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Soul
Retrieval Integration Arts case study
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Soul
Retrieval & Inner Work -case study
Client* Lee During one of the Alchemy class cycles, I had a dream of seeing a student, whom I'll call Lee, with an old rusty ax buried deep into his heart. As spiritual practitioner I receive dreams telling me about my clients, and I have learned to trust and work with them. The the dream showed me that Lee had an old wound regarding matters of the heart, and since he was walking around in the dream, it implied that he had learned to live with it. On meeting with Lee privately I asked him if I could share my dream content. He readily assented, and I told him what had visited me. When I was finished with the dream I asked him if he had any knowledge of who might have sunk that ax into his heart. Although he typically shared to a deep level in group (we were working on shadow material in intimate relationships in the menŐs class), it wasn't until this dream event that he shared his original love wound. • He related that sixteen years ago he was completely in love with a girl whom he felt was "The One." He had planned to marry her. But shortly into the relationship, she dropped him for a homeless man. This doubly devastated him, affecting him on both emotional and physical levels. He lost weight and the will to work, his self-esteem plummeted, and he fell ill. He underwent "the dark night of the soul" and promised himself that he would never be hurt like that again. And he never had been since then; he always left his relationships any time the subject of marriage or commitment came up. He had never connected his noncommittal behavior in relationships to that initial wounding. Considering the message within my dream provided a revelation to him. That is not where the work ended, however. From a shamanic view the dream was not only for information but also for showing me that he had a spiritual wound in his heart. It appeared to me as an ax, but that was just a symbol of a spiritual intrusion in his heart region. He was willing for me to do a shamanic extraction process and pull the "ax" out of his chest. We decided to do this at the end of the group cycle, when the men's and women's groups got together to cocreate healing ceremonies between the masculine and feminine principles. The ax also signified that Lee had suffered soul loss due to the trauma that happened to him sixteen years ago. For his healing ceremony, I asked Lee to bring an ax to the weekend retreat. By creating a symbolic ritual forum for Lee's unconscious to open up in this allowed him to move past his rational mind and to receive the healing. We waited until the end of the day, after the sharing and other ceremonies, when the energy was very charged with love and healing. At that time I shared my dream, and Lee shared his heart-wound story with the group. The group agreed to support him by drumming for the healing ceremony as I did the extraction process. I carefully tucked the ax deep in his left armpit and told him to go back to that time of betrayal with his beloved. I told him not to let go of the ax until he was ready to let her go as well. His face was wide open and tears shimmered in his eyes. The drummers started a monotonous beat and I called in my healing spirits. I pulled on the ax until suddenly it came free. Lee jerked off the ground and started to weep uncontrollably. I gave him a soul retrieval and brought his soul essence back to him. A soul
retrieval fills one up with one's own spiritual essence, and then
illness cannot take hold. For follow-up work, I instructed Lee to
literally bury the hatchet, do a healing forgiveness ceremony, and
take personal responsibility for stopping particular behaviors with
women, which had become a compulsive way of relating. Since that retreat,
he has been in a committed relationship for years and reports that
he is working on their connection and intimacy in creative ways. |
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The
Sacred Art of Dreaming-case study
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