Denise Schultz: Consider This . . .

I was recently pub­lished on the excel­lent PawsTalk forum for ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tors, under the sec­tion Interviews With Professional Communicators. Hats off to Lisa, the big Caat at SpiritCaat, for her excel­lent ques­tions. The inter­view is repro­duced below, and if you want to check out her excel­lent board and other ser­vices, give her a click!

• How do you describe ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion to those who are unfa­mil­iar with what it is?

Animals com­mu­ni­cate with each other in many ways, includ­ing telepa­thy. That is their native lan­guage, and how ani­mals of dif­fer­ent species can com­mu­ni­cate with each other. Humans can also use telepa­thy. We are trained to ignore it while quite young, in favor of ver­bal lan­guage. But it is pos­si­ble to regain our aware­ness and stop block­ing it out. I have spent a lot of time doing this, but it can also hap­pen in an instant, for any­one, with­out training.

• What tips would you give to stu­dents of ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion who are just start­ing out?

• I am answer­ing these remarks in a way that often assumes you are pros and that you are work­ing, get­ting paid, etc. I know this is not nec­es­sar­ily the case, but I want you to feel what it is like to approach ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­fes­sion­ally. It is good for the ani­mals and for you, to see it this way.

• Take a Reiki class. This is the best way I know to increase your sen­si­tiv­ity and aware­ness to energy. It will help you to rec­og­nize telepa­thy, and give you a heal­ing skill you can use in your com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Find some­one who will teach the three lev­els sep­a­rately, with time in-​​between lev­els to assim­i­late your heal­ing skills and to prac­tice with humans and ani­mals. Don’t set­tle for some­one who teaches two or three lev­els in one or two week­ends. That is a dis­ser­vice to Reiki, to the ani­mals, and to you.

• We are not just trans­la­tors. We can do a lot more with our sen­si­tive, car­ing insight than just trans­late. Inter-​​species coun­sel­ing skills are very valu­able, and two of the best places I know to study are with Penelope Smith (www​.ani​maltalk​.net) and Dr. Jeri Ryan (www​.assisian​i​mals​.org/). Also, not all coun­sel­ing skills are gained in cer­ti­fi­ca­tion or train­ing. Spiritual coun­sel­ing is at the cen­ter of many com­mu­ni­ca­tion prac­tices. You will need to explore this in your own life, not just with your teach­ers and mentors.

• Start or increase your med­i­ta­tion prac­tice. Don’t freak out! This is EASY! You can use Google shop­ping to find a med­i­ta­tion CD which uses “bin­au­ral beat” encod­ing. That means that you will wear head­phones, and the sounds deliv­ered to the two ears will be dis­tinct from each other. Binaural beat med­i­ta­tion auto­mat­i­cally cre­ates theta brain­waves (deep med­i­ta­tion) by the rela­tion between the two dif­fer­ent sounds reach­ing the two hemi­spheres of your brain. Some brand names are HemiSync (which holds the orig­i­nal patent) and HoloSync, and many other ver­sions are avail­able; I espe­cially like the ones with nature sounds. We have been cul­tur­ally trained that med­i­ta­tion is dif­fi­cult to do and that it’s hard to main­tain a sched­ule of it. Neither is true. Binaural beat med­i­ta­tion is a tech­nol­ogy which deliv­ers med­i­ta­tion to us. Once you begin to expe­ri­ence the ben­e­fits, it is not so hard to com­mit to the sched­ule. Meditation is help­ful for fine-​​tuning your aware­ness, and for your well-​​being and abil­ity to deliver com­mu­ni­ca­tion on demand when nec­es­sary. Listen to the CD once a day if pos­si­ble. It is impor­tant not to only lis­ten to it just before you go to sleep. Theta brain­waves are either deep med­i­ta­tion or lighter sleep. If you are too tired, you will sleep instead of med­i­tat­ing. Many peo­ple will fall asleep some­time dur­ing the CD, but if you are awake at least part of the time, you will get the ben­e­fits of the med­i­ta­tion and not just the sleep.

• Find a men­tor. They may be an ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tor, a vet, a priest, or that old lady you always meet at the store. It’s up to you to attract the right per­son for you. This is some­one who will help you to achieve depth in your work. Whatever your native skills already are, they will add new facets to your awareness.

• As soon as you can, con­sider charg­ing for your work. It helps clients to take you seri­ously, and they put more into the ses­sion in order to get more out of it. Also things that increase your sense of pro­fes­sion­al­ism are good for you and good for the field. You can start with a lower price, or work by dona­tion if you wish.

• And sav­ing the best for last, my num­ber one tip is: work with ani­mals whom you don’t already know! This is sur­pris­ing for many peo­ple, who assume they will do best with ani­mals in their own fam­ily. Not true! With our own ani­mal fam­ily we have an inher­ent bias, because we are stake­hold­ers. We want Skippy to eat his din­ner in the kitchen and not drag it onto the rug, or Bella to stop hunt­ing birds in the back yard. That is not the place to start. Those are advanced nego­ti­a­tions, because we are fam­ily. Would an MD start to do surgery on their own fam­ily? No! In my ani­mal fam­ily, when things get seri­ous, I call another com­mu­ni­ca­tor. If you start by try­ing to prac­tice with your own ani­mal fam­ily, you may never find out how good you really are. It is sim­i­lar when work­ing with friends’ ani­mals whom you know pretty well. Especially as a begin­ner, it is much harder to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between your ratio­nal mind and your intu­itive aware­ness when it is some­one you know ahead of time. So give your­self a break and try com­mu­ni­cat­ing with ani­mals you don’t know that well. Where there is an absence of ratio­nal knowl­edge about the sit­u­a­tion, the ‘still small voice’ of your intu­ition can be heard more easily.

• Can you share some ver­i­fi­able ques­tions to ask the ani­mals for peo­ple just start­ing out?

I believe pur­su­ing ver­i­fi­able ques­tions, espe­cially at the begin­ning, is the wrong direc­tion to go. We want to build relax­ation, for our­selves, the clients, and espe­cially for the ani­mals. Relaxation cre­ates open­ness to the infor­ma­tion that is already there.

Have you ever asked some­one a direct ques­tion and they answer about some­thing else entirely? The doc­tor might ask you, ‘how is your hand’? And you don’t really care about your hand, you’re really wor­ried about this mole on your face — is it a skin can­cer? So you start talk­ing about the mole. Imagine that most ani­mals may never have had the oppor­tu­nity for a real com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Now that they have your full atten­tion, maybe they don’t want test ques­tions, maybe they want to talk!

I find that ver­i­fi­ca­tion comes much more eas­ily in the course of an unstruc­tured con­ver­sa­tion. For exam­ple, I would never have thought to ask a cat, ‘how many water bowls do you have, and where are they’, but dur­ing the course of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he reveals that he has three bowls, and with each of them he has to turn his back to foot traf­fic. He would rather his peo­ple moved the bowls away from the wall, so he could have his back to the wall, and not worry that some­one is going by his tail while he’s drink­ing. The client was amazed at the level of ver­i­fi­able detail, but the quest was not for ver­i­fi­ca­tion, it was for what the cat needed. This cat was hav­ing kid­ney prob­lems, and mak­ing drink­ing eas­ier for him was very important.

Really, I believe that in all com­mu­ni­ca­tion the ani­mal is more impor­tant than our human effort to improve or ver­ify our skill as com­mu­ni­ca­tors. If we just put the ani­mal first, it all goes so much bet­ter, for every­one! If you con­duct a ‘nor­mal’ con­ver­sa­tion (rather than directly pur­su­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion), much ver­i­fi­able infor­ma­tion will arise, with­out the tense strug­gle to be right, and get a tele­pathic ‘hit’.  Read the rest of this entry »