How are Power-loss, soul loss and loss of personal power different?

Is Power-loss the same as losing personal power? #

No. They are easily confused, which is why Power-loss is written with a capital P: it is not the same thing as the loss of personal power.¹ The ‘power’ in Power-loss is life-force: “By ‘power’, here, what shamans mean is essentially ‘life-force’.”² They are different wounds.

What is Power-loss? #

Disconnection from the living world. “Power-loss occurs when we become disconnected from nature, from the interconnected web of life and our place in it. This disconnection weakens us.”³ It is healed by reconnecting, above all through the Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer. See What is Power-loss?

What is loss of personal power? #

Losing our ability to stand in our own authority. Healthy personal power is power-from-withinPower-from-within. Starhawk’s term for the healthy mode of power, as against power-over. Egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands held power this way; practising shamanism from power-over is ‘just more Fall’. More about this, a phrase from the writer Starhawk. People who have it do not unhealthily hand their power over to anyone else, nor do they want power over anyone else; they operate from a place of respectful relationship. “Characteristic of power-from-within is that, when someone has it, they have no wish to have power over others, nor are they willing to hand their power to others.”⁴

So loss of personal power shows up as weak boundaries, difficulty being assertive, and giving our authority away. One of the qualities of a true Adult is being “willing to step into and own their personal power and authority. Does not unhealthily hand their power over to others.”⁵

How do boundaries and the fire element fit in? #

Personal power is closely tied to boundaries and to fire. As adults, we mostly create our own boundaries, and we are in charge of them: the zip handle should always be on the inside. In the language of the five elements, the fire element in us is our power, the source of our ability to hold our healthy boundaries, to assert ourselves when needed, and to speak the truth as we see it.

In ‘depression’, it is the fire element that is being de-pressed. See What do earth, water, fire, air and ether represent?

How is soul loss different from both? #

Soul loss is the loss of a part of ourselves. Power-loss and soul loss share most of their symptoms, but “soul-loss is characterised by some (or even all) of the above, plus having a sense that part of you is missing somehow. Whereas power-loss is characterised by some or all of the above symptoms, plus a disconnection from the natural world.”⁶ See What is soul loss?

Soul loss can also overlap with loss of personal power. The commonest modern cause of soul loss is sending parts of ourselves away to fit in, and amongst the things we send away are “confidence, assertiveness” and “anger”.⁷ So a lack of assertiveness can go with a part that has been lost.

How is each one healed? #

Differently, and that is why telling them apart matters. Power-loss is healed by reconnecting with the living world: “Anything that helps us to reconnect helps in healing power-loss. First and foremost in this is doing a Power Animal retrieval”.⁸ Soul loss is healed by soul retrieval: “healing soul-loss that has already occurred tends to be marked by a series of events. These events are ‘soul-retrievals’.”⁹

Personal power is reclaimed in our everyday human lives. As adults, we mostly create our own boundaries, and we are in charge of them. Healing Power-loss and loss of personal power is not an event; it is a process.

Is Power-loss a personal issue or a cultural issue? #

Both. It is the normal state of our whole culture, and each of us carries it. “As a society as a whole, when we disconnected ourselves from the natural world and Mother Earth, we suffered massive, collective power-loss.”¹⁰ “We are suffering from severe and chronic power-loss, at a scale unprecedented in human history.”¹¹ Yet healing it is personal: it is about how you live your life, day in, day out, for the rest of your life. It is both at once.

Is loss of personal power cultural too? #

Yes. Our culture is built on power-over: modern culture is largely built on a hierarchical relationship with power, in contrast to hunter-gatherer cultures characterised by power-from-within. “At the time of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, we handed our power over to psychopaths, and put them in charge of things.”¹² Taking our power back is personal and collective work.