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Totem (Spirit) Animals

vortech

vortech

Bluelighter
Joined
Jul 18, 2012
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2,045
Location
Desert USA
What is your belief in or experience with totem (spirit) animals? Do you believe that each person has a corresponding totem animal? Sometimes they are also called 'power animals'. How does one find out what their animal is?

I've been doing some research after an experience I had a week ago with a bird, a wood thrush specifically, that has lead me to explore the significance and symbolism of this particular bird in my life. The alignments hit close to home so far, but that is another story.
For many years whenever I was asked, I was never sure if my spirit animal was a bird or a cat, so I sometimes jokingly referred to it as a bird-cat. However, since cats are basically murderers of birds for fun, there seems to be a fundamental conflict in their marriage; the run-in I had with the wood thrush last week only cemented my belief that my totem is a bird. Bird songs have always been a strong inspiration for me; I have made many songs that include samples of birds. According to Native-American Astrology, my star sign's (Cancer) totem is a woodpecker (http://www.psychic-revelation.com/reference/m_p/native_american_astrology/woodpecker.html).
 
I thoroughly enjoy the concept of a spirit animal, and i myself found my spirit animal on my very first mushroom journey. I took 3.5g by myself my very first time, and i made sure to allow myself some time to contemplate life with my eyes closed in the dark. I recall running across several animals including an elephant and a massive butterfly, but i felt no deeper connection with them than anything else in nature. It was when i ran across a fox that grabbed my attention. As i watched him hunt, i felt a very deep connection with it. An understanding about what it was thinking while it was hunting....it was smart, cunning, and sly, yet knew when to use discretion. I understood it completely, and from then on, the fox has been my spirit animal. I even got a fox-head tattooed on me.
 
Um, if animals have conciousness the way I percieve it then my spirit animal would be a sea turtle. I've got the physical feeling of a sloth and the mind of a sea turtle.
 
When my first son was born he would wake up many times during the night and need to be nursed back to sleep. We live in a temperate seaside climate so a lot of times I would sit out on the back steps wrapped in a blanket to nurse him. A pair of owls hunted in that unlikely neighborhood and though I never saw them I loved to listen to them calling to each other from one cypress tree to another as they foraged. One night when I was nursing my son I had a vision of him grown and alone in a foreign country--lonely, but not in a bad way. The vision I believe was inspired by the owl's voices calling their soft calls that sound so much like the question who? Who will this tiny little babe in my arms become? I ended up writing a poem about it that night and I gave to him many years later. I have been thinking about it a lot lately because he is getting ready to go traveling by himself for a while. I have always associated the owl with him. I have written a lot in my youngest son's shrine here on Bluelight about how the rabbit was his totem animal. He was the one that identified that one and the more I have looked at archetypal meanings as well as observed rabbits, in the wild and domesticated, the more closely I associate his life with that of a rabbit. As for me, I have no idea--many animals I admire and am drawn to but I have no idea which, if any, would be my totem animal.
 
Oddly enough, I had a conversation about spirit animals with my father last night, and he said that his spirit animal must be the owl. Yesterday I took one of those tests online that supposedly tell you your spirit animal after asking a bunch of questions, while I don't believe in it should be accurate, I took one anyway to humour my curiosity and the result was the owl.

By the way, the conversation with my father started because during the afternoon yesterday another bird hit the same window as last time, exactly 10 days earlier down to the hour, but this time my father was the one to witness it. I came into the room just a few minutes later...sadly, it was another wood thrush. This breaks my heart and I've been stressing to my parents the last 10 days to put some decals on the wi Dow that are supposed to inform birds that the window is not a 'portal to the other side', and got really upset when my mom said she didn't want to obstruct her view into the woods from the kitchen...I hope yesterday's incident finally convinced her to sacrifice such an absurdsabsurdly desire for the sake of the birds...I don't recall any other incidents in the last 25 years of this happening with that window...but even if it is just random coincidence, as someone pointed out, random events tend to occur in clusters.
 
Another possibility besides the decals on the window is to drape a piece of bird-netting from the eaves that would hang just a few inches out from the window. It tends to disappear when you are looking through it.
 
My animal chose me during adolescence, when I thought I was choosing a different animal. It would be in my dreams regularly for 5-6 years, until I finally accepted it and integrated its meaning into my life. My animal changed my life in so many ways.
 
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