Soul Loss

The Hmong believe in the power of shamans to heal their emotional and physical wounds. Often an illness is the result of “soul loss.” The shaman must enter a trance in order to travel through the spirit world and call the soul back.

When I returned from visiting my family in Pennsylvania this Christmas, I felt out of sorts. One morning I was struck by the sense that some young part of me had not returned at all. I realized I had to call her back: Come here! We live in Minnesota now!

In therapy, much of the work I do is to locate parts of me that I’ve rejected or exiled and coax them back. I experience this as inviting some separate being into my own body and holding it there in love. More and more, these parts of myself come to me as images so clear and crisp and potent that they must arrive from some other “place,” not from what I normally experience as consciousness. When I interact with these images, I experience healing at a level much deeper than words alone.

How similar we all are; we just use different words to explain our experiences, both common and divine.