Lion spirit sits in the sun, is this your power animal?

A spirit animal or power animal is the spiritual energy of the animal on earth. The spirit animal is greater than the actual animal because it embodies the essence of that animal. It is the animal. It is not a human form of the animal or an human dressed as an animal, it is the animal spirit itself. For example with a spirit bear, it is the voice of all the bears that have ever lived. It is the shamanic bear. It is the bear that can see itself and speak. A spirit animal appears to the shaman as a vision. It is the voice of the wild, the voice of nature, the voice of the earth. This animal informs the shaman of the earth energy it holds. It gives the shaman power and protection. It is a helper that assists the shaman on the journey inward. No shaman would attempt an inner journey without the help of a power animal. The power animal conveys to the shaman and their people an energy they need to heal.
 

The medicine wheel is built by placing a small object that stands for the animal or energy in each direction around a circle. The circle can be as small as a hand or as large as the earth. The object can be a animal fetish, a feather, a sea shell or a special stone. It is always something deeply meaningful to you, something you have found or been given as a gift. In the process a center is also created and another special object can be put there. Through this process you create a sacred space that becomes a mini vortex of power. It is used to create intention.. Balance is created by the equal presence of all four energies acting at once.

By creating the medicine wheel, you makes a physical manifestation of earth's energies. It is a sacred alter which evokes the powers of the earth. Like an alter it brings your prayers in harmony with the energies of the earth. By actually making something real in physical space you act and create. The energy and prayer to heal is embodied and seen and can be touched.

A medicine wheel is simply a way of making sacred space more real and more visible. Ancient peoples believed that the medicine wheel in itself had great power and helped create change and healing. Medicine wheel are circles that were made all over the world. They come from the most ancient cultures and persist to the present. They were found throughout history in every culture.

Medicine wheels were always a place of ceremony and rutual. The rituals that were done at the medicine wheel are hidden or long forgotten. They probably were about the hunt, rites of passage, the stars, planting, migrations, the spirits. They were done at a community level, and involved huge amts of energy. Often the making of a medicine wheel involved moving huge stones hundreds or thousands of miles. It was like the making of the pyrimids in Egypt. The technology of making a medicine wheel or stone circle is not clear, how did they move those huge stones? Medicine wheel or stones cirlces exist from Europe to North America. There are stone circles in Florida cedar key England. They were certainly a place of great cermony, a place for the gathering of peoples, and were often away from village sites. Sometimes they were places of burial and temples too.