Intuition is a powerful survival tool as was seen in the behavior of the animals who fled to high ground right before the recent Asian tsunami. In one case, elephants who were chained to stakes at a resort intuitively sensed the onset of the tsunami and broke out of confinement and went up on a hill. The humans at the resort stayed at sea level and were inundated. In the bittersweet aftermath, the elephants that had been forced by people to live in chains, voluntarily transported humans to safety at higher ground. We can only hope that the elephants will be rewarded by being released from bondage.
Why did the animals know of the tsunami beforehand while the people were oblivious? Because people have been conditioned to ignore their intuition while animals seek to cultivate it as an essential aid for optimizing existence.
Animals know that a feeling or sense of danger means they should pay attention and take action to protect themselves. They go inside to ask what needs to be done for protection and then they act without question on that inner sense. Animals are also alert to any hint of something positive that's about to occur and they take whatever action is needed to optimize that event for themselves.
Intuition is a tool that organisms use to maintain status quo and optimize their experience of life. Intuition operates something like a thermostat. If the temperature in a room starts to fluxuate the thermostat registers that and triggers the furnace or the air conditioner into action. Intuition serves the individual in the same way: it helps us achieve and maintain comfort. All organisms are born with intuition, but only humans are taught to disregard and suppress it. Fortunately, we aren't completely successful at this and our intuition regularly brings us information; it is especially active in a crisis. I'm sure there were humans who sensed the tsunami and sought higher ground just as the animals did. In fact, many people in that incident probably had some kind of internal warning, which they then immediately disregarded.
Someone told me that Deepak Chopra's comment about the stories of animals fleeing the tsunami, was that humans need to get back in touch with and learn from animals and nature. I agree, and one way to do that is to reconnect with your intuition, which means becoming more like an animal.
Intuition is your true self and most valuable guidance. Animals know this and never disconnect from their intuitive sense. To start reconnecting to your intuition, begin to notice when you have vague feelings about something - whether good or bad. Examine those feelings, draw them out, and experiment with taking action and making adjustments in your life based on your feelings. Then evaluate how effective the process was. Be alert to any urges or hunches, any internal voices guiding you, and any feelings of certainty or knowing that you experience. The more you develop and honor your intuition, the better and harder it will serve you. If you feel like something is wrong (or right) it probably is. If you are certain about something (as yet unknown) you are probably correct.
To truly learn from animals and nature I believe we need to stop seeing ourselves as better than other life forms. In the research I did for my new book, I found that indigenous people considered other species to be like relatives. I teach and promote intuitive communication for the very reason that it imparts this experience of animals and nature as equals or relatives. To shift your worldview from modern to ancient, you can begin by relating to each life form you encounter as if it were as intelligent as you and capable of experiencing the same range and depth of emotions. Then use your intuition to discover the best way to interact in this alternative world where everything is alive, aware, equal, and related. If enough of us have this experience it may help shift the paradigm and allow us to more easily alter the destructive course our world in now embarked upon. «Top» |
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Nancy Stephens sent me many stories to use in my new book. Here are two that didn't get included that I wanted to share with you in the newsletter.
Scrappy
"Our nine year old mare, Scrappy, decided to sample her new stall shavings. She ate a few gulps and choked. There was a visible lump a few inches down her throat. For almost two hours we syringed water and oil into her and although the lump moved closer to her chest it would not clear. We called a veterinarian who was able to push the lump into her stomach with a tube".
"The interesting thing was that during Scrappy's ordeal, all of our other horses came to stand as close as they could get to her. I was surprised because Scrappy is an old boss mare with a grumpy disposition and no friends. One young filly was worried to the point of pacing along the fence line while we worked on Scrappy. She called to Scrappy several times".
"Surrounded by well wishers, Scrappy remained calm even in her deep discomfort. I don't know what they were saying to her, but I know she was comforted and calmed by their attention."
Ladda
"I try to help place animals that need new homes and was called to assist an older man named Dave, who was ill with cancer, find a home for his horse Ladda. I went to meet Ladda and discovered that Dave had been too ill to train the horse. I worried about who might want a mature untrained gelding like Ladda. As I pondered the options, Ladda walked up to his pasture mate, grabbed her by the halter and led her around in circles. It was hilarious. I felt he was saying, "Look what I can do. I learned it all by myself. She can't get me now!" The mare was very bossy as a rule, but was helpless against the grip of this 1,500-pound mischief-maker.
"Although Ladda had no training, he obviously wanted to show me that he could be trained. Before I had a chance to try talking intuitively with him about the problems he faced, he had communicated with me about them. His sense of humor and his gentleness won me over. I decided he would come and live at my house." «Top» |
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A Letter to Our Companion Animals:
Dear Dogs and Cats:
• The dishes with the paw print are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food.
• Please note, placing a paw print in the middle of my plate and food does not stake a claim for it becoming your food and dish, nor do I find that aesthetically pleasing in the slightest.
• The stairway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Beating me to the bottom is not the object. Tripping me doesn't help because I fall faster than you can run.
• I cannot buy anything bigger than a king sized bed. I am very sorry about this. Do not think I will continue sleeping on the couch to ensure your comfort. Dogs and cats can actually curl up in a ball when they sleep. It is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other stretched out to the fullest extent possible. I also know that sticking tails straight out and having tongues hanging out the other end to maximize space is nothing but sarcasm.
• For the last time, there is not a secret exit from the bathroom. If by some miracle I beat you there and manage to get the door shut, it is not necessary to claw, whine, meow, try to turn the knob or get your paw under the edge and try to pull the door open. I must exit through the same door I entered. Also, I have been using the bathroom for years-canine or feline attendance is not mandatory.
• The proper order is kiss me, then go smell the other dog or cat's butt. I cannot stress this enough!
• To pacify you, my dear pets, I have posted the following message on our front door:
Rules for Non-Pet Owners Who Visit and Like to Complain About Our Pets:
• They live here. You don't.
• If you don't want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture.(That's why they call it "fur"niture.)
• I like my pets a lot better than most people.
• To you, it's an animal. To me, he/she is an adopted son/daughter who is short, hairy, walks on all fours and doesn't speak clearly. Dogs and cats are better than kids: they eat less, don't ask for money all the time, are easier to train, usually come when called, never drive your car, don't hang out with drug-using friends, don't smoke or drink, don't worry about having to buy the latest fashions, don't wear your clothes, and don't need a gazillion dollars for college - and if they get pregnant, you can sell the children.
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I recently helped author Robyn Landis communicate with her dog Bailey who died in March. Robyn sent me the obituary she wrote to her friends about Bailey and I am including some parts of it below with her permission. It seems to me to express perfectly what all of us go through when a well loved animal dies.
"I am writing with huge sadness to let you know that my most beautiful, sweet, beloved dog Bailey left this world yesterday, Sunday, March 13, 2005. She was 11 years and 7 months old. She was released at home, in her yard, on a blanket in the morning sunshine and spring breeze, with many loving hands and words surrounding her till she was gone.
She lived a full 3 months past her Dec. 17 diagnosis of nasal cancer, far longer than was expected without treatment (and roughly half the time radiation was expected to give her, on average). She also lived much better than was expected without treatment. She was good-natured, affectionate, and living life fully up to the end. .. She always loved life. She loved it silly. She loved people and food and running and smelling everything. She was an inspiration to any creature, human or otherwise, in the art of living in the moment and loving without conditions, resentment, or reserve..
"It was excruciating to let her go, and it's SO hard to accept that she's gone. Damn near impossible, in fact. It's surreal. Somehow, it feels both as if I had her forever, for lifetimes, our beginning stretching back eons--and as if her whole life went by in a flash, terribly short. I miss her so overwhelmingly, every minute, and I know I am going to miss her for a very long time. I can't put into words how hard it is, how much I want to still see her, how roaring the silence is, how bizarrely empty the house. How abrupt and unfair that she is gone, even though I had plenty of time to process it in advance. She's been ever-present everywhere I was for over eleven years. She was as much a family member as any human I ever shared a home with.
"While I have a reasonable amount of trust that her spirit is in a good place, and I'm glad of that, it isn't all that satisfying to me at the moment. I like the physical realm. I'll have to adjust to a spirit relationship. It doesn't ease the emptiness right now where she used to be--which is to say everywhere. Not an item in this house is free of some association with Bailey. Nothing can replace the earthly, tactile feel of the individual, familiar, soft, silky, sweet-doggy-smelling dog; the expressive, steady, intent gaze of luminous knowing eyes; the paw slapped smartly and purposefully next to the pillow signaling that enough's enough and it's time for breakfast; the ring of an impudent bark demanding a ball be thrown; or a cocked head peering back from around the next curve of a hiking trail, the radiantly happy expression asking amiably but with affectionate exasperation, "Are you coming, or what?"..
"We who love companion animals know when we give our hearts to them that we will be broken, crushed. We know we will have to say goodbye and that the sorrow will be as towering as the joy we had; the hole ripped in our hearts will be as enormous as the space they filled. We can virtually guarantee it. It's not an easy thing to choose this kind of love, knowing that loss is utterly inevitable. We love our partners and children, but we don't expect to lose them soon; we pray that we will go first. We do expect to lose our parents, but we didn't choose that. To *purposely* begin a relationship you know will end this way, and give your whole heart to it, takes perhaps equal measures of courage, generosity, vulnerability, and reckless denial. It's a setup. We knowingly enter into a contract in which all the years of fun and warmth and pleasure and closeness will, without exception, end in an overdue balloon payment of grief. While dogs virtually always manage to keep from ever hurting us throughout their entire lives (a remarkable truth we can rarely say of even our most treasured human loved ones), they do wallop us in the end, though of course not with intent. I knew all this, but I plowed into love and through life with Bailey with reckless abandon, my heart totally open, no holds barred. And I made that balloon payment yesterday. Emotionally it took every dime I had, and right now it feels like I will be paying in tears into oblivion.
"So what is this masochism? I guess we walk into it willing to pay that price because there is so much to be gained and learned from the relationship. And the pain, while it may be as expansive and overwhelming as the joy, doesn't *cancel out* the joy. Perhaps the universe created dogs as one of the lessons of living,so that that we would practice loving, losing, healing and loving again and again. Something this hard must take practice. I don't know. I'm just musing. It's all theoretical to me right now. ..
"Even if I love many more dogs and other beings in my lifetime, Bailey will always be extra special to me, as canines go. I will love again, but never that particular way. It's like first love. She was a special being at a special time. .
"I cannot forget SO many visions of her. Thousands of them. They crowd my mind right now, warring with a stricken disbelief that I won't ever see her again. How can it be? That alive, kinetic being, so full of life and energy, full of gentleness, sensitivity, impudence and mischief, is really gone forever? Just like that? She won't amble into my office to see if I'm ready to walk yet? I won't see her in the yard, basking contentedly in the sun, when I glance outside my office window? Hear her at the door? She won't be waiting for her meals near the kitchen when I go in there? Or curled up napping in one of her favorite spots? No barks? No loud water drinking? No toenail clicking or tags jangling? She won't come to wake me up when I sleep too long, nudging me with her cold nose and acting like it's Christmas because she gets to see me again? It's unthinkable. Yet true. I know it's true but I can't quite get my arms around it. She's always been here, and it seems like she *should* be here. It's like a missing limb for me.
"Some people will think that of course it is sad, but it *is* just a dog. Those people do not know me and did not know Bailey. I realize for some people, pets are PETS. For others, they are full family members who happen to be canine (or feline or equine or something else). Bailey and I were as bonded as I've been with any human. We built a relationship over these years. We knew each other like two old pals. "It's the bond of love that makes death difficult, and the stronger the bond, the more difficult the loss, regardless of species," says author Kim Sheridan. Love is love. And Bailey was not incidental in my world. She didn't live on the outskirts. She occupied the center with my most beloved people. She was woven tightly into the fabric of my life. We all talked to her constantly, laughed with her and at her, shared our food with her, cooked with her underfoot, touched her while we played a game or music or watched a movie. I didn't even leave her to go to work. Her head would be in my lap, if only for a brief visit, when I worked. Or she'd lie down just outside my office door. Or watch me intently as I ate lunch. If I was outside talking on the phone or weeding, I'd also be watching her or throwing a ball. If I went to town, she came with me. She was a 24/7 active presence.
"I'm taking it on faith that someday, as people promise, missing her will feel like a dull ache or a small wistful stab, instead of like being set on fire or having my head held underwater. I don't have answers to those age-old questions like "Why now?" or "why ever?" No more than I can answer, I guess, why Robert and I both felt inexorably drawn--for no reason either of us could explain afterward--to take a walk to the *hardware store* to look at hot-water heaters near 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night in October 1993."
Robyn found Bailey that night - a tiny wailing puppy abandoned in a huge mall parking lot. She told me that the only explanation she could find for why she and her partner took that walk that night was so that they could find and rescue Bailey. «Top»
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