Exiles and Essential Nutrients

Do you suffer from feeling like you’re not enough, you’re alone, you’re unlovable, or you’re unworthy of the things you want in life? Have you experienced being overcome with intense emotions, flashbacks or nightmares?

In this episode I’ll explore the parts of our psyche that get locked away or exiled and carry these beliefs or messages about ourselves as well as intense emotions and memories. I’ll also show you how to update your subconscious programs and heal those exiled parts. 

Our exiled parts are often referred to as our inner child, wounded child, suppressed or repressed parts. They are called exiles because they are locked away or exiled by our protector parts of our psyche. Exiles can be experienced as dissociated or fragmented parts. They can be experiences and memories that we can’t remember because they are exiled and locked away.

The main emotion of our exiled parts is emotional pain. For example feeling rejected, abandoned, alone, unlovable, wrong, unworthy, unsafe, ashamed, insignificant, or hopeless. 

The exiles are stuck in time reliving the pain from the past and they try to get our attention so that they can heal. Exiled parts know that they can’t subtly get our attention or the protectors will quickly lock them away again. So they will come through with intense feelings, flashbacks, nightmares, or even bodily illness or disease to get our attention. This is why parts of you will flood you with these intense feelings. The wisdom in this is if they can get your attention, they have a chance to heal and no longer be stuck in the past, reliving pain or trauma all alone.

We can also look at exiled parts from a shamanic perspective. An exiled part is likened to what shamans call soul loss and when there’s soul loss the remedy is soul retrieval. I really enjoyed having a few personal conversations with Dick Schwartz about the shamanic nature of his Internal Family Systems model and understanding how people can be guided to do their own healing instead of a shaman doing it on their behalf.

From a shamanic perspective, soul retrieval is a healing practice that involves recovering and reintegrating lost or fragmented aspects of a person's soul. Shamans believe that traumatic or distressing experiences can cause a person's soul to fragment or become disconnected, leading to emotional and spiritual imbalances. Soul retrieval is performed to restore wholeness, health, and balance to the individual.

Richard Schwartz has introduced another way to go about soul loss and soul retrieval where the client can do this process on their own by using their core self. After studying with two shamans, an American trained in essential shamanism and an indigenous African shaman named Malidoma Patrice Some, I think guiding a client to do their own soul retrieval has many benefits.

I'll walk your through the step by step process of retrieving and unburdening an exiled part.

At the end of this episode here are a few things to try:

1. Identify your exiled parts
2. Explore taking the steps I outlined to help heal and unburden the exiled parts. 
3. Find the place inside of you that can be with the exiles pain without being afraid of it or having to fix it or make it go away. There is a place inside of you that can be with this pain from a place that is open hearted and present.
4. Notice how you feel in your body as a result of this healing process.

Thank you for listening!
With gratitude, 
Danielle