When the Animals Speak: What Happens When You’re Open to the Message

I want to tell you about a recent Tuesday in Turkey.

I nearly missed the whole thing. After navigating 4 local bus trips, I walked the wrong way, for 30 minutes on a road going nowhere, and had to make a snap decision that every childhood warning my parents ever gave me was screaming against: get in a car with two strangers!

I got in the car.

And what followed was simple Universal magic. Not because anything dramatic happened. But because the natural world decided to have a very clear conversation with me, and I was open enough to listen.

First, what actually is a power animal?

If you’ve never worked with this concept, let me give you a grounded explanation, not a mystical one.

A power animal, or animal spirit guide, is a consciousness in animal form that accompanies you through life, offering protection, medicine, and wisdom specific to your journey. The concept exists across virtually every indigenous and shamanic tradition on earth. It is not metaphor. It is not superstition. It is a living relationship with the intelligence of the natural world, which has been trying to communicate with humans since long before we decided we were too sophisticated to listen.

In shamanic practice, we understand that everything is alive and everything has a spirit. Animals carry specific qualities, frequencies, and teachings. A condor sees the whole picture with clear focus on the details. A wolf understands loyalty and the intelligence of the pack. A spider weaves the web of creation. These are not random associations. They are the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of observation and relationship.

You don’t choose your power animal. It chooses you. And it tends to show up when you need it most, if you’re paying attention.

I have a veritable zoo of power animals, and my jaguar, Athena, is always with me, however turtles have definitely held space for me.

Turtle: the one who crossed the water with me

When I was navigating what I can only describe as the hardest years of my life, sailing with someone who was emotionally toxic, my main power animal was sea turtle.

Of course it was.

Sea turtles navigate thousands of miles of open ocean using the earth’s magnetic field. They hold their breath in depths that would crush most things. They are ancient beyond comprehension. And they always, always find their way home.

Sea turtle energy is patient, enduring, and quietly unsinkable. It doesn’t fight the current. It reads it.

When I came ashore and began to rebuild my life, I briefly used a turtle as my first business logo, right off the boat. Then, after about a year, my strength returned and Athena nudged her way back to front and centre.

Jaguar: the one who claimed me on land

My jaguar has been with me since I was twenty years old, when I first became aware of her presence. Many years later she told me her name was Athena, which is apt, because jaguar medicine is not brute force. It is precision. Penetrating sight in the dark. The ability to see through illusion, to act with surgical clarity, to move through the unseen world without flinching.

For twenty-five years of practice as a shaman and healer, Athena has been beside me in every extraction, every soul retrieval, every session where I need to go into the darkness and come back with something true.

People sometimes ask me where my confidence in the work comes from. Part of the answer is Athena. You don’t second-guess yourself when a jaguar is standing at your side.

Sea turtle got me through the crossing. Jaguar claimed me on land. And I have thought of them as two separate chapters of my life.

Until Turkey.

The day the animals came back

Here is what happened in Hierapolis, which is an ancient healing city in Turkey, built around sacred thermal waters that people travelled weeks to reach. The region sits on an active fault zone, and Hierapolis suffered several major quakes over its history. The fact that it was destroyed and rebuilt did not pass my notice.

I was walking near a dry aqueduct when a land tortoise, about ten inches long, came walking through the grass directly toward us. Not past us. Toward us.

My friend Adam, who is now deemed a ‘turtle whisperer’, picked him up gently, and the four of us, Adam, Leisa my closest soul sister, the tortoise, and me, had a conversation. The tortoise was completely unhurried, utterly unbothered, heavy with what Adam described as surprising weight for his size.

Then we put him down, and I watched him walk back into the grass. I waited until the ceremony was complete on his terms.

The next day, on a riverboat heading for the mud baths, a giant brown sea turtle surfaced right next to me, seventy-five seconds before the boat returned to the dock. Looked at me. Disappeared. One other person saw it. It wasn’t for the crowd. It was for me.

Same animal. Different element. Full circle.

What the medicine was

Let me tell you what I was carrying that day, because the message only makes sense in context.

After. 3 years of long Covid, I finally came back to myself fully last September. New energy. Real vitality. A granddaughter newly in the world. Twenty-five years of deep practice, six ebooks, a podcast show, a body of work that I know is genuinely needed. And yet the business visibility feels like it’s moving at a pace that makes me want to scream.

I am not a patient woman when I can see exactly how something could look. That’s my Waxing Gibbous nature. The refiner. The one who can see the destination so clearly that the gap becomes almost unbearable. I know I am not alone in this!

And into that frustration, at an ancient healing site that people once walked weeks to reach, a tortoise walked directly toward me.

Turtle medicine does not do urgency. Turtle has been on this earth for two hundred million years, unchanged, because it found something that works. It moves through the grass, one step at a time, carrying real weight, completely unbothered by its pace.

And it still arrives.

The message was not subtle. The message was: stop measuring yourself against a timeline that was never yours. The consistency is the strategy. Do one small thing today. The next episode. The lead magnet doing its quiet work. None of it feels dramatic. All of it is movement.

The sea turtle surfacing in the final seventy-five seconds before I left those waters felt like something older than strategy. It felt like a completion. Like the part of me that survived the sailing years, the crossing, the long recovery, being seen and acknowledged by the same ancient energy that accompanied me through all of it. It reminded me how far I’ve come in almost 8 years of having my business online.

You made it. Now keep walking.

How to know if you have a power animal

You might already know. There may be an animal you have always felt an unexplained connection to. One that appears in your dreams. One that you encounter in ways that feel too precise to be coincidence, at turning points, in moments of decision, when you need courage or stillness or clarity.

You might find that a particular animal’s qualities seem to describe something essential about you that is hard to put into words.

Or you might simply start paying attention, and discover that the natural world has been trying to have a conversation with you for some time.

Here is what I know after twenty-five years of shamanic practice: power animals are not passive symbols. They are active relationships. They bring specific medicine for specific moments. A snake appearing when you are in transition is not coincidence. A jaguar showing up in your dreams when you are afraid or doubting your own power is not coincidence.

The question is whether you are open to receiving the message.

The lizard on the rock

On the same day as the first turtle encounter, I stopped to say hello to a lizard sunning itself on a rock.

Lizard medicine, since you’re curious, is about the dreamtime, about sensitivity to what is moving beneath the surface before it registers consciously. It is about knowing when to be completely still and when to shed what is no longer needed without losing yourself in the process.

I found him in the quiet between the two turtle encounters.

The day was giving me a full curriculum.

The wrong turn that led to everything

I want to come back to how the day began, because I think it is the most important part.

I went the wrong way. I almost didn’t get on the boat at all. The boat required a minimum of ten people and there was only me when I finally arrived, late.  A German family of six appeared at the last moment. We paid at least double and had the mud baths entirely to ourselves. I found a heart-shaped stone on Turtle Beach. A sea turtle surfaced to say goodbye. The German family gave me a lift home.

If I had gone the right way, I would have been early, probably taken a different boat, been surrounded by tourists, and lost in the chaos of all of it.

Along the road I recorded the abundant sound of nature, and enjoyed the second day of sunshine pouring down. But eventually I realised my map was leading me astray.

The magic did not come through the controlled route. It came through the wrong turn, taken anyway.

Through the childhood fear, overridden with discernment. Through waiting when I couldn’t force it, and trusting that the right people would appear.

Which, I think, is also what turtle was trying to tell me about my business.

What I am sitting with now

Turtle has returned to me in a new form, on new ground.

Sea turtle carried me through the crossing. Jaguar has stood with me through twenty-five years of practice. And now land turtle, ancient and grounded and unhurried, is walking through the grass of this new chapter with me.

Three animals. Three frequencies. All pointing toward the same truth: I have been on this path longer than this lifetime. The work is real. The foundation is solid. And the pace, if I stop fighting it, is exactly right. Maybe you are experiencing the same thing?

I am practicing turtle energy now, particularly around the frustrations of building visibility. One step. Consistent movement. Full presence. No urgency.

And I am watching the grass, because apparently the next message is already on its way.

 

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