Soul Hunt

By Shervin Hojat

In May 2010, I attended a shamanic retreat in Hawaii which was lead by Wilbert Alix. I would like to share with you a glimpse of what I experienced in the class.

One of the activities I participated in during the retreat was a soul hunt. The concept of a soul hunt is that when we encounter a trauma, usually at an early age, a part of our soul departs to safety. As a result, we feel emptiness in ourselves that we fill with our ego. This is a great burden for our ego, whose primary responsibility is to report what it sees rather than interpret or be our guardian (imagine asking a five year old to protect you). Our ego will protect us not only from that trauma, but all the bad things that it thinks may hurt us. As part of the soul hunt, we need to kill that which protects us: our protector (ego), which then becomes a sacrifice to recover our lost soul in order to have a thriving soul and experience our Self again.

In the context of Tending to Your Garden Within, it is sometimes necessary to trim the old branches of the trees in our garden within in order to strengthen and enhance the vitality of the trees for the longer term.

The soul hunt is a method used to overcome our past hurts and traumas and to expand our sense of self by connecting with the higher self. As the result of experiencing our higher self and the experience of a vast expansion within, the magnitude of our traumas shrink drastically relative to the expansion experienced. Experiencing and connecting with our higher self provides an awareness of vastness that is beyond our imagination (think of changing one’s perspective from close up to 20,000 feet). With such an expansion of consciousness, our traumas resemble a small pebble in a large ocean to us. The poem below describes my emotional state before, during and the day after the soul hunt.