I'm not Bruce but I wanted to let you know that Bruce has been in Europe the past four weeks and won't be returning until May 2nd.  So he probably won't see and be able to respond to your post until next week.

I learned how to do retrievals by coming to Bruce's website, reading the articles, buying and reading his books and then buying the workshop tapes he offered (Friday Harbor tapes).  Although I had an extensive background in meditation when I started doing retrievals, I'd had a few OBE's but, except for one, they were all spontaneous. 

You don't need to have gone OBE to do retrievals.  Like myself many people have used Bruce's methods to do retrievals with little or no experience with OBEs.  And I know of at least one person who is pretty adept at OBE's but who actually prefers Bruce's methods for exploration and retrievals.

Anyway, good luck with your search.  If you check out the articles on this site you'll get a better idea of how Bruce approaches things.  If you're interested in investigating OBEs, I'd recommend doing google searchs for Robert Bruce, William Buhlman and Robert Peterson, all masters at OBE's. 

I wanted to answer your question so that you'd know that OBE experience wasn't necessary to get started with retrievals.  But there's no reason you can't use both methods.  In fact, you might want to experiment with trying both.  Skill with OBE's is a little harder to develop, but then again you could be a natural and find them relatively easy.

Good luck.

Love and light,

Jeff Williams