Spiders in the Night

I’ve been studying Shamanism since the Fall of 2005 with a group of dedicated students led by Ann Drake, a psychotherapist, shamanic practitioner and author of “Healing of the Soul: Shamanism and Psyche”. Ann describes a shaman as “a healer who has the ability to travel to other realms of reality, communicate and work with spirit guides and power animals to bring about healing for individuals, the community at large and the earth and all that inhabit the earth.” For the first six months of our training, we worked solely on connecting with our power animals to bring about protection, teachings and spiritual insight for our lives. There is much we can learn from understanding the nature of animals and how they operate in their world. For one thing, animals provide us with a model of instinctual behavior, doing what they are created to do without thought or conflict in response to whatever their world presents to them. They also possess great strength and power and in most cases, far surpass human beings in the area of physical prowess and sensory skills such as sight, hearing and smell. Their ability to adapt to sometimes quite harsh environments stands alone as a lesson in survival. What follows is another journal entry from my “Looking Back” series where I describe my initial look at the significance of a power animal in my life, two years before I began studying the more in-depth role they play in the practice of Shamanism.

Spiders in the Night
September 23, 2003

When I was seven or eight years old, I developed an unnatural fear of spiders. It was a point in my childhood when I started to see visions of gigantic shapes and creepy crawling things that moved across the walls of my bedroom while I lay in bed at night waiting for sleep to arrive. They were monstrous specimens, as much as seven inches in diameter with thick legs and round hairy bodies. I was terrified by their appearance even though my mother did her best to insist they didn’t exist. In my own young and inexperienced mind, I knew that what I saw wasn’t solid to the touch, however that realization frightened me more than if they had the power to bite through my skin. I didn’t like seeing things no one else saw or knew was there.

Throughout the years and well into my adulthood, I continued to have spider visions, sightings…hallucinations is maybe the best word to describe them. Sometimes I would sit up in bed and reach out and enclose them with my fingers. I was always surprised when I opened my palm and found nothing there; they seemed so life-like, so three-dimensional and real. They appeared in many different shapes and sizes. Some moved down from the ceiling on a wispy thread and hovered over my head on the pillow. Some lay silently still in the corners of the room. Some floated by on a breeze as cotton soft and fleeting as the air that blew them in and out of the shadows. And others scurried across the ceiling so fast, I would jump up and turned on the lights in hopes of dispelling their presence before they descended upon the bed and crawled under the covers with me.

The spiders never appeared again as large and luminous as in the eyes of the imaginative child I once was. And these days I don’t see them anymore, or at least I haven’t seen one since my first trip to the Monroe Institute about four years ago. There, I found a small frail spider perched in its web…the only time I ever saw one in a web as a matter-of-fact, stretched tightly across the opening of my CHEC unit (a Controlled Holistic Environment Chamber that provides isolation from light and sound). I stared at the spider for a long time, not able to determine whether it was real or not and I didn’t dare touch it to find out. A few days later I happened to mention the spider and the web to the program leader. After hearing about my experiences in the past, he said he suspected the spider was an animal totem or in my case, an insect totem…a natural object, being or animal to whose phenomena and energy I was closely associated with during this lifetime. He dug around and gave me a book called “Animal-Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small” by Ted Andrews which explained everything I needed to know about totems. A couple of things about spiders specifically, he writes, “Most spiders are actually very, very delicate. If you were holding a tarantula and dropped it, it would break and die. Spiders are a combination of gentleness and strength, and they have learned to combine both for successful survival…As delicate as they are, spiders are also very agile. They can maintain balance and walk the tiny silken threads. To walk the threads of life and maintain balance has been one of the mysteries throughout the ages.”

Once I heard and identified the meaning of the spider’s presence in my life, I never saw one again…that is, a vision of one. Sometimes the sad part about knowing the truth about something is that a portion of the mystery fades away. However, the resonance of its character has stayed with me. As I learn more about spiders and their relevance to my life, I discover new connections and common traits within myself to work on bringing out into the light with the hopes of furthering my progress towards becoming a healthier, more adaptive human being.