My story.
I tell you this story to give you an honest understanding of my background and my spirit. There is no reliable, objective or meaningful “certification” process by which to evaluate the ability and credentials of us empaths, intuitives, communicators and healers. But you can judge us by two things: the concrete results of our work, and by how we live our lives. So I feel it is only honourable to offer you an honest glimpse into my past, to help you evaluate my strengths and weaknesses as a communicator.
In India when we meet and part we often say, ‘Namaste,’ which means:
I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides,
I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace.
I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us.
~Ram Dass
I set out to learn how to communicate with animals as a child. And I failed, miserably. When I was 6 it was obvious to me that animals had some means of communicating with each other that was far more sophisticated than our kind gave them credit for. I solemnly decided it would be my mission in life to “break the code” of their language and learn how to translate for them, so other humans would understand. Snails struck me as simple creatures who would likely express themselves in fairly simple terms, so I thought I’d start there and then work my way up the food chain. Out I went to the back yard, day after day, sploshing about knee-deep in icy spring water and watercress, trying earnestly to “break the code” of snailspeak. I alternated between unsuccessful attempts to eavesdrop and unsuccessful attempts to control them by “beaming” commands (“Stop.” “Turn around.” “Go up the watercress stalk, not down.”). The darn snails never once had the courtesy to obey me. I tried communicating with birds. Bugs. Rabbits. Wild deer. My patient yellow lab, Nellie. When I said “sit,” with my voice, she usually obeyed. So I tried thinking “Sit!” in her direction. Or silently pleading with her, “Pleeeeeeeeeeease, sit! I’ll give you a giant, juicy dog biscuit if you would just once sitting when I think it!” For all my earnest hope, focus and determination, Nellie would gaze at me, bored and puzzled, and pointedly not sit. With all of these animals, of course, I was not communicating so much as telepathically commanding them to do things, and they saw no reason to obey. I assumed they just hadn’t heard me!! Oh, how human I am.
“Not everything is easy, but it is always simple.” ~Anon.
After a few years I gave up trying to communicate with the darn animals, and set out at the age of 10 to become a veterinarian. I loved science and of course animals, and as a teenager I got the first of many, many jobs as a veterinary assistant. Unfortunately, I fainted every time I saw or helped someone hurt or cut open an animal. After years of doggedly trying to “get over” my reaction to blood and the physical suffering of animals, I finally succeeded. A fluffy orange cat couldn’t pee, and the vet had to stick a long needle through his abdomen to extract the urine. It was my job to hold the cat. The cat screamed and yowled and struggled, but I didn’t get dizzy. Not even a little bit. I was thrilled. For about 5 minutes. And then it dawned on me that I didn’t get dizzy because it wasn’t a cat I was holding. Rather, it was a furry sack of fluid and bones and teeth and yowls. I’d finally severed every last empathic connection to this animal, and I realized, with a jolt, that I might as well be a motorcycle mechanic as continue to work with animals this way.
So I gave up my dream of going to vet school, and went to graduate school in English Literature at the University of Virginia instead. I loved to read and I loved to write, and I figured I’d become a gentle and inspiring English Professor like my father-what could possibly go wrong with that plan? A lot, as it turned out! Though I loved the literature, the highly competitive and emotionally barren landscape of academia proved utterly toxic to me, and I ungracefully dropped out of the program shortly before completing my Ph.D. Now I was quite disoriented, deeply discouraged, devoid of any real marketable skills, and suffering from a severe eating disorder (anorexia/bulimia). I tried selling my artwork to pay the bills. That plan, too, failed miserably. Whew!
For all my heart and determination, I was having trouble finding my way in this big world, to put it mildly. But something miraculous happened in the darkness of that confusing time. I think I was just so tired of disappointing people and screwing my life up that I figured the least I could do was figure out how to EAT, for heaven’s sake. And so I did. Slowly. With the help of a courageous and wonderfully unconventional therapist, I slowly, clumsily began to heal my relationship with my body. But after spending most of my adult life starving and mistreating my physical body, I really didn’t have a clue about how to actually take care of it! So I went to the local health food store, hoping I think to find something akin to the health food kibble I fed my beloved dog. I was sure some authority figure would be able to tell me what simple mixture of food human bodies needed to thrive, and I could get a bag of it and go home and get on with my life. Instead, I found the array of vehement and contradictory opinions at the local health food store (macrobiotic, vegan, low carb, raw food, soy is healthy/soy is toxic, meat is healthy/meat is toxic, buy this supplement/no this one... etc.) utterly overwhelming, and I fled.
But finally I had a breakthrough. It occurred to me as I sat there, crying in the parking lot, that mustangs in the wild simply “know” what they need to eat. They find minerals in the earth, and they deworm themselves with wild plants. If horses and other animals could accurately determine what their bodies needed, why couldn’t I? And so I tried intuitively “tuning in” to my own body wisdom to decide what and how to eat. And, to my surprise, I got clear, helpful and vivid “answers”-usually in the form of pictures in my head. A plain boiled potato. A crisp apple. Almonds. These plain, simple, nourishing foods didn’t scare me. And so I began again to eat. Though my diet was strange, I was healthy and had enormous energy. And so, as life went on I began relying on what the Quakers call that “still small voice” inside to decide not just what to eat but what job to take and how to handle other life situations.
“Another consolation, of course, will be the learning-which better be good giving the price. But it’s a fact: few of us are naturally profound; we have to be forced down.” ~William Sloane Coffin
And lo and behold, a way began to open for me in this world. Years tumbled by and I found myself with a husband and a cat. We moved out to the country, and the cat, bless her heart, immediately began peeing on my bed pillow. Yuck! Finally, after several weeks of this, I called a woman named Patty Summers who advertised locally as an animal communicator. I didn’t really believe she’d be able to help, but I loved that darn cat and we were desperate. Patty explained that the cat was furious with me for moving her so abruptly. And, lo and behold, after that one short session with Patty over the phone (I thought that was crazy), the cat never once peed in the house again.
A year later, I found myself reluctantly enrolled in one of Patty’s animal communication workshops... very nervous and deeply skeptical, but curious to see what in the world this “animal communication” business was all about. Even if communicating with animals was possible for Patty, I couldn’t believe it was a skill that could be taught to the general public (and I was sure that if I was capable of communicating with animals I’d have gotten somewhere when I was seven). But to my complete surprise, when I “sensed in” and focused on an animal in the room, my head filled with vivid and detailed pictures, which the animal’s owner usually understood exactly! Yes, they had another cat just the color I described. Yes their dog chewed the legs of furniture. Yes their horse had breathing problems. By some strange twist of fortune, all those hard, slow years of intuitively inching my way out of an eating disorder and struggling to hear the “still small voice” of my own spirit turned out to have been superb and thorough preparation for telepathic communication with the animals! Something huge just “clicked” in my life. Somehow, in spite of myself, I’d finally come full circle, back to my childhood dream of communicating with the animals. It’s a crazy story, but every bit a true one.
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow... if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own... if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you up to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself... if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
~Oriah Mountain Dreamer, from Declaration of Non Interest