Working with Your Power Animal: Asking, Listening and Receiving Guidance

Andrea Lawrie
3 hours ago
7 min read

I’m writing this on the 30th April - it’s a Full Moon, Beltane and my birthday, and everything feels as though it’s aligning all at once.

I’ve always loved this time of year. Beltane feels like a true new year to me, a threshold into something brighter and more alive. There’s a sense of renewal everywhere. Longer days, lighter nights, and the trees have that soft luminous green. Bluebells are in full bloom, and blossom drifts across the landscape like confetti on the breeze. It’s so beautiful.

Floral wreath with daisies and wildflowers hangs on a tree stump in a sunlit meadow, against a blurred green background.

In this blog series so far, I’ve been introducing different aspects of shamanic practice step by step and so far have covered - what it is, how we journey, the role of the drum, how we prepare to journey, the other worlds, and most recently, meeting a power animal.

So once you’ve met your power animal…

what happens next?

A Note on Language

In this post, I’ll use the term power animal, though what you may have encountered could be another kind of helping presence. In many traditions, these are understood more broadly as spirit allies or helpers, so here I’m using power animal to include any kind of guiding or supportive presence you may meet.

Setting Your Intention

Before you journey, it helps to begin with a clear intention. If you want to connect with your power animal, you might start by asking a question:

I journey to non-ordinary reality to ask my spirit ally…

What do I need to know right now (to help with…)?
What would support me with this situation?
What am I not seeing?
Do you have a message or a gift for me?

In many indigenous traditions, this is understood as entering into a reciprocal exchange. You’re not merely extracting information from them, but entering into conversation. Guidance is something that's given within that relationship.

And then…

you listen.

If you’re new to this, it may help to revisit my earlier blogs on The Shamanic Journey, Preparing to Journey and The Axis Mundi where I go into more detail about how to journey and how to begin.

Mystical animal art: a howling wolf, bear, owl, eagle, leopard, snake, and hummingbird. Dreamy pastel colors, stars, and moons fill the scene.

How Guidance Comes Through

Within the journey, guidance doesn’t always arrive in the way we expect. It’s rarely a clear sentence or instruction. More often, we are shown something, handed something, or led somewhere.

Sometimes your ally will move and you’ll follow. Sometimes they’ll pause, turn away, or simply wait.

You might notice sensations in your body such as warmth, a tightening or a release. And sometimes, nothing much seems to happen at all. That’s often where doubt creeps in.

Was that real? Am I just making this up?

A mystical illustration with a fox, deer, heron, dragonfly, moth, and salamander amidst trees and flowers. Words "Strength," "Earth Medicine," "Spirit Journey."

This is especially common for us in the West, where we’re conditioned to prioritise what is logical, verbal and provable. But in these spaces, communication doesn’t follow those rules.

As Albert Einstein reflected, we’ve come to honour the rational mind, but often forget the intuitive one. Shamanic practice brings us back into relationship with that intuitive way of knowing.

Encounters with our spirit helpers are relational. Experiential. Embodied. And over time, as you return again and again, you start to trust what you’re perceiving.

Asking and Allowing

In our day to day lives, we’re often used to directing things, figuring them out, trying to get somewhere. But this work is different. You ask your question, and then you allow the journey to unfold.

There’s no need to push anything forward or make something happen. The more we try to control the journey, the more we tend to move back into thinking rather than experiencing.

Sometimes what comes is clear. Sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes, very little seems to happen at all. In everyday life, we might interpret that as nothing happening. But in these spaces, stillness is not nothing.

It can be where a shift is taking place in a way we don’t yet fully understand.

Sometimes the pause is what we’re being shown.

The Role of Your Power Animal

Enchanting forest scene showing a fox and moth swirling in a glowing vortex, with a deer in a cave. Labels: "Shamanic Journeying," "Trance."

In some traditions, a power animal is understood as a spirit helper or a guide with its own intelligence and way of being.

Among some Native American traditions, these relationships are seen as a source of strength, protection and connection to the wider web of life. In Siberian traditions, animal spirits are often understood as intermediaries between worlds, companions who help us move safely and appropriately through unseen landscapes.

Different cultures have different ways of understanding, but there are similar threads. My own training is in cross-cultural shamanism. This means I’ve been taught core methods that appear across many traditions, without replicating or taking specific ceremonies or cultural forms from any one lineage.

What I'm sharing here is rooted in those core practices, and from my own lived experience of working with them.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand power animals as both a source of support and a guide in the other worlds. They know these landscapes in a way we don’t, each has their own expertise, purpose and meaning and they help us move safely and with awareness.

People often experience their power animal as steady, wise and deeply loving and supportive and a presence that walks alongside them not only in the other worlds, but in everyday life as well.

Trusting The Guidance

I've come to know that your power animal won’t take you anywhere you’re not ready to go nor show you anything you're not ready to see. If you reach a point in the journey where you feel unsure, you can always pause, acknowledge how you feel, and ask your power animal:

What do I do now? Take me where I need to go.

Or simply watch what it does. If it pauses, it's okay for you to pause too.

A Personal Experience

In my own life, during a considerable period of distress involving family, work, career, health and more. Around that time, raven began appearing in my journeys.

At first, I didn’t fully understand why it had come forward. Over time, it became clear that it was shining a light on areas of my life I hadn’t fully seen before. It challenged how I was living, while also leading me towards healing, support and change.

Across many traditions and mythologies, raven is associated with transformation, endings and beginnings and seeing beyond what is immediately visible. Raven often appears at times of deep change, when something old is falling away and something new is beginning to emerge, even if we can’t yet fully see it.

Looking back, I can see how much that relationship helped transform my life. The journeys with raven gradually led me toward deep rest, healing and significant life changes that ultimately improved both my health, wellbeing and lifestyle. I am deeply grateful for the wisdom and insight raven has given me.

That’s often how this practice unfolds. Through relationship, awareness and experience, and through the medicine these helping presences bring into our lives.

Shamanic journey illustration with mystical trees, eagle, fox, and rainbow bridge. Labels include "Sun," "Moon," "Midgard," and "Yggdrasil."

When the Relationship Comes Into the World

As the relationship with your power animal deepens, it doesn’t only stay within the journey. You can call on your power animal in everyday life, for example, asking it to be with you in situations that feel difficult, or simply imagining it beside you when you need steadiness or support.

Some people find it helpful to to imagine merging with it, or you can draw it, craft it, or place an image or small figure of it somewhere in your home. These simple acts can help integrate what you experience in non-ordinary reality into your everyday world or ‘ordinary reality’.

I recommend you also journey simply to spend time with your power animal just to give it thanks, or bring a gift. This reciprocity is important just as it is in any relationship, it isn't only about receiving, but also about tending it.

A gift can be something symbolic offered in the journey such as an imagined pebble, flower or shell, or you can ask your power animal what they would like. What matters most is the intention behind it.

Recognising Meaning

When you return from a journey and begin to reflect on its meaning, it doesn’t always seem obvious at first. It's much like interpreting a dream.

You may have heard something clearly, or you may have been shown something such as an object, a place, a symbol, a flower, a tree or an animal. For example, let’s say you are handed a floral crown. There are many symbolic meanings associated with flowers and crowns, but rather than reaching immediately for interpretation, it can be more helpful to stay with your own experience of it first.

What was it like to receive it? What did you notice?

You may also notice things such as how your power animal moves, how it behaves, how it exists in its world.

If it’s an eagle, there may be something it’s showing you about perspective, the ability to rise above, to see the wider picture, to not become pulled into what is close or immediate.

If it’s an otter, there may be something about play - about lightness, about not holding everything so tightly.

And over time, you may begin to recognise something in that, not just the animal, but something in yourself. Perhaps a quality you already have that you can use, or something you are being invited to grow into.

Over time, this awareness can extend beyond the journey. A tree you keep seeing. A plant that draws your attention.

You might find yourself wondering:

What is this showing me? What can I learn from its nature?

And gradually, the world can begin to feel more like something you are in relationship with.

Shamanic journey illustration: elder drumming, spirit path through forest, guiding animals, celestial symbols, bear spirit guardian glows.

Letting Meaning Unfold

Meaning doesn’t always arrive straight away. Sometimes it’s clear in the moment. Other times, it takes longer, perhaps hours, days (or longer) for something to make sense.

A journey that feels unclear at first may make sense later, or connect with something that happens in your everyday life.

So rather than trying to work it all out straight away, I’d simply say: let it unfold. Trust that understanding will come in its own way and in its own time, and that the medicine of the journey is often working more deeply than we realise.

Closing

Working with a power animal or spirit ally isn’t only about getting answers. It’s about relationship, reciprocity and learning to trust what you are being shown. As that relationship and trust grows, interpreting your journeys becomes easier and more natural.

I’d love to hear how this is for you - does any of this resonate? Has it felt easier over time? How do you find interpreting what you’re shown in journeys? Or perhaps your experience has been different?

Thank you so much for reading. I hope you have a beautiful Beltane, and a lovely month ahead.

Warmest wishes and gratitude,