Q:  Alberto, in Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul Retrieval, you differentiate between having a fate and having a destiny.  What’s thedifference?

A:  Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, there is a big difference between fate, which Eastern traditions call kharma, and destiny, which is otherwise known as dharma.  Fate is a course that’s been predetermined by our family, our history, our genes, and our emotional wounds.  We speak about the fate of nations with a sense of inevitability. We hear our neighbors are getting divorced, and say “well, they were always fighting, it was fated to happen.”  So fate is predetermined to happen, an inevitable series of events that happen to us.   Fate seems unavoidable, like death, it seems fatal, it stalks us at every turn.  Destiny, on the other hand, is the purpose and calling of one’s life.  It takes work to discover, but it can be realized.

Q:  So fate just happens to you, it’s the easy road.  Whereas destiny takes work to attain, but has a much bigger payoff?

A:  Exactly.  The early Greeks believed that fate is spun from a certain
thread, and that once it is woven into an entire cloth it becomes irreversible, while destiny is a powerful force that can actually intervene to reweave the cloth of fate.

Q:  So what does it take to re-weave the cloth of fate?

A:  It requires that you heal your past wounds and respond to the calling you were born with.  To do this, you must embark on an epic journey to transcend circumstance and really take the helm to steer the course of your own life.  I outline that process in detail in the book.  It’s derived from a traditional, shamanic process known as Soul Retrieval that I underwent with my shaman-mentor in the Amazon and high mountains of Peru.  And it’s the process our students go through in the Soul Retrieval Certification Program I developed at the Four Winds Society.

Q:  Tell us more about Soul Retrieval.  How, exactly, does it work?

A:  The shaman knows that the conscious world we live in, this surface
world, is only one form of reality.  It is the Middle World.  The shaman’s
task is to become familiar with not just one, but with three worlds.  There is the Upper World, the domain of Spirit, of the great myths, and of our becoming.  The Lower World is the domain of the subconscious mind, the place where dreams come from, what Carl Jung began describing in his work on dreams and the “collective unconscious.”  In Soul Retrieval, we work in the domain of the Lower World.  And we use shamanic journeying to visit our subconscious, to locate and heal deeply buried wounds.

Q:  Did the shamans you work with invent the concept of the Lower World?

A:   The Lower World is a universal concept, but one that is interpreted differently by different world cultures.   For example, Native American cultures believe that all life sprouts forth from the hidden, Lower World. When a part of the soul fragments, it returns to the dark, feminine womb of Mother Earth, leaving behind a void that we try to fill with anything that will stop the hurt.  As in our metaphor of the soil nourishing the seed, the Lower World is a living, life-giving place to which we can journey for restoration and rejuvenation.  This isn’t true for us Westerners. Judeo-Christian and Greek and Roman mythology see the Lower World as a place where we bury our dead.  We fear the Lower World, associate the deep earth with hell, fire, and brimstone.  We don’t see the earth as the origin of our life.  In the West, we aren’t children of Mother Nature- we’re children of other humans.  And so we disassociate ourselves from the Earth and work destructively against her, and against ourselves, really.  The shaman sees it differently.  The earth is a fertile place of renewal, a rich terrain into which they can journey to retrieve parts of a person’s original “seed” that splintered off as a result of trauma or of pain.

Q:  What do you find in the Lower World?

A:  This is a place where we can find the 7 year old who fled because she couldn’t stand the pain being inflicted on her by bullies.  Or the "seed potential” that was lost in a previous lifetime when someone was burned at the stake.  The Lower World is the domain that our fragmented soul parts return to, as well as where they’re protected until they’re ready to be brought back safely into the Middle World of our everyday consciousness.

Q:  So you journey to the Lower World to find your client’s original seed. How does that work?

A:  For the shaman, we have a four-chambered soul, much like we have a four-chambered heart.  In our Soul Retrieval journey, we visit and map all four chambers.  The first chamber is the Chamber of Wounds.  To mend your past, you must first enter the Chamber of Wounds to discover the story of your own original wounding that derailed your destiny.  You find out how it happened, who the perpetrators were, when it occurred, and how the story continues to live within you.  In the second chamber, you look for any soul contracts that you made at the time of the wounding…promises you made to ourself or to God to try to protect yourself or keep such a traumatic thing from happening to you again.  In the Chamber of Contracts, the shaman re-negotiates soul contracts surrounding the original wound, promises that no longer serve her client’s growth or higher purpose.

Q:  Can you give me an example of a soul contract?

A:  A soul contract is a pledge we make silently and honor without discussion, or even consciousness, for a long time.  It creates a sense of security in a world we deem unsafe, but become the source of our limiting beliefs about abundance, intimacy, love, and success.  One of my clients, Bonnie, is a perfect example.  Bonnie had been estranged from her daughter for a number of years, when her daughter called out of the blue and asked Bonnie to accompany her to a biopsy appointment.  Bonnie became overwhelmed with grief and emotion, and scheduled a Soul Retrieval session with me prior to the biopsy.  We journeyed together, and in the Chamber of Wounds, she found herself as a young mother living in a medieval cottage with her two babies.  They were being terrorized by marauders, who had knocked down one of the support beams of the house.  The mother and her babies were trapped under the fallen timbers of the cottage, and she knew that they wouldn’t be able to escape.  It was wintertime and the sun was setting, and she knew they would freeze to death.  So when we journeyed to the Chamber of Contracts, Bonnie found herself asking God to take her children before she died so that they could hear her comforting them.  Her soul contract read “Let my children die before I do.”  It may have been centuries old, but it was still in force.

Q:  How did you help Bonnie to re-write that soul contract?

A:  We played around with the wording, changing the contract to “Let my children know that their mother will always be there to comfort them.”

Q:  And how did that shift things for Bonnie and her daughter?

A:  Bonnie stopped being emotionally shaken as soon as she understood the events that were causing her grief.  She realized that she’d pushed her daughter away because she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.  And within days, the biopsy showed the lump in her daughter’s breast to be benign.  Bonnie’s once-severed relationship with her estranged daughter began to mend.

Q:  That’s an incredible story, Alberto.  We didn’t get to talk about the
third and fourth chambers of the soul, the Chamber of Grace or the Chamber of Treasures, but we’re almost out of time.  So how can people buy this book and investigate further on their own?

A:  It’s available online at HayHouse.com, or at Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Waldenbooks.  You can also order a signed copy through my office, at www.thefourwinds.com.  At FourWinds.com, you can also find out dates and information about our Soul Retrieval Certification program, which I developed and continue to direct