On Meeting Animals
Notes From the Psychic Field
I have come to approach all conversations with animals, with plants, with Spirit, and with other human beings as little intersections, tiny bridges, moments of mutual arrival at the same point in time, in the same dimension, with a shared interest in meeting each other.
At the heart of these conversations is a desire to speak with and listen to each other—from very different vantage points, which are themselves intersecting all kinds of other times, dimensions, and lived bodily realities.
And so I am aware that I come to know another in glimpses, in partial understandings, at very specific moments of time.
The more I am open to what I don’t know and cannot know about another, as well as what I can know, the more I allow myself to be transformed by the meeting.
I “met” animals first as a lover of animals who didn’t understand what was possible in animal-human communication.
Then, I “met” them as a professional Animal Communicator, who, after the rigorous work of being trained and certified, has spent years “meeting” animals at a mutual arrival point in the psychic “field.”
Most of the time, these animals are not in the same room as me, as my Animal Communication sessions have primarily been conducted over Zoom or on the phone in recent years.
Often, I know what the animal looks like only from the version of themselves that they “show” me telepathically, and even then, they sometimes show me how they see themselves, not how they actually look. Or those animals with a sense of humor might show me the opposite of how they actually look, with a playful air to clue me in that a joke is afoot.
When I meet animals as an Animal Communicator, I come to know them from the psychic information they wish to share with me, through the unique ways that my intuition works. This means that I meet these animals by way of images, words, feelings, bodily sensations, or “downloads” that they choose to share with me.
These wise, funny, smart, goofy, sexy, serious, playful, and everything-in-between animals include cats, dogs, horses, cows, goats, chickens, snakes, mice, rats, hawks, birds, fish, groundhogs, squirrels, turkeys, lizards, spiders, ladybugs, butterflies, moths, slugs, worms, dolphins, sloths, bees, ants, stink bugs, beetles, deer, and raccoons.
They also include animals who have crossed over, who “arrive” at the meeting point with very important messages for their grieving humans.
In each case, I have been lucky enough to be trusted by the animals as someone who is there to listen to them and learn their perspective on whatever is going on—whether it is behavior that is frustrating their human, or health issues that need tending to (or don’t need tending to), or how the animals view BIG things, like death and dying, differently than we humans do.
The animals also meet me where I am, and each encounter helps me grow and shift my perspective, not only as the transmitter and translator of the information the animal has for their human, but also because I am never a non-presence myself. The animals always take the opportunity to teach me, as well.
I came to see how opening ourselves up to meeting animals transforms us.
When I started out, I looked for answers to my questions, questions that came out of my needs, fears, and perspectives. I had a way of viewing the world and myself and animals, and though it was with love and respect, it was also limited, from a human perspective.
I wanted to help my dog—he had mysterious health issues. I wanted to fix things and save him. I was able to help him, but in the process I was taken on a journey that made me re-see these human goals differently, to understand where they originated from, what was at stake for me, and how to let go.
Doing good Animal Communication, it turns out, consists of coming to know myself fully, and know what I am bringing to the “meeting place” with the animal, so that I do not mistake myself, my fears, my beliefs, and my stories for them.
It consists in getting quiet, getting still, and mastering “release”—what we might call surrender or letting go (or what I sometimes jokingly call “going limp”), versus pushing, or looking for, or reaching for the information coming in, which closes the channels down.
It consists of tuning into the subtle changes in my body, my energy, my senses, and my thinking, when I am in the energetic presence of an animal.
And it consists of describing these changes, out loud, to the animal’s human, as best I can. It often means trying to describe the strangest physical sensations that we humans don’t have a reference for, such as the taste of a fly and specific feeling of its crunch in the mouth (from a lizard). Or the internal experience of being wild (from a wild cat). Or what it felt like for a dog the moment his soul left his physical body.
Over the years I found myself having full-on bodily experiences—no, more than bodily… I found myself experiencing states of consciousness and ways of being that were vastly different than my own, along with the “knowingness” that was part of that way of being.
So that even after the experiential part of a session was over, when I returned to the experience of my body and my consciousness, I retained the knowingness that I learned from embodying each animal’s experience, even if I could not, and cannot find language for it.
To be thus changed on such a deep cellular level by experiences that are so vastly different than mine—to the point that I do not have any reference point for them, nor adequate language for them—is, in a sense, the work of the spirit.
I suppose all writing approaches its limits and gestures beyond them. I suppose, as well, that this is why Caroline Myss has said that metaphor is the language of the Soul.
We can approach what is vaster than us, what is radically different than us, and what is unknowable by us in a totalizing way, via the bridge of language.
And where we cannot—where language falls short—we can approach the experience of another via the bridge of our hearts. We can carry with us difference, with love, even if we cannot speak it.