 Hello, beautiful souls. I'm standing here in my local food co-op because I just had the opportunity to do a commission piece for somebody local here, which was such an amazing thing. And with her permission, I wanted to show this piece to you because there's so much in here that I feel that just the collective of people can really benefit from beautiful energy with Mama Bear and the Tree of Life and Child energy and so let's let's dig into it. So in this video, I'm going to share the process of making one of these old oracle paintings, and we'll look at this particular painting and some of the meaning that's shining forth and then I'm going to zero in on one little character in this painting. That's Mama Bear because I feel like her energy is really, really important right now. So if you are coming here to learn about the spiritual meaning of Mama Bear, you're in the right place and that will get to that pretty quickly here. Okay, so first of all, what is a soul oracle painting? Well, it's a painting where I tune into the energy of a person and image comes out. Now in this particular painting, this is based on a dream of the client and it was actually pretty cool. I met her at a holistic fair. She was a fellow vendor and on the way down, my daughter had come down with me. We have been talking about bears and almost as soon as I have my table set up, my client comes over. I didn't know her, but she comes over. She's like, you're the one. I was like, what? She said I had a dream and I'm looking for an artist to paint this dream and I just know from looking at your work that you're the one. And so of course I was delighted and so here's the process that I work with people is that first of all, we'll meet together. We'll discuss what the intention is for the piece and then I include an energy session. That's an energy scan where I'm looking to all your chakras and see what comes forward. So in this case, she already had the dream. The imagery was already really well-formed and so when I did the energy scan, a lot of stuff came up and some of the imagery also came out of that scan, but primarily it was out of her dream and one really, really important character in the dream was this little golden grizzly bear cub and so that's in there and then her daughters came forward. So I really had the strong feeling that the children needed to be in the painting as well as this beautiful tree, this pine tree, came forward. And so I won't go into the deep into every single aspect of this painting. There's a lot of symbolism. Everything in here is meaningful and so of course my client has a full video with going into all these little pieces, but I just wanted to give a general feeling because I feel like this this painting is really bringing forward an energy that's important for all of us to keep in mind and hold in our mind's eye right now is this feeling, I call it joy of life and it's really talking about the life force and which is the also known as the Christ stream, but the life force energy of the planet, that which loves to live, right, that sings the consciousness of the planet into being. And I feel like my client's dream was really calling on this life force and helping her to connect with it. And that's what this painting is about and the I feel like it's a portal also for helping to connect with that life force. The child symbolism is so so central and integral to this idea of the joy of life, right, because it's the child that represents the continuation of life, right, and there's there's a lot in our culture right now that is undermining the child and the archetype of the child and children in general. So I feel like you know, the power that's coming forward in this painting is calling on that in the world, which is upholding and nurturing and enabling the child energy to grow and thrive. Okay, a couple other things here, the butterflies and moths, of course, those are symbols of transformation, the sun and the moon, the deep, deep symbolism. It's so deep, I'm not even going to go into that right now, but also the salmon is also a transformative kind of a spirit animal and it also has to do with wisdom and as the child also does. So again, I will leave that for another time, but I just also wanted to go into the symbolism of Bear and Mother Bear in particular, okay? And if you look closely, you may be able to maybe able to find Mama Bear here. She wasn't in my client's dream, but as I worked with her and as I started on the piece, it really felt strongly. I felt her energy very strongly and all through the period of time that I was working on this piece, which is over the summer of 2022, that Mama Bear energy was super, super strong, okay? And here you can see her in the background in the the green bushes, almost like a spirit bear watching over the scene and kind of making sure that everything is well, okay? So in the second half of the video here, I want to talk more about Mother Bear and her symbolism and what she means and the power that she can bring to us as we work with this particular power animal, okay? So in this painting, we're working with Grizzly Bear energy, okay? This is the brown bear, which is also related to the European brown bear, and the Grizzly is a symbol, as all bears are, of courage and strength, confidence, right? Protection, bears in general are also very, very connected with shamanism, okay? With the shaman. And partly it's because the bear will go into this kind of state of hibernation. Scientists tell us it's not true hibernation, but it's very similar. They go into this deep sleep, right, throughout the winter. And so this is associated with the dream time and going into that state between, right, the state where you can access other worlds. And the bear also has this association with healing as well as the dream time. And also with the natural rhythms and cycles, okay? And looking at Mother Bear in particular, Mother Bear is known, of course, for being this incredible, both protective energy and the nurturing energy. And that pertains, of course, to the young, to the child energy or the bear cub. One thing that I feel like is coming forward really strongly right now in the collective is this very strong sense of feminine power. And often kind of the feminine anger is coming forward really strong. And like everything else, there's a polarity to that. And so the feminine anger and feminine rage is an incredibly powerful force to reckon with, okay? And we need to recognize that there is a positive end of that spectrum and a negative end of it, okay? And so on the positive end and where we see that feminine rage in nature is in, always in the protection of the young. That's where that feminine protective energy really gets triggered and activated and is used in the service to life, right? So she's there as this protective force. And we all know that when there are cubs present, you don't want to get the weight of mama bear, right? Because she is formidable and she will just take down whatever is threatening her cubs, okay? This is a really, really super positive aspect to that feminine rage, right? That she's going to take down anything that threatens her young. As we move forward as a human collective, this is something that we really need to feel into. It's like, where are we right now? And what is it that we're wanting to protect? It's the future. It's a future of humanity. And here's another rabbit hole I could go deep into. But it's very, very important to recognize that humans are parts of the world, right? We belong to this world. And a lot of times as star seeds often we don't feel like we belong here. But really we do where children of the earth just as much as we are of the sun and the stars. And I love that in this painting, the two daughters, the little children, are coming in with the bear cub, okay? So it's like this reintegration or this conformation that we are this part of nature and that we're a very special part of nature, okay? The children are not becoming the bear. The bear and the children have different roles, but they are all playing together, right? And part of this whole incredibly beautiful scene and environment and landscape, they're integral. The children are just as integral as the bear, okay? But the negative polarity where this can go awry is where the mother energy turns against the child energy. This can happen in nature in certain times when the mother gets very stressed. But I feel like in this painting, the mother bear represents that very positive polarity of the protective mother, okay? So as we move forward, just a caution, okay? If you're connecting really strongly to that feminine protective rage energy, really be aware of, is this a rage that is really protecting the life force? Or are we actually moving into a rage that is inverted that is actually taking down the life force? Really feel into that. And because some of the most, some of the most, the strongly held beliefs in the collective right now, and especially amongst women in the feminine collective, they don't always uphold the life force, okay? So we really need to be aware where we are directing our rage and how that is being held and felt, okay? Because rage that is really protecting the life force is a positive force when it's not, you know, it can be a very negative thing. Okay, so a little bit about the grizzly bear mother and some, some facts that I want to share that will help to understand if Mama Bear is coming forward for you, how that works. And because it's the mother, right, we're working with the creative cycle and your creative power, okay? So if Mama Bear is coming forward for you as a power animal or as a totem, here's how she often will be affecting your creative cycle, your creative power or force. And so let's look a little bit at how that works in the bear. A grizzly bear typically will mate in the early summer and she'll give birth in the winter or early spring, but there's some really interesting things that happen in that cycle, okay? Unlike most mammals, that embryo is not going to implant right away. It kind of free floats for a while. And the reason it happens is that it allows the mother bear to determine if this is going to be a good year for her to reproduce, okay? Because she needs a certain amount of weight to put on. And if it's a really good year, she'll be able to do that. If it's a poor year, if she's not able to find the food she needs to sustain both her and cubs, right, in a healthy way, that embryo may not implant, okay? So it gives her that little sense of control over her body in order to really carry forward that life force in a way that is going to give the young the best chance, okay? So we need to know here that the bear has like the lowest reproductive rate of any land dwelling carnivore, a carnivorous mammal anyway, and the smallest size ratio of the newborn compared to its mother. So a newborn grizzly is only 12 to 16 ounces at birth, whereas mom's going to weigh 250 to 350 pounds. She's big, okay? And so these are very, very vulnerable creatures and she needs to be able to give birth and nurture them. Another interesting thing is that the bear gestation period will vary just because of this delayed implantation. It can be anywhere from between about 180 to 266 days between the time that she mates and the time that she gives birth, okay? So again, a lot of control here that she has over the body and over the reproductive cycle. And part of the reason for this is that she spends a lot of time, she invests a lot of time and energy into her cubs. She'll have an average of two cubs per litter. It'll be usually one to four. And on average, she's only going to have one litter every three years, okay? And she spends a lot of time teaching them, raising them. And so she wants to make sure that she gives them the very best start possible, okay? So a few things to keep in mind if you're working with this bear energy, especially in regards to your creative life, okay? You want to be very selective about kind of giving your creative projects everything that they need, finding the right time to start them, gathering everything that you need in order to give your creative projects, whether it's a work of art, whether it's a business, whether it's whatever else that you're creating, a new family, take the time that you need to gather everything together that you need and to give yourself the time and the space to do this, okay? To make sure that you're giving things a good start here. The other thing is that with the mating and the delayed implantation, sometimes there may be a seed of an idea or something, or you may be sowing seeds or planting seeds well in advance and you might not even be aware at the time that these are seeds that are going to lead to something creative coming forth out of you, okay? So if you think back to earlier parts of your life and you might be able to see things that are, you know, seeds that you've planted, skills that you've developed that you might not even have known why and that these are going to be something that feeds into something that you're here to bring forth. And then the other thing of course is that she gives birth during that deep sleep, okay? So it's this sense of going down into the deep which symbolizes the unconscious, the subconscious, the intuition, right? And really allowing oneself to go into that room space. So this could indicate a period of downtime. It could be a period of even going into that dark night of the soul of or allowing yourself to go into meditation or just clearing your mind, clearing yourself and allowing the seeds of intuition to implant themselves in your subconscious, in your intuitive mind. And that it can be talking about just kind of shutting the mind down a little bit, okay? It's really easy in this day and age in our modern world for the mind to want to take over and plan everything but Mother Bear asks us to release that and just to allow ourselves to go into the dream world for a while, okay? And I think it's no coincidence and we had talked about the link of the bear to shaman, to the shaman. More than one language is said to use their word for bear to mean a female shaman, okay? So this is very deep kind of magical shamanic feminine energy that we're working with, okay? And what she does is she goes into the dream world and she brings forth out of the dream world what she's here to create. And so that's really incredibly powerful mystical feminine energy that the bear symbolizes. She's a very, very powerful totem if you're working with her and both for anything creative and also for healing. Also, there's a big link with the ancestors, okay? So she can go into that ancestral realm and have that link because she has that link with the life force. And then finally when she comes out and gives birth, she'll give birth to the cubs early winter or late winter or early spring and she'll give birth in the sort of state of a hibernation or dream time. And the young again are very, very small and vulnerable. They'll find her teats and suckle and then by the time she brings them out, they're able to move around and she spends a lot of time teaching them, okay? She'll teach them how to hunt. She'll teach them how to do things. But she's sort of a stern task master, okay? She's not a lenient mom, but she's a very, very loving mom. So she knows how to bring up her young and discipline them and teach them the ways of the wild, right? So that fits with like learning, you know, any kind of shamanic practice, any kind of traditional wisdom schools, right? Or wisdom traditions always have very strongly stipulated laws and kind of taboos and what is proper and the proper ways to do things and what to avoid, okay? So that's what she's teaching her young and that's also an indication or an encouragement if you're working with bear energy to maybe delve into one or more of the wisdom traditions or the spiritual law, her medic principles, anything like that that will help you to have that kind of framework to work within because that gives her the safety and the security of knowing how to work with the world and that's what she gives to her cubs, okay? And she does not hesitate to discipline them if necessary. And then finally, another thing that we need to be aware of is that one of the biggest threats to a young cub is the male bear, okay? Because he does not play any part in the raising of cubs, okay? And this doesn't mean that men don't raise, you know, like human men. Human men very much do are a very important part of the raising of children. But when we're tuning into bear, we're tuning into that feminine energy and what she protects against is the negative polarity of masculine power, okay? That, and again, just like the feminine can take down the young, so can the masculine, okay? And so she's a very, very strong protective force that will protect against that overly dark masculine. She will protect her young against that. Even a male bear will back down from her, okay? So that's really, really important thing to be aware of the power of the angry feminine to really protect life. And we see that in the goddess Kali and some of these other warrior goddesses, that's what they're there for. They're there to protect the young life, right? The continuity of life, okay? And then at the end of the two or three years that she raises her cubs, she will drive them away. And she does that for a very good reason. It's time for them, first of all, and she needs to save her energy now for the next litter, the next round of life that will come up. And also because she knows that she will, you know, as she moves into her next cycle, she will start to attract those male bears to her. And it's really important that those young who are still, they're grown enough to be on their own, but they're still not quite a full grown bear. They need to be just out of the picture. So even in driving them away, she's got that protective sense of her being working on their behalf. Okay. And so just to recap with the grizzly bear meeting, and the mama bear meeting in particular, is going to be the courage, the strength, the protection, being aware of natural cycles and where you are in your cycles of accessing the dream time, accessing that deep, intuitive world, the dream world, and being able to go down into that, into the womb space and to bring forth life, the power of mother bear. All right. So I hope that you've enjoyed this video. And also I just want to let you know that I am available to do this work. I call it Soul Oracle Arts. And if you are feeling drawn to this work and would like to learn more about having a custom piece done for you, it doesn't have to be a dream. I can also just tune into your energy and see what wants to come forward or tune into, say, your angel guides or specific spirit guides and bring them forth into an image that you can see and work with. There's a lot of power in these. And so if you're interested in that, I'll leave the information below. And so thank you for joining me here. And remember, you were born to be free.