“Language is the very voice of the trees, the waves, and the forests”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Could you be losing your soul? If I suggested that you may be suffering from soul loss, you might reasonably wonder if I’m losing my grip on reality. Let me explain. I realise that the very notion of ‘soul loss’ sounds to many of us today in the West like an ancient superstitious belief, or instead perhaps a New Age fantasy.

But that’s far from the case for many people in the developing world. Soul loss is called susto in American Latino communities and because of its prevalence, it has forced itself upon Western medicine to be recognised as a disease: though viewed as a culture bound syndrome, a disease of adaptation.

Commonly, Brazilian tribal members who’ve tragically lost their rainforest homes and been displaced and forced  to relocate to the slums of big cities, often suffer from susto as a result. They have devised healing rituals to deal with this soul loss; these involve visiting and reconnecting with their ancestral forest, often at night – and failing actual visits, by reimagining nature – in order to become whole again. In this way, people are often cured through their renewed connections, even though their former lands may now have been destroyed, or become mere ghosts of their former homes. 

It seems that soul loss is more common than we think and is found across the world, not just in Latinos or Brazilian indigenous people. It’s not a new ailment since soul loss and the means for its retrieval have been recognised for thousands of years in shamanism. Shamanism itself is not reserved to any particular culture, being spread throughout the world amongst diverse indigenous peoples. In many preliterate cultures soul loss is believed to be a primary cause of illness and death.

I’m purposely not talking about an academic definition of ‘soul loss’, but I find it a very useful general term for shedding light on broad aspects of many people’s experience. Sandra Ingerman, a leading authority on shamanism and of soul loss and retrieval says,  “The basic premise is whenever we experience trauma, a part of our vital essence separates from us in order to survive the experience by escaping the full impact of the pain.”

From this broad definition, you can see that there can be various causes of soul loss and it can often present as PTSD; causes include all kinds of trauma, abuse from others, grief and loss. The understanding is that In order to preserve oneself in an intolerable situation, part of the soul leaves, since continuing to be in these conditions is so uncomfortable that it can lead to complete disintegration.

Again, from Ingerman, “Some of the more common symptoms of soul loss are dissociation where a person does not feel fully in his or her body and alive and fully engaged in life; chronic depression, suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress syndrome, immune deficiency problems, and grief that just does not heal. Addictions are also a sign of soul loss.”

However, in our modern world, a leading cause of soul loss, which I want to highlight, is our drastically increased rupture from nature and the more-than-human world. This cause is in my opinion especially insidious, because we moderns don’t realise we are suffering from soul loss; it’s just not recognised and wouldn’t be taken seriously as a diagnosis anyway. This unacknowledged malady tends to manifest as a perpetual feeling and experience of incompleteness and disconnection.

In our modern world, we’ve collectively withdrawn from nature, psychically and emotionally, from the vast web of life which succours and sustains us. We’re now more or less psychically disconnected from the rhythms of the seasons, from the cycles of nature, moon phases, animal migrations, from the seasonal growth and harvesting of plants, the touch and feel of the winds, the symphony of bird song. Our recognition of our embeddedness in nature previously gave us a natural sense of belonging, of meaning, of humility, of cyclical time, of kinship with the greater more-than-human life and its deeper rhythms. 

We didn’t embark on this direction consciously and it didn’t occur suddenly; it just crept up on us, as it were, insidiously. This wasn’t a violent trauma at all for the majority of us westerners – we weren’t dispossessed and thrown off our ancestral lands. Yet over years, decades and the last couple of centuries, part of our vital essence has separated from us, and we have become bereft, even though we are barely conscious that this has happened. 

Of course there are many factors involved in soul loss in modernity, as its downsides have become ever more pronounced: breakdown of community life, of anchoring certainties, of identity, traditions and cultural heritage, with rising stress and anxiety, etc. 

But a leading cause in my opinion, is nature dissociation and deprivation. These days I often have a strange sense that Western thought and philosophy can seem as if it exists in a vacuum: trying to work out the meaning of human life and our place in the cosmos, as if as a species, we’d somehow suddenly materialised on the surface of planet earth, the sole intelligent life form. In contrast, for the vast majority of the human race’s existence over hundreds of thousands of years, no peoples anywhere thought they were apart or separate from the life giving world in which they were inextricably immersed. Indigenous peoples didn’t even feel that they were ever alone in the woods, since trees were animate subjects in their own right and had personhood too.

Increasingly feeling unconnected to the real world, we distract ourselves with virtual substitutes, which promise meaningful connection, though all too often that promise can’t be fulfilled.  Jerry Mander (yes, that was his real name – he sadly passed away this spring), a tireless campaigner and deep ecologist for many decades, made this point more powerfully than I ever could in his, In the Absence of the Sacred:

“Living constantly inside an environment of our own invention, reacting solely to things we ourselves have created, we are essentially living inside our own minds. Where evolution was once an interactive process between human beings and a natural, unmediated world, evolution is now an interaction between human beings and our own artefacts. We are essentially coevolving with ourselves in a weird kind of intraspecies incest. At each stage of the cycle the changes come faster and are more profound. The web of interactions among the machines becomes more complex and more invisible, while the total effect is more powerful and pervasive. We become ever more enclosed and ever less aware of the fact. Our environment is so much a product of our invention that it becomes a single worldwide machine. We live inside it, and are a piece of it.”

It’s little wonder there is so much sense of alienation, of pointlessness, of trying to fill our heart shaped void with consumption. This is our modern context for the prevalence of soul loss. Shamanism was most of humanity’s solution to soul loss with a wide range of remedies for soul retrieval. In our modern societies, the power and efficacy of ‘green therapy’ is now recognised and commonly dispensed by western medicine: forest bathing, walks in nature and in green environments, gardening, have all been shown to improve mental health and depression. Even having a print depicting trees and greenery on the wall of a hospital bed has been shown to speed up healing. The effects are often better than drug therapy, so clearly something fundamental is involved here. Yet the deeper implications of what lies beneath this, seem hardly explored. 

Perhaps this is not surprising in a rigidly secular western society which finds it anathema to contemplate anything remotely touching on any notions of soul, spirit or the sacred. Anthropologist and writer David Abram has long promoted the need for us to include the wider more-than- human world in which human beings have co-evolved over untold millenia, as a way to reclaim our fuller humanity.

“Whenever we become intensely engaged by other styles and shapes of life, when we drop away our concern for ourselves and begin to celebrate and praise other beings and elements that exceed our exclusively human concerns, then—paradoxically—we most realise and epitomise our humanity.”

David Abram

Paul Kingsnorth, co-founder of Dark Mountain, suggests that the more simply we can live and the closer to nature we can live, the more we can resist what he calls the ”machine narrative”. As he sees it, environmentalism is really about connection and people’s relationship to place, to nature and each other. 

The direction is clear for whoever feels moved to reconnect with a greater kinship and place-based belonging, and to reclaim a fuller sense of soul. I’m not saying that merely taking a regular stroll in the local park is sufficient, but as with anything, the first step leads to the next step. And deep within us, we can connect with an innate gravitational pull towards home.

“The cure for soul loss is in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning’s sunlight, and the human walking in a world infused with intelligence and spirit”

Linda Hogan, Native American writer and academic, from The Radiant Life of Animals