Breath of Life

JonFairies, Shamanic Journeys, Soul Retrieval

I’ve become really curious lately about what serves as a medium for transporting energy from non-ordinary reality into this physical or ordinary reality in which we live.  When a shaman brings healing energy, power, or soul parts back from the spirit world, the breath is used as the medium of transport.  Breath is after all a life-giving force.

For years I did soul retrievals, power and power-animal retrievals by sending those healing energies into the physical body of a client (or a stone or similar object) with my breath.  This was how I was taught to perform these shamanic techniques, but it seems that I am understanding why breath for the first time.

Breath has a kind of mutability, a boundlessness and aspect of non-physicality.  It’s part of the physical world and yet, you ask yourself, how physical is it really?  You can’t see it—unless it’s cold outside—you can’t cut it up into pieces like a pie.  Or weigh it, grab onto it, contain it, taste it.  Yet it is filled with energy and life—and who knows what else?  Yeats said that you couldn’t raise your hand in the air without grazing hordes of faeries.  It seems to me that breath is a kind of spirit form in and of itself.  (Inspire and expire come from the word for spirit.)

Here’s an experiment I’ve been doing lately:  while taking a journey, I ask for the resolution of some issue in my life (like, let’s sell this flippin’ house already!).  I hold out my hands as I do when I take up power animals or soul parts I am endeavoring to bring back from the spirit world.  My spirit helpers place power and energy to complete the issue in my hands.  Then I blow that energy out of my hands into this physical reality to take seed and grow.