I had had some American Indian soul recoveries done by a beautiful shaman in Arizona. This was over the telephone. What happens in a soul recovery is that the shaman invokes spirits who bring back lost pieces of soul, in this case, mine. They could be a part of me at birth, before birth, as a child, past life etc. The pieces of soul could have been lost because I gave them away, they were taken from me, or they might have flown away because of trauma. The pieces may have been located in this world or in the earth or in other dimensions. The shaman does not choose which pieces will come back. She simply tells what she has seen.

During a couple of soul recoveries, beautiful pieces would come back. Very sweet. Perhaps come back as a jewel. It was all like poetry.

Now that the pieces are back, you want to keep them. As part of the soul recovery, you thank each piece for coming back every day for twenty-eight days. You also ask them for what gift or knowledge they brought, and you ask what you can do to make them happy to stay.

I would do this in my mind, and then my mind would wander off, and I couldn't be sure I had really done it. I certainly didn't remember most of the time what had transpired. So after a while I started to write down what the pieces of my soul told me.

Pieces of me at aged seven might give me precious knowledge. Every day beautiful insights and wisdom came from these forlorn pieces of myself.

The shaman died, as we must all. And I had one session with another shaman. And it was different. If my original beloved shaman had been alive, I don't know whether the same pieces would have come back, but this time it was very different. The pieces that came back were not what I would call beautiful. One was a knife. One was a knife and a man and a woman as one. One was a black panther.

I followed the same procedure. The knife turned out to be my assertiveness. The man/knife/woman - the knife was my spine, the man my masculine side, and the woman my feminine. The black panther was my power. I don't remember now what exactly they said, but please believe me, every day something wise would come.

At some point, I thought: Good grief, if a knife or a black panther can give me wisdom, why not God?