Seeing A Dead Fish – Spiritual Meanings:
It is about the end of a cycle
“To everything, there is a season…” — Ecclesiastes 3:1
When I see a dead fish, it is an impactful way of acknowledging that an emotional chapter has come to a close.
When I dream of fish, it actually refers to water that is connected with my emotions, intuition and also my unconscious.
Water is fluid, mutable and it sees all sides of various emotions: from the easy sparkle on top to those fathoms deep wells that remain unseen.
Dead fish in the road basically means a closure with some emotional aspect of my life.
It can also represent the closing of an unhealed wound of an old relationship.
Seeing the dead fish is obvious that it’s time to let emotions which stick around too long flow back out.
And this end of the emotional energy creates room for a new variety of emotions to sprout.
The spiritual wisdom of the dead fish is that stagnation must be released. Water becomes stagnant when it lies still for too long and is no longer fit to give life.
Unresolved feelings likewise preclude spiritual growth.
It is a clear-cut message that in case I hold on to any emotional carrying or continue dwelling in the old energies, I am just stuck and dead like my fish.
It helps me to unpack my luggage and open the floodgates of fresh new rivers in which I navigate emotionally.
It is about transformation
“The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” — 2 Corinthians 5:17
Transformation is not just a phase for me; I am always transforming.
The silhouette of a dead fish holds an emboldened typographic message of renewal.
Death in nature is not an end.
Death is one of the wheels turning that lively, unending circle.
A dead fish in a pond attracts scavengers and decompositions that feed the ecosystem, helping the fish’s successors survive.
Nothing ever really ends, spiritually speaking.
Any end is a door to something new.
At its fundamental core, death is a transition.
Not only is the dead fish a manifestation of something ending in my emotional or spiritual life, but it is also an indication to me that something new will begin.
While it might seem merely a grim or mournful sight, I have come to see the dead fish as the precursor of rebirth.
It is these times that I am the biggest believer in leaning into and accepting transition.
The universe is telling me to let go of that which I no longer need.
And I need to do the work, letting go of the old beliefs and limiting times/ways/places so that rebirth can occur.
This kind of death makes way, and soon, I begin to feel something emerge in those places that I had once thought were nothingness.
I take solace in letting it all happen.
I was where things come to an end and seeds grow into new beginnings.
It is about mortality
“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” — Psalm 90:12
I cannot deny for a second that all things — myself very much included— must end.
I find confronting my mortality to be largely avoidable because it is painful, but within this confrontation lies great spiritual growth.
If I see a dead fish, it draws my consciousness straight back to just how fleeting our time on this Earth is.
A moment that requires me to acknowledge the fact that everything here is temporary.
This may seem like a small view, but it acts as a great reminder that life is short.
No amount of holding on will allow humans or circumstances to abide permanently in my life.
It does not require being a morbid exercise.
Instead it is a lesson in appreciating every moment and person I ever encountered.
They mold me into the person that I am, and accepting their temporal nature compels me to live a life with more meaning.
In a spiritual sense, everything in life is temporary.
Knowing this brings me closer to the realization of non-attachment.
There is no permanence in life, and nothing at all can be guaranteed.
I feel the holding of that emotional weight from trying to control everything.
It moves me into a life of intention, gratitude and reverence for the moment because, really, that is all I have.
It is about cleansing
“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28
Fish are the deepest currents of emotion to me spiritually.
When I come across a dead fish, the sign is my feeling of an emotional weight being finally lifted off me that I didn’t even know they had been carrying.
That feeling is gone now, which tells me something emotional and symbolic has just died so I can let my spirit free today.
There are moments in my life when the emotional wounds get to be a bit too much.
These feelings of guilt, shame, anger, or even grieving have a way of getting hold of my soul.
And the dead fish is there for me to gaze upon, reflecting those energies that are rotten long back and still hinder my growth process.
I need to cleanse them and confront these unprocessed emotions festering for far too long beneath my mental awareness.
It is such a difficult concept for me to grasp that emotional release can sometimes be so arduous because it needs to happen.
Unresolved emotions are the same as those dead fish that eventually sink to the bottom of a lake until I let them surface and release.
This message motivates me to the path of emotional purging, to erase the past in order for my new self can take place with strong and nurturing feelings that help my evolution.
It is about spiritual nourishment
“Immersion in the scriptures is essential for spiritual nourishment.” – Quentin L. Cook
My history with fish has always been one of sustenance—physical and emotional.
If I find a dead fish, it tells me that there is something off balance in the way of feeding my spirit.
A dead fish reflects my spirituality gas tank being empty.
This brush with starvation is a wake-up call to check in on where I have been spiritually neglected.
This is when I need to go in and practice all the things that once turned me on.
Meditating, praying or just quiet time where I allow room for my spirit to take a breather.
Time to reignite that passion, feed the soul some wisdom and love, be at peace, and not begone like a hungry beast.
It is about adaptation
“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” – H. G. Wells
A death fish brings to me one of the strongest messages — adapt.
By their very nature, fish are fluid and can adjust.
When they die, it means something in my life is just not working and has fallen away.
The other message was clear: it’s a matter of adaptation and upward mobility.
As life is ever-changing, so must I grow and change along with it.
A dead fish let me know that the world around him is changing, and to resist would be like resisting change in my soul. But instead, I must move with life.
Adaptation is not always easy.
It often takes me out of my comfort zone but is a part of what spiritual growth looks like.
Resistance has no purpose.
It causes me to stay in place.
In opening myself up to the rhythms of nature, I am allowing for new developments, entanglements and connections on a spiritual level.
It is about the divine feminine
“You always have access to the divine feminine.” – Danielle LaPorte
Fish is a symbol of fertility and the Divine Feminine.
The fish dying always seems to be a reflection of the feminine energy in me—my intuition, my nurturer nature, and even my creativity — going through some changes.
Fundamentally, this energy is within all of us.
The dead fish tells me to remember that it is a part of myself. Centering back into the divine feminine helps me to heal so much trauma of my past.
It is about the water element
“The voice of the Lord is upon the waters…” — Psalm 29:3
Fish are creatures of water and hold a close affinity to the element of water.
A dead fish is like a message from the water element that there might be some emotional and intuitive energy I’m neglecting.
Maybe something is getting blocked or some imbalance has crept, and this is my alarm.
This is why water, intrinsically on its own, purifies.
The way it moved all the time was equivalent to my emotional and mental life.
The dead fish interrupts the harmony of this flow, indicating that an emotional and intuitive flush is in order for me.
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I’m Bulgarea Candin Stefan and I have started Spiritual Whirlwinds to pass my learnings from my spiritual journey. Spiritualwhirlwinds.com provides a space of spiritual awakening with guided meditations, e-books, mantras, and pendulum readings.