Bear Medicine
We are not alone...
I saw this marking just two days before a huge brown bear sauntered right by me, maybe 20 feet away.
My eyes must have looked like a cartoon character's—I've waited my entire life to see a bear in the wild and I couldn't believe it had finally happened. For better or worse, pure ecstatic joy overrode any fear.
If you look up Bear as a spirit animal online, you'll find everything from bear signifying a cycle of hibernation coming, being courageous, motherhood, appreciating the sweetness in life, protection, and so much more.
When I encountered Bear, I knew the appearance was significant. I knew Bear was coming as a messenger from spirit—but I also knew that online animal references could not tell me the personal meaning of my experience. I believe that we must cultivate the ability to work with spirit without a middleman, the ability to find our own answers.
I felt that this bear's appearance was less about Bear medicine specifically, and more about me opening up to a new era of power.
I've just been through—well, I'm still in it really—an extremely challenging period of major transformation and initiation. Everything, in every part of life, has felt stuck, blocked , grief-ridden, unnecessarily difficult, and bizarrely bad for so long, despite my best efforts. But I've been making my way through, trusting in spirit and doing the work, and have finally felt a shift and a bit of levity enter back into my life.
The day before I saw this bear, I commented to my partner that a bear was the one animal I hadn't yet seen in these mountains that I wished I would someday, even though seeing one in the wild might feel a bit scary.
The timing of all of this feels like a pure gift from spirit, a sign of encouragement and confirmation that I am in touch with spirit and on my path. A confirmation that indeed, I have reached a turning point.
As I enter this new era, I feel Bear blessing me with power, protection, maturity, sweetness, rest, and so much more.
Many of these qualities of course overlap with what you might read online, and yet the major lesson and confirmation from my bear sighting had to come from my personal reflections about this encounter, my own intuitive perceptions.
Have you ever encountered an animal and wondered if it carried a message of some sort?
Animal sightings are one of the most common ways spirit communicates with us, and learning how to understand the omens and messages coming to you is an absolutely invaluable skill. If you’d like to learn more about how to interpret the animal messengers in your own life, be sure to take a look at The Spirit Animal Workshop.
This self-paced mini-class will teach you how to differentiate between animal messengers and power animals, and how to understand what animals mean without having to look them up in a book or online glossary. If you have any interest in spirit animals at all, then this is for you!
