The Power of the Snake

The Healing Power of the Snake Totem

In ancient times when we worshipped a Goddess and not a God, and before the Adam and Eve story gained precedence as the determined story of humanity on the earth plane, the snake was a revered animal totem strongly associated with healing.  It was understood that transmutation, or the ability of the snake to shed its skin, directed the full process of complete healing as directed from the outside in.

It is also interesting to note that the image of the snake has always been part of the "logo", as it were, for physicians.  To resurrect this shamanic healing practice to be able to participate in healing as an organic, holistic, integrated progression, the myth of snake energy offers tremendous guidance.

Experience a Clean Healing Slate for Yourself This Year

We, too, shed our skin and our cells completely along about once every seven years of our equally profoundly unfolding lives.  We are truly "born again"  with a full, clean slate to then freely create and respond as we wish anew.  Would we wish – do we wish even once a year along about this time, with new year’s resolutions, to incorporate a clean healing slate for ourselves?

How does healing work, anyway?  Physiologically it is a progressive process, using wound healing as an example, that begins with opening and bleeding, and ends with scabbing and absorption.  I use wound healing often in my Centering practice as a metaphor for integrative healing, and also frequently bring in the ancient meaning of the snake totem to better understand this process.

Sources of Great Power for Healing and Creation

In the days when we all lived in tribes, the designated healer, or shaman, of the tribe would go in search of guides, or totems, for healing and all spiritual direction.  It was understood that animals and all life on the earth plane were sources of great power for healing and creation.  The divine feminine, or Goddess, worked particularly with the snake totem in healing.

The snake totem, according  to ancient myth, develops the ability to take in any poison and transmute it, or convert it to a benign, even healing element.  Perhaps we carry this ancient wisdom into the present when we talk about how all challenge and misfortune brings us gifts of healing and development. 

Call on the Power of the Snake Totem for Complete Healing

When the snake ritually in its completed cycles sheds its skin, it is born again completely clear from "poisons", or what, in therapeutic terms we could call "woundedness", having developed enough and experienced all integrative healing to "absorb" the wounds, whereupon they disappear.

So here are some self-healing questions to reflect on and journal about to call on the power of the snake totem to support full, complete multidimensional healing for you in this forthcoming year:

"Medicine" Questions to Meditate On

1.  What have been the central "poison(s)" of my life?

2.  Have I transmuted them completely?  How?

3.  If not, what poison is left?  How do I know that?

4.  How can I imagine transmuting what’s left calling on the healing power of the snake to experience complete healing?  What would that look like?  Feel like?

5.  Now how can I "shed my old skin"?

6.  How does it feel to have a brand new one?

Be as the Goddess, and let the snake intimately coil itself to envelop you and extend to you all processes of complete healing, through all involved dimensions and cycles; and restore your spiritual power to initiate your own organic healing "from the outside in".  And blessed be …