Totems: The Transformative Power of Your Personal Animal Totem

225 Pages·1997·0.82 MB·English

by  Brad Steiger

TOTEMS
The Transformative Power of

Your Personal Animal Totem

Brad Steiger
To the memory of Glenn McWane,
who left the Earth Mother on the wings of his totem guide,
the eagle, in January of 1996.
Contents
1. Our Animal Companions on Turtle Island 1
2. Receive the Power of Your Animal Totem 15
3. Entering Shamanic Time 41
4. Going on Spirit Journeys 55
5. Catching and Retrieving Dream Teachings 71
6. The Sacred Force Behind All Magic 85
7. Praying for Strength and Guidance 97
8. Avoiding the Horrid Things of Darkness 115
9. The Healing Powers of Totems 125
10. Receiving Initiation into Higher Awareness 139
Totem Animal Dictionary 151
Bibliography 213
Acknowledgement
Praise
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher

chapter 1
Our Animal Companions on Turtle Island
I
joined the others in the teaching circle with Grandmother
Twylah in the original Seneca longhouse of the old Buffalo Creek
Reservation and listened to her tell us about the harmony that once
existed among all living things in the beautiful forests of our Turtle
Island.
Before any human beings there was the Great Mystery. After
preparing the Sun and Moon and Water and setting them into place,
the Great Mystery made patterns for all things that were to be born
and arranged for all happenings that were to occur.
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Then the Great Mystery prepared Nature Land, where all things
were to mingle in harmony, and the Great Mystery created the plants
and all the creatures that swam, crawled, walked, and flew. Gifts
were bestowed upon them, with abilities to learn lessons from one
another.
All things belong to the Great Mystery. For this reason, the same
Spirit is in everything that breathes, senses, hears, tastes, smells, and
sees. The inhabitants of Nature Land are aware of the Great Mystery
through the whisperings that speak through the mind.
The ancestors of our people sensed a powerful force all around
them. Some were able to feel the force; others were able to see it.
They called the force Swen-i-o, the Great Mystery.
The lessons that nature taught set a pattern for the people to fol-
low. The Seneca soon learned that each person must find a way to fit
into this pattern in order to experience a sense of happiness. In the
atmosphere of the forest, they recognized the presence of the Great
Mystery. Its force penetrated into every soul, making every soul a
part of it.
As they learned the unspoken language of the inhabitants who
live in the forest, the Seneca understood the necessity for living in
harmony with self and with nature.
They accepted the kinship of all creatures and all plants of
nature.
They believed all creatures and plants were equal in the sight of
nature, each performing its specific talents according to its abilities.
Whenever the Seneca fell out of balance with nature, they caused
conditions of discord. When the Seneca developed spiritual equality
and a life of spiritual balance, they became a mature people of wisdom.
The Seneca taught their children the importance of identifying
themselves with all creatures and plants of nature. They learned the
differences between themselves and the creatures, but they under-
stood that it was the same Spirit flowing through all of them.
All of Nature Is in Us
Understanding the sanctity of nature and having a reverence for life
begins with the recognition that we humans are but one species of
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living beings. All living things are the Great Mystery’s sacred cre-
ations, endowed with spirit, consciousness, and intelligence.
In the Oracle of Atsuta, an expression of the path of Shinto, it is
written: “Regard heaven as your father, earth as your mother, and all
things as your brothers and sisters.”
In his thought-provoking book Recovering the Soul: A Scientific
and Spiritual Search, Dr. Larry Dossey theorizes about the existence
of a universal mind that connects human beings, animals, and all liv-
ing things. From the very beginning of human evolution, Dr. Dossey
suggests, it has made “good biological sense that a nonlocal, psycho-
logical communion might have developed between humans and ani-
mals as an asset to survival . . . [that] . . . nature in its wisdom
would, in fact, have designed a mind that envelops all creatures great
and small.”
To fully understand and embrace the concept of a “nonlocal
mind” requires a genuine humility that enables us to know deeply
“that we may be on a similar footing with all the rest of God’s crea-
tures.”
The Bhagavad Gita (6:28–32) states that those who touch the
Godhead and free themselves from the burden of evil see “the Self in
every creature and all creation in the Self.”
In Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives, Joan Halifax
quotes Petagna Yuha Mani’s statement: “As my brother Lame Deer
has said, all of nature is in us, all of us is in nature. That’s as it
should be.”
Today, Grandmother Twylah, the Repositor of Wisdom for her
tribe, still teaches her students the Seneca practice of going into the
Silence of solitude to regain the feeling of belonging to nature, of
being at one with the Great Mystery, and of being in harmony with
all of nature’s creatures.
To enter the Silence, in Grandmother’s words, is “to be enchanted
by the Great Mystery.” It is truly a magical process by which serious-
minded students are able to elevate their consciousness to the spiri-
tual realm, where visions of the past, present, and future live in an
existence independent of our material world. This dimension exists
in the Eternal Now, thus making it older than Time and newer than
our next heartbeat.
Our Animal Companions on Turtle Island 3
Draw Upon Ancient Wisdom Through Your Animal Totem
One of the most effective methods of drawing upon the power of this
ancient wisdom is to regain the awareness that you are once again
fitting into the pattern of nature and that you are living in harmony
with all creatures. And one of the quickest ways to truly understand
that it is the very same Spirit that flows through you and through all
other beings is to learn the proper use of animal symbology in the
creation of your own personal totem.
Among the Medicine teachings of the traditional Native Ameri
cans, the totem represents the physical form of one’s spirit helper,
his or her guardian or guide.
As Medicine Hawk and Grey Cat have said, “While the Great
Mystery lives in everything, animate and inanimate, it also exists as
itself. It is above us and at the same time is us. It is not a ‘God’ in the
European’s sense of God. Neither are the totems ‘godlings,’ separate
pantheistic deities. However, there may in some ways be a compari-
son to the concept of the guardian angel.”
Or as one of my own students once suggested during a Medicine
seminar, “The totem entity is kind of like a spirit guide or guardian
angel that presents itself to you on the earth plane in the form of an
animal.”
However one wishes to identify and name the animal form that
represents one’s spirit helper, I can promise that to do so will create
a spiritual-psychological mechanism that will bring about great per-
sonal transformation and manifest an extended sphere of awareness
in an ever-expanding reality construct.
“You must learn to live in harmony with everything around you,”
said Amoneeta Sequoyah, a great Cherokee shaman. “If you let the
animals know that you mean good, they’ll be good to you. They will
be your helpers.”
Activating Cosmic Memory
Robert Davidson is an internationally known artist who is giving new
life to the art forms that represent the Haida, the native people of
northern Canada and Alaska. Although the ancient style has been
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