Tips For Students of Animal Communication

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’.  [Please click the link to part 2 “More” of this arti­cle below the dona­tion button.]

© Denise Schultz 2010

Dona­tions and con­nec­tions from the many to each other,
in even a tiny way, can cre­ate big shifts.
So please share Con­sider This . . .
with any­one else whom you want to con­sider these con­nec­tions and insights.

• Do you lean more towards get­ting your mes­sages visu­ally, audi­bly, or sen­tiently, or is it a com­bi­na­tion of all. Does it change with the animal?

Peo­ple tend to have a native style. Ani­mals tend to have their own native style. I tend to get a gestalt (over­all aware­ness greater than the sum of the parts). We all adapt to make it pos­si­ble to get the infor­ma­tion across. I believe there are the main styles or chan­nels, like get­ting visual or audi­tory infor­ma­tion, feel­ing phys­i­cal sen­sa­tions, feel­ing emo­tions, and so forth, but also there are a sur­pris­ing num­ber of com­mu­ni­ca­tors who get infor­ma­tion in the form of song lyrics! You never know how the infor­ma­tion will arrive. I find the pri­mary qual­ity of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is not the chan­nel by which it arrives, but the amount of energy with which it is delivered.

Many ani­mals will ask for spe­cific foods or sup­ple­ments, even some I have never heard of before ― like the horse who asked for a blood builder and tele­path­i­cally showed me the label on the bucket, and it turned out another horse in that barn was get­ting that sup­ple­ment and he wanted it, too. So prod­uct and treat­ment requests are a kind of chan­nel too. I worked with some bees hav­ing trou­ble with mites, who asked to be smudged with untreated tobacco. It turns out that is a very old bee­keep­ers trick. Many times I have had ani­mals tell me spe­cific acupunc­ture points or other infor­ma­tion which I have no train­ing in, and the vets ver­ify that was the cor­rect point, or the client says, ‘oh, yes, the vet is already work­ing that point’. It is as if there is a vibra­tional aware­ness of every­thing that is in our heads or theirs, in cur­rent or past cul­ture, and they will do what­ever it takes to get the mes­sage across.

• Do you use the sense of smell or taste? If so, how does one become more pro­fi­cient at that?

They com­mu­ni­cate the infor­ma­tion in a vibra­tional way which is not nec­es­sar­ily tied to my actual organs of sense. Ani­mals may show me smells and tastes which I can­not rec­og­nize and col­ors which I can­not see, but there is a vibra­tional qual­ity, even if it is out­side of my per­sonal abil­i­ties to rec­og­nize it with my own senses. My pro­fi­ciency comes from being will­ing to stay with those unrec­og­niz­able sen­sa­tions until I find a cor­re­la­tion with some­thing rec­og­niz­able to me or other humans work­ing with the ani­mals. So if I describe a smell and I find myself mak­ing a par­tic­u­lar face, I describe my funny face to the client too, and she says, ‘oh Mickey always makes that face when I give him his pro­bi­otics’. To me, pro­bi­otics have no smell, but in this way Mickey estab­lishes that we are talk­ing about the pro­bi­otics, and his mes­sage was, ‘I don’t like the smell, but they’re help­ing me’.

• Why do you do what you do (com­mu­ni­cate with ani­mals)? And how do you feel it ben­e­fits human­ity? How do you feel it ben­e­fits the animals?

I com­mu­ni­cate with ani­mals because I love it more than any­thing. I feel more whole and more right with the world, more in the ser­vice of the Divine, when doing this than any­thing else. I believe this world is entirely out of bal­ance too far to the ben­e­fits and rights of humans at the expense of ani­mals and plants and the Gaia essence of the whole planet. The ben­e­fit is that I give ani­mals a voice in the world which they have not had for most of human exis­tence. And just maybe, giv­ing their voice an out­let, one-​​at-​​a-​​time in con­sul­ta­tions, or many-​​at-​​a-​​time in arti­cles and books, we can shift the bal­ance in their favor.

Humans can become more respon­si­ble and com­mit­ted to ben­e­fit ani­mals, plants, and the planet, and ani­mals can come back into the bet­ter bal­ance they deserve if we do so. A vet just sent me an arti­cle that said that three Cana­dian MDs are try­ing to force Cana­dian leg­is­la­tion that would keep ani­mals out of the cabin on com­mer­cial air flights, to pro­tect humans with aller­gies. This vet mov­ingly described how he had been called on to exam­ine a cat who was dead, frozen stiff from rid­ing in an unheated cargo hold. He asked, how can we jus­tify that we are the only species that matters?

I believe that ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion helps the indi­vid­ual ani­mal to have their say, ask for help, become a ‘per­son’ in our eyes, and helps to shift human under­stand­ing to include ani­mals as more impor­tant in their own lives and to the planet than just being com­pan­ions and work­ing ani­mals to us.

• What would you rec­om­mend to stu­dents who are jug­gling with their full time jobs and/​or school and/​or chil­dren and try­ing to squeeze in time to do AC?

I know a high school stu­dent, 16, who makes time to study Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage (ASL), a col­lege course, when he already has an 8 AM to 6 PM sched­ule 5 days a week, includ­ing an after-​​school job, plus tutor­ing younger stu­dents, plus his own home­work and extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties, friends, etc. He does the ASL course because it is impor­tant to him to be able to com­mu­ni­cate with the deaf. If he can do it, so can we.

I think we get caught up in the ‘how’. How do we find time to do it? How do we get good at it? It is bet­ter to say: today, I will spend five min­utes doing some lit­tle piece. I will go online and find a med­i­ta­tion CD. I will join an ani­mal men­tors call. I will hold up two dif­fer­ent cans of food to my cat (know­ing she can’t read the label or smell inside a steel can) and just notice that she sniffs at them, then chooses one. I will lis­ten to the grack­les in the tree at sun­down, and just see if I can get any sen­sa­tions or infor­ma­tion from it. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion begins with aware­ness. We have at least some time every day to explore our awareness.

Over time these efforts add up, and over the years as we get choices to elim­i­nate some­thing else from our packed day (now your son is in preschool, now your daugh­ter has a job, your hus­band is retired) we will find the time to do more of this, because it mat­ters. Ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion is some­thing to be doing for your whole life. If you can’t afford or don’t have the time for a course or a book this year, maybe next year. Tell your friends that it mat­ters to you, and they will bring you their sto­ries. That is how we get more time for it. If we only think about want­ing more time for it when we don’t have it, and we give up, that is a loss to us and the ani­mals. Think about the big pic­ture, find­ing time over the course of your life­time. Opera singers and sports teams sched­ule for years ahead, you can too!

• What would you rec­om­mend to stu­dents who shy away from prac­tic­ing because they feel they’re “mak­ing it up?”

I say, try really mak­ing it up. Don’t fight it, go with it. Write some fic­tion from the ani­mal in ques­tion. Then when you have really made it up, notice that some parts of what you wrote feel real to you, but there is an edge, a con­trast with other things. Your ratio­nal mind will do some of the mak­ing up, and your intu­itive sense will say yes and no to the things which are real and not real. You are learn­ing to cal­i­brate your­self by notic­ing what feels real and what doesn’t.

An exam­ple of cal­i­bra­tion is this: one time I observed a chi­ro­prac­tor work­ing with a client’s dog. After a par­tic­u­lar spinal adjust­ment, the dog told me she was thirsty. I asked for a break for the dog to get a drink. The client said, “I heard that! But it was so soft.” I said, “There is your cal­i­bra­tion; you are lis­ten­ing to find that very soft voice. Now that you rec­og­nize it, it will be much eas­ier.” Then the dog went and drank a whole bowl of water!

Do you see how it is bet­ter to find cal­i­bra­tion and ver­i­fi­ca­tion where they just show up in the course of the con­ver­sa­tion? The cal­i­bra­tion gets eas­ier with prac­tice. But don’t make ver­i­fi­ca­tion the cen­ter of your prac­tice. Then you will be prac­tic­ing to make things hard. Make relax­ation the cen­ter of your prac­tice, and you will be prac­tic­ing to make things easy.

• When skep­tics chal­lenge you, how do you han­dle it? Do you answer at all, and if so, how do you respond?

This one is worth a whole arti­cle in itself, but I will try to hit the high points. I deal with it on a case-​​by-​​case basis; just as a stand-​​up come­dian does not have a one-​​size-​​fits-​​all response to hecklers.

• Some skep­tics just want to know if I believe in my own work. I can tell them I’ve been con­firmed by X rays, MRIs, blood and urine tests, acupunc­tur­ists, vets, and chi­ro­prac­tors, etc. Things ani­mals have told me about their house­holds have been ver­i­fied by clients, neigh­bors, other fam­ily mem­bers, etc. My sto­ries are so spe­cific and there are so many of them that peo­ple tend to see that I couldn’t have made it all up.

• Even skep­tics have ani­mals who need their needs met. I will try to help every­one I can, within the con­di­tions listed below.

• When a client is dis­sat­is­fied with a con­sul­ta­tion, I give them a refund, imme­di­ately and in full. I will sug­gest sev­eral col­leagues for them to con­sult if they want to con­tinue with ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion now or in the future. I don’t want the ani­mal to lose the chance to have a voice if there was a bad fit between the client and me. I like to assume that some­one with a dif­fer­ent style or tone could accom­plish a con­nec­tion which I did not. Very often in these cases the dif­fi­culty is that the ani­mal has needs or opin­ions which con­flict with the client. Also after we get off the phone, I take a moment to explain to the ani­mal what hap­pened, and let them know I will hold them in my prayers, for them to get their needs met. I ask the ani­mal, if they have a chance to talk with another com­mu­ni­ca­tor, to please give that per­son the chance to accom­plish what I did not, and not to give up hope.

• Some­times I am not able to reach the ani­mal — they may not have a good feel­ing about me, not want cer­tain things looked at, they may be skep­ti­cal ani­mals: ‘I’ve talked to humans before and it didn’t go very well.’ These are most del­i­cate con­sul­ta­tions. I try to find out what they want with­out directly ask­ing. If I can get them talk­ing, I can prob­a­bly help them.

• Skep­tics in gen­eral are chal­leng­ing us to prove things to them. They may ask trick ques­tions, or even make up an ani­mal to test us. Usu­ally you can feel the dark and sticky energy around those peo­ple, and avoid work­ing with them. You can say you are not tak­ing any new clients right now, etc. Trust your intu­ition about the client, not just the communication.

• Some skep­tics are gen­uine explor­ers, really want­ing to believe there is more to the world than their ratio­nal minds can per­ceive. These peo­ple are more worth work­ing with. But I tell them straight out: you have to give your ani­mal per­mis­sion to speak freely to me, or they will sense your dis­trust of ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and/​or me, and clam up. If a child sensed that their mother did not trust a stranger, they might not talk, or say weird things to throw the stranger off track. This can hap­pen with ani­mals too, and unfor­tu­nately it can set up the ani­mal for mul­ti­ple dis­ap­point­ments, with other com­mu­ni­ca­tors, vets, etc.

• “First do no harm” is a good pol­icy. If the ses­sion is not going well, and you push too hard, you can harden the per­son against try­ing with another com­mu­ni­ca­tor. If you feel like it is not work­ing, say so. It is okay to say the “inten­sity” (I don’t say the client’s ‘ten­sion’) makes it kind of hard for me to hear what the ani­mal has to say, so maybe we could try another time, or another prac­ti­tioner, etc.

• You may have a spe­cialty which makes you a bet­ter fit for some kinds of clients than oth­ers. Get to know other com­mu­ni­ca­tors (even if you are all just get­ting started), so you have a refer­ral net­work. I have a col­league who excels at after-​​death con­tacts. I’m good at that too, but if a par­tic­u­lar ses­sion is not work­ing, I can refer that client to her, because they may be a bet­ter fit. I have a col­league who spe­cial­izes in flower essences (and in her hands it is both an art and a sci­ence, amaz­ing). In those cases where I feel this is not some­thing that a ‘talk­ing cure’ will help, which needs vibra­tional heal­ing, I can refer those clients to her. Kay Aubrey Chimene, of Grand Adven­tures Ranch, is the best bio-​​nutritional ther­a­pist I have ever found. Usu­ally even a skep­tic who does not believe in ‘heal­ing’ or ‘talk­ing’, can get help for the animal’s phys­i­cal well-​​being from Kay. Wher­ever a skep­tic runs into a stop­ping point with me, I am look­ing for some­thing they can fit into their world view, which will help the animal.

• I have a sci­en­tific back­ground, so I am often a good fit for sci­en­tists and med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers. Recently, for over a year, every new client was a nurse, a nurse-​​practitioner, or an MD, with the sole excep­tion of a PhD geol­o­gist! I ease their skep­ti­cism by being able to speak their lan­guage. Here is a case where “Know thy­self” comes in handy. This is where I fit into the refer­ral net­work from other com­mu­ni­ca­tors to me.

• Some skep­tics are want­ing to expand, some to attack. I try to spend time with the for­mer, and defuse the lat­ter. Be aware that they may be polite to your face, and then get off the phone and talk it over with their spouse and then ask for a refund. It is even okay to pro­vide a refund if they do not request one. I may have done a fine job, but I can still tell they are not com­fort­able. If I get off the phone and it does not feel right, some­times I call or email them and say, “There will be no charge for this ses­sion because I don’t think it went as well as I would like. I hope you will try ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion again with some­one who is a bet­ter fit for you and your ani­mal, and these are sev­eral col­leagues I recommend.

• In all cases I want to be an ambas­sador for ani­malkind, and for ani­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. If I can’t accom­plish either of those things, then it is okay to let go and go.

One more ques­tion, which I added at Caat’s invi­ta­tion for any addi­tional ques­tions I wanted to answer:

How do dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tors work?

• Did you know that some com­mu­ni­ca­tors only take the ques­tions before­hand, work ‘offline’, then give you a report after­words by email or phone?

• Oth­ers work only in person.

• Some have to have a pic­ture before the session.

• Some want no infor­ma­tion before the ses­sion at all, or they feel it gets stale.

I don’t work with pic­tures because they tend to tie me to the time the pic­ture was taken, instead of now. I work much bet­ter on the phone than in per­son. I dis­cov­ered I have a ‘quiet zone’ near me where I don’t hear as well. I have come to under­stand that this keeps me from going crazy with the over­whelm­ing amount of infor­ma­tion I would get from walk­ing into a store or any­where there are a lot of peo­ple. But my own cat fam­ily gets a lit­tle frus­trated with how dense I can be some­times. ‘You want food, food, food, right?’ . . . ‘No! It was to scoop the lit­ter box!’ ;-)

So maybe one of these alter­nate ways of work­ing fits you bet­ter. Or maybe you have another way, or will start with the eas­i­est one of these for you, but add other ways as you get more expe­ri­ence. Just keep at it. You have a whole life­time of ani­mal expe­ri­ences ahead of you.

ques­tions © Lisa Lar­son, http://​www​.spir​it​caat​.com/​s​p​i​r​i​t​c​a​a​t​f​o​r​um/

answers and final ques­tion © 2010 Denise Schultz, http://​www​.denis​eschultz​.net

Dona­tions and con­nec­tions from the many to each other,
in even a tiny way, can cre­ate big shifts.
So please share Con­sider This . . .
with any­one else whom you want to con­sider these con­nec­tions and insights.