The Reality of Return Shock and ‘Soul Lag’

2 September 2024 | BY ANDJELKA JANKOVIC | Life

My new party trick is crying every time I talk about Ireland.

Most people seem to do life gracefully.

Not me.

I was gifted the intensity gene.

While my body is back in Australia, my heart — and more to the point, my soul — feels like it is still in the hills of West Cork and the mountains of Kerry, picking a blackberry straight from the bramble.

I travelled and lived in Ireland for 10 months, returning to Fremantle earlier this year.

To say I was not ready to leave Ireland is the understatement of my life.

I did not want to go.

Not just a river in Egypt, I was living in denial.

I moved my first ticket home in November 2023 to February 2024 when I decided that I wanted to experience an Irish winter and finally get to writing the first draft of my book (that I certainly had not written a single word of in the first six months of travel as I was quite literally living the book).

I’d also fallen deeply in love with Ireland, even before I’d arrived — through the words of John O’Donohue, David Whyte, music, and films.

I was on a pilgrimage to honour the soul of John O’Donohue — a remarkable man and as I discovered later, a spirit guide.

This piece is not about Ireland though.

I will be starting a Substack soon that will detail – in great length and no anecdotes spared – the magic of Ireland and everything that happened to me. It was extraordinary.

If these things had happened to anyone else, I’m not sure I would have believed them.

This piece is about leaving Ireland.

On the morning of my departure, I was in such a state of anticipated heartbreak and disbelief, that I thought, there is no way I can possibly be going.

I was staying at my Irish anam cara Geraldine’s house in Dublin – having our usual morning chats when my taxi arrived. Halfway through my breakfast, I hadn’t even finished packing. This is a shocker for a Virgo.

I was dilly-dallying in the bathroom when Geraldine said, “You have to go or you will miss your flight.”

Missing my flight was actually my full intention.

I was anticipating that at any moment, there would be an announcement that all global planes were grounded and that we’d all have to stay put.

No such news came.

So I exited her pink door to the street, with the boot popped on the taxi, and all my belongings in the back.

At the airport, I checked in and was fully awaiting all the departure screens to turn to CANCELLED like they do in 90s movies.

I was simply waiting for my chance to go back to my Irish life. I was fairly confident it would only be a matter of minutes.

It wasn’t until I was wandering around the whiskey section, buying a special gift for my stepdad, that it hit me. I was leaving. HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

Then I started bawling – while a kind man was explaining the difference between copper barrels and muscatel-aged whiskey. I think he thought I was finding the choice point emotional. He had no idea what torrent of pain I was sitting on. As I boarded and handed over my ticket to cross the threshold into the plane, I was genuinely still thinking, here it comes, it will all make sense when we all have to get out in a second.

I cannot leave and I cannot let it go; the pilot says we are about to fly.

The plane took off.

And my soul was no longer with me.

Arriving back, I hugged my mum and then was hit with a mammoth wall of heat, a full 43 degrees Celsius of it.

My feet were in Western Australia, I couldn’t tell you where the rest of me was.

The hottest it has been in Ireland was 27 degrees, and in summer there was almost daily rain, which suits me fine and no one seems to believe me on this.

I can tell you what 43 degrees feels like – the end of times. A dry, unforgiving to your core heat. The flatness shook me too. I call it, ‘Southern Hemisphere displacement’ or vice versa when you feel like you belong in the opposite hemisphere.

I got back to my house, so excited to see my beautiful kitty CousCous, and then left alone, the unravelling began.

A deep volcanic pain started to arise in me and it was saying, oh no — what have you done? 

I like to call this my ‘crying everywhere in Fremantle’ period.

I cried walking to the beach, at the beach, during tea, at the shops, at my favourite cafe, in my car, in the shower. Every path and corner. You name it, I’ve probably cried there.

Despair is the place that takes us in when we have nowhere else to go. — David Whyte

I was at the bottom of the world again and at an extremely low point in my life. It was agony.

There is a word for this: return shock.

I was enveloped in a sacred sadness that I can only describe as the most disorientated I’ve felt in a long time (and I had a double Saturn Return).

As I pointed out to my mum, I was born in the Northern Hemisphere (Serbia). All my ancestry from as far back as anyone knows was surrounded by rivers and mountains and trees. Back in the Southern Hemisphere, I felt like I didn’t belong here more than ever – which is a knowing I’ve had since I was six. But now this was amplified from a whisper to a stadium concert.

And I had no idea what to do about it.

One morning, I was at a cafe with friends after a group meditation on the beach. I was crying (you can sense a theme here) when my friend Libby asked how I was doing, and I said: “It feels like my soul didn’t come back with me.”

And then what she said next changed my life.

“Oh honey, that’s totally normal – you have soul lag. Souls don’t travel on planes. They go much slower.”

Soul what? I asked. Something resonated.

She went on to explain that just because I left Ireland doesn’t mean my soul came with me.

THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT IT FELT LIKE.

My soul was not with me. It was still in Ireland.

No wonder I felt so lost.

I’d never felt more understood in my life.

And now I had a name for it.

I needed to know more, so I’ve spent a lot of time sitting with the concept and trying to understand it. Now I’m able to share what this was all about.

What is return shock?

I don’t want to exaggerate — but I felt like I was going to die.

Return shock is the utter heartbreak of leaving a place that you love.

The ‘shock’ comes from returning ‘home’ and it feeling nothing like that word implies.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. — Rainer Maria Rilke 

It is confusion, bewilderment, and panic. Life feels boring, flat, and unhopeful.

You can’t help but feel that you’ve majorly (and I mean METEORICALLY) messed up by returning home, and now you have to live with it.

Welcome to the human experience of being alive and an animal of longing.

I’ve hit rock bottom so many times, my name must be on a plaque down there.

I seldom take the easy path in life (something I am working on) and here I was DRUDGING THROUGH THE THICKEST OF MUD. I know that Thích Nhất Hạnh said ‘No mud, no lotus’ and I’ve observed actual lotuses growing from mud when I was at a silent retreat in Ubud, but this was quite literally a whole new metaphor. It felt like there was mud in my lungs. And I am aware why: lungs are grief.

The lowest point of the low was one Saturday night. In extreme balmy heat, I took myself to a local hot dog joint to get my favourite bowl of shoestring fries. As I sat eating and reading, the tears wouldn’t stop so I just ate my fries with the extra salt. At the end, I thought ‘well I tried’ and then out of the corner of my eye, I spotted my dear friend Emily who I hadn’t seen in many years. I was so excited, and then a split second later I thought, oh gosh she can’t see me like this. I was frightful. She saw me anyway and came over. It took her a second to get a snapshot of this whole ‘girl crying alone into a bowl of fries’ situation and just gave me the biggest hug. I said a few words. She knew this feeling. I didn’t have to explain myself which was a relief because the teenagers working were probably like, wow people in their thirties are INTENSE.

I was in fully-fledged return shock and it is normal.

Arriving home after a big trip is very strange. You can’t believe it happened. You can’t believe you’re home. Are you in a dream?

You need to get grounded ASAP or you’ll fly away or fall into disarray.

Return shock also goes by reverse culture shock and post-travel depression.

I am not the first person to experience this, and this is not my first rodeo. I experienced this fiercely when I returned from a university exchange in Canada at the ripe age of twenty.

I walked the streets in a daze. Home felt foreign and I, a foreigner. It is something like shock.

This time felt like that feeling times a thousand.

I was convinced that this world was a simulation, and the worlds I was dreaming of at night were the real ones. I kind of still am.

But because I knew now that I had ‘soul lag’ and that souls don’t travel on planes, I could do something about it.

Around this time I learned of the term ‘soul retrieval’ from the Irish shamanic practitioner Aldo Jordan whom I spent time with in Mayo honoring the Wheel of the Year at fire ceremonies (he also taught me about the medicine of hawthorn). In short, when our soul leaves our body (due to trauma, flight or fight response, disassociation, a huge psychological pain) we experience soul loss and we need to retrieve our soul back, otherwise, the loss will be felt forever. Interestingly, this is where the term “a lost soul” might come from.

So, how was I going to get my soul back from Ireland?

Around this time I realised that this made little sense to anyone around me. I said it once to a massage therapist, and she said: “If your soul wasn’t with you, you’d be dead.” Fair point, but my experience tells me otherwise.

The depression that comes with not having your entire soul with you – or only fragments of it – is also something to note. It’s a melancholy in your bones that you keep running into forgetting, like a housemate who’s just moved in.

I have had bouts of depression; but unlike anything like this.

I call it ‘soul depression’ — because that’s what it is.

This is what it feels like…

• Lost
• Listless
• Unmoored
• Deep grief
• Confusion
• Gut-wrenching discomfort
• No energy, very tired, exhaustion
• Lack of enthusiasm for life
• Melancholy
• Sadness
• Not inspired or motivated
• Just trying to make it through the day
• Inability to express what happened on your travels
• Feeling out of place
• You want to isolate yourself
• You want to sleep for a year and then wake up in the country that you miss the most

Basically, sitting with a lot of Big Feelings™ and trying to be okay. It is very hard and very heavy.

The sorrow has not left me.

In my first few weeks back, someone said I sounded a tiny bit Irish, “You brought some back with you”. I said: That’s the nicest thing you could say to me right now.

The missing is physical.

I play an Irish song or hear an Irish accent or a memory visits me, and the deepest places within me ache.

I’m not clinging to the past, I’m hanging into it for dear life.

Walking around in waking life but living in a dream world.

The dominant culture trivializes imagination and encourages people to avoid the unknown. Yet darkness is part of the seasons and cycles of life. It helps us grow and strengthens our visionary capacity. What if we dared to step into the dark, ask important questions, and swim in our deep imagination? We could acknowledge what’s deeply not working and seek anew what is meaningful and alive. — Rebecca Wilder

I am also very aware you can’t stay in this state forever. It’s not helpful and also it’s stagnant – something I really don’t enjoy being.

So I had to acknowledge what was not working.

My house.

As much as it pained my ego and I had the nicest landlords — it was close to a busy road, too noisy, and after four years, my solitude had become a prison.

I moved into a new place with my beautiful anam cara Tiff and now there’s only bird call (P.S. I make this sound easy but there was much mental anguish with changing for another time).

Secondly, I had to embrace my Projectorness and I couldn’t go back into the full-time paradigm.

I started working as a consultant, hosted my first deep rest retreat with Tiff, and served a tea ceremony with live music – a longtime wish of mine.

Nothing else major happened or changed — but a lot has been simmering away.

Souls are dying at a rapid rate. That is what I am observing.

Souls are starved.

I am looking at every possible way I can keep mine alive.

I didn’t as much ‘retrieve’ my soul, as I think a deep part of me will always be tied to Ireland — it was more making a quiet peace with the fact I am in the middle place between what was and what will be.

You can do it like it’s a great weight on you, or you can do it like it’s part of the dance. — Ram Dass

My tea practice has kept me alive.

And friends and small joys (winter roses) and a stray cat that we’ve now adopted called ‘Moonie’.

All the voice messages from my Irish friends.

And every musician I’ll never get to thank in person but very much sing the language of my soul (The Foggy Dew on repeat and my Soul Lag playlist).

I know it’s a country and there are many but if you’ve had a full-body love for a place, you will know what I am talking about.

It’s a very rare feeling when you are in Ireland. The love for Ireland inside Ireland is immense. And a place that quickly gets under your skin and into your heart.

I have been irrevocably changed.

What is right for one soul may not be right for another. It may mean you have to stand on your own and do something strange in the eyes of others. But do not be daunted. Do whatever it is because you know within it is right for you. — Eileen Caddy

A realisation I’ve had is that: no one ever wants to leave Ireland.

Many people had to leave, in fact, the Irish people claim to have invented emigration — as millions had to move abroad for economic opportunities and to find a suitable marriageable partner outside rural options. Of course, there was the devastation of the Great Hunger, the English occupation, and starvation that drove many to get on ships they did not want to be on to travel across torrent seas to a better future.

But no one actually – at their very core – wants to leave their homeland. And especially if that place is Ireland.

I will be exploring this in great depth on my Substack.

I am currently sitting with many questions around home and Place (as one of the three Ps in the book I am writing) in all its many forms.

Like, how I belong to Ireland when I am not Irish or have any blood ancestry?

All I know is that the moment I saw the green fields outside my tiny window as we descended into Dublin, I heard John’s voice in the landscape and he said: Welcome home.

My soul knew something I was only about to discover.

I belonged here and all the longing finally made sense.

My heart burst open and innumerable flowers flourished from inside of me.

You can see why I was discombobulated and a mess of emotions on my return.

I had come ‘home’ from travel, and it doesn’t feel like home anymore.

Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about. — Haruki Murakami

Nothing feels like it will help; there is no remedy for this — what depression feels like.

‘Soul lag’ is an interesting phenomenon, and perhaps a recent one.

Souls need preparation to travel.

We — as in humans — for all of existence except the last few hundred or so years had to walk everywhere. Read that twice. Rebecca Solnit writes that ‘Walking is how the body measures itself against the Earth.” Our souls travelled with us because they could keep up with the pace. She goes on to say, “I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought.”

As Nick Hunt shares, there is an old idea that “The soul travels at the speed of walking.” He brilliantly explains what it’s like for your soul to travel on an airplane after he walked for seven months from the Hook of Holland to the shore of the Bosporus in Turkey. He writes, “As the plane touched down in London, I had the sense that somehow, something had gone extremely wrong.” 

Now with planes, we can travel from the top of one hemisphere to the bottom of the other and on the same day. And the fact that we can cross a city in 30 minutes with a car which would normally take a day of walking is kind of inconceivable from a soul’s point of view if you start to really think about it (If you don’t find this marvellously fascinating, I’d sincerely like to know what you’re reading).

I was preparing to ‘go’ to Ireland long before I actually did. Reading John O’Donohue, taking David Whyte courses, listening to Irish music, reading Irish stories (still not over Normal People), and watching Irish movies. My soul was more than ready to arrive to actual Ireland, hence why I instantly felt at home and like I belonged.

Now, the situation is reversed because up until the last second, I was not prepared to be in Australia and hence my soul was not either.

When they say “dagger in the heart” it is honestly what leaving Ireland felt like – I still look for the puncture wound.

As Miranda July writes, “A knife to the gut would have been gentler.”

I felt disassociated from my body. I would walk to a cafe, sit down after I’ve ordered, and think “Why the heck did I come here?”

The shape of this soul depression was new. It was thick and gluggy. It suffocated and terrified me, and also made me very bored of myself.

I was back in the longing after the longing had been met.

I love how the Irish say, there is a sadness over me, as opposed to ‘I am sad’. They don’t identify with it, as if it’s a passing weather front that will clear.

I remember many times thinking, I can’t do much more than breathing right now.

I went to the grocery store looking for Nairn’s oatcakes and I couldn’t find them. That’s all I wanted. Then I stood in front of the laundry liquids for ten minutes, got overwhelmed, and walked out without buying anything.

You let time pass. That’s the cure. You survive the days. You float like a rabid ghost through the weeks. You cry and wallow and lament and scratch your way back through the months. And then one day you find yourself alone on a bench in the sun and you close your eyes and lean your head back and you realize you’re okay. — Cheryl Strayed

The first time I felt okay I can’t remember, but it did happen. The way CousCous hugs her tail when she sleeps, laughing with friends. A hug from my favourite farmer at the markets.

And because the Universe has a terrific sense of humour — my beloved bike was stolen and found the next day on the opposite side of town parked under someone’s tree in their backyard. Through two gates and a set of stairs. My friend Dallas helped me retrieve it and we had a marvellous giggle.

And then it dawned on me, return shock is all about absence.

The absence of what you love, the people, landscapes, the feeling of magic, smells, the trees and plants, and who you are when you are there — that ‘you’ that you are so specifically there, and not anywhere else. It’s the acute loss of what you so loved.

Sometimes I miss Ireland so much I feel dizzy.

Death happens every moment. We live in a wondrous flow of birth and death, birth and death. The end of one experience is the beginning of the next experience, which quickly comes to its own end, leading to a new beginning. It’s like a river continuously flowing. — Pema Chödrön

I said to my friend Romany, “Maybe I should lock myself away for six months as I am depressing everyone.” I can’t hide anything. And the darkness was overwhelming. I was in the abyss. The no-name middle place, or the ‘numb cloud’ as my soul friend Tiff calls it. It was a lot of falling into pieces in front of other people. I felt I had lost all the magic. I waited for guidance and meditated for a vision.

A voice came to me one day and said, “Enjoy the loss.” I have no idea what it meant. But I was sure it would mean something one day.

The thing is you can’t call your soul back. I tried.

If you have been successful, please give me notes.

Your soul simply returns in its own time.

Perhaps it stopped off in the Galápagos for a mini retreat.

For me, there was no divine moment.

I can’t recall one anyway because perhaps it fully hasn’t happened, but parts of my soul are with me once again (Side question – is the soul comprised of pieces or a whole?)

The missing is something deep that I can only start to explain now.

The world’s most tender thing
Surpasses the world’s hardest thing
What has no existence enters where no space is
From this we know that in not acting we gain
A wordless teaching
An effortless increase
Few in the world realize this
— Tao Te Ching

Ireland is not my birthplace, but in many ways, it feels like ‘the birthplace of me’. I also felt this in the Canadian Rockies.

I’m still trying to make sense of a lot of it. It is wild.

I have travelled a lot and I know the feeling of being ready to go home. I have also arrived back from many a trip as well as living overseas in New Mexico and New York City, and had no major drama; an easeful re-entry. “It was grand,” as the Irish say.

The reason I am paying very specific attention to this return shock now is because this feels ancient.

This feeling of: leaving before you are ready to leave.

How many of us, through all of human time, have experienced this quality of grief in its many forms?

Recently in a dream, someone I hadn’t seen for 10 years came to me and said, “Congratulations for growing.” That feels apt. 

You will learn the hard way, but my god, you will learn.

This return shock has been a ride.

I wanted to hide from the word. To disappear. I didn’t want to be seen. I wanted to be back in Ireland.

A friend asked, Do you have to be here? Good question. And it may seem like the easiest solution to my problem — and that is, to go back. I plan to. But I need a clear invitation, an open door. I will see the hawthorn bloom, my soul friends, and those green hills once again.

As Niamh Regan sings in What to Do, no one’s going to tell you what’s coming next. 

So you must witness what is.

Make lots of perfectly brewed Barry’s.

And belong to yourself first.

Everything is hard. It depends on what hard thing you want to dedicate your life to. 

I want to know if you can disappoint others to be true to yourself: if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. — Oriah Mountain Dreamer

To be honest: a part of me will always be in grief that I am not in Ireland.

That is just how it feels now.

My taxi driver asked, so you’ve got Irish ancestry? I said, “No, I just love Ireland”.

It is something unexplainable.

There is no substitute for Ireland.

My soul told me.

And it’s the truest thing I know.

A journey can become a sacred thing.
Make sure, before you go,
To bless your going forth,
To free your heart of ballast
So that the compass of your soul
Might direct you towards
The territories of spirit
Where you will discover
More of your hidden life;
And the urgencies
That deserve to claim you.
— John O’Donohue