it becomes a matter of triage, where the guides pick the most important things to work on and move energy with.
The Collateral Healing That Happens in Shamanic Work
One of the things I love about shamanic work is the collateral healing that happens. When you start to move old stuck patterns, a lot of really cool other things can open up.
Going into these sessions, I already know that the most common thing people say to me at the end is, “Wow, that was a lot.”
And I understand that. There can be a real fire hose delivery of information. I record my sessions, and there are often a lot of guides with sometimes little messages, sometimes big messages, that they want me to consolidate and share.
A Fire Hose of Information and Perspective
There’s a lot of opportunity for upgrading your framework for seeing the world or understanding your place in it in a way that is more advantageous and helps you thrive.
I once had a practitioner I worked with, who does different things, describe shamanic work as popping your head through the veil, looking at all the territory, and then coming back and reporting on it.
I felt really seen by that. I was especially charmed by that no-nonsense, no-jargon explanation of what I do. There really is so much that can come through in a single session.
What Doesn’t Always Get Represented About my Soul Retrieval Approach
One of the things I’m very aware of is that a huge part of my work doesn’t even necessarily have a good public-facing representation, because I already have a lot to say about soul retrieval and what to expect.
What often doesn’t get fully represented is how many protocols or sets of things get woven into the soul retrieval in my approach. A lot of them are simply things I do on an as-needed basis, covering as much ground as I possibly can in the time available.
Healing and Cleaning Up Sexual Trauma
One of the big protocols I have is healing and cleaning up sexual trauma.
Humans can be so messy around sexuality, and there is so much abuse that happens in the formative years, when we really don’t have the same freedom and access to safety that we do once we have our adult voice.
There can be very painful experiences of other adults being really messy, if not outright violent, with sexuality.
How I Work with Sexual Trauma Energetically
I have some very good systematic cleanups that go through a lot of the layers of how this kind of experience impacts someone.
I start with clearing all the cords and connections to the perpetrator. I get your soul part back from the perpetrator. I help a soul part that may have dissociated and left as a result of that specific trauma return.
A lot of times, people who use us as objects to meet their sexual needs dump unsavory energy at the time. That may have cleared out in the natural course of things, but I like to go in and track any energy that’s been released into you from someone else’s sexuality that doesn’t belong there.
Releasing What Was Never Yours
One of my tantra teachers pointed out that, especially for men, ejaculation can act as a kind of bleed-off emotional reset button. It doesn’t resolve deeper underlying issues, but it can be a potent way to alleviate emotions a man may be ill-prepared to deal with in the moment.
The trouble is that some of that can get energetically dumped into a woman or person who receives the ejaculation, and it’s a very good thing to clean that out so your energy body is more deeply available to your own experience.
Then there’s an elegant trauma-release protocol where I go back along the timeline to the event or events and dismantle the traumatic energy.
A Protocol I Haven’t Always Talked About
Because I’ve been doing this for a really long time, step by step, I can do it very efficiently and quickly.
It’s one of the things I haven’t always talked about much ahead of time, mostly because I’ve been trying to describe my work in a more succinct way, which I would argue I have not particularly succeeded at overall.
When a Relationship Still Has Charge
Another protocol comes in when there’s a tangle, especially in romantic relationships, although this can also show up in friendships or business partnerships, where your normal ability to get over a relationship and move on just isn’t doing what it would usually do with the passage of time.
There are a lot of reasons this can happen.
Relationship Tangling, Neuroscience, and Past Lives
I’m a geeky layperson when it comes to neuroscience, and the pathways we form in the brain when we have repetitive thoughts with emotionality are also important to address.
Unfortunately, a lot of that is an inside job, although I do have some really kick-ass tools I can offer in that regard.
But sometimes we get really tangled up with people because of a past life.
The Deeper Protocol for Charged Relationships
One of the questions I ask in soul retrieval has to do with relationships that still feel charged, even though time has passed.
For those, I often have a deeper protocol, in addition to my standard protocol of getting soul parts back from exes.
Sometimes that includes clearing the energetic structure of all the relating, as well as going into past lives if needed and cleaning up repeated emotional patterns, or patterns of huge intensity, that have informed and clouded someone’s ability to deal with a person in a contemporary way or find a path that would actually be successful.
Why People Can Stay Hung Up
A lot of times we’re hung up on people we wish we weren’t hung up on because they’re no good for us and there’s no path of genuine, authentic success there, and yet we still feel a pull and a tie.
Heavy Drug and Alcohol Use Changes the Picture
Another area that is so, so, important is when there has been chronic or heavy drug or alcohol use.
If someone had a period where they were drinking a little too much wine or smoking some pot for a few years, this doesn’t apply in the same way.
But I also work with people for whom heroin or cocaine were part of the journey. Maybe they overused ayahuasca and had many journeys. Maybe there was a period of meth addiction. That is something I think is important to know.
Rehabilitating the Energy Body After Substance Use
I talk about this in much greater detail in my podcast in a two-part series on rehabilitating the energy body if drugs or alcohol were part of your journey.
But the short version is that when this crosses into heavier usage, or involves more intense substances, the energy body can begin to believe that we were going through the dying process. It can start to draw itself up and out of the body, sort of defund the lower chakras, and disconnect.
How This Can Create Ongoing Vulnerability
There can even be a correlation sometimes with the people who come to me for entity work, because they’ve stopped fully inhabiting their energy body and there is more vulnerability to things getting attached.
People who never had that history can absolutely still have entity issues, but this is one of those long-tail consequences that old “just say no” education never warned people about and didn’t prepare people for when they were having those research-and-development experiences of how to be on the planet.
What I Add In at No Extra Cost
So again, this is an add-on I put in at no extra cost.
I work to restore the structure of the energy body, help someone come back into it, and rebuild areas that were damaged or dismantled as a result of these substances creating an interpretation that the soul was beginning to travel out of the body.
When that process of moving from middle world (the human realm) to upper world (the realm of the soul) is in motion but not complete in either direction, it can cause a lot of mischief in life.
As Much Healing As Possible In One Session
My core desire is to help people in a single session receive as much healing as I can possibly offer, and to help them be on a destiny path that will support them in thriving, or at the very least in coming back to baseline so they have a solid jumping-off place for everything else they may do to support themselves.
Why I Still Love This Work After So Many Years
I think this diversity and complexity is part of why I’ve been doing this work for so many years and I’m still so passionate about it.
I love that I can make an appreciable and meaningful difference for someone in a single session.
When the Work Is Less Likely to Land
The place where that is least likely to be felt, honestly, is when someone is very deeply identified with a victim mindset or very immersed in the story.
Not all the time, and not most of my clients, but sometimes I hear from someone who really wants to be right about the universe being out to get them, or about how bad and evil and wrong nearly everyone they’ve ever dealt with has been, and also wants relief and transformation.
Availability Matters
That subjective piece matters.
If someone is not anchored in that victim mentality and is more available, there can often be a really powerful transformation.
I say that with a great deal of compassion. I understand that there are very real survival-based patterns in the brain that can have us ruminating on old grievances even when we sincerely want to forgive.
So I want to say this gently. But availability matters.
Feeling More Is Not Always the Same as Healing More
I also want to frame this carefully, because energetically sensitive people often feel more, and yet being energetically sensitive is not necessarily advantageous.
Some people report dramatic changes right away. Others say they didn’t feel all that much, but they notice that they feel more solid, or something I said ends up landing in a deep way.
What People Sometimes Tell Me Years Later
It’s always interesting to me when people come back ten years later and say that the soul retrieval helped them so much, and that I said this particular thing that was hugely meaningful.
I usually have no memory of saying the thing, because in many ways I’m being the hollow bone.
Once I’ve shared the messages from the guides, I release it. I go clean up the kitchen and don’t hold on to your messages or your journey.
I Approach the Work as an Ally
I approach the work from the standpoint of being an ally.
I do the work on your behalf. I share absolutely all the messages the guides ask me to share, within the time frame we have. Sometimes it’s useful to leave a little extra space because some people have talkative guides.
And then I release it, and it’s yours to do with as you will.
Some of the Extra Notes I Don’t Always Share
Part of what I’m sharing here is simply some extra notes and material about what this whole process is like for me, what shows up, and what can come through in that fire hose data dump of information.
A lot of it is nuanced and obscure in the best way. People may come in making themselves bad and wrong about something, or carrying questions they’ve held for years, and the guides will bring through a perspective that is unexpectedly kind, liberating, and clear.
A Good Example: Abortion, Miscarriage, and the Soul’s Perspective
A good example is the diversity of how people may or may not be impacted if abortion was part of their journey.
I deeply honor that for some people it feels like, “Yes, that’s just the way it went. No big deal.” For other people, there can be a significant traumatic or emotional relationship with that experience.
But what I can say, after working with very large numbers of people, is that on the guide side there has never been criticism of that choice.
Free Will, Soul Plans, and Innocence
The soul is more like, “Oh, free will. That’s what reigns on earth.”
We come into these bubbles of biology and we have free will. We may make soul plans, and if those plans don’t work out, it’s back to the drawing board.
Before incarnation, that is often a much simpler thing than it feels like from inside the human experience, before all the ego, right and wrong, socialization, and inherited intensity about what things are supposed to mean.
So when a pregnancy isn’t chosen, or there is a miscarriage, the soul’s response is not condemnation. It is more like, “All right. Other opportunities. What else do I want to get up to?”
The Guides Often Bring Unexpected Compassion
There is often so much innocence in places where people have carried shame.
Sometimes the guides will say, in effect, “You were so innocent in this. You made a decision. And this thing that seemed like a bad idea actually moved you along your path in a powerful way.”
There is so much cool perspective available in this work.
Why This Work Keeps Calling Me Back
I love the opportunity to see deeply into how people are humaning, with all the complexity and challenge and beauty and pain and loveliness and innovation and stuckness that come together in this very interesting experience.
That is part of why I keep loving the work and keep coming back to it. There is just so much richness in approaching things in this very particular way.
Why I Wanted to Share This
I wanted to share some of the things that, in the interest of prioritizing other information I give about soul retrieval and what to expect, I don’t always articulate.
But this has been bubbling up over the last few weeks, and I wanted to make an attempt to communicate some of it here.
Want to learn more about my soul retrieval work?
Additional Resources
Want a full overview of the soul retrieval process? Check out What to Expect in Your Soul Retrieval Session- https://handsoverheart.com/2017/01/20/about-soul-retrieval/ or my full article series about soul retrieval.
Want to learn more about my soul retrieval work? https://handsoverheart.com/soul-retrieval/
Ready to book a session? https://handsoverheart.com/book-a-session/
Curious about how long people have been receiving some version of shamanic healing? Check out this article! https://www.thecollector.com/shamans-mesolithic-period/
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