If you strip shamanic healing down to its bones, you don’t find logic or linear explanation.
You find story.
You find image.
You find metaphor.

And for many people, especially those who have experienced soul retrieval, this can feel unsettling at first. Was that real? Or was it symbolic? The answer is: both.

Metaphor Is Not “Just” Metaphor

In modern culture, metaphor is often dismissed as decorative language; something poetic but not concrete. Yet the psyche does not operate in bullet points or spreadsheets. It speaks in images, symbols, and felt experience.

Your nervous system doesn’t understand “I am safe now” as a sentence.
It understands the felt image of safety: a warm fire, a protective animal, a familiar place, a guiding presence.

Metaphor is the native language of the unconscious.

The Psyche Thinks in Images

Long before humans developed abstract reasoning, we made meaning through story and symbol. Myths, dreams, fairy tales, and visions weren’t entertainment, they were maps for survival, healing, and transformation.

When something overwhelms us such as; trauma, loss, shame or fear the mind often cannot process it verbally. So the experience gets stored as sensation, image, or fragment. This is why trauma is so difficult to “talk through” alone.

Shamanic work meets the psyche where it already lives.

Soul Retrieval as Metaphorical Medicine

In soul retrieval, a practitioner may journey to retrieve a lost part of the self, often seen as a child, an animal, a spark, or an essence left behind during a moment of pain or rupture.

Is this literal?
Not in the way the rational mind wants it to be.

Is it real?
Absolutely because the psyche responds as if it is.

When someone sees their younger self hiding, frozen, or waiting… something shifts.
When they feel that part being welcomed home… the nervous system reorganises.
When the body recognises wholeness again… symptoms soften, patterns loosen, energy returns.

Metaphor gives the psyche permission to reorganise itself.

Why Metaphor Bypasses Resistance

Trying to heal purely through logic often keeps us stuck in analysis. We stay in the observer seat, explaining ourselves instead of experiencing ourselves.

Metaphor slips past the inner critic.

You don’t argue with an image the way you argue with a belief.
You don’t overthink a symbol the way you overthink a sentence.

Instead, something inside you recognises truth without needing proof.

This is why dreams can change us without explanation.
Why a single image can unlock tears that words never touched.
Why a ritual, however simple, can feel more powerful than hours of talking.

Shamanic Healing Works in the “As If” Realm

The psyche does not require literal fact to heal.
It requires coherent meaning.

When we work “as if” something has been retrieved, restored, or reclaimed, the body responds accordingly. Safety increases. Agency returns. Boundaries strengthen. Vitality flows.

This is not fantasy.
It is how the human system has always healed.

The Return of Symbolic Intelligence

We live in a culture that privileges explanation over experience. Yet healing rarely comes from understanding alone. It comes from integration, from something landing in the body, the heart, the nervous system.

Shamanic healing doesn’t ask you to abandon discernment.
It asks you to remember another way of knowing.

A way that listens to images.
A way that trusts story.
A way that understands that metaphor is not a detour from truth, it is a doorway into it.

When the Soul Speaks, It Uses Poetry

If you’ve experienced soul retrieval and felt changed, even if you can’t fully explain why, you haven’t imagined it.

You’ve simply encountered the psyche in its first language.

And that language has always been metaphor.

If something in this speaks to you, if an image lingered, a feeling stirred, or a quiet yes arose in your body, it may be worth listening.

Soul retrieval work isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about remembering what never truly left.

If you’re curious about whether this kind of shamanic work might support you, I offer a gentle, no-pressure conversation to explore what’s calling and what you need right now. Sometimes clarity begins simply by being met.

You’re welcome to book a (free) call with me to talk it through HERE or, if it feels right, to explore a soul retrieval journey together, you can BOOK A SOUL RETRIEVAL HERE.

Trust what’s moving beneath the words.