My personal totem pole
by Heather
As promised, here’s the SoulCollage card I made to represent my personal totem pole. Last spring, as part of a SoulCollage workshop, I listened to a guided meditation to identify companion animals for each of my chakras. I’ve made individual cards for a couple of these animals so far–the owl and the leopard. (I plan to make cards for all of them, but haven’t found all the images I need yet.) I wanted to see how the different animals fit together and perhaps support each other–and after all, the whole idea was originally inspired by the totem pole.
The animals are collaged on the card in chakra order.
My first chakra companion is the elephant, the largest mammal on land. The elephant is grounded, harmless, and moves slowly and deliberately–as should I. The elephant flicks away annoyances with its tail. The elephant offers the wisdom of many years, and has legendarily thick skin. (I’m not there yet on the tough hide.)
My second chakra companion is the leopard. Powerful, strong, and sinuous, a force to be reckoned with. Wild and sensual. Can a leopard change its spots?
My third chakra companion is the monkey. Powerful, effective, confident, certain, fights when necessary … and with its tail, always has another way to balance.
My fourth chakra companion is a joyful bird. Come fly with me!
My fifth chakra companion is a fawn. Sweet, gentle, innocent, harmless, loving. The fawn is frisky and playful.
My sixth chakra companion is an owl with a white face, like a British barn owl or a snow owl, an owl whose face features its eyes and not much else. The owl is wise and knowing, and sees clearly in darkness. The owl soars and sees everything.
My seventh chakra companion is a toad. This is the crown chakra, and there are many images of frogs wearing crowns! The toad lives in a dark, cave-like space, very yin, and we also usually turn inward to connect with our spirituality. I read that “the appearance of a Toad heralds a successful time of drawing upon and using our inner resources. People with a Toad totem can see things and people more clearly.”
I’ve found identifying totem animals to be a fun and useful process. I hope you’ll try it too!
[…] myself and my attitude as I do what needs to be done this week. As I selected images for the card, my usual totem animals just didn’t seem right. A fiercer animal, the tiger, is the right totem for the situation I […]
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Fascinating. How do you find your totem animals?
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Hi, I linked to the guided meditation I used, which is Seena Frost’s. I like it a lot (because it works!).
You might also be interested in the book that was the source of these ideas for her, Eligio Stephen Gallegos’s The Personal Totem Pole Process: Animal Imagery, the Chakras and Psychotherapy. SoulCollage encourages creating a separate card for each totem, while he encouraged his clients to call together their totem animals as a council and consult them as a group. Some of the stories he recounts are absolutely fascinating!
The whole process started when one of his clients visualized a totem pole that he intuited represented himself. The book is also interesting for how it reveals that truly, we are our own healers.
My dogs have shown me aspects of how much we can learn from animals, and this process just kind of opens additional dimensions of that learning, including learning from animals we may never meet.
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Thank you very much for this information. I’ll certainly look into it. I know we can learn a lot from animals, having been around them for years.
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You’re welcome–let me know how you go on! You may find that some of your totems are animals that have been around you. The owl and the toad are examples of this for me. It’s also possible to get an animal you’ve never even heard of!
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[…] to represent my throat chakra totem, and what I want to do with my voice in the world. The fawn I’d envisioned was playful, graceful, sensitive. I’ve been looking for quite awhile for an image of a fawn […]
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What an amazing meditation process to take part in, I would love to do this!!! Thank you for the idea. How wonderful to have an owl in the sixth chakra – lucky lucky you!
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I do really love the owl ❤ One of my early posts was about the owl I can often hear calling outside my house, just about every night now. When I hear him or her during the early morning hours, I struggle not to be pulled from sleep to listen 🙂 I've also been seeing my toad lately … when the weather has been damp, they hunt on my deck 🙂
It is a great meditation–I'm sure you'd enjoy the process.
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[…] This is the SoulCollage card I made yesterday to represent the last of my seven chakra totems, a monkey. This totem is associated with my third chakra, the solar plexus, seat of power and control. (The other totems are an elephant, leopard, bird, fawn, owl, and toad. You can see the complete totem pole here.) […]
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