Sacred Animals Series: The Stag

This will be the beginning of a series that I’ll be doing on the blog all about sacred animals. To me, all animals are sacred and hold so much wisdom and guidance for us in our day to day lives. I think that we could benefit to take many lessons and ideas from the animal kingdom and utilize them as windows and mirrors into our own lives. I will periodically explore certain animals that truly speak to me and the lessons and traits that I believe we can gleam from them to help serve us in our human lives.  There’s an inherent intelligence that exists amongst the animals that seems to cut through all of the noise and confusion of our human existence; I hope to shed some light into the noise!

The first in this series will be The Stag. Each week I will highlight a certain trait of the stag and dive a little deeper into them with journal prompts and quotes!

    The Stag represents:

grace, strength, vitality, reverence, and fierce love.

The Stag is seen as the protector or King of the Forest and keeps watch over all the other creatures within it. The Stag also embodies and represents the dance of masculine and feminine energies within a single being or entity.

    The Stag’s presence is powerful and revered amongst all the creatures of the forest yet only utilizes force when necessary. The Stag also calls upon our ability to pay keen attention; they are skiddish and require a stillness to be able to connect with their beauty and the nature they inhabit. In this stillness, we make room for observation, connection, and integration. The Stag is mysterious and has been a symbol of The Mysteries for ages. Their value has often put them in the literal cross hairs of violence. They are hunted and their antlers are taken as a symbol of the fierce love and strength they possess. For many living in this human experience, The Stag’s qualities either seem unattainable or they are unwilling to do the inner work to achieve them.

Grace

“Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.”

Philip Yancey

Grace is commonly defined as simple elegance or refinement of movement. Grace can also take on the connotation of divinity or divine influence. Grace is about having and practicing a loving-kindness for yourself and those around you. As the King of the Forest, The Stag showcases and demonstrates this loving kindness to all the creatures that dwell within it. Also, as the guardian and gatekeeper of your internal forest, The Stag calls upon your ability to show this loving kindness to yourself. Within your internal forest is a well spring of this divinity or divine influence that is in endless supply. In doing deep, internal work, we may dig and find things that are not to our liking or parts of us that we may make us feel unlovable, unworthy, or even ugly. In those places, the low parts, we must let grace flow into them. And with grace, we are then able to integrate those aspects of ourselves into our whole and completely loved being.

Below are some downloadable journal prompts to help you dig deeper into the quality of grace! Do you think we have many things to learn from animals? What animal are you most drawn to? Do you have any suggestions of animals that you would like me to do for this series? Let me know!

I really don’t like cleaning; but I really love having a clean and organized space. Because I’m an average person that doesn’t have the extra cash flow to hire someone to do this work for me, I decided that instead of letting all of my shit pile up for weeks and then go on a cleaning frenzy I should create a cleaning schedule that makes my life easier. Sometimes creating a system helps to break certain tasks down into more manageable chunks. How’s the saying go? How do you eat an elephant-one bite at a time! Same rings true for me and housecleaning and generally any sort of adulting. But adulting, at the end of the day, makes me feel good. And it leaves my mind and time open to do other things that I truly enjoy more be it cooking, creating, reading, or doing nothing.

I’ve included a PDF of my personal weekly cleaning schedule that I hope helps you out too! Keep in mind that this cleaning schedule is built and created for a one bedroom apartment but I believe that it’s broken down in a way that could be applicable to any type of home you have. And because I really love doing things other than cleaning, the bulk of the cleaning is done during the work week-which leaves your weekends entirely cleaning free aside from the daily maintenance shit like dishes. But if your work week lands your weekends on different consecutive days then, by all means, adjust accordingly to keep you free of chores as much as possible during your days off!

There’s nothing like the feeling of having a clean and organized home, because for me I feel like it allows me to have a clean and organized internal space as well. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but when I’m feeling internally gunky and generally don’t know what I’m doing with my life-my home will reflect that. There will be piles of books and papers everywhere, dishes in the sink, and I haven’t folded laundry in two weeks. It’s the physical equivalent of keeping all the tabs open from my brain except it’s spilling all over my table and I have to move everything to eat dinner. No bueno. So, instead, I use this to help keep my physical and internal worlds clutter free!

Do you have any tips or tricks for creating a clutter free space? Do you have a schedule that you like to follow or do you struggle with keeping the clutter and mess under control? Let me know how and if you notice a correlation between internal and external clutter! I think it’s an interesting parallel to discuss!