Bear

Bear Animal Medicine: Introspection

The Bear is an animal that hibernates in caves to get away from the outside environment. So as a power animal, it indicates that you have to search within to fulfill your hopes and aspirations, or to find solutions to your problems. Bear is concerned with the reaching of goals. Just as a bear withdraws from the outside world when it hibernates, so should you withdraw from your entanglements and seek refuge within – in the silence where the power of knowing is, and where they answers to your needs, and the harmony you seek, lie hidden.

Bear also stresses the importance of the – the time to nurture your dreams and aspirations in a quiet period, and to seek ways to “own” them so they can become practical realities.

Bear is the power of the meditative state. So if you have Bear as a power animal ask it to help you find the center of your being – the place of perfect balance and harmony – and make sure that time for inner looking becomes part of your daily routine. Strength comes from looking within.

The strength of Bear medicine is the power of introspection. It lies in the West on the great medicine wheel of life. Bear seeks honey, or the sweetness of truth, within the hollow of an old tree. In the winter, when the Ice Queen reigns and the face of death is upon the Earth, Bear enters the womb-cave to hibernate, to digest the year’s experience. It is said that our goals reside in the West also. To accomplish the goals and dreams that we carry, the art of introspection is necessary.

To become like Bear and enter the safety of the womb- cave, we must attune ourselves to the energies of the Eternal Mother, and receive nourishment from the placenta of the Great Void. The Great Void is the place where all solutions and answers live in harmony with the questions that fill our realities. If we choose to believe that there are many questions to life, we must also believe that the answers to these questions reside within us. Each and every being has the capacity to quiet the mind, enter the silence and know.

Many tribes have called this space of inner-knowing the Dream Lodge, where the death of the illusion of physical reality overlays the expansiveness of eternity. It is in the Dream Lodge that our ancestors sit in Council and advise us regarding alternative pathways that lead to our goals. This is the power of Bear.

The female receptive energy that for centuries has allowed visionaries, mystics, and shamans to prophesy is contained in this very special Bear energy. In India, the cave symbolizes the cave of Brahman. Brahman’s cave is considered to be the pineal gland that sits in the center of the four lobes of the brain.

If one were to imagine an overview of the head, the top of it would be a circle. The South would be the forehead, the North the back of the skull, the West would be the right brain, and the east the left brain.

Bear is in the West, the intuitive side, the right brain. To hibernate, Bear travels to the cave, which is the center of the four lobes where the pineal gland resides. In the cave, Bear seeks answers while dreaming or hibernating. Bear is then reborn in the spring, like the opening of spring flowers.

For eons, all seekers of the Dreamtime and of visions have walked the path of silence, calming the internal chatter, reaching the place of rites of passage – the channel or pineal gland. From the cave of Bear, you find the pathway to the Dream Lodge and the other levels of imagination or consciousness. In choosing Bear, the power of knowing has invited you to enter the silence and become acquainted with the Dream Lodge, so that your goals may become concrete realities. This is the strength of Bear.

Go within. Personal strength comes from inner knowing.

Source: Sams, Jamie and Carson, David. Medicine Cards (Santa Fe: Bear and Company, 1988).