Finding Your Spirit Animal

Everyone loves animals. Some more than others. No matter what your specific degree of affection for the animal world, every human on earth has an animal spirit guide. Animal spirit guides, also called power animals, animal totems and fuzzy buddies, are animals that are spiritually and emotionally connected to us.

Different people have different animal spirit guides. The type of animal that walks in your shadow (not literally) bestows upon you unique natural powers that may help you adapt to new surrounding, become leader of the pack, or bite the heads off of all of those who oppose you (literally).

Chances are, you have already thought of an animal that you want to be your animal guide (it’s a shark, right?). Well, think again, buddy, because I’ve got news for you – you don’t choose your animal spirit guide. It chooses you! You can’t just say, “Wow, sharks are so cool! I want to be just like them – dominant, cunning and completely hairless.”

That’s just not how it works. Unfortunately, you have to wait for your spirit animal to come to you. Luckily, there are a couple ways to bait your spirit animal out of hiding so that it will reveal itself to you. According to the Native Americans, the first to harness the power of spirit animals, there are two ways to effectively find your animal spirit guide:

The most ideal way to find your spirit animal guide is through intense meditation. Start by journeying deep into the forest, desert or produce section of your grocery store. Then, draw a circle around you and bless the area with a sacred medicine, such as healing sage, soothing mint leaves or tough actin’ Tinactin. Sit in the middle of the circle and meditate. Breathe deeply, in and out. Clear your mind completely and open your heart.

After a period of time – from several hours to several days – you will hear something. It is your spirit animal coming to greet you (or possibly the produce manager telling you the store is closing). Your spirit animal will speak with you. However, unless you speak Wolf (or whatever) you won’t understand a thing the animal is saying. That is okay, though, because you have found your spirit animal and soon it will teach you how to speak in howls, meows, chirps or ca-caws so that it may guide you in your daily life.

Alternatively, if you don’t feel like meditating, you can probably just open up a zoology book or something and stop on a random page. Then, you could pick the animal on that page that you like the best, and maybe that can be your animal spirit guide.

Once you have found your spirit animal, it is important to connect with it so that it can more easily guide your path. Learn everything you can about it – what it eats, special skills, life cycles, its baby making process, etc. Then, find ways to honor and get close to your spirit animal in the physical world. For example, if your animal is a forest creature, go camping and gain reverence for the forest. Or, if your animal is a bird, build a nest out of twigs and stones and put it in a tree. Then, sit in the nest for a few days (naked), grooming yourself with a papier mache beak and incubating the eggs you bought from the supermarket.

After you gain a better understanding of your spirit animal, it will help guide you spiritually, mentally and sexually. Eventually, you will achieve your full potential and you and your spirit animal will become one. At such a time, you will transform into a superior half-man, half beast transmorph that possesses the power to both drive a car AND rip the flesh from an antelope through sheer force.

Just as Mother Nature intended.