Time Traveling Trauma Healing

On Soul Retrieval and how I time traveled to save my own life.

{Image description: a full orange sun setting over a beach and trees in the distance beyond a plane of grass. Towards the front is a bush with a yellow and orange half circle light reflection from the camera.}

When I was 16 years old, I stood at an intersection that would change the direction of my entire life. To my left was the George Washington Bridge I planned to jump off. To my right was Alianza Dominicana’s Counseling Center. I was so depressed my face was going numb and my speech was slurred. I desperately longed for what I thought would be the relief of death.

As I was turning left to go towards the bridge, without conscious choice, I turned right. I walked into the counseling center and broke out into a sob. The only words I could muster to the receptionist behind a glass were,

“I need help.”

Perhaps the most important words I’ve ever uttered. This started my journey in therapy and trauma healing. Slowly I began to regain hope and life energy. I am now 35 years old and I am a psychotherapist myself. Turning to that counseling center changed the course of my entire life; I got to stay alive.

Since that time I’ve always questioned what was it that made me turn right.

This summer on a blazing July day, I did a soul retrieval ritual with my best friend of 20 years. Recently the themes of our long phone calls have been around stuckness and feeling the need to release. I got a vision of us on a beach, she got a vision of us doing a release ceremony. We live in different states, so we found a beach halfway between us and planned to cocreate a ceremony.

On the first day, we played in the waters of a waveless low-tide Connecticut beach, dunking our heads in the cool water, howling and crying like babies, as we mimicked giving birth to what was stuck in us and coming into the world anew. A band played old school covers in the distance and we danced with our hands in the air, undulating our hips, and laughed and laughed. We wrote what we needed to release on paper and asked the ocean to help us let go. We felt we needed a poem and I recalled one I had written:

The Release Ceremony

hold on my dear, you will 
dislodge it from your system, 
what you ingested and never digested 
as a child. it will wreck you,
but you will feel it, so that 
it won't stay stuck in you 
again. one day you will 
feel the sun on your face and 
remember—everything passes, 
and you will have poetry 
to make of it.

Perfect, as what we were releasing was of course entangled with our childhood traumas, our mothers and our fathers.

After releasing, we felt we needed to nourish the spaces we released. We needed to retrieve. The next day on the same beach, we were guided in a Soul Retrieval practice by gina Breedlove and Grace from the incredible book Vibrations of Grace. As we listened to the audio, gina Breedlove and Grace invited us to see which past versions of ourselves wanted to come through for the Soul Retrieval. We were to land on one specific memory. Immediately I landed on my 16-year-old self and the time I stood at the intersection.

Waves of sobs and laughter washed through me. It was so clear. As my 35-year-old adult self I went to that 16-year-old, held her hand, and said, “Hey, we’re going this way.” I guided her to the counseling center, and when she said “I need help.” I whispered in her ears,

“ You’re so brave, I’m so proud of you.”

{Image Description: 16 year old Rysse’s face and part of an arm and chest with chin length wavy hair, thin eyebrows, black eyeliner, her brown/amber colored eyes looking sadly to the side, her mouth slightly parted. She is wearing a brown shirt with little white buttons from the collar to the chest.}

I stayed with her for the remainder of that evening, steadily loving her, as she spilled her guts to a stranger about how depressed she had been, as she waited in a cubicle while the therapists deliberated on what to do with her, as she waited for her mother to come pick her up because the therapists, rightly so, thought she was a safety risk and could not leave alone.

I then brought her to my current reality. I showed her all the amazing things in my life right now. I let her know we are living our dream of living by the beach. I showed her that I am in a loving marriage and a heart-centered purposeful career. I showed her all the deeply intimate friends and communities I have. I let her know I was well, and though life is heartbreaking still a lot of the time, I now have so many tools to be with that heartbreak. I said to her,

“Give me the heartbreak, I can hold it now.”

That heartbreak that was way too much for an unsupported 16-year-old body to hold. On that beach with my best friend next to me, I cried and cried for all that I couldn’t cry at 16. I thanked my body for the wisdom to depress all that pain, and even the wisdom to think that ending my life would bring relief. “Of course,” I said, “that was all way too painful for you. Of course, you wanted relief.”

I told the 16-year-old she was safe and I would always be with her. I showed her all the adult things I take care of. I showed her I had the capacity for the heartbreak now. I told her that I would make the decisions from now on, and that she can stay on the beach in forever paradise dancing with her best friend and just being 16.

{A lightly clouded sky, with a bit of orange hew at the bottom, and a bird flying in the distance. On the bottom is a beach with sand and 2 tiny boats in the distance.}

I can say now, with my full body, that I know the reason why I turned right that day on the intersection. It was me. It was 35-year-old me who went back to hold the hand of that girl standing at that intersection. I guided her to the right.

Time travel may not be possible yet, in the physical realm, but I know it is possible in the spiritual realm.

I time-traveled to my 16-year-old self and I saved my life.

“Soul retrieval is an ancient shamanic process practiced by many cultures…Most shamanic cultures around the world believe that illness is due to the loss of the soul. Many believe that, whenever we suffer an emotional or physical trauma, a part of our soul flees the body in order to survive the experience.” (Ingerman)

A part of my soul fled during that period at 16. I still felt it in my body in the way my face never fully recovered from the numbness, the frozen heartbreak in my chest. The Soul Retrieval allowed me to unfreeze that long-held pain in my body. It allowed me to step into my adult body. It allowed me to recover that 16-year-old from being suspended in depression.

As we were ending the ceremony, I got a prescription from Grace.

“Cry! Sing! Dance in spiral waves! Whenever you feel the urge in your body. Even if it’s in front of people. The world needs people who are feeling and releasing. And if you really can’t do it at that moment, tell your body you will come back to it later, and come back to it later! Don’t let this heartbreak get stuck in you again.”

As I’ve been writing this, waves of tears and sensation rise up and down from my sacrum and chest. At the library, at the coffee shop, at my desk, I’ve been weeping, allowing what needs to move.

Deep gratitude for these ancient wisdom practices that allow us to time travel. I am so grateful to my best friend, the ocean, Grace, gina Breedlove, my 16 year old body.

I will leave you with this poem that came to us on the day of the Soul Retrieval, encompassing so much of our journey.

Burnt Kabob by Rumi

Last year, I admired wines. This,
I’m wandering inside the red world.

Last year, I gazed at the fire.
This year I’m burnt kabob.

Thirst drove me down to the water
where I drank the moon’s reflection.

Now I am a lion staring up totally
lost in love with the thing itself.

Don’t ask questions about longing.
Look in my face.

Soul drunk, body ruined, these two
sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.
Neither knows how to fix it.

And my heart, I’d say it was more
like a donkey sunk in a mudhole,
struggling and miring deeper.

But listen to me, for one moment,
Quit
being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you. God.