An equine therapist wrote to me years ago with a very earnest and powerful question. I’ve expanded the answer I wrote to her for this column. I recently listened to a talk you gave and I was very delighted with your message(s). The message I most gratefully got from your talk that I have been wanting to hear from the Animal Communication world is:
"I want everyone to learn how to listen to their own animals.” As a bodywork practitioner, observer, and absolute lover of animals, I have had a resistance to Animal Communication popularity simply because I have so many clients who are paying huge amounts of money for someone to "talk" to their animals when the animal is practically jumping up and down screaming at their person to just notice what they are trying to “say."
I was revamping the garden of my Sonoran desert tortoise, Mo, shifting blocks in the retaining wall and putting in a few large planter boxes. Mo was trundling around, munching on grass and exploring, when he suddenly made a beeline to one of the large planters I had on its side as I was cleaning it.
He plodded around my feet and proceeded to climb into the planter. I picked him up and put him back on the ground to finish cleaning. He climbed back in. We repeated the scenario a few times with me laughing at Mo’s persistence and vaguely, in the background, puzzling about his unusual behavior as I stayed focused on my garden work.