The truth about your spiritual guide(animal totems)

It is just how humans perceive things. I don't believe there are any "wimpy" power animals. Then again, the animal which you are drawn to is not necessarily the animal that is with you. From what I understand, if you dream of a specific animal in you're dreams several times, it is more likely your power animal.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not a totem animal different from a power animal. The totem animal is more like the "clan" totem. The power animal is your personal protector.

 

Hey Runewolf1973----there can be some classification like that, but I think in today's world where most cultures have lost that connection, it doesn't make a big difference. In many tribes, the clan animal and power animal were the same.

Most important is that you have a connection to a spirit animal or bush spirit that protects and guides you, whatever you want to call it.

Naoki Ninja, when I first met my spirit animal, I had no idea what it would be. It was the wolf, but I didn't neccessarily feel so close to the wolf that i am aware of. Months leading up to my meeting with the wolf, I saw many foxes at night. At one point I felt like that might be my power animal---there are only a few wolves were I live, mostly replanted into the state.

After I met the wolf, there was a sense of---'I'll be darned.' But I didn't feel as close to the wolf until that event. Now the wolf is around me at all times. Also the turtle, or should say the Turtle Maiden has helped me, but that is another story...

 

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I'm not positive but I'd have to say that if experiances with animals can show you what your guides are mine would be hawk, rabbit, and horse. My hippie name is Little Hawk and my Native American name means Running Horse, tho I can't rembmer how to say it normally

 

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In my own experience and understanding, you must find your spirit animal through a spiritual experience such as a spirit journey, or a lucid dream, or through an elder or shaman (or shamaness) who finds or perceives it through his (or her) own spiritual perception. This is especially for those of us who have lost our archaic clans and spiritual earth connections.

I would doubt that an online quiz, no matter how serious, would determine anyones spirit animal-----But Prana, you do speak of a synchronicity----after you were told what animal it was, you then found a picture of it online----as if the animal was validating it for you. Perhaps you needed it, or needed to make contact so badly, that it used an online quiz to contact you. The spirit world does work in strange ways----or if you don't buy into that, our unconscious archetypes work in strange ways in influencing our modern linear-thinking-based objectivistic minds in this post-modern era.

Try to make contact with the otter, either through dreams or in other ways. When I look for it, I can always feel the presence of my wolf nearby----or I can call it, and I feel it's presence. In certain indigenous cultures, when you lose your spirit animal, you become ill. THough in other cultures it is your soul that wanders off making you ill.

 

This is something about which I know very little. However, I have had the experience of feeling very close to cats at times, and I've always thought cats have a kind of grace about them which to me says they're totally centered in the flow of things. Once I had an experience where it semed to me that I could see the divine in a cat I was caring for at the time.

 

I think you're right as regards how it would have to be, although this isn't something I know much about.

You know, the idea that you could connect with or find anything much spiritual through an online quiz seems like a typical example of the shallowness of modern 'culture' to me. People seem to think there's a kind of commodity called 'spirituality' which they can get in the same way as they get fotball results.

 

I found my power animal through prayer and ceremony. I had read alot about a connection you could make between living things...birds animals trees etc. I made a prayer asking to experience this connection. It was very involved with burning of sage etc. I wrote the prayer on paper. When I was finished I burned the paper with the sage and went outside one night and threw it out to the winds. As soon as I popped my little sack of offerings open an owl flew over me only a few feet from the top of my head shrieking. Now my vision and my hearing aren't good, but in the next few moments I could see and hear EVERYTHING. How grateful I am for this experience. I have been dreaming of owls ever since.

 

Wow Windy, that is a very cool and powerful experience, you definitely came upon your spirit animal in a meeting of good medicine.

For anyone that is willing to set aside their linear logical thinking, even for a moment, and truly wants to seek out their spirit animal---these powerful things can happen. While we all live in this 20th century moment, there is still that inner core of our brains that recalls the remote 100,000 plus years of human history before the dawn of agriculture and civilization!

 

...yes, if you humbly ask the Spirits/God/Great Spirit from your heart, they will oblige. They are always willing to help

 

21st c isn't it?

But otherwise I agree. The 'modern psyche' is something like an artificial overlay.

 

When I went to a Canned Heat concert last year, Fito De La Pata introduced some of the set they did at Woodstock by saying, that we are coming up on the 30th anniversary of Woodstock---and I'm thinking "Wow, 30 years already, man that went fast." It wasn't until the next day that I realised----we were coming up on the 40th anniversary!

What can I say----time is so relative when you become an old hippy...

 

Aha - yes I know the feeling.

 

....this really reminds me of a dream i had some months ago; I was walking along a road at night and there was a fox trotting along beside me. Then my landlady and her boyfriend were with me and it's still nighttime on the road but the fox has now turned into a wolf with a bluish tint to it's coat created by the moonlight. I say to my landlady and her boyfriend "Look at the wolf" ... but they don't see it, they are still seeing the fox and they don't believe me when i say it's a wolf.

Is this teliing me that the wolf is hidden somehow and only seen by those who can see it?

 

Wow---that's cool.

The spirit animal, in a scientific format is an archetype. In a spiritual format the archetype is an eternal spirit that provides the prototype of the being that reflects it in the physical world----I could probably come up with a better way to say this (but I am supposed to be doing my taxes and am writing quickly even though this is once again creative avoidance... I have time...). It is more than just a mere prototype----it is the spiritual constant that lives in all wolves. In the eyes of many of the ancients, if a wolf dies, it returns to mother earth, the spirit to the spirit of the wolf, and then is reborn again from the earth, from the wolf spirit, from its mother wolf.

It is said that the spirit animal can take many forms. And can even appear in human form. So I would not be surprised if your spirit animal, as a wolf, was making itself evident through a fox to nudge you that it was there. That it is seeking to make contact. DO you live in an area where wolves no longer exist?

But this is based on the assumption that your spirit animal is a wolf. That is something you would need to find out. But if you really saw a wolf, and it was not your eyes playing tricks on you (and then again, it could even seem it was your eyes playing tricks...) or the way the light hit the fox----I would say it was something significant that was meant for you to see.

That is a cool story. It reminds me of a Native American I knew who was given his earth name. He met with an elder, they had a sweat lodge and the whole bit (I forget the whole story). And the elder gave him the name, if I recall, Soaring Eagle. Afterwards he was thinking that it was a cool name, but how did he know if that was his 'real' earth name? What if the elder just made it up, or it was based on random facts about his life that had no real meaning.

As they left the meadow where the sweatlodge and all the ceremony took place, he sat in the front passenger side of the car. Suddenly an eagle swooped down and flew along side the car---in fact along side the front passenger window. as the car drove down the road. He looked at the eagle, and he knew the eagle looked at him. After a little ways the eagle flew off, but he still felt the spirit of the eagle next to him. He knew that his name was Soaring Eagle. He also had renewed great respect for the elder that named him.

 

Well, i never considered any primary animal spirit helper of mine to be a wolf, ...there are a few but no wolves until that dream.
Am i right to assume that most people on this thread and beyond consider wolf in it's primary role to mean teacher? In this sense my understanding is that to see the wolf is to see the teaching in something ... to see beyond the mundane or outer appearance of in this case, the fox, to see the teacher within. Perhaps.
There is also the link that wolves, foxes, dogs, dingos, hyenas ect are all species related, so in that sense the fox is a wolf and visa versa in a similar way that as a human being i am a man but also a woman but my genes dictate that i have the appearance and function of a man ... just the way the genes express in each individual.

But yes, here in Devon we used to have wolves but no longer ... just lots of foxes. And i do feel a real kinship with dogs generally, i love that they are so playful and uninhibited. In fact another dream not long after the fox/wolf dream ... i was snuggling up to sleep with my landladys black Labrador, 'moomin', Awww!

Also just to mention, once when i visited London, on hampstead heath, a green woodpecker flew along like that beside my passenger window ... it was a great thing to see because you dont see them all that often where i live in Devon let alone in London, ... and they have such vibrant colouring. The funny thing was though, later that evening in a pub somewhere i overheard a snippet of a conversation and a woman was saying to her friend that she saw a green woodpecker today.... which is very telling in itself; Who saw the woodpecker?
The animal world is quite remarkable and surprising sometimes! Oh, and yes i agree with the archetype bit. ... sybolically as parts of ourselves.

 

Yes, I think the wolf is viewed by most as a treacher. But there also many other elements and lessons in what one's animal spirit is. The wolf is a very family oriented animal by nature, yet you also the lone wolf. In my own experience with the wolf, he has been a teacher, a helper, and so forth. I think that is typical of anyone's relationship with a spirit animal. There is a word I am trying to think of, it might be Souix or Apache---I forget the word----but basically it means that the spirit animal embodies the archetype, and therefore we learn archetypical lessons from this. It guides us from an unconscious level.

My wolf led me to another spirit teacher who fits Carl Jung's 'old man archetype.' Is he the wolf, or is he my inner self? I don't know. But I have learned things from this teacher that suggest he is not 'of me.' To make it even stranger, the things I learn from him, I have verified through my physical reality.

It is one of the ways that I see that the universe is much stranger than we can imagine.

But that is a great post---thank you for sharing.

 

I met that 'old man' archetype in a dream once. He was an old chinese guy ... the epitome of old and wise! It was to do with a relationship with a woman which had ended but which i wanted to continue; I was there with this young woman and the old man gave us a fortune cookie. We read it but didn't understand it, looking at eachother quizically. I then woke up and then went back to sleep and had the exact same dream ... you see he was a persistent old man! We still didn't understand and asked him what it meant but he was silent.
Anyway i eventually accepted that a relationship, ... a physical and worldly one with that woman wasn't to be, and i think that's what the fortune cookie was saying.

Yet this was something i knew deep down and when i accepted and surrendered to that knowing i had the most profound spiritual experience of oneness. I already was with her ... had been all along and always will be. I thought i needed to be with her physically in a relationship to 'be with her', but that wasn't the case. In letting go of her in a physical way i found i actually was her ... always one.
I think this old man archetype represents the wisdom of the higher self/ the deepest inner self ... all wise and all knowing, yet that higher self is not separate ... it is simply who you are at the deepest level, yet remains unconcious to us until we awaken to it, and it seems as if that wisdom and the things it knows come from without and from another but actually comes from within.
So when someone knows things they feel they couldn't possibly know it's natural in the way we think to summise that it comes from another entity ... but at the deepest level there is no other entity.

If that old man were an animal he'd be my white horse. The white horse was the first animal spirit i ever encountered and a couple of years later in a reading with a wonderful clairvoyant medium i know, she introduced me to a 'chief white horse' ... a smile spread accross my face "How did you know!?" i laughed. Yet here was my white horse now in human form. So how is 'chief' relevant? Well the chief is the designated leader yes? ... and the white animal is the spirit form and the chief of it's animal clan.