Soul retrieval is a Shamanic practice to retrieve parts of the soul lost during trauma. During traumatic events, the soul fractures and pieces fall away and stay 'hidden' in the lower world, and in the past.

In the Jewish tradition, there is an understanding, that a human being is like a vessel, and once God created this vessel, and wanted to share his love with the human being, and poured all of it into the vessel, the vessel could not contain it all, the love was too vast, and the vessel shattered into many little pieces. The Shamanic view of soul fragmentation I feel resonates with that view. 

When the soul parts go to the lower world, they take with them some feelings and often the memory of the event; so the person won't remember that painful experience and how it felt.  Also some human potential is 'lost' with the soul part. The potential is the not yet realized creative force, which could not find a way to become fulfilled in the waking reality. It is a seed of consciousness, that needs to be planted back into the present moment to flourish in the present reality of the person's life.

Different people feel the loss differently. Some literally feel like something, or a lot, is missing; some feel unable to realize themselves completely, like some invisible force is preventing them from reaching a peak experience in creativity, like a glass ceiling. This is often accompanied with feelings of being fatigued and drained, or depressed continually. Some may also experience apathy towards life, lack of energy to get involved. Some feel an emptiness so severely, that they attempt to fill it with external things or people, leading to addictions, obsessions, and negative attachments.

Through the healing process of Soul retrieval, the intelligence of the soul and the 'lost potential' is restored to the present, integrated into the whole, is reconnected with the Source in the present moment, and you are able to bring that potential into realization, and lead a more fulfilling life, have peak experiences in your creative work, and have more energy.

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In indigenous cultures, people did soul retrieval within 3 days of loss, because they knew that the whole community suffers when one person is wounded. In the West, we are mostly ignorant of what the soul is, and of its wounds or desires. We feel the presence of the wounding but we have no physician for the soul. The Shamanic Healer is that physician.