“Integrative Soul Work” is the term I’ve come to use to describe a way of looking at our lives through a lens of free and bound energy flow and then considering the present lifetime personal and systemic threads, karmic threads and ancestral threads, both resource- and trauma-based, that weave together to form these different states. Where we are able to identify resource threads, these can be deepened by allowing them to become more conscious and by entering into more of an actively reciprocal relationship with them. Where we are able to identify trauma (whether personal, systemic, karmic and/or intergenerational), these threads can be untangled, metabolized and integrated over time through slowing, asking for additional support from resourceful energies in both the physical and soul planes, and bearing witness to the stories that these threads carry that have heretofore gone unseen and unheard. At it’s core, this tracking and untangling of threads is the domain of the weaver archetype.
Prior to the execution of so very many folk healers across Europe in the Middle Ages and beyond at the hands of representatives of the Church and the Feudal Lord system (see Lyla June’s essay on Reclaiming Roots of European Indigeneity and her music video, Mamwlad, for more on this), many of the Goddess energies revered by these skilled and gifted healers were spinners and weavers (see Max Dashu’s amazing work around this through the Suppressed Histories Archive). The archetype of the weaver as one who can hold awareness and track the interplay of multiple energetic themes and threads across space and time in the service of a co-creative relationship with the flow of Universal Energy is one that I strongly identify with myself and help others to reclaim within themselves. Sadly, I find this archetype which is non-linear and deeply spiral-based and labyrinthine in its nature, is often pathologized within the more linear and efficiency-focused dominant overculture of “Whiteness” in the West.
As such, I offer one-on-one integrative soul work sessions for those who are interested in deepening their walk here in the physical world with an eye on and attention to the wisdom and intersecting threads underlying this journey in the soul plane. The primary entryway into the soul realm, whether it be connection with the elements, plants, animals and/or ancestors, is often the felt sense of the physical body in the present. When combined with and channeled through each person’s unique gifts of sensitivity, active engagement with this felt sense and it’s underlying soul wisdom often opens up whole new worlds of understanding, choice, possibility, and healing, not only for ourselves in the present, but for those further back in our lineage and those who are yet to come.
Integrative soul work often dovetails into and out of some of the more commonly-known shamanic healing rituals such as soul retrieval and curse extraction, as places of bound energy and authentic power make themselves known for release, removal and transformation according to each person’s authentic rhythm and timing.