Soul recovery, I think, is much richer and more helpful. Instead of having a shaman retrieve our soul for us, we help each other to become the shamans and healers of our own soul.

The body believes in images.

Our ancestors are looking for us even if we're not looking for them. And by our ancestors I mean our bloodlines and the ancestors of the place where we live and our spiritual kin who go beyond our biological families. We could be walking around carrying an entire ancestral history of the wrong kind for us.

Choices are our choices so I am not taking away anyone's personal choice, but we run into difficulty when we're having choices made for us rather than making our own.

This relates to the concept of time and our ability as dreamers to reach across time to a past or future self and do some good. This is very important as it relates to soul loss and soul recovery.

On a visceral level, most of us know what soul loss means. This is the shaman's diagnosis of the root cause of many of our complaints: our lack of energy, our fatigue, our depression, why our immune systems are blown, why we lack enthusiasm and courage for life.

When we wake up to the fact that our thoughts touch the people we are thinking about, we are again asked to choose which thoughts we send out. If we send out the thoughts of the heart, we can heal, even if the person who needs healing is far away.