by Steel Dragon

Steel Dragon (Bob Thomson) was a French practitioner active in alt.religion.shamanism through the mid-2000s, known for cross-cultural perspectives and occasionally idiosyncratic theorizing. This short post, from May 2006, is one of his most grounded: a specific account of an encounter with a living tiger that opened into a working relationship with a tiger spirit guide, and an episode in which that guide gave practical, effective counsel.

The form of the encounter — present animal as bridge to spiritual counterpart — is a classical shamanic technique. The practitioner uses an image of the physical animal (in this case, a photograph set as a desktop background) as a focus for contact with the spirit. What the tiger says is worth noting: not "attack" but "you have the strength, you don't need to use it." This distinction between demonstrated and latent power is a teaching that appears across many wisdom traditions.

Among my animal spirit guides, the one I worked with the most was a dragon — the other ones being a brown bear, an eagle and a tiger. I tend to work less with this dragon recently, for various reasons. Anyway, I felt like sharing something about the tiger.

Some time ago, I had brought my kids to an open zoo where they care a lot about the animals, giving them really big areas to move on (ok, still a zoo). I remember being looked at by a tiger who was a mere three yards from me, only separated by a reinforced wire fencing. He looked at me straight in the eyes, and in a short glimpse, without any specific agressivity, he told me that I was basically nothing more than a potential source of food, just in case he cared.

Physically, any unarmed and careless human would not stand a chance in front of a decided tiger, and he was simply reminding me of that.

A few days later, still thoughtful about this moment in the zoo, I searched for a close-up picture of a tiger that I then put as a background on my computer's desktop, then I used it in order to get into contact with my tiger animal spirit guide.

At this time, I was a bit pestered by a know-it-all dude, and did not know how to put things straight enough. I was looking at the picture on my desktop and noticing the high intelligence in the beast's eyes, and gradually, it was my spirit animal guide that I was seeing and I was asking this model of raw force how to better handle such situations. I was not looking for any brute force option, but I got an interesting answer. I was told that being confident in one's strength could show up in quite subtle ways and in fact enabled me to play within any situation with a much more relaxed attitude, and this shift of perspective was maybe all that I ever needed.

I thanked the tiger and tried to do so the next time I was into contact with this person. It was really funny. It worked within minutes, so well, even though I was acting really subtly, that he felt quite destabilized. When I told him that I had applied this lesson, straight from the mouth of the tiger, after a few thoughtful seconds where he remained speechless like if he had not seen it coming, he could not mask his humiliated feelings, which was really funny since I had absolutely refrained from any agressive behavior, remaining calmly on the bank of the river. Not only was this lesson a very efficient trick, it was also most amusing one to put into practice.

Colophon

Posted to alt.religion.shamanism on May 7, 2006, by Steel Dragon (Bob Thomson), a French practitioner. The post is offered as a concrete example of working with an animal spirit guide: an encounter with a living tiger that opened into consultation with its spirit counterpart, and a specific answer applied in daily life.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

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