Book 1 - Chapter 6 - Animal Guides and Totems - Excerpt 1-3
Opening to the Spirit Realm
Totems refer to a specific animal that is connected to you for your entire life as a life guide, while all other animals are temporary guides or messengers and may only be with you for a short period of time. Animal guides and totems can take on any form like a mammal, bird, amphibian, fish, reptile or insect, and by becoming aware of what animals are around you, you can also get clues and insights into what issues you need to look at in your life. Once you become aware of these animals in the Spirit realm, you may also begin to be aware of them coming to you in your physical world. When an animal guide or totem from the Spirit realm is trying to get your attention, or is working on your energy Body, you may feel like there’s something’s crawling or picking on your head or arm, but there’s nothing there that you can physically see. When you use your third eye, or feel with your intuition, you may find that a spider, ant, or even a small crab is crawling or picking at you. Feeling something larger crawling on you, might be a snake, and when you feel your Body being nudged or poked it might be a deer, lion or even an elephant.
While you’ve already explored the Astral plane during your meditation and visualization, meeting your animal guides and totems will be a precursor of things to come. Meeting and communicating with ones animal guides and totems in the astral plane is less stressful and fearful than having to immediately deal with people, entities or energies that are unknown, or of facing people and issues that are known. Exploring this journey and resolving any issues that it presents, enables you to be more comfortable and confident when you are ready to move to the next journey.
NOTES:
Like the other journeys, I highly recommend that you have a partner so that you can assist and guide one another on your journeys. If you are doing the guiding or facilitating, allow yourselfto be open, to feel and sense what the other person is feeling and expressing, as well as allowing yourself to feel and express your own intuition, feelings and emotions. By expressing what you’re feeling and picking up, you’ll assist in triggering the person doing the journey into acknowledging what they’re feeling but may be denying expressing, as they may feel that it’s just their imagination or that it’s not important and so on. If on their journey they begin to talk and share their experiences or express their emotions with you, allow them to do so, it’s their journey. You may find in some cases that they’re actually directing their own journey and you’re the witness, but you may also be called upon, or become a participant at any time. Also, just because the person you’re guiding has a particular issue, don’t be fooled into thinking that you don’t have any involvement with the same issue, because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be there and it wouldn’t be coming up for you to witness and to feel.
In meeting your animal guides and totems it’s important that the person doing the journey looks in all directions, that is, all four sides as well as above and below. Usually people will see or sense at least one animal but most often it will be five or six and sometimes it might even be a zoo full. Animals do have names but do not often give them unless they are asked. Some animals are our Totems or Life Guides and are with us for our Earthly sojourn, while others are here for only a brief time but they can re-appear often. There are no limits as to what kind of animal guides we have.
Meeting your animal guides and totems is a good way to get people to open up to the spiritual realms, as they are usually not as afraid of animals being a guide but may be afraid of a guide in a human, angelic or other form. Often people will have a spiritual or emotional experience when they feel the unconditional love of their animal guides. If you were not able to communicate with your animal totems and guides, but you know what they are, then I’d recommend that you buy the book, Animal Speaks or “Animal Wise” by Ted Andrews. These books list a variety of animals from all categories and some of the powers and gifts each has to share. While I recommend these books, you need to use discernment when reading the material that is provided. Use it as a guide and not as a gospel, and couple it with your experience, feelings and emotions.
