“Your face is the icon of your life.  In the human face, a life looks out at the world and also looks in on itself.  It is frightening to behold a face in which bitterness and resentment have lodged.  When a person’s life has been bleak, much of its negativity can remain unhealed.  Since the negativity is left untransfigured, the bleakness lodges in the face.  The face instead of being a warm presence, has hardened to become a mask.  One the oldest words for the person is the Greek word “prosopon” it originally meant the mask actors wore in Greek chorus.  When bitterness, anger or resentment are left untransfigured, the face becomes a mask.  Yet one also encounters the opposite, namely, the beautiful presence of an old face deeply lined and inscribed by time and experience that has retained a lovely innocence.  Even though life may have moved wearily and painfully through such a person, the have still managed to not let it corrode their soul.  In such a face a lovely luminosity shines out into the world.

The face always reveals who you are, and what life has done to you.  Yet it is difficult for you to see the shape of your own life; your life is too near to you.  Others can decipher much of your mystery from your face.  Portrait artists admit that it is exceptionally difficult to render the human face.

Traditionally, the eyes are said to be the windows of the soul.  The mouth is also difficult to render in the individual portrait.  In some strange way the mouth seems to betray the contour of the life; a tight mouth often suggests meanness of spirit.  There is a strange symmetry in the way soul write the story of its life in the contours of the face.”

When working with clients in my Shamanic Healing practice I use my own healing gift of face and body reading to help clients with Soul Retrieval.  The work of re-membering ourselves into wholeness is Soul Retrieval, part of the ancient Celtic ways of re-uniting our full spirit with the face its stands behind.  Healing from within returns us to our original, soul-shining face.  Rev. Nadiya Nottingham