"These animal totems are pretty cool. Is there somewhere you can get the animal totem meanings? What the questor is looking for here is a list to make it simple, a kind of spiritual Cole’s notes.

And at that point, I have to think, ‘hmmm, OK... What are the animal totem meanings? Can they be actually quantified in some way? Are they a sort of nifty divination trick, not that different from Tarot or Power Decks after all, so we could have an African Animal Totem Deck, or a Native American Animal Totem Deck, or the Atlantean Power Totem Deck, or whatever. (I’m making these up, by the way, but think of it as news of opportunity.) It’s lucrative, this giving the rubes what they want.

Now say you’re a soul retrieval practitioner, and you use Animal Totems to help out all the time. You need a bear, a bear comes, you do the work and that’s it. There is no specific divinatory meaning, but you will know already, having received the info from a telepathic chat with the animal spirit, that the bear comes from the West, is recognized for it’s dreaming ability, has a lot of authority and so forth. One can even put divinatory importance into animal totem meanings, but bear in mind that a divinatory guess is a divinatory guess, and as good as anyone else’s.

From the Shaman’s perspective, an attempt to get a list of animal totem meanings is sort of risky, quite unlike reading the astrology page, since the astrology page actually is for the purpose of entertainment. This is because a query there is of necessity too broad, too general to be of actual help. And so it goes.

A part of the Shaman’s training, whether the shaman is Celtic, African, Native American, Ecuadorian or comes from Samoa involves communication with animal spirits, and the symbolic link between the Animal Spirit and Human Spirit is often some part of an actual animal, a bear claw, shark’s tooth, eagle feather, some fur or skin that announces a bond between animal spirit and man to any who know how to look, or what to look for.

It’s fine to buy such an ornament in a local shop in Nepal, for instance, or Jamaica or Taos, but unless some work is forthcoming from you, what you have is an ornament steeped perhaps in the power of your own imagination and not much more.

How, you ask, does one discover what work one must do and get on with it?

Thereby hangs a Shamanic Tale.

I once gave a demonstration of healing to a group of forty or so folks, and shifted my energy to allow a bear spirit I’ve known for a long time to enter. The bear did the work, during which it appeared that a shin bone on our subject changed and straightened. There are other ways to achieve this, all having to do with state of mind, but in this case, I did nothing, and was not in fact present as this occurred.

Afterward a man came forward and said he wanted to learn to do what I had just done. I began to explain, with gestures, how a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and he said, ‘No. You don’t understand. I catch on to things pretty quick, and if you’ll just show me how you straightened his leg, that’s the part I need.’

It was quite clear to me that he needed much much more. I thought, ‘Yes. You and every doctor I ever met.’ I said, "Do you think doing this involves the use of a magic word? You need to have your tongue in the right place?

He said, "Does it?

I’m sorry, I can’t help you. You have to take my course. That’s what it’s for."

"If I take your course, will you be able to teach me to do what you just did?"

"Probably not." (How could I? I hadn’t done it myself.)

He went away, claiming under his breath that the whole thing was probably a fluke. Or maybe a fake.

So here’s what I did do. I found a teacher who understood the process of getting in touch with animal totems. He taught me that process and left me alone. I went to animal spirits in dreamtime, using his procedure, (but there are others) and asked them for help, and they helped. Only took a couple of years, but I saw results nearly right away.

If you want some further clues to the process, enjoy the rest of the website.

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