Sorry it’s taken so long to reply to reply to this. I haven’t had the time to sit down and detail it until now. I’ll also need to do a little back tracking, so please forgive me if I sound a little long winded. But without a prior point of reference, my explanation won’t make much sense.
Unconventional totemic shamanism is essentially a free-form method of shamanism that removes all the modern stereotypes, and places a heavy emphasis on the totemic aspect. So what does all that mean?
Shamanism is, in a nutshell, the oldest form of human spirituality that once served as the foundation for all complex religions. It is a belief and value system based on cause and effect, and focusing on a highly personal relationship with both the external visible natural world, and the internal unseen unnatural world. It can be secular or non.
In contemporary terms, most people and most occult/pagan publications view shamanism as almost exclusively Native American or generalized Indian spirituality. While AmerInd beliefs certainly fall under the blanket of shamanism; and are fairly good examples, those beliefs are not exclusive and the terminology and etymology is incorrect. The actual term “shamanism” originated in Eastern Europe by nomadic Mongolian tribes. The indigenous people of the Americas are more correctly called “medicine men”, and ironically among North American tribes (especially the Lakota), non-Indian practitioners who embrace shamanism are derogatorily called “Plastic Shamans”.
Anyway, the unconventional shamanism minimizes or de-signifies the pop-culture stereotypes that essentially only use Indian-exclusive methods, as well removes the potentially faux neo-pagan symbolism that was added in the early-to-mid 20th century to sell books and legitimize other forms of budding belief systems that were not yet in the mainstream. Those forms are certainly welcome; after all, whatever works for the individual is valid, but the practice does not exclusively use any one path as the default method. Instead, it draws influence from all parts of the ancient world and uses simplified belief currents from much older and arguably more simplistic forms. It also concentrates heavily on the local regional geography of the shaman, instead of relying on fixed tribal or magical doctrines that may not be relevant or available in a different part of the world.
The totemic aspect relates to a totem or fetish. (Fetish meant in the historical sense of the word, not a post-modernistic psychosexual trigger.) These are physical objects or personal accouterments that worn (e.g. animal skin), placed (e.g. totem pole), or embraced (e.g. moonlight) bestow power, bring about change, are used as magical tools, or are guardians or thought memes that can attack or defend.
In my own pathworking, I bring shamanistic practice down to its most simplistic terms—a single individual who tries to create his or her own personal cosmology by observing the natural world, exploring the unnatural world, and using both spiritual means and artificial methods to bring about change.
I then further narrow it down into a singular aspect that reflects my persona: I’m a cat person. But more specifically, ever since I was a child, I wanted to be a real cat person. From my earliest memories as a child, I longed for the ability to manipulate or transform myself into a hybrid of the two. As I grew older, I had a very specific mind’s eye image of what cat people (or werecats) would look like, but nothing in my immediate surroundings properly represented cat people. Thus most of my emphasis turned to lycanthropy, because werewolves were far more common, and there was enough material out there I could study.
However, three influences came into my life in the mid-80’s that were epiphanies; and ones that would later shape my spiritual path:
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As something everyone here is familiar with, in 1985 Thundercats aired on TV, and soon later the toys came out. That was the first instance when I was exposed to something external that pretty much mirrored what cat people were “supposed” to look like, and I was hooked. For the first time, I had an outlet that was more than just my drawings or imagination.
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In 1987 my second exposure was when I saw the musical CATS. That was an even bigger shock, because that took the general aesthetics of Thundercats out of the two-dimensional television, and brought it live in front of me in flesh and blood. This was especially thrilling, because for the first time, I realized cat people didn’t have to be confined to cartoons or drawings. They could exist in the real world as realistic looking beings, instead of the corny mascots or unrealistic anthropomorphic animals I had seen up until then.
(The mascot and cheeky anthro costumes would later be hijacked by the Furry community in the 1990’s and touted about as their signature ethos, but that community emphasizes almost exclusively the sexualized “animal” persona, whilst ignoring the human half which makes up the duality of “true” human/animal hybrids.)
- My final revelation was in 1988, when I played the video game Altered Beast for the first time at the arcade. In the game, you must go through levels collecting magical orbs that allow you to gradually transform into a were-creature. In the first level, you turn into a werewolf. In the second, a weredragon, in the third, a werebear. But it was the forth level that really affected me, because in it, you turn into a weretiger. This was a profound moment because Thundercats and CATS represented the beatific blending of the human/feline hybridization I had always imagined, but the weretiger in Altered Beast represented the more feral “warrior” werecat done almost in the vein of the werewolf—bipedal stance, body covered in fur, with an animalistic head.
Of course, as I got older, I discovered many more outlets in comics or books that I didn’t know about, but the aforementioned were the trinity (or trinary) to foundation of my spiritual pursuits.
So, to wrap it all up: I use shamanism (broken down into meditation, mimicry, dance, and music) as an initializing current to tap into the very specific and very primal nature of our animalistic sides. We all have it in us, but the advent of so much technology and modern culture has dulled our senses and made us too dependent on things that require electricity or gears to function.
Once that connection has been established, I then use the totemic aspect as the physical, final representation of transformation into a werecat through guising. (Guising is basically costuming, but done in a formal manner that supercedes mere conventional cosplay. Furries wear costumes at conventions. Norse Berserkers guised when they wore bear skins into battle.) So, my costume aspect in my avatar pic is the totemic form of shapeshifting. I.e., it’s the physical object or totem that allows a transformation. In this case, the costume is the visible outward representation of the body’s transformed state.
True physical transformation into a human/animal hybrid form as we know it seems unlikely, unless there’s some seriously powerful reality hacking out there, or through applied future genetic engineering. I’m not discounting other ways, but the skeptical side of me demands proof. Considering nothing has been corroborated, I have to take everything with a grain of salt and concentrate on the means that work. For me, that means embracing artificial means (guising) to transform, instead of pursuing alleged “true” methods that will never succeed in my expectations of a real physical change, yet are somehow validated because someone wrote a book about it and claimed they did change; yet can’t back it up when confronted and ask to do so in front of a video camera.
With all of that said and done, now you know why I love Thundercats. 
I hope you manage to get the ones you still need