How To Find Your Animal Spirit
People ask me how they can find their animal spirit almost every day and up until now I have told them that the best way is to do that is with a guided meditation/journey. Now, I can direct them to the guided meditation that I created myself to find their animal spirit. This is something that I have had on my 'To-Do' list forever so I'm very excited to finally have it finished and to offer it for free.
What I am talking about here is finding the animal spirit that is your Animal Totem or Power Animal. So, what is the difference between your power animal or animal totem and the animal spirits that you may encounter when you, let say, do a reading with The Messenger Cards, other oracle cards, or have an amazing encounter with an animal in the physical world? The purpose of those animal spirits is to bring you their gifts and messages and guidance for a specific situation in your life and are not your power animal.
So, to find your power animal there are a couple of ways to go about this. One way is to find a shaman in a remote part of the world that can tell you what that is OR (and this might be a better option for most of you) you can do a guided meditation and your power animal will come to you.
Why would you want to know what your animal spirit is? I have mentioned this before but knowing what your animal spirit is can be a window to your authentic self and knowing how you tick. Your animal spirit will have many gifts and attributes that you will naturally embody or are on your way to embracing as natural aspects of yourself. Also knowing what some of these characteristics can bring to light parts of you that you reject about yourself, and in rejecting those aspects of yourself you could be unknowingly be causing yourself misery.
You may need to do the journey more than once and you even if you do find your animal spirit you can do the guided meditation again. You may find that other animals come to you at different times and this great. You will probably have one main power animal but you may have other power animals as well. For example, I have Raven as my animal spirit but there are also others that play a strong role in my life like Fox and hummingbird and I can see where they all fit in and how I exhibit certain qualities of these animals.
So, let's say that you did my guided meditation or other guided meditations and you didn't catch a glimpse of anything? Nothing. And you wonder if this process even works? Keep trying. It is important to remember that the more attached we are to the outcome and have expectations of how our Guides should behave the more we tend to push away what it is we desire. So the more sincere, open and unattached you are to what they do and how they should behave the easier and more successful this process will be for you. You can say a prayer of intention before you start the meditation asking for the process to be easy with lots of clarity and even joy. If you know me, you will know that I say a prayer of intention before I do lots of things - it really helps clear my energy and it brings better results.
What do you do when you start to connect to your Power Animal? You can start by studying it. Google or read the animal spirit find out as much as you can about it's gifts. Pay attention to the parts that resonate with you as they are aspects of you that you carry. Also pay attention to the parts that repulse or irritate you as those may be aspects of yourself that you reject and it could serve you very well to look closely at that. These may have turned into shadow aspects of yourself - these parts of you that you reject and then 'run the show' from your unconscious mind creating suffering in you life. After all. this whole process is an amazing journey of self discovery, right?
Next, you can create an alter for it or carry a memento, also known as a power object, that reminds you of the animal and the qualities that you wish to nurture in yourself. An alter can include a photograph of the animal, an animal spirit painting (hint-hint), other pieces of nature, or anything that brings your attention and good energy to yourself. The point is to feel empowered and self aware. Try to look deeply at all aspects of yourself and ask your power animal to assist you in seeing all aspects of yourself- the light and the shadow as it is all a part of you.
You can meditate with the animal or go on your own journeys with the animal, or if you need to ask a question of it for guidance then centre yourself in silence if possible, ask the question and then let it go as best as you can. Being in nature is a wonderful way to do this. The answers are always there for us - we just need to be quiet enough to hear them.
