Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Dancing Your Power Animal
To ‘keep’ a power animal and renew personal vitality by physically moving and sounding like it to a steady rattle/drum beat — letting the body, not the analytic mind, hold the ally.
Dancing your power animal: With a steady rattle/drum beat, invite your power animal to move you. Take its posture, gait, and gestures; add its sounds; turn through the four directions; become it for a few minutes. Then still yourself, thank it, and ground. Do it regularly — the body-state shift and the felt connection are what the practice is for.
What it is
In Michael Harner’s Core Shamanism, meeting a power animal on a journey is only the beginning; the animal must be kept, and Harner taught that the principal way to keep it is to dance it — to physically embody the animal, moving and sounding the way it does, to a steady rattle or drum.
This is a somatic, waking practice (eyes can be open), distinct from the eyes-closed imaginal journey. Harner held that a power animal, unattended, drifts away; regular dancing “honours” it and lets it express itself through your body, renewing the vitality (the “power”) the relationship is meant to confer.
Read honestly, it is an embodiment/state-induction practice: rhythmic movement plus role-enactment plus arousing percussion reliably shift one’s felt energy and mood. The “ally” is best understood as a personified inner resource you are activating through the body.
The Method
A faithful representative protocol following Harner’s teaching:
- Have a power animal first. This practice presupposes you have met an animal ally on a journey (see the Lower World journey). You are now embodying that animal.
- Make space and set the beat. Stand in a clear area. Use a rattle or drum at a steady, fairly rapid tempo (Harner’s restoring-power work uses a rattle shaking on the order of ~180 shakes per minute; a brisk, even beat is the point). You can shake the rattle yourself or have a recording/partner keep time.
- Call the animal into your body. With the beat going, invite the animal to come and move you. Stop directing; let it lead the movement.
- Move as the animal moves. Adopt its posture, gait, and gestures — crouch, prowl, soar with the arms, paw, coil. Let the movement be the animal’s, not a polished dance. Harner’s instruction is to become it, not to perform a routine.
- Sound as the animal sounds. Add the animal’s voice — growl, screech, call, breath. Sound deepens the embodiment and the shift in state.
- Turn to the four directions. Classically the dance moves through the four cardinal directions (a turn toward each as you dance), a structuring rhythm Harner used for honouring and orienting the practice.
- Dance for a few minutes, then settle. A short, full-bodied dance is enough. Let the movement wind down with the beat.
- Thank the animal and ground. Stand still, feel your own body return, and silently thank the animal. Repeat regularly — Harner stressed that dancing the animal periodically is what keeps the relationship alive. (Sourcing note: “dancing your power animal,” the rattle-driven movement, sounding the animal, the four directions, and the keep-it-by-dancing rationale are Harner’s documented teaching in The Way of the Shaman. Exact tempos vary by edition/teacher; descriptions are faithful paraphrase, not quotation.)
Source & Lineage
The practice appears in The Way of the Shaman (1980), in the material on the Journey to Restore Power, and is taught through Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies. → suggested node.
Harner cited cross-cultural examples (e.g. a Tlingit grizzly-bear song) of shamans becoming one with their animal through song and movement; his contribution was to render it a learnable, secular-friendly exercise. Compare the journeywork of Sandra Ingerman and Hank Wesselman.
The Traditions' versions
Lower World journey (Harner) — how you meet the animal that you then dance.
- Trance / ecstatic dance — sustained rhythmic movement to drive an altered, energised state; the broad family this belongs to.
- Animal-form practice across cultures — totem dances, masked animal dances, the “becoming the animal” of many indigenous traditions, which Harner generalised.
- Embodiment / parts work — deliberately taking on a posture and voice to evoke a state (cf. somatic psychology, Gestalt “two-chair,” Feldenkrais role-taking).
- Power posing / state-by-body — the milder, secular cousin: changing felt state by changing posture and movement.
Common refinements
Choreographing instead of letting go. This is not a routine to perform; let the animal move you. Self-consciousness is the main blocker.
- Skipping the sound. Voicing the animal markedly deepens the state — don’t stay silent out of embarrassment (do it privately if needed).
- Doing it once. Harner’s whole point is regularity; a single dance won’t sustain the relationship or the felt benefit.
- Over-doing intensity. A few committed minutes beats exhausting yourself; wind down and ground.
- No grounding. Always return to your own body and orientation at the end, especially if the dance got trance-like.
- Literalising. Treat the “ally” as a meaningful inner resource, not a captured spirit, to avoid magical thinking.