Tag animals

Get the most from your animal communication session

Nancy Crowe Leave a comment

Your animal companion, like my Dusty here, is ready to offer up her opinions. You are ready to arrange an animal communication session. How do you get the most from it in order to help your animal and build a better relationship?

Based on my experience as an animal communicator, here are a few tips:

Choose a communicator who’s right for you.

There’s no substitute for a personal referral when you’re looking to hire an animal communicator. However, not everyone is able to get that. Even if you do have a name from a trusted friend, spend some time looking at their website and social media. Look for whether the practitioner subscribes to or mentions a code of ethics. Do you feel more confident and hopeful, or more anxious? Trust your research, but also trust your gut.

Read the instructions.

Just about any practitioner will have a form to fill out or information you need to include to arrange a session. You may be asked to acknowledge your understanding of the session; for example, that it is not a substitute for veterinary care. We all struggle with information overload. However, it saves your time and the animal communicator’s time if you read all of this and understand how the process works before reaching out.

Decide what’s most important.

What do you most want to find out from your animal during this communication session? If you have several questions, can you narrow it down to, say, two? Animals have limited attention spans just like we do.

Be ready to hear and follow through in good faith.

You probably already are; otherwise you wouldn’t have read this far. Animals may bring up concerns or express needs or preferences. They may tell me something you’re doing isn’t working well for them and ask if you can try another method. We owe it to our fellow beings of whatever species to listen to one another and give change (such as more play time, a cleaner litter box or being fed separately from the other dog) a chance.

Animal health info: what I do (and don’t do) with it

Nancy Crowe
Having Mojo tell me what he needed, and relaying that to his human and an equine bodyworker, helped us all help him feel better.

As a non-veterinarian, I do not diagnose or treat. As an animal communicator, I do sometimes get information about sore hips and hooves, tummy discomfort, itchy spots and more.

Sometimes the animal’s human caretaker tells me about any health issues going in. When I’m on rounds I always check in with the humans ahead of time for any updates (health included). Sometimes the animal himself will tell me about a health issue — or show me through images or feelings — during a communication session.

When a client arranges a session, “What does your vet say?” is one of my first questions. I want to make sure that any medical reasons for the cat not using the litter box or the dog’s increased anxiety have been addressed and ruled out.

Medical or otherwise, “what’s wrong” is never the focus of a communication session anyway. That’s because all of us living beings are so much more than our symptoms, illnesses, injuries and seemingly odd behaviors. No animal’s illness or trauma changes the fact that she is a unique creation with an inner light all her own.

After an animal communication session I relay any information the animal chose to share, including anything that might relate to health, to the human carer. The human can then choose to ignore it, keep an eye on it or share it with the vet. As I tell clients: Take from this only what resonates and is helpful, and leave the rest.

Much the same goes for my Let Animals Lead® sessions. In this specialized form of Reiki, the practitioner never “beams” energy to the animal (or any body part thereof) the way a practitioner might in a human Reiki session. Because Let Animals Lead® is meditation-based, a session is a quiet time to relax and reset. Though this method is not about fixing anything (and I keep the Serenity Prayer close), relaxation can only help with healing, whatever healing might mean for the animal in that moment.

It’s important to note that Let Animals Lead® is hands off unless the animal initiates contact. Many do, especially if they’ve been working with me for a while. Mojo, a Tennessee Walking Horse, once backed up against the fence between us and asked for hands-on energy. He showed me some pain in his hips and along the left side. I placed both hands on his hips and began my meditation. After a while he began licking and chewing, then walked off to join the rest of the herd. I passed this along to Mojo’s human and to the equine bodyworker who also worked regularly with him. After her session with him a day or two later, she sent me a diagram to show how she adjusted a misalignment on the left.

The codes of ethics I follow for both animal communication and Let Animals Lead® are clear about not dispensing medical advice or treatment. They’re also pretty clear about showing up and doing what we can do. It does take a village, and I try to do my part in it.

‘Do Unto Animals’ takes savvy, practical approach

Nancy Crowe

81sxcc1obelWhen the enormity of a problem makes you want to shrug your shoulders and turn away, that’s the time to break that problem down — into a million oddball pieces if necessary — and find something, however small it may seem, that you can do. Sometimes it’s right in your back yard.

Tracey Stewart’s book, Do Unto Animals: A Friendly Guide to How Animals Live, and How We Can Make Their Lives Better, does this with the savvy of a an animal advocate and former vet tech and with mom-next-door authenticity. The book also does it with Lisel Ashlock’s breathtaking illustrations, some of them simply capturing the natural world and others showing how pigs express sadness, how cats may react to catnip (“whoa, dude!”), and more.

Within these colorful pages, you’ll find everything from practical animal care tips (“Five Ways to Make a Cat Happy”) to recipes for homemade dog biscuits and horse cookies to hard-to-take information about puppy mills and factory farms. At no point in the reading of this book did I find the shaming, blaming, or manipulating that can seep into the most well-meaning literature that aims to benefit animals or the environment as a whole. Parents will find this book especially useful, as there are several activities (such as the “Hurtless Hunt”) families can do together.

So the next time you read or hear something that leaves you feeling overwhelmed with sadness and/or that nothing you can do could possibly help — first of all: Breathe. Then open this book.