Commissioned by Spirit to help people to turn their cages inside out, Penelope is a liberating force for your true nature and your uniquely beautiful song to give to the world. Since the 1970s, Penelope has been founding pioneer for the field whose name she originated, interspecies telepathic communication. Author, Species Link magazine founding editor, and founder of ACCAW - The Animal Communicators Coalition for Animal Welfare, Penelope holds the spiritual center of the growing worldwide community of animal communicators.
She has taught thousands of people worldwide, guiding the unfolding of generations of professional animal communicators. Her courses and publications have prompted millions to remember our innate interspecies connection. Full of playfulness and wisdom, called “animal mystic,” Penelope is riding the front of the giant wave of awakening that is coursing through life on Earth.
Meeting you has opened a bright window of lovable knowledge. Listening to you has healed my heart. Learning from your humble and cheerful wisdom is a pleasure and an invitation to continue.
Thank you once again Penelope, for being the pioneer for us all. I believe we would each be struggling mightily to establish ourselves and this work were it not for your being our pathfinder. St. Francis is an important guide in spirit for my work, but you are the main being who brought this work possible for us all on the earth plane for this time. This is a powerful gift you have given the animals, their people, and all of us who now walk in your initial footsteps. Please know that I honor you and what you have created for so many. May you be given ten times all you have given us all.
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Penelope has retired from teaching the full animal communication training program. The course descriptions on this page from Penelope's training program are a reference for what others are teaching who have apprenticed to teach these courses.
To use Penelope's publications for your animal communication education, see this suggested program.
Visit the animal communicator directory for teachers who give in-person or online classes, including a list of those trained to teach courses developed by Penelope Smith as described on this page.
I am so glad that I live at a time and place on earth so that I have been able to have my life enriched by your writing and teachings.
INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION TRAINING PROGRAM
BASIC COURSE
How to Communicate with Animals
Part 1 - Introduction to the essentials on how to get in touch with animals telepathically. Discover your blocks to communicating with animals and the levels of communication possible. Learn how to experience animals' perspectives, how you have already communicated telepathically with animals, and how to expand on that. Enjoy exercises and meditation that open your heart, increase your awareness and understanding of animals and your receptivity to telepathic communication. Deepen your communion with all of life. You do not need to bring an animal companion to Part 1.
Part 2 - Learn how to quiet and focus your mind when being with animals. Practice opening the channel to get across to animals and to receive what they communicate telepathically in thoughts, images, impressions, feelings, messages…
For Part 2, you may bring an animal friend, on leash or in a carrier, only if they are comfortable in strange surroundings and not a distraction to you or others. You will be able to work with other animals, so you are not obliged to bring your own. You may also bring photos of your animal companions.
PREREQUISITE: read Penelope Smith's book, Animal Talk.
Communicating with a cow at a Basic Course photo by K.C. Remington
I attended the Basic Course and experienced what I can only describe as the beginning of a powerful spiritual awakening and healing. As you talked about plants, animals, and minerals being of the same spirit I connected into that vision, and that's when the healing started.
In your Basic Course I gained a tremendous foundation of knowledge, of what interspecies telepathic communication is all about. I learned about how to expand my view of animals, their minds and emotions and spiritual awareness. The skills I gained have helped me start communicating with all species, both sending and receiving communication. It was very refreshing to realize how much this form of communication is basic to our well-being, on all levels.
I was searching for an extraordinary experience that would open my eyes, awaken my soul, and refresh my spirit. A retreat from everyday distractions, where I could reconnect with all creatures and nature, sounded wonderfully nourishing for this writer's essence. I was able to attend Penelope Smith's visionary workshop, accompanied by my best pal, lab mix Diamond Dreamer. I immediately become connected to a community of animal lovers—all of us striving to reestablish a link with creatures that had been severed after childhood. With Penelope's guidance, I was delighted to attain an intensity of awareness and a heightened consciousness as I conversed with Diamond and other animals. This glimpse into animals as "other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time," as Henry Beston so eloquently wrote, shall certainly inspire me as I write children's books that weave webs of compassion for all creation.
The Basic Course "How to Communicate with Animals" audio recording & booklet is available for at-home study in CD and digital format!
The Basic Course opens the door to the world of direct interspecies communication. Each additional course offers a giant leap in awareness, communication capacity, and kinship with all life. Prepare to face and release the blocks that inhibit your telepathic connection and understanding. Focus on your challenges, strengths, aspirations, and inspirations. Be encouraged by Penelope's multi-dimensional communion with other species and wisdom gleaned from years of work and lifetimes of experience with all forms of life. Questions and difficulties will be individually addressed.
ADVANCED I The Deepening (3 days)
For those who have practiced telepathic communication with animals after the Basic Course and want more knowledge, experience, direction, and inspiration to broaden and deepen their experience.
Relax, connect, bring to light and shed misconceptions that inhibit communion with our fellow beings. Learn from the master teachers of communication with animals: the animals themselves.
Explore your spiritual communion with all the kingdoms of Nature, the essence of communication with domestic and wild animals, plants, minerals, the elements, and the Earth. Savor the enchantment of the land, from forest to ocean. Intensify your awareness of the intelligence, beauty, and wisdom of all species. Travel into realms often unnoticed by humans.
Ancestral ways of honoring spirit in all life, including drumming circles, chanting, dancing, and journeying for power animal guidance, amplify our root connection, communication, and kinship with the whole web of life.
PREREQUISITES: The Basic Course, Animal Talk (book); continued practice of course skills.
You may also be accepted for Advanced I Course The Deepening if you have completed a Basic Course with other animal communicators. Write when, where, and with whom you did basic training; include a written statement on what you gained and how you have applied your animal communications skills. E-mail to penelope@animaltalk.net
RECOMMENDED: When Animals Speak; Animals in Spirit; Animal Communication Mastery Series. Bring pen and notebook and photos of your animal friends. We will work with Penelope's animal family, wild animals, and other species and participants' animal family members long distance.
Penelope has such a wonderful way of supporting everyone on their path and focusing on hope and possibilities. I felt safe to share my frustrations and difficulties. I feel more positive and hopeful of my ability to develop the skill of communication with animals.
The Advanced I course really built my confidence and opened me up to a new level of faith and spirituality. My last day in Point Reyes, I hiked down to the ocean and listened. Many facets and the whole of Nature "spoke" to me. I was encouraged to move forward with my energy healing, and so I am. Thank you for your encouragement, candor and openness.
In your Advanced I Course you asked the participants what they expected from the seminar. I remember very well what I said: "I see myself walking on a path that leads to the land of animals. I hope that the course will bring me further on this path - just a few steps. I do not expect too much." I could not foresee what would happen to me. I had asked for a piece of bread and I got a birthday cake!
Drum and dance with the Spirit Power Circle song from the Advanced I Course in the Animal Spirit Call audio recording
ADVANCED II Interspecies Counselor Course (5 days)
For beginning or experienced animal communicators who wish to engage in a dramatically life-enhancing, soul-evolving personal and professional experience.
Penelope will guide you to shift deeply into your soul essence to experience the heartfelt nature of this work and your own unique part in it. The focus is on being truly present in your core self as a counselor.
Exercises and discussion will center on counseling skills, problem solving, consultation guidelines and ethics. Other topics that are covered in the course pack and highlighted during the course are: how to work with animals in-person and long distance; how to tune into people for mutual understanding and successful consultations; how to compassionately interpret and relay the communications you receive for the benefit of all concerned; educating people and helping them to solve problems and enhance their relationship with their animal companions; handling crises and difficult situations; lost animals, illness, dying, and death; animals taking on human illness or emotional problems; inter-animal conflict; the role of past lives in counseling animals; basic healing skills; application of the Code of Ethics; how to set up and run a business as an animal communicator; building clientele, working with veterinarians and other animal professionals; resource information for further growth and networking.
PREREQUISITES: The Basic Course and Advanced I; When Animals Speak, Animals in Spirit; Animal Communication Mastery Series plus
a written essay describing: (1) your path in life, (2) your history with animals, (3) how you wish to use what you learn from this course, and (4) three or preferably more specific examples of how you have already used the ability to telepathically send and receive communication with animals to assist yourself, family, friends, or others. Include the communications that you have received from animals, how you responded to them, and the tangible, practical results of your communication experiences: changes in behavior and other improvements that are evident to you and others. (If you are not yet able to practically apply this skill, you may need to restudy publications on the subject or repeat the Basic and/or Advanced I Course.)
Advanced I may be waived for experienced professional communicators who send in 5 testimonials from people who state specifically how they have benefited from your communication with their animal companions and a summary of your professional experience, including newspaper or magazine articles about your work. Many experienced communicators have attended and benefited personally and professional from all the courses in the training program.
RECOMMENDED: All of Penelope's publications.
Bring pen and notebook and photos of your animal friends.
On the first day of the Advanced II Course you asked again about our expectations, and this time I didn't answer. What could I tell you? It was so simple - I came to Point Reyes because I had to come. No expectations, no wishes but the absolute certainty that I had to attend the course. Perhaps I would get a piece of bread - perhaps. But again I received my birthday cake.
I am grateful for so many things: first of all for your presence, your attention, your enthusiasm, your affection, your care. The composition and the organization of the course were perfect. Your house and your animals really made me feel at home. I am also very grateful for having met so many wonderful people. The experiences that we shared during our lessons were extraordinary, and I will never forget the intense and intelligent conversations.... And our laughter, our joy, our feeling of being connected since a long time!
I wanted to let you know how "changed" I felt, how transformed after I attended your two courses. I found myself saying to friends that it was the best thing I'd ever done, and I've done a lot of workshops, thereapies, seminars, courses, and healing modalities in the last twenty-five years.
Your classes open up a wonderful portal for me to jump through to see and live life in a more real, connected way.
I have changed so much by talking with animals, for I dream and pretend again. At one of your classes you made a comment to us "if you just aren't getting it, pretend you are." I know what you meant by this, it was to let yourself go and not stress on the answer. However, it made me realize how serious I had taken all the "crap" that had happened to me in my life. Also remembering how I was reprehended as a child to stop making up stories and dreaming and get serious! Well, now I dream dreams and make up stories for my seven-year-old son before he goes to bed at night. I tell him stories of flying silver dragons, castles, fairies and dolphins that give you rides through the sea and around the world. What I love most about telling these stories, is the imagination that I see shine through my son's eyes as I tell the stories. He goes to sleep with a smile on his face. Your thoughts on how we view our world was so "right on" for me and I thank you.
COMMUNICATING WITH ALL LIFE
Mastery Course
Understand the core principles and experience the essence of telepathic communion with all life. Recognize sources of guidance within yourself and in life forms all around you. The Mastery Course will help you hone your telepathic connection with laser beam precision.
Penelope combines her talents in interspecies and inter-dimensional communication, tuning the experience to facilitate quantum leaps in spiritual growth. Bring to light and release the blocks that inhibit tire telepathic heart communion. Explore spiritual union with the kingdoms of Nature and the Earth. Harmonize primate nature and soul essence. Cultivate the course of your being. Dissolve feelings of separation through infusion with our place and oneness in the family of life.
We may enhance body and soul communion through telepathy, drumming, toning, singing, movement, dance, breath, and energy awareness, shamanic, inter-dimensional journeying, story telling, healing circles, meditative exercises, quiet time in Nature, and dream sharing.
Those who attend earn Life Credits = ability to feel and express the unity of life, and Love Credits = ability to tap into the source of life and live the love that you are.
Adventurous should who yearn to dance to the tune in their hearts are invited to join Penelope Smith, authentic wise woman guide, in the forefront of what she calls, "The Underground Peace Movement." The Mastery Course is subtitled, God is on the Move!
PREREQUISITES: Familiarity with intuitive and/or interspecies communication skills and openness to the unity of life. The Mastery Course augments the other courses of the training program and is also valuable as a stand-alone retreat.
RECOMMENDED: All of Penelope's publications.
Bring pen and notebook. Drums, rattles or other musical instruments are welcome.
As I was driving home from the Mastery Course, and after I arrived, I was in a state of consciousness of timelessness. I was so in the "now" that I gave up trying to think about past our future.
Thank you does not begin to express how I feel about the Mastery Course. I feel that my goals and intentions were accomplished and then some. I would recommend the class to anyone and would take it again.
How does one thank someone who has helped to break their heart open to love? I have attended satsang with Gangaji and now to hear you speak the same truths, only with an even greater connection and appreciation to ALL THAT IS has filled my heart with love and appreciation. Whomever we meet, human or otherwise, is just an opportunity for further investigation of the self and another chance for opening to ALL THAT IS.
From the retreat, I learned to live in the big "O" leting g"O" and living and building on that kn"O"wing ability. When I got back to the vet clinic where I work after our retreat, no only had I let go, but I felt that new place of being. People who had been challenging for me changed positively in their behavior toward me. The letting "go" and living in that "O" and that wonderful feeling of honoring all had an effect on everyone around me. It was not a temporary state. I began to live it. Thank you being SUCH a huge impact on/in my life.
Thank you for the profound experiences with you and the other beings, human and non-human. I have had a few teachers over the years that have made a profound difference to my life and you are one of these. All of my beliefs have been shaken up and turned upside down. It is now my task to decide which ones are worth keeping and which ones to shed. I have been dropping down into that soft, quiet space, and I hope to live there once the road is clearer. I truly appreciate having the privilege to learn from you.
The proverbial life altering experience....It was like taking the most difficult, yet most rewarding graduate class of my life. We worked on OURSELVES to peel back the layers of issues that just living life paints over us. The theme was BEING PRESENT. In order to actually BE PRESENT I learned that one needs to clear out the accumulation of debris one carries around for who knows how many lifetimes. When one is actually PRESENT, I found that telepathic communication is possible with literally ANYTHING!
We felt the presence of the Divine as we chanted, drummed, danced as our power animal companions, called in the Spirits from the four winds and connected firmly to Mother Earth. We meditated, discussed our dreams and shared our lives....I have gained a wider, deeper appreciation of myself and all whom I encounter. So what now? THE WORK CONTINUES. THE JOY IS ENDLESS. LIFE IS GOOD!
INSTRUCTOR TRAINING PROGRAM APPRENTICESHIPS
ADVANCED III-VIII Teaching the Basic and Advanced Courses
Apprentice to teach the Basic and Advanced Courses developed by Penelope Smith. Available only for students who have previously had first-hand observation of the Basic and Advanced Courses taught by Penelope. You receive the course materials, attend the course, and then review the materials and your questions with Penelope. As needed, we'll handle other areas of professional growth and practice. For more experience, you may assist at more courses taught by Penelope or other teachers who have trained with her.
PREREQUISITES for Advanced III-VIII = each previous Advanced Course and review of professional experience.
Apprentice in-person or by phone (possible in rare cases only if you have done the training program with Penelope and you cannot apprentice in-person) to teach the Basic Course, Advanced I and II and, for those who become very experienced in teaching these courses, how to teach others how to teach these courses developed by Penelope Smith.
For apprenticeships by phone/Skype when in-person opportunities are not possible, after reviewing the materials sent by e-mail attached file, we will go over all the materials and how to teach the course, covering how to handle what can come up with students, answering all your current questions and further questions as they arise by phone or by e-mail. You can also attend and observe the relevant courses I teach in-person at no extra fee.
Advanced III Teaching the Basic Course PREREQUISITES: Advanced II Interspecies Counselor Course and review of professional experience and readiness
Advanced IV Teaching Advanced I - The Deepening PREREQUISITES: Advanced III and review of professional experience and readiness; must have successfully taught the Basic Course
Advanced V Teaching Advanced II - Interspecies Counselor Course PREREQUISITES: Advanced IV and review of professional training, experience, and readiness
Advanced VI Teaching Advanced III - Teaching the Basic Course (includes updated course material and permission to copy these materials to give to Advanced III students) PREREQUISITE: Review of professional training, experience, and readiness
Advanced VII Teaching Advanced IV - Teaching the Advanced I Course (includes updated course material and permission to copy these materials to give to Advanced IV students) PREREQUISITE: Review of professional training, experience, and readiness
Advanced VIII Teaching Advanced V - Teaching the Advanced II Course (includes updated course material and permission to copy these materials to give to Advanced V students) PREREQUISITE: Review of professional training, experience, and readiness
I'm about to teach my first animal communication workshop in my new house. While I was going through my notes and getting the sequence I'm going to do the exercises in I felt flooded with love and respect and gratitude to you for all you have given me, and the world.
I continue to be delighted and gratefully astounded at the profound shifts in my awareness, desire, commitment, and presence since apprenticing with you.
