Power Retrieval Reclaiming What Was Taken or Given Away
In shamanic traditions, power loss is recognised as just as real and damaging as soul loss. While soul retrieval focuses on the parts of the self that leave during overwhelming experiences, power retrieval addresses a slightly different aspect: the vitality, authority and life force that was either taken or given away over time.
Power loss manifests in various ways. It occurs in relationships where one person gradually surrenders their sense of self to maintain peace, love or survival. It also happens in environments like workplaces, families and institutions where a person is systematically diminished, controlled or told their instincts are unreliable. Furthermore, chronic self-betrayal, the accumulated weight of overrode instincts for others’ agendas, contributes to power loss.
Experiencing significant power loss often leads to a distinct feeling of deflation. It’s as if the volume of one’s life has been turned down. While functioning, managing and holding everything together, there’s an absence at the centre – a missing quality of presence, vitality and self-trust that may be forgotten.
Other signs include chronic difficulty making decisions, particularly about personal needs. There’s a deep-seated sense of not being allowed to take up space. Prioritisation often shifts to everyone else’s comfort over one’s own. Relationships with desires feel either frightening or foreign. Living a life that doesn’t quite fit without a clear reason is also common.
Sometimes power is deliberately taken. It’s taken by those who need control, systems that benefit from compliance and relationships built on domination and submission.
More often, power is given away incrementally through small, necessary surrenders. A child learns that being too much leads to rejection, an adult discovers that making themselves smaller makes them safer and a person gradually lets someone else’s version of reality replace their own.
None of this makes a person weak; it makes them human. The nervous system learns what it needs to survive its environment. Power retrieval involves learning that the old environment is gone and that it’s finally genuinely safe to return to oneself.
In Sacred Alchemy sessions, power retrieval operates on multiple levels simultaneously. We work somatically with the body, which holds the memory of disempowerment in its posture, breath and relationship to space. We also work symbolically using shamanic and hypnotic processes to meet the lost power and invite it back home. Finally, we work relationally because the return of power impacts how a person relates to others and they need support navigating this.
What returns isn’t aggression or domination; it’s sovereignty. It’s the gentle grounded sense of occupying your own life on your own terms. It’s knowing what you need and being willing to say so. It’s trusting your own knowing again.
If something in this resonates, I’d be delighted to hear your story.
That’s always where we begin.
Alexia Elliott is a hypnotherapist shamanic practitioner and psychospiritual therapist based in Leicester, UK. With over 30 years of experience in psychiatry, forensic mental health and Sacred Alchemy practice, she offers sessions in person in Leicestershire and online worldwide.