Editor's note.

Welcome to this issue of the Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies as we begin our ninth year of publication. The Heart-Centered Therapies Association is expanding, and we welcome you to participate with us.

This issue is devoted to one article that has been in preparation for almost two years. It is "Soul Migrations: Traumatic and Spiritual" by David Hartman and Diane Zimberoff. We have been incorporating soul retrieval work into our healing practices for some years now, techniques we have learned from our shamanic teachers. A question has puzzled me about my experiences with these practices: if we are retrieving the soul, where are we retrieving it from? Where did it go? And what is the actual intrapsychic process involved?

It seems intuitively clear that an individual's connection with his/her soul fluctuates with various experiences. Some experiences weaken that connection, such as shame, fear, rage, indulging addictions, great pain or general anesthetic. Some growth, psychological and spiritual, is enhanced by such traumatic and wounding experiences. The name in common use for this phenomenon is posttraumatic growth. What role does the proximity or connection with the soul play in such growth?

We look at the defenses developed by a child as a response to extreme trauma. Inner resources such as innocence, trust, spontaneity, courage, and self-esteem were lost, stolen, or abandoned in those early traumatic moments, leaving an immense empty space. The psychic energy cast off through a profound level of dissociation and splitting, the sacrificed aspect of self, does not simply disappear into thin air, but rather continues in split off form as a primitively organized alternative self. Retrieving these inner resources in age regression to those traumatic events reunites the sacrificial alternative self with the immanent embodied person, strengthening the fabric of the soul's energetic field.

One of the well-documented observations coming out of the attachment theory research is that strength of character, resilience, determination, deep trust all come from repair of disruption in intimate relationship, not through eliminating any disruption. Likewise, we are proposing, the growth of the human being spiritually is achieved through the repair of the bond with his/her soul following disconnection (loss, theft, hiding, exile, murder).

The Association website offers many resources to visitors, including selected articles from past issues of this Journal which are available to download. There are also many audio programs in MP3 format posted on the website for members to listen to or download and burn onto a CD.

Consider submitting a manuscript for the September, 2006 issue of the Journal, and share your clinical experiences with other readers!

David Hartman, LCSW 

Editor-in-Chief

Heart-Centered Therapies Association, Issaquah, WA USA