Soul Retrieval and Returning to Yourself – When the Soul Calls, Will You Answer?

Soul retrieval is the process of reconnecting with the parts of yourself that feel lost, scattered or disconnected through trauma, survival, grief and difficult life experiences. In this episode of Spiritual Awakening with Shaz, I sit down with spiritual healer, shamanic practitioner, psychic medium and Akashic Records reader Joy Danielle Cabodi for a powerful conversation about healing, intuition, sobriety, soul retrieval, boundaries and what it really means to return to yourself.

Joy’s story begins long before she ever identified herself as a healer. As a child, she was deeply empathic and sensitive, but she also grew up in a chaotic and dysfunctional home. That sensitivity became part of the way she learned to survive because she was constantly reading people, scanning her surroundings and adapting to the emotional environment around her. For many people, empathy begins in a similar way. What eventually becomes recognised as intuition or energetic awareness may initially develop through the need to understand whether a situation feels safe.

From Survival to Sobriety

As Joy moved into adolescence and early adulthood, she began drinking and engaging in high-risk behaviour as a way of escaping what she was carrying emotionally. Eventually, she experienced homelessness for a period of time before becoming sober at 22. She describes that period as a major wake-up call and part of her dark night of the soul, because even while she was homeless she was experiencing spiritual phenomena and beginning to sense that something greater was trying to keep her alive.

There was a growing awareness that she had a reason for being here and that her life was not meant to end on the path she was travelling. Sobriety became the first significant step in returning to herself, but as Joy explains during our conversation, getting sober did not suddenly remove everything that had happened before. Once the drinking was gone, she still had to face the trauma underneath it and begin the much deeper work of understanding who she was without the behaviours she had once used to survive.

Recognising Psychic Ability

Joy’s understanding of her psychic gifts became clearer in her mid-twenties after she experienced a powerful spiritual dream that drew her back to one of her childhood homes. She invited a friend to go with her, and during that visit they experienced a range of spiritual phenomena. The difference this time was that her friend came from a psychic family and already had language for what was happening.

That experience helped Joy understand that many of the things she had been experiencing were connected to psychic ability rather than something she simply had to fear or dismiss. Her abilities began developing quickly from that point, and she started having spiritual experiences almost daily. At the same time, she was in therapy and spoke about some of what she was experiencing, which led to concern that those experiences may be interpreted through the lens of mental illness. That frightened her, but rather than shutting down completely, she continued exploring her spiritual awareness and learning how to work with it.

This part of our conversation stood out to me because spiritual awakening can be confusing when you do not have anyone around you who understands what you are experiencing. Sometimes the first real shift happens when somebody simply gives you language for what you have already been sensing.

Shamanic Healing and the Akashic Records

Around 26 years ago, Joy began attending Native American ceremonies, medicine circles and spiritual teachings. She felt deeply connected to that work, and later a teacher came into her life who invited her into shamanic training. During that process, Joy discovered that she could access what she describes as the Akashic Realm.

One of the things she has learned through years of Akashic work is how little judgement exists in that space. Joy describes the guides and the Akashic Realm as not judging people for where they are in their journey or the experiences they have moved through. For her, that has become an important lesson in how we can view ourselves as well. Rather than constantly asking what is wrong with us, we can begin becoming curious about what sits underneath a behaviour, pattern or emotional response.

Joy shares one experience involving a client who came to her concerned about alcoholism. During the Akashic work, the pattern appeared to connect with a past-life experience, and they worked within that space. More than a year later, the client returned to tell Joy that significant changes had occurred throughout both sides of her family. Family members who had struggled with alcohol stopped drinking, her daughter stopped drinking, and her daughter chose to have a sober wedding.

For Joy, it became an example of how healing one person can sometimes appear to create movement throughout a much larger family system. It also led us into a deeper conversation about generational patterns and what can happen when one person decides they are no longer willing to continue carrying the same cycle forward.

What Soul Retrieval Really Means

Soul retrieval became one of the most significant themes in our conversation because both Joy and I have experienced it personally. Joy explains that after trauma, parts of us can feel as though they have been left behind. Those pieces may hold our voice, our joy, our memories, our confidence or simply a sense of who we were before certain experiences changed the way we moved through the world.

Her approach is about inviting those parts of yourself back rather than forcing them. Through meditation, self-love practices and conscious awareness, you can begin noticing where your energy has gone and where you may have disconnected from yourself in order to cope. Over time, you can start calling that energy home and rebuilding a deeper sense of wholeness.

This resonated strongly with me because soul retrieval was one of my own earliest and most transformational healing experiences. I had reached a point where I felt as though pieces of myself had become scattered through trauma, life experience and survival. Calling those parts back became less about fixing something broken and more about remembering who I had always been underneath everything I had lived through.

That is one of the reasons I often say that you are not broken. Sometimes the deeper work is remembering who you are beneath the fear, conditioning and survival mechanisms that taught you to disconnect from yourself.

Calling Your Energy Back

Joy and I also talk about the way we give our energy away, often without realising we are doing it. Trauma, difficult relationships, conflict, fear and people-pleasing can all pull our attention outside ourselves. Over time, that can leave us feeling depleted, overwhelmed or disconnected from our own internal guidance.

Joy believes awareness is the first step because you cannot call your energy back if you do not recognise where it is going. Once you begin noticing the situations, relationships or patterns where you repeatedly abandon yourself, you can start making more conscious choices about how you respond.

For me, that awareness forms part of the awakening process. Many people already know on some level when something feels wrong, but they have learned to override the feeling or dismiss it. The transformation happens when that unconscious knowing becomes conscious and you decide to do something differently with the information.

Intuition as an Inner Navigation System

When we reconnect with ourselves, our relationship with intuition also changes. Joy speaks about intuition as a way of navigating life from within rather than allowing every external influence to tell us what to do, who to be or which direction to take.

I often describe intuition as our inner GPS. It guides, redirects and gives us information, but we still have the free will to ignore it. Sometimes it tells us to turn right and we decide to go left anyway, only to find ourselves being rerouted later.

The more we trust that internal guidance, the more our choices begin reflecting who we actually are. Relationships can change because we become more aware of what feels aligned and what does not. Boundaries become clearer because we stop relying entirely on somebody else to decide what is acceptable. We begin making decisions from our authentic self rather than constantly responding to the expectations around us.

Boundaries, Power and the Goddess Within

The conversation naturally moved into boundaries and what Joy calls the goddess within. She describes the goddess as an expression of the divine feminine that exists both within us and around us. It includes nurturing, creativity, intuition and inner wisdom, but she also believes it includes the power to destroy what no longer belongs.

That destructive energy is not something she sees as negative. Nature constantly shows us that creation and destruction belong together. Fire can move through a landscape and clear what is dead, while new growth begins emerging soon afterwards. The destruction creates space for something else to grow.

Our lives often work the same way. Sometimes an identity, relationship, belief or behaviour has to fall away before we can move into something more authentic. The breakdown can feel frightening while we are inside it, but that does not automatically mean it is the end of the story.

Joy believes one of the ways women begin reclaiming that power is by recognising where they are feeding situations that continually leave them feeling disempowered. Instead of pouring more energy into those spaces, they can begin withdrawing that attention and returning it to themselves.

Soul Retrieval and Returning to Yourself After Trauma

When I asked Joy what she personally had to reclaim first, she came back to sobriety because the drinking had been masking everything underneath it. Once she became sober, she could no longer avoid the trauma she had been carrying, so the next part of her journey involved actually doing the work to heal.

Soul retrieval became part of that process because she had to call back the parts of herself she felt had been lost. She describes it as returning to herself and becoming whole again, while also being very clear that this was not something that happened quickly.

That distinction matters because we can talk about healing in a few neat sentences after we have lived through it, but the lived experience rarely feels neat while it is happening. Joy acknowledges that there were years of work underneath the story she can now summarise in a few minutes.

I could relate deeply to that. My own trauma did not show itself through alcohol, but it showed up through anger and frustration. I normalised so much of what had happened because that was how my nervous system kept functioning. It was only when the anger started breaking down that I could see the trauma underneath it.

Sometimes survival requires us to bury parts of what happened until we are strong enough to look at them differently. Healing then becomes the process of taking those pieces out, understanding what they created in us, keeping the wisdom and leaving behind what we no longer need to carry.

Your Greatest Hardship Can Become Your Training Ground

Near the end of the episode, I ask Joy what she would say to the younger version of herself from the perspective she has today. Her answer became one of the strongest moments of the conversation.

She would remind herself that her soul chose this journey and that she already had the skills within her to move through what she was going to experience. She also believes that some of our greatest hardships eventually become our greatest training ground because they teach us about ourselves, our gifts and the people we may later be able to help.

That does not mean hardship is easy or that we need to romanticise trauma. It means that once we have enough distance from an experience, we may be able to see something within it that was impossible to recognise while we were still surviving it.

Joy now understands people differently because she has lived through addiction, homelessness, trauma, healing and the long process of rebuilding herself. Those experiences gave her a depth she can bring into her work with others who may be walking through similar territory.

That is one of the reasons lived experience can be so powerful in healing work. None of us have lived every possible story, but when somebody has genuinely walked through something close to what you are facing, there can be an immediate understanding that does not need to be manufactured.

Breaking Generational Patterns

Another major theme in this episode is the possibility of becoming the person who breaks a cycle. Joy and I both talk about the people who seem to step forward within a family system and decide that certain patterns will not continue in the same way.

That work can be confronting because somebody has to become willing to look directly at what everyone else may have learned to normalise. Whether the pattern involves addiction, trauma, violence, emotional disconnection or another form of pain, change begins when somebody becomes conscious enough to say that the pattern stops with them.

Sometimes the work we do for ourselves also changes what becomes possible for the people around us. Joy’s story about her client and the changes that appeared across multiple generations became a powerful example of that idea.

Letting Grief and Joy Coexist

Our conversation became unexpectedly personal when grief began rising physically in my body. My aunt had recently passed away, and as Joy and I spoke about death, rebirth, transformation and returning to ourselves, I could feel the emotion sitting in my throat.

Rather than trying to pretend it was not happening, I allowed myself to recognise what my body was showing me. That moment became another reminder that healing does not require us to choose between grief and joy.

You can be deeply sad and still be excited about what you are creating. You can laugh while carrying grief and cry while feeling grateful. Those emotions do not cancel each other out because real life does not happen in neat emotional compartments.

For me, transformation is about allowing yourself to feel what is genuinely there instead of immediately trying to bypass it. Sometimes the emotion needs to move through the body before the next layer of understanding becomes available.

Self-Love and Coming Home

Joy and I eventually return to self-love because it sits underneath so much of this work. She describes self-love as one of the most important journeys we can take because when we begin remembering that we are loved and worthy of love, we also become more able to receive it from others.

We can pour enormous amounts of love into another person, but if they do not feel capable of receiving it, that love may never truly land. The same applies to us. If we constantly expect external people to fill something we refuse to acknowledge within ourselves, we will continue feeling as though something is missing.

Returning to yourself means learning to recognise your own value, honouring your boundaries, listening to your intuition and becoming aware of where you continually abandon your own needs in order to keep everybody else comfortable.

In that sense, soul retrieval becomes much bigger than a single healing modality. It becomes a way of recognising what parts of yourself you have left behind and deciding whether you are ready to bring them home.

When the Soul Calls

Towards the end of the episode, I asked Joy what she would say to somebody who can feel something beginning to awaken inside them but does not yet understand what is happening.

Her advice is to try not to be afraid and to give yourself time. She encourages people to allow their experiences to develop slowly rather than rushing to put a label around everything immediately. Curiosity can be more useful than trying to force yourself into a spiritual identity before you truly understand what you are experiencing.

She also recommends finding someone who has walked a similar path, whether that is through mentorship, classes or another form of support. Having somebody beside you who understands the territory can make the journey feel far less isolating.

Ultimately, Joy’s story brings us back to a simple idea. Healing is not about becoming somebody completely different. It is about recognising what you have survived, understanding what you have learned and allowing the parts of yourself that became hidden along the way to return.

That may mean reclaiming your energy, your intuition, your voice, your boundaries, your gifts or simply your sense of who you are.

The soul retrieval journey is personal, and it does not need to look the same for everybody. What matters is whether you are willing to hear yourself when that deeper part of you begins asking for something more.

As Joy so beautifully leaves us at the end of our conversation:

“When the soul calls, will you answer?”

Connect with Joy Danielle Cabodi About Your Soul Retrieval

If you would like to explore more of Joy’s work, learn about her spiritual and shamanic practices or follow what she is creating next, you can connect with her through Starrlite Weaver and her personal channels.

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YouTube: Watch Joy Danielle on YouTube

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