My formal training.
“It’s like, at the end, there’s this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?” ~Richard Bach
photo by Brennan Caverhill
I studied animal communication with Patty Summers, a wise, ethical, and gifted communicator and author of Talking with the Animals. Patty taught me to trust-perhaps the most precious gift I’ve ever received. I first studied energetic healing work with Sandy Rakowitz (formerly of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing), a skilled healer who gently opened my uncertain and sceptical “inner eye” to the wonderland world of chakras and energy fields, and who started me on this difficult path of intuitive healing. I have studied some advanced shamanic healing techniques with Carla Meeske Person (Foundation for Shamanic Studies lineage), author of The Calico Shaman, who guided me through an intense, difficult and exhilarating apprenticeship in soul retrieval and the ancient, shamanic approach to health and wholeness.
But far and away the animals (yours and my own) have been my best, most inspiring and most stubbornly rigorous teachers. I often say that we humans love our fancy notions about life and the universe (some accurate I’m sure, but some pretty frilly). But there’s nothing, absolutely NOTHING “new age” about an indignant cat peeing on the couch. If a pissed off cat calms and changes her behavior after a conversation with me, I’ve been given the highest compliment I think a human could ever earn in this world. It’s the animals I struggle to impress and earn the respect of in this work, not the humans. Not an easy task.
Over the years I have also studied with less depth Tellington Touch, traditional herbal healing, flower essences, therapeutic essential oils, Reiki, homeopathy and almost any other spiritual/energetic healing modality I have reason to believe might be concretely effective. In the earthen realm, I am an experienced and enthusiastic “clicker trainer,” and a strong advocate for positive-reinforcement animal training. I spent years studying different popular methods of “natural horsemanship,” but eventually found it easiest and simplest to let the individual horses teach me how earn their trust and respect. And each horse I meet is different. My horses don’t wear shoes, and I trim their healthy, happy feet myself.