Embracing Your Beastie: Connecting To The Wisdom of Your Spirit Animal
A 4th generation physician living a nature-starved lifestyle saved herself by taking a walk on the wild side — connecting to the powerful guidance of spirit animals
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We can benefit from the natural world in many ways simply by beginning to open to it. And one of the easiest — and most fun — ways to begin to open to nature is to connect with animal spirits, or beasties. It can begin with a simple encounter like I had with Walrus.
The summer I decided to take a sabbatical from my medical practice, I didn’t know if or how I was going to figure out a way to feel good again at work. In the previous couple years, I had completely lost my mojo for the diagnosis of disease, which was the main task of my job as a board certified pathologist. Instead, I had become more curious about what makes people well. I wanted to focus my energies there, but I had no idea how. With four kids we hoped to send to college and a mortgage to pay, we were depending on my income.
During that summer, I stumbled into a walrus, albeit one that was lifeless, taxidermied, and hanging on the wall at a shop in our downtown. Nonetheless, I was mesmerized. His enormous tusks and whiskered face beckoned to me. I got curious.
Could this unusual beastie be trying to tell me something? As I learned more about walruses, I discovered a few things. I watched some footage of them hanging out on a beach and I noticed that, unlike me, they didn’t seem to be caught up in their heads worrying about the future. Instead, they were extremely relaxed. I also learned that, essentially, they have no competition. They are ‘apex predators’. Putting these two ideas together, I wondered if the walrus was trying to show me that if I could just manage to relax and be myself, that whatever I chose to do next with my career, I would have no competition.This message gave me a lot of hope.
With Walrus’s assistance, I eventually walked away from medicine to discover work that I love again.
I wasn’t aware of the deeper world of nature until the beasties found me and
