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5. There will then be a discussion of the client’s journey and the shaman may make further recommendations and observations.
6. The session ends again with smudging.
7. If the shaman is taking the journey, the stages are the same but the shaman himself returns the soul part and further explanation and discussion will be needed.
TRAINING FOR RETRIEVAL WORK
In order to do this kind of work, a soul retrieval practitioner must have developed considerable skills at journeying and have built a good working relationship with his own power animals and spirit allies. Contemporary shamanic practitioners can develop these skills at workshops now taught in America and Europe, where they will undertake many hours of supervised journeying into the otherworlds, and seek objects or energies which have been deliberately hidden.
One person may journey, for example, and then hide something, such as a personal symbol, in the otherworlds. Their partner must then enter that world and find it. Such ‘spiritual hide and seek’ is powerfully affirmative when something or someone hidden in this way is found by another with no prior knowledge of the person who is hiding, of their memories, the landscape of their personal world, or their interests. Far from being a land of imagination, a mental landscape, the otherworlds prove to be something much more – a transpersonal world which exists outside of us where our soul parts can find a home until it is safe for them to return.
“Think of a child lost in a deep wood, cold frightened and alone, who hears a warm voice singing a song of comfort and love, which he can follow back home and into the light”, is the way one