Fortunately, the ghost was crossed over. It existed for years in my life. It started at an early age. I have a very long memory. I can remember the first time I visually perceived my mother’s face. I was an infant. Some people say that I have the memory of an elephant. Perhaps. All I know is that it works and it remembers things from very, Very long ago.
The first time I encountered the ghost in my life was when I was about six months old. I was crying in my crib. My mother was not responding, apparently because she was out for the evening. My father was watching a hockey game on T.V. My older sister heard me crying and, being that she was in the middle of washing her hair, was calling to me to just be patient and she would be right with me. But my crying was something that was too loud for my father’s hockey game. He came in, picked me up, slapped me around and threw me back in my crib. My sister walked in on this and lost her mind on him. While they were arguing, I saw the ghost. It was hovering just above my crib, looking at me, and floating upward to the ceiling. It looked at my sister just before she picked me up. Suddenly it was gone.
This sort of thing happened often between myself and my father. He was mentally ill, and undiagnosed. He was quite violent towards me all my life. I got used to it. I also got used to not having a voice. I did not speak till I was around three years of age. I mentioned that in a previous blog and explained why that was. So I won’t go into all that now. Suffice it to say that, even when I did speak, I had no voice.
I could begin to say something and immediately be interrupted, as though I was not even heard, but more likely as though no one cared to know what I had to say. After years of having this happen, I began to just not talk again. Why should I? No one cared what I had to say or that I wanted to say anything anyway. This was actually a very long process in the making. Twelve years at least. Over that time I became more and more introverted and just kept to myself for the most part, not even wanting to venture out and try things or create other relationships. Looking back, I can see that I was being groomed. If I could become as submissive as those with power over me wanted, then they could trust that I would just do and say whatever I was told. I had a lot of soul loss during that time. Years later I had that retrieved and was ever-so-grateful, even though by then it was a painful experience to walk through.
All during that 12 years, I was haunted. There was a ghost that kept showing up and startling me. I would wake up with it looking down at me in my bed. My heart would almost stop and I would come to with such a sudden start that I thought I for sure jumped out of my own skin. In the bathroom I would open the medicine cabinet to get something off a shelf, and when I would close it the ghost would be standing right behind me. I used a lot of 4-letter expletives during that time. I mastered the use of the word “fuck” as an adjective, a prefix, a suffix, a verb, an adverb, a noun and a pronoun. To this day I still have that skill set. A number of times I would wake up in the middle of the night with this ghost sitting on my chest. The weight was so heavy I could not breathe and would usually pass out. I would see the ghost in the window of the house as we drove down the lane to go to town. I would see it there when we drove back up the lane on our return. Whenever I would open my closet door to retrieve clothes it would be there, standing and staring at me.
Years later, once I began my journey of soul retrieval, I began to realize something. I began to realize that from that first moment of disassociation in the crib to the most recent (at that time) sighting of the ghost, that ghost was always…ME. I was a ghost in my own home. And I had become a ghost in my own life. And once the soul retrieval process kicked in, I was able to re-gather myself back into my body. I was able to anchor it there. And then the rage began. A few years of rage at the fact that I had been so damaged for so many years. But under all of that was the realization that no one had the right to do that to me, and no one was EVER going to do that to me again.
It takes great courage to approach the process of soul retrieval. It can be terrifying at times. It can be painful at times. This is because there has been so much pain that has been held within due to the soul loss that has happened over years and sometimes lifetimes. That pain heals. As we heal on a soul level, we heal on all other levels as well. This is not something that is done just as a one-off experience. It is a process that can at times take years of work. But it is so worth the investment. YOU are so worth the investment.
So often when I speak of soul retrieval I will get someone who thinks acedemically say things like, “Oh, this is just cognitive therapy and one needs to be trained to do that.” They forget that until just a few years ago, their psychology degrees were considered pseudo-science. And so they project that attitude toward shamanic practices. They do not realize that the shamanic practices are most often at the base of all of their therapeutic techniques. And that is why sometimes they can only go so far, so deep, and then run up against a wall. Shamanic practices breach those walls and dig deeper and further into the very soul of a person’s existence. In so doing, we are able to heal the deepest of emotional and psychological wounds. And in doing that, the healing then ripples back and forth through time and space, through family, friends and community. We are never working with just one person, even if there is only one person present in the healing other than ourselves. And we recognize that as we open the pathways to healing for each individual with whom we work, we are opening the same pathways for ourselves and for everyone else on the planet. And this is important to recognize as a concept. Because, considering how vile humans can be as a species and how much damage we have done already just by leaving crater-sized footprints on the earth, we need all the healing we can get, whether or not we want to admit that.