Animal spirits and symbolism

Working with the energies of animals and receiving messages from benevolent spirits with animal symbolism is something I picked up as a young woman learning from members of the Native American community. This is also where I cemented my beliefs as an animist. Animists believe that the material world around us, and all of the things in it, are their own unique and individual beings. We believe that animals, plants, stones, inanimate objects, places, weather, phenomena, the universe, and the great beyond have their own will, their own desires and thoughts, and we simply exist alongside them. I definitely believe that everything has a spirit. I commune with the spirit of land I live on daily. I can feel the spirits of the plants that grow around me, the animals that roam, the birds in the sky and the fish in the rivers and my fellow little humans I see out in the world. We are all part of creation, and all of it and us are connected. 

I refrain from using the term spirit animal when I am working with animal symbolism. That isn’t a tradition for people who didn’t grow up in Native culture. We have so many wonderful ways to communicate our ideas that there is no need for appropriating words from other cultures whose spiritual contexts we have no way to fully understand. Not everything is for us white folks and that’s okay.

You can also call on their spirits, or the general spirit of the earth, to aid you in your workings.