What Is An Animal Spirit Guide?
And how do I know what it’s trying to tell me?
It’s pretty common these days to hear someone refer to a person with an attitude that they admire as their “spirit animal.” It makes me smile every time that I hear it, particularly when the person being referenced is quirky or marches to the beat of their own drum. But in a traditional shamanic sense, a spirit animal, or animal spirit guide as it’s more commonly known, is not only just a source of inspiration. They are the way that some Universal energy is trying to communicate with you, using a physical image that helps you to better understand what it’s trying to convey.
In other words, if you’re out on a walk and a toad is sitting right in your path staring at you in a way that seems meaningful, it’s not a magic talking toad. In fact, the individual animal isn’t really that important at all. It’s simply the archetype of Toad energy, that is trying to make itself known to you so that you can use that as guidance in some way in your life.
In shamanic outlook, the entire world is hung together by the Web of Life, wherein everything is linked in some way to everything else. Because of this, signs and messages from one aspect of the Web to another are often expressed through the natural world. And because different animals have specific characteristics that we know a lot about, they are a…
