Soul Recovery

When I was just starting to process the abuse of my childhood after starting college and getting some head space away from my family, I read Maxine Hong Kingston’s book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.  A collection of essays about growing up Chinese-American, Kingston’s book included a story about her mother’s experience at nursing college in China.  This story, as I remember it, involved a haunted dwelling place for the nurses-in-training where one of the other girls was terrified out of her mind by some of the events they witnessed.  Kingston’s mother in the story rubbed the woman’s earlobes and called her by her true name so that her spirit, which had been chased out of her body, would be able to find its way back.

I remember reading that and telling one of my best friends at the time that I felt that should be done to me.  I didn’t really understand why I felt that way until I read a passage in Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom.  In it, Christiane Northrop talks about about the interaction between the physical body and the spirit especially in response to a traumatic childhood experience (such as rape/molestation).  Northrop goes on to say that a part of the spirit energy of a person can literally split away to protect itself, one reason why sexual assault victims, such as myself, experienced their trauma from an “out-of-body” viewpoint.

This explanation not only helps me understand why I was attracted to Kingston’s story, but also why I’ve felt that there was an insurmountable gap between my Self before the age of 8 (when the molestation started) and after.  With this knowledge, I hope to better overcome my lost spirit and energy.

Northrop  suggests this method of energy recovery: lying in bed at night and let your worries wash over you as they naturally do.  Call aloud to your spirit asking it to return to you.  It will probably take a while for your Spirit to recognize your voice, but this way you should be able to recall the energy you’d otherwise be wasting on what you can’t control.