I was on the plane yesterday and decided to do a guided meditation by one of my Sedona sisters. The theme was a connection to an animal spirit. So as we start the visualization journey I am imagining all of the cool animals I want to connect with. Jaguars, bears, eagles, dragons... But as the meditation takes me to the clearing in the center of the earth where I am going to meet my animal teacher, the only animal there is a rabbit. I keep looking around, waiting for another badass creature to emerge that I can learn from. Nothing happens. Just the same old little rabbit.
I resign myself to the fact that rabbit has something to tell me, so I open myself up to the wisdom of the rabbit. I start to understand the rabbit's inherent vulnerability and the paltry defenses that it has to keep it safe from predators. Its fur is incredibly soft, it is full of juicy meat, it isn't incredibly clever, nor is it particularly fast. Their camouflage is pretty average, and it makes it's nests right out in the open. It has absolutely zero offensive capabilities, in fact instead of claws it's feet are so friendly that people put them on keychains! The spirit of the rabbit has surrendered wholly to this reality, without evolving a single horn or sharp tooth.
In my meditation I visualized hawks, cats, foxes, and wolves all eating the rabbit a billion times over throughout eternity. My silly ego kept trying to talk to the animals that were eating the rabbit, but only the rabbit would stay present in my vision. Every time I turned to another animal to connect with it, it would become a flat illustration.
But the Rabbit was not perturbed by these countless sacrifices of it's flesh. Tapped in to it's highest collective consciousness it was pleased that it could feed so many other animals. Then I learned the rabbit's secret weapon. Reproduction. Rabbits can produce more rabbits far faster than other predators can consume them. So the rabbit does not overly concern itself with the survival of any one particular rabbit, but rather the propagation of the species as a whole. As long as there are rabbits on this Earth the spirit of rabbit will exist in the manifest.
I understood the great lesson here. As beings of consciousness the greatest way to ensure survival of that consciousness is to reproduce it with the speed of the rabbit. We pass it on to people we talk to, our family, our friends. We spread these ideas faster than any drunk driver or heart attack can take it from the world. This is rabbit medicine. Great wisdom often comes from very small places.
This is a stunning post. What an incredible idea.
beautiful!
I’ve viewed most of your blog since finding it yesterday morning, and this post is probably my favorite, next to the helpful 3 pillars article and your video pills. This post is well developed and exhibits more subtlety than some of the others. I like your description of how the meditation was humbling as well as the conclusion you reached about the rabbit showing you the value of the collective whole and giving back to it at a rabbit rate. It resonates with an idea I’ve come back to often in the past few days, which is that people feel to me to be both wildly more and less than is the standard belief. I feel like we have a smaller than we can imagine role in the “big picture” of the universe so to speak but that the “big picture” is far more vast than any story we have yet developed comes close to describing. As a result of being part of such a big thing, we are greater in our small role than we are in any of the large roles we’ve imagined for ourselves thus far.
I’m a trapper 1/4 of the year and it’s my dad who taught me not to trap the rabbit because everything in the world wants to eat the rabbit.