Feral Goat as Totem
Further information on Goat as totem can be found here at my website .
Fear
I work a lot with the emotion fear, since it is – at this stage in my life – my core emotion, the one that informs most of my life decisions (often mistakenly) and the emotion that also governs a great deal of my personal thought processes and such. It’s not the healthiest way to be, and I know this, and I’m working on it. In the meantime I work on ways to manipulate fear to my advantage.
The majority of my shamanic ‘work’ is done in the underworld, usually in a few core locations. The first and perhaps the most significant for me is the dead forest. It’s a place that I’ve heard of some others encountering before too. A place where the ground is dead, the trees are skeletal, the animals are skeletons, dead, or dying, and there is a sense of preternatural stillness. This place stays with me once I leave it, and I can’t rid myself of the feel of the humid air clinging to me, or the actual smell of dessicated decay out of my nose. And I don’t actually mind this either, because it constantly reminds me to ruminate over what I’ve experienced. After all, I don’t go to this place to find the soul fragments of others, I go to explore the voids within myself.
There are certain gods I tend to be visited by in this forest. Not Ucza, as I have come to expect (since she is the governing power, I believe, behind this place). Instead there is the wiry, fear-mongering, Zirczekaja. And there is the trickster and ‘don’t-trust-him-even-though-he-looks-great’ Lesavny.
Zirczekaja is a god that helps people to confront their fears, perhaps because he is so fearful, and very much so because you know that he would stop at nothing to get the message across. Some Vilturj gods – or my experiences of them - are quite unforgiving. You either pass the test, or you’re a bit of a write off. I suppose it depends on the deity or the spirits though. There are Vilturj deities like Vasilia who can be very forgiving, and others like Zirczekaja who… I wouldn’t recommend anyone evoke/invoke just for the hell of it.
But the local spirits are like this too. Koondoola has some forgiving spirits (which I’m going to have to give names one of these days, because a lot of my research has yielded nothing), but local bushland and the land in general also have the kind of spirits that are blood-thirsty, feed off fear, or just simply want nothing to do with us and don’t care about ‘people.’ They don’t need us, they will exist without us, and trying to petition them for contact or understanding can be met with a whole lot of being thrown out of your journey.
I’m rambling.
The point is that fear is something that governs a great deal of my life, including my spiritual one. Yes, I may be a tad more confident in the otherworlds than in this world, but I have also been caught fleeing from a predator in the otherworlds, and yes, my strength has failed me before too. I may have reasons for this, but it doesn’t stop it from being a completely humiliating fact. Lol.
I have a journey, or series of journeys coming up… where I am to voluntarily confront Zirczekaja. And I must admit I’ve been putting it off. And he’s been letting me, aside from sometimes haunting my dreams and my real life. I know that I just need to grit my teeth and commit to it, and yet again I find that fear holds me back. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many demons you’ve negotiated with in the otherworlds, it doesn’t matter how many perevrnji (spirit helpers) you have, it doesn’t matter how many successful soul retrievals or extractions you’ve done.
None of that matters, when it comes to battling your own inner demons.
I sometimes just want to escape it all. To work elsewhere. To not constantly find myself in this dead forest, with the tasks I have. Shamanism is not an easy path, or if it is, I’m doing it wrong. 
But in all seriousness, you ever get that feeling where you just want to go ‘okay, so… no, I’m not doing this. Too scary. Sorry!’
I will do it anyway. Raven’s instincts are to fly away from danger, but the fishing cat knows better, it can sense that in the murky pond, are some nourishing fish, and its willing to leap in feet first to find out just where they are.
I am learning, slowly, to trust my feline side. I am so used to bird-jumpiness, fear and being anxious. But now it is time to actually look in the other direction and trust in that other part of me which instinctively knows how to make the big jump. Which knows that I actually need and crave touch in order to survive. That I need to hunt in the dark and murky places in order to find nourishment. That sometimes the places that seem to feature the most death (like swamps, and the dead forest) are actually the places that are teeming with the most life.
Thylacoleo also helps. He has a workman-like manner about him. A sort of, ‘I will do this because I have to, and how I feel doesn’t matter.’ This is what I have with many aspects of my own existence, except with a series of recent events where I find myself – claws out and wings spread to escape - just absolutely dying to get away.
But that’s the whole point isn’t it? My health is shot to pieces. I am literally in some ways, dying to get away.
It is my responsibility to take hold of my fear, and also of the illness, in order to see what it really wants to communicate to me. I have taken long enough. Sometimes it’s just a matter of accepting where you want to go, instead of fighting against the method of journeying.
Zirczekaja knows what he’s on about, but I expect that I might have some interesting journeys to talk about soon!
Feral Rabbit as Totem
Further information on Rabbit as totem (with emphasis on the feral rabbit of Australia) can be found here at my website.
Thoughts on Working with Extinct Animals
I work with Thylacoleo. I couldn’t tell you exactly what species I work with, and nor could I tell you exactly what the Thylacoleo I work with would look like in real life. They’ve been extinct for a good 30,000 years after all.
Some people bemoan the fact that they work with, or are, or have a totem that is extinct. It’s understandable really. You can’t just go and literally observe the animal. You can’t necessarily verify anything in your head as fact, unless there isn’t some obscure (or less obscure) scientific paper speculating about it first. And mostly it throws up the whole issue of trusting yourself.
It’s healthy to have a skepticism bone, and to exercise it. But sometimes we use it to trap ourselves from finding new knowledge. After all, we can’t ‘prove’ our UPG experiences in the Otherworlds, but what we can prove is the growth and transformation that can potentially occur because of them, if we choose to believe. Love is not something you can lay down on paper. If scientists knew exactly what chemicals caused love and why, they’d generate it for the terminally lonely. But we choose to believe in love firstly because of a commonality of experience (other people experience and believe in it, which gives us ‘permission’ to do the same), and secondly because we can actually experience it ourselves and it can lead to growth and transformation (and of course pain, bitterness and cynicism depending on where you want to take it).
Call me a fool – I don’t mind – but UPG and journeying is the same to me. There is firstly a commonality of experience, shamanists worldwide share surprisingly similarities of experience and purpose, in amongst their differences. And secondly there is my own experience of it, that has lead to growth and transformation.
For this reason I choose to believe in the way Thylacoleo has shown himself to me. I choose to believe that when I invited Thylacoleo into my body to experience his animal energy, my experiences were valid. I do certainly believe that those experiences were heavily biased, because I am a human, because my human brain likes to rush to make assumptions, and because we always like to have ways to explain things to ourselves. I also had my skeptical bone, so I dissected the experience too, chose to research Thylacoleo further, and also to look at where my assumptions might be letting me down and preventing me from further wisdom.
The one thing I did not do, was bemoan the fact that Thylacoleo was extinct in the first place. I’ve seen it happen, online and in person, where people complain how they can never truly ‘know’ if their totem / animal-ness / guide / spirit helper is that species, or if they’re seeing it right or correctly.
I think: Why does it matter?
At some point, there are gaps in scientific research that cannot give you the answers you need. And even people who work with ‘real’ animals that they can observe are let down by the research. At some point, you simply have to accept that you cannot know, and either choose to let go of the whole situation because your skepticism prevents acceptance of the unknown; or choose to take the situation into your hands anyway and see what positive forms of growth you can get out of it.
I choose to believe in many things I cannot see or prove beyond my experience, because one of the things that is a priority in my life is not scientific ‘fact’ (which I respect, though I am not scientist and I’ll be the first to admit it), but personal growth and transformation. Which means that if there is no science available to help me out, no list of species, illustrations and even skeletons to choose from with Thylacoleo to have some point of focus, I will have to do the hard work and find a point of focus within myself.
Choosing to trust in my own UPG experiences has, and continues to be rewarding. Yes, I have let myself down. I have had the odd experience which is almost completely informed by the ego and not designed to be rewarding to the spirit at all! Hasn’t everyone? Heh. But the wealth of my experiences shows me that this path I’m on is a healthy one.
Thylacoleo, my perevrnji, my spirit helper, shows himself to me however he wants. It may not be factually accurate, but it doesn’t stop him from teaching me strength, courage and perseverance.
I choose to believe.
Wildspeak… what the hell is this anyway?
My path originally started out as something quite traditional, I have ‘roots’, a heritage, and all of that.
A long time ago now I recognised that my path in shamanism / animism would have to spin away from that heritage and go on its own way. Russian shamanism in Australia is a laughable concept. And the Australian spirits that I’ve encountered and included in my practices are not a part of my spiritual past and cannot be included under the mantle of ‘Russian shamanism.’ And in fact, nor can a lot of the other concepts I’ve picked up over time. Concepts including how to incorporate mental illness and use it positively in shamanism, working with animal totems and guides on different and new levels to what I was taught.
And so I tend to call what I do now; ‘Wildspeak.’ It’s simple, and it fits me as a person, and that’s all it needs to do.
So while my pantheon has roots and a heritage, what I am learning from the gods now is almost all UPG. Same goes for the animals I work with. The journeying I do and the places I visit in the Otherworlds. I’m lucky to have a good rally of perevrjni (spirit helpers) and I’m also lucky to have quite a few ‘real life’ friends who are just as eclectic and dedicated as I am.
The purpose of this blog is to house my ramblings, thoughts and philosophies on what I practice and how it’s developing as I do as a person. It will change and grow, as I change and grow. And it has developed so much already. It has become more cohesive for me, less about strands of knowledge from a country I’ve never been to, and more about actual practicable experiences, learnings and teachings.
So I guess I’m also hoping to share those learnings in the hope that they may become teachings for others. Even if it’s just a ‘what not to do’ guide.
Okay okay, so I’m a fairly self-deprecating person at heart.
I just walk my path. I am extremely dedicated to what I do, but what’s not to love? I mean except for the initiation aspects, how challenging it can be, and when your spirit helpers are unhappy with you and want you to know exactly *why.* Actually I love this too.
Time to reel it in, otherwise I’ll ramble forever.
Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs)
Altered states of consciousness throw up a lot of confusion in Western society. People often asking themselves ‘what do they look like? what do the feel like? how do I get one? Okay, was *that* one? I don’t know!’ Many people that I’ve talked to who are learning shamanism often struggle with the concept of journeying, because they don’t know how to identify it, and are so used to consciousness. Worse, they may even be suspicious of it, mistrust it, or just assume that anything that isn’t consciousness must be delusion.
There are many different types of altered states of consciousness (which I’m going to refer to ASCs for convenience), and we slip in and out of them throughout our lives. Dreams are an example of an ASC that we all experience. And another that you may be familiar with is that blank state that you can enter into when life is feeling particularly hard. Ever catch yourself just staring blankly at something? Welcome to a very meditative state of consciousness! If you can learn how to employ that exact feeling during meditation and put a positive cast on it, you’ve learnt how to find a reservoir of inner peace.
Likewise, for those of us who do repetitive motions like cleaning, artwork, manual labour, or anything that is basically the same thing over and over again, you may find that you eventually enter an almost trance-like state. It is ‘trance-like’, because it is a form of trance. In fact it is an excellent preliminary state for journeying.
Journeying is – to me (different shamanists have different viewpoints on this) – the act of taking such a state and then using it in order to visit other realms in the otherworlds. Trance state can also be used to help create powerful visualisations of our internal universe and inner states which can be very transformative and healing.
Even the simple act of withdrawing enough to visualise an internal walk through a ‘garden’ (that looks however you want it to look) is the act of moving away from consciousness, into an ASC.
Studies (referring here to the work done by D. Goleman into the work of the mind) into consciousness and trance are showing that there is not only one or two types of ASC. There are countless types of ASC being employed in different religions worldwide. A shaman’s state of ecstasy may be very different to a Buddhist’s cultivation of deep, inner stillness and peace. And indeed, different shaman’s experiences of ‘ecstasy’ and trance from culture to culture may be perceptions and experiences of differing ASCs.
What is important is that these different states are all aimed to bring about some form of growth, though that growth may be focused in different areas of a person’s soul or psyche. It is also how we differentiate from a spiritual ASC, and an ASC associated with mental illness – like dissociation. The mechanics of dissociation are similar to those of a shamanic trance state, the difference being that one is an involuntary coping mechanism that is often employed unhealthily; the other is a tool used voluntarily (usually, and ideally) to achieve growth and transformation.
It’s easy to get confused about ASCs, so it’s important to be gentle with yourself, and remind yourself that you already know how to achieve a few states of ASC without even really thinking about it! 
Bringing it under your conscious control is a skill that can be mastered, and then using them to journey is a further skill. But that’s all it is. There is no magic trick to it, and it is something that almost everyone can do (some take longer than others, but there’s nothing wrong with that either).
