Healing The Inner Child With Soul Retrieval

The term “Inner Child” gets thrown around a lot in the context of spirituality and general therapy work, however, there is often a misunderstanding surrounding what it actually means and how to truly address it. In new age spirituality, the inner child is seen as a love & light symbol, as opposed to the powerful, ancestral healing tool that it truly is. Addressing the inner child is much more than just embracing our child-like aspects - to truly begin to shift the energies surrounding the inner child, one must address the different stages of their development from birth to adolescence as well as the specific events that occurred throughout different stages of the past. Through this, we begin to identify the emotional triggers that were experienced and in turn, we begin to identify the roots of our destructive patterns and programming. Only then, can we work to re-write this programming and address our core wounds to heal our Inner Child.

Using advanced Shamanic Journeying techniques, we have the ability to journey back to meet our Inner Child at various stages of their development, in order to form a relationship with them. Once this connection has been established, we can begin to re-inform, and re-programme our patterns by altering our responses to certain events from our past. In other words, we begin to provide the younger form of ourselves with information, reassurance and love that we may not have received at the time. This process alters our timeline through changing the information we receive as children and in doing so, changing the formation of our shadows into tools for power and growth.

What Is The Inner Child?

The Inner Child is a way of referencing the child-like self that exists within us. This child-like self is built upon how we have learned to think and behave as children, which in turn, affects how we view ourselves and the world around us as adults. Often, the people, situations and events that we bring into our lives as adults are a direct mirror of the state of our Inner Child and how we learned to view the world at an early age. Therefore, the core of how we perceive and feel about ourselves and the world around us, exists within the Inner Child. By addressing the core stages of the Inner Child’s development, we are in turn, addressing the core of who we are and why we perceive things in the way that we do.

Through addressing and reconnecting with the core development stages of the Inner Child and re-informing those parts of ourselves, we also retrieve the aspect of our child-like self and inner-playfulness that resides within each core stage. In doing so, we replace our learned beliefs and patterns with the child-like qualities that were suppressed. The process utilises Shamanic Journeying to access altered perceptual states to allow us to tune into our child-like selves.

What Is Shamanic Journeying?

Shamanic journeying is considered to be one of the core abilities of the Shaman but is also a technique that can be used on different levels by everybody in order to shed light on certain things within ourselves and the world around us. Many of us are journeying to certain places within ourselves without actually realising it so with that in mind, journeying in a Shamanic way is a method of consciously utilising our intent, knowledge and imagination in order to access different parts of our consciousness. It involves the conscious awareness of the person to shift beyond the physical world and into different segments of the astral and spirit world, whilst the awareness of the body is anchored into the physical plane. There are different levels to journeying - some of which are safe for many practice alone but to access deeper places, it is important to be facilitated in a sacred, protected space by a trained practitioner due to the fact we are entering different realms and states of being which without a sacred space, can leave us open to attachments from other beings and spirits that may exist in these different planes of existence.

Shamans receive in-depth training and practice in order to be able to shift into these perceptual states with ease, as well as much time being spent to build connections and allies from within the spirit world, in order to journey to deeper places safely - all whilst being firmly anchored to the physical. The purpose of this is to simply shift energies from one place to another and share knowledge and insight between the physical and spirit world in order to bring healing and transformation.

A common question is how the Shaman knows where to journey in order to attain a specific result or extract a certain piece of insight. There isn’t just one answer to this as different Shamans may have different techniques for shifting into different states of being. However, amongst Shamanic traditions across the world, many use the concept of the three worlds to navigate these planes with the assistance of their allies.

The Lower World - This is known as the realm of the ancestors and spirits. The lower world contains nature's secrets which are instinctual to our nature - the roots of our deepest thoughts, feelings and emotions. Most healing work for the Shaman and the client takes place in the Lower World, due it containing the keys to healing our past wounds and traumas. Modern Psychology refers to the Lower World using terms such as “the collective unconscious”.

The Middle World - This is known as the physical plane, the world we currently occupy as a civilisation. The middle world is the place of density, and integration - it is an essential part of journeying because it is the place that we bring our insight from the other worlds in order to integrate healing and change. It is through portals within the middle world where we are able to enter the Lower and Upper World. Accessing the middle world is something we are all doing by existing in the physical but journeying to it Shamanically involves us tuning into the energetic structure of the physical plane, also called the invisible world.

The Upper World - The Upper World for many is the most attractive out of the three due to it being the home to the higher-dimensional entities such as angelic beings, ETs and other luminous beings. Unlike the lower and middle worlds, it doesn’t have a defined structure and there are different levels to it. Shamans journey to this space in order to step out of time and into infinity. It is through the upper world that we can access our timelines and read the signs of destiny.

The three worlds are like multi-dimensional maps that have different layers to them - each layer or segment containing the energies that make up a world. It is through the three worlds that we can access various planes and even other civilisations. The three worlds are held together by the liminal, which is an infinite space between dimensions which is often referred to as "the void" which also acts as the home to various liminal beings such as Dragons and Dark Elves.

These worlds are taught in great detail in our Shamanic Journeying Course

When we work on the inner child, we are journeying between the upper and lower worlds. We enter the lower world to retrieve the events and wounds that are related to our past and we access the upper world in order to move backwards on our timelines to these core events. The process is highly resonant with a powerful process that we refer to as Soul Retrieval.

What Is Soul Retrieval?

Soul retrieval is a term that many find alluring. It is a process of identifying the events from your past that resulted in soul loss. In modern psychology, soul loss is referred to as “detachment” which is a core point in our past that caused us to distance ourselves from the story and in many cases, the emotion that is attached to it. From the Shamanic perspective, everything that we are experiencing physically, also shows as imprints in the energy body. Therefore, the concept of detachment actually causes a core part of ourselves to fall out of resonance with the rest of our life force, causing it to become lost. Soul retrieval is the process of identifying the aspects of our past that caused soul loss, and to create a vibrational resonance to call the soul piece back. When the soul piece is retrieved, it creates the sensation of becoming more “whole” and can very quickly change a destructive pattern, due to the state of detachment being resolved.

When we journey to retrieve the soul part, there are four core segments of our consciousness that will need to be visited - all of which exist within The Lower World. The following are what we refer to as the four core chambers of the lower world that we visit for soul retrieval. The Chamber Of Wounds - The segment of the consciousness that contains the keys to our repressed trauma. We visit this chamber to find the specific event that caused the given soul piece to detach. The Chamber Of Grace - We visit the chamber of grace to create a resonance with the detached soul piece in order to draw it back. All shadows have light and dark and the chamber of grace is where we acknowledge the lighter side of the shadow. It is within this lighter side that the energies that are resonant with the soul piece lie.

The Chamber Of Soul Contracts - This chamber appears as a big open room that is filled with billions of papers and contracts - it is here where we find the collective spirit of the script keeper. If it is viable to do so, we visit this place to identify a soul contract that is binding us to a particular way of being. These contracts are often written before we enter this incarnation. When we identify the contract, we can begin to commune with the script keeper to rewrite the contract in order to attain a more fruitful result. If the contract is old and destructive, it will need to be destroyed. The Chamber Of Treasures - This is the place where we retrieve a core quality that was lost through the detachment process. This is normally things like: playfulness, humour or trust.

Soul retrieval is offered as a core Shamanic Healing tool. In order to retrieve a lost soul part, we need to revisit the events from our past that caused soul loss which can be seen as the same as journeying to the Inner Child. Both practices utilise very similar tools and techniques to achieve similar results.

Combining Inner Child Journeys With Soul Retrieval

Having combined both of these methods within my Inner Child Program, combining them feels like both of them are completed by each other. The Inner Child journeys provide much needed structure to the soul retrieval process by allowing us to visit the five main stages of our development in order to fully address the core aspects of why we are the way we are and by doing so, we naturally identify the soul parts which detached along the way, which drastically amplifies the effectiveness of the soul retrieval process.

In order for a soul piece to be able to return to the life force, there needs to be a resonance. By providing the inner child with the love and guidance that it needs at the core stages of their development, we are altering our programming which in turn, is shifting our vibration back into alignment with the part of us that became lost at these core stages. Therefore, if we perform a full soul retrieval after re-parenting all of the core stages of our inner child, the soul part is attracted to us like a magnet.

For more information about utilising soul retrieval to heal your inner child, take a look at our Inner Child Healing Program.