six
ANIMAL INTUITIVES
I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
Journal, 1833
I SUPPOSE MANY PEOPLE remember a happy childhood, but mine seems an enchanted time to me now, cast in gold and silver light in a time before TV and iPods and cell phones, e-mail and text-messaging; before computers, Facebook, and Twitter; before hi-fi surround-sound systems, Bluetooth, and hi-def—when we roamed barefoot all summer, exploring our outdoor world. So important were animals that we children knew the names even of our parents’ and grandparents’ long-dead favorite dogs. In the course of a fairly long life I’ve known cats, horses, dogs, ducks, cows, chickens, pigs; I’ve even kept honeybees, and as my daughters’ mom I husbanded a host of pets, including gerbils, mice, guinea pigs, goldfish, a box turtle, and one exceptional Dutch rabbit.
On the other hand, it never occurred to me to “communicate” with them like Dr. Doolittle. Our animals indicated wants or needs by ears, eyes, paws, tongues, hooves in an easily readable code. We also recognized that they knew much more about our inner lives.
There’s no question that animals know everything we’re thinking or, rather (and more important), what we are feeling: like children, they sense our inner states, absorb our emotions. Are we anxious, sad, fretful, confused? Are we angry, annoyed, vengeful, violent? Are we afraid? Are we pretending or preening with vanity and pride? The animals know it; they forgive us all.
Cats are especially intuitive. No wonder the Egyptians worshipped them as gods! (One man was pulled limb from limb by a mob after killing a cat.) For some five years now, Oscar, a black-and-white cat who has been visiting the Alzheimer’s patients at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, has been able to predict when a person is a few hours from death. He is never wrong. He never lingers unless the patient is at the point of death, and then he curls on the bed, purring, and does not leave until the patient succumbs. David Dosa, a geriatrician at the facility, did not believe it. He didn’t even like cats, but he had to admit what he had seen. In 2007 he wrote an essay for the New England Journal of Medicine and later a book, Making Rounds with Oscar. How does the little cat know who will need his help to ease the journey to the other side?
I think the animals stand in as angels for us humans, teaching the qualities of mercy, tolerance, acceptance, trust. They have resilience and courage, and often a sense of humor, even playing little jokes. They love to play. They prick us out of our self-absorption and back to important things—like enjoying life. Animals that have been tortured and abused have other things to teach. Even with kindness, they may never fully recover, for, crippled by trauma and abuse, they become like frightened people, as it were, to draw forth our compassion and show us aspects of ourselves.
Our animals pull our emotions into themselves (how do they survive it?) and, by the purity of their own nature, transform our distress and pain. Merely resting in the presence of a good cat or dog or horse can call us into a sense of Being.
You groom a horse, and each brushstroke along those beautiful muscled withers and down its barrel soothes away troubles. Animals return us to the present moment. Your dog, gazing into your face, ready to take on any task you ask of him—or better yet to play—offers you solutions. The comfort you receive from a cat purring on your lap, its little paws kneading your stomach, or the sniffed kiss it tips daintily onto your lips—these are no small things. They heal a broken heart.
Once a cat I owned died a tragic, horrible death. I sat on the steps of my back porch looking out on my scruffy garden and wept, sobbing, the tears rolling down my chin. Then our pet rabbit hopped across the garden, jumped up into my lap, and lay across my knees. She sat there, comforting me, as my tears fell on her fur.
The psychic abilities of animals are renowned, and if telepathy and precognition were standards of intelligence, they’d be off the Richter scale, so that we humans would be relegated to serving them as their slaves. Animals predict earthquakes as well as seizures in their owners; they know when their owners are coming home; they travel incredible distances, in one recorded instance walking two thousand miles to find the way home; they pick up our intentions; they know when their owner has had an accident or died in a distant place. After his owner’s death, one grieving dog found the burial site where he’d never been, and for weeks, with no footprints to follow and no aid from his sense of smell, he trotted eight miles to lie down on his master’s grave. The story is reported in Rupert Sheldrake’s excellent book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.
I’m constantly amazed to read that some scientist has dug up a grant to discover whether animals think or feel—or whether they have a sense of humor! Have they never known an animal in their lives? Chimpanzees learn sign language; parrots and mynah birds repeat our words and know their meaning perfectly. The gentle bonobos demonstrate a social system so generous and tender that we crude humans might apprentice ourselves to learn their ways! If the animals are smart enough to know our thoughts, why can’t we hear what they might have to say?
It turns out we can. Some people do.
Once when I was going through a particularly difficult time in my life, I drove out to the Great Falls of the Potomac with my beloved dog, Puck, a small corgi. There, I sat on a rock for a long time, simply staring at the tons of water that poured through the gorge, leaping and raging over rocks, and spraying white spume into the glittering blue air. I think I must have gazed at the same spot for twenty or thirty minutes, moving neither my body nor my eyes. I had no deep thoughts but merely gazed, distracted.
After a time I rose and began to climb over the rocks and craggy boulders to a higher vantage point, when suddenly behind me I heard a cry: “Wait! Wait for me!” I turned and saw my dog peering over the edge of a rock at me, his little legs too short to jump or clamber over. All I could see were his pointed ears, his pleading eyes. Yet I had heard him speak. In English! I went back and helped him over the boulder, amazed that I had not only picked up his distress but also heard him as an external voice.
In general I don’t have the gift of hearing animals, unless finding my lost cat when she’s trapped in the closet counts. I attribute my hearing Puck that day to my deep meditation as I watched the water tumbling over the falls.
My daughter’s friend Ronda was caring for her mother’s German shepherd at her house in Massachusetts when the dog disappeared. It was winter. Snow. She called and called. The dog was gone five days when she called an animal psychic, Brenda Cunliffe, who lived nearby. Brenda asked for the name of the dog and a description. Then she hooked up with the dog and after a moment began to speak.
“There’s a big house with a white porch and columns. I’m on the porch, when a loud sound scares me [a car backfiring? a gunshot?]. I’m running down the road. I run into the woods and across a stream. I’m in the woods. I’m lost. I can’t find my way back. I keep on for a long time. I come to a big, slippery meadow. It’s hard to walk on. On the other side of the meadow is a little shack. I crawl under it. I’m hungry. I’m cold.”
“I know exactly where he is!” cried Ronda. “He’s at Fire Pond number five! Tell him I’m on my way.”
And she went and picked him up.
The first time I ever heard of a pet psychic, or animal communicator as it is sometimes called, was in the early 1990s, when I was being interviewed at a Boston radio station. The radio host was saying goodbye to her earlier victim as I arrived, and as she welcomed me, she mentioned that the woman who had just left could talk to animals. And so can I, I thought, but they don’t answer back.
“Did she talk to your dog?” I asked, pointing in amusement to the spaniel at her feet.
“That’s exactly what I asked her halfway through the interview. She said, ‘Oh, we’ve been talking all this time.’ While we were on the air.”
“Really. What did he say?” I was curious.
“She said he says he doesn’t like to go down the basement stairs because they’re too steep and he’s afraid of falling. But he has to, because we feed him in the basement. And it’s true!
“He said a new two-legged has come into the family, and he doesn’t like her, and the cooking isn’t as good as it was before.”
“And?”
“Well, my mother has come to live with us, and she doesn’t like the dog that much, and also she’s taken over the cooking, since I work full-time.”
I never found out the name of that animal communicator, but since that time the profession, it seems, has grown. Some find lost animals. Some specialize in expensive racehorses and show horses, and others offer help with your disturbed or psychotic house pets. If you hunt around, you can find classes in how to commune with animals.
A friend, Margaret Dulaney Balitsaris, lives on a farm in Pennsylvania. She loves her horse. He’s learned to turn the barn lights on with his tongue, and she has to cover the light switch with duct tape when she puts him in his stall at night. The horse, injured, cannot be ridden, but Margaret walks beside him every day, talking to him and petting him. They’re happy going for walks. She says she doesn’t need to ride. They have a good time together.
One day, walking beside him, she watched his hind leg buckle under him. “I wonder what it feels like when your hind leg jerks and unhinges like that.” The next step she took, she felt an electric current ripple down her leg. It made her leg collapse.
“Oh.”
Was that animal communication?
The major problem with animals comes in verifying the information you receive. I’ll explain what I mean. On Monday, April 27, 2009, Tinker Bell, a tiny, black, six-pound Chihuahua, was picked up in a freak tornado in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and carried away by seventy-mile-per-hour winds. Dorothy and Laverne Utley credit a pet psychic with guiding them to a wooded area nearly a mile away where they found the little puppy, tired, dirty, and hungry but alive. This kind of thing is easy to verify: You either find the dog, or you don’t. (There’s always the possibility that the animal walked off or was killed and eaten after the psychic found him, but if you find him you can pretty well trust that the animal intuitive knew what she was doing!)
I heard of one animal psychic who “gave a reading” to the half brother of the famous racehorse Secretariat. This horse was bold and sure of his own position in the world. He told her that he didn’t like the little creature in the baby carriage that came sometimes to visit.
Speaking in Pictures
Animal communication is often done in pictures. Melody, a cowgirl who lives in Taos, New Mexico, had a horse with whom she communicated through images. She could never catch him in the pasture if she was upset or rushing (no one could), but if she sent pictures of stroking and petting him lovingly and of what fun they had riding in the high meadows, of galloping through the tall grass, of drinking from streams that gurgled over brown rocks, the horse would lift his head and walk to her, bending for the halter. She had to feed him love-feast pictures. When she was forced to sell him, she says he turned and gave her such an aggrieved look as she has never forgotten.
Sometimes, however, the information comes in scrambled form.
A few years ago, my daughter Sarah found that one of her two cats was so jealous of her baby that she had to give him away—the cat, I mean. Ishi, a magnificent black cat who was part Siamese, to judge by the shape of his face, was young, wild, and energetic. After he scratched the baby, however, my daughter informed me (in the direct way children use with a mother) that when I came to visit the following week, Ishi would be going back to Washington with me; she thought a cousin in Virginia might give him a permanent home.
I wasn’t happy, but I flew to Massachusetts and arranged to bring Ishi back to stay with me until he could move on to his new home. Meanwhile, to ease his likely distress, we asked a pet psychic to explain the change to Ishi, but as you’ll see, it’s sometimes easier to know what the cat is thinking than to have him imagine an incomprehensible event. On the day of his departure, petting and soothing him, we gave him a tranquilizer and drove him, asleep in his little crate, to the plane.
Arrived at my apartment in Washington, I slid the still-dopey cat into the kitchen and shut the door, confining him to a small, safe space where he had food and water and soft bedding for the night.
The next day I faced a panther! Terrified, he hissed and slashed at me with his claws. Moreover, it turned out that the cousin couldn’t take Ishi as planned; the cat was mine. For a week he challenged me, ears back, teeth bared. He hated me.
Finally, I called another animal intuitive. She talked to Ishi long-distance and relayed his story to me over the phone. When he was young (she said) and vulnerable, he’d lived with two girls who’d tried to poison him. They gave him drugs for fun. One of them wanted to kill him. Now, on his own, he didn’t know where he was, and he was frightened.
I was astonished. Was she making this up? Ishi had never lived with two young college girls, much less drug addicts! Sarah had adopted both Ishi and his mother from the pound when he was only a few weeks old, and he had never lived with anyone else, much less someone who’d tried to kill him!
Disappointed, I paid the pet psychic and dismissed her entire story. A week later, Ishi and I had a breakthrough, and in the months that followed we became so deeply bonded that later still, when I was forced to give him away (allergies), I wept. He was a beautiful creature, sweet, loving, attentive, gentle. I found a wonderful home for him. I know he’s happy there.
It was only long afterward that it dawned on me what the animal intuitive had meant: She’d seen the situation in images from Ishi’s point of view; the “two young girls” were my daughter and myself! We had tranquilized him for the plane, and when he’d woken up, he was in a strange place without his family or owner. He thought I’d meant to kill him. And so I learned that while you can hear what the animal has to say, you might have a hard time interpreting it. They are not thinking in words, after all, but in images—in “knowings”—in the same way they pick up telepathically our thoughts and emotions.
WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE to “communicate” with an animal? Once, many years ago, I met an Australian fisherman who talked to dolphins. Whenever he went out fishing, he found that dolphins swarmed around his boat and, moreover, that he could ask them to jump and they would jump or to follow and they would accompany his boat, diving and cavorting around and under and ahead of him. He called to them by mental telepathy.
We were at an environmental conference held at the Freer Gallery of Art when he told me this. I was intrigued.
“I can do it to you, if you want,” he offered.
“Do what?”
“Make you come to me.”
“You’re not serious!”
Who could resist such an offer? I walked outside and down the gracious sandstone stairway of the art gallery to the pavement below, and there I stood a moment wondering how he would “call” me to him and how I would recognize it if he did. It was a lovely soft dusky summer evening. Indoors, in the reception hall, a crowd of environmentalists was shouting happily at one another, creating an awful din as they battled for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. I took a breath, looking across the grassy sweep of the Washington Mall.
Suddenly, and I can’t explain why exactly, I felt a “need,” a longing, a desire to take a few steps toward the gallery. As I moved toward the stairs, it felt “right,” and so I mounted the stairwell, still not quite certain what I was doing but following the instinct, the intuition, as if pulled by a beam of light. I imagine an airplane on automatic pilot, when hooked onto the landing beam at the airport, as it descends with this same surety and sense of yes. I pushed open the Freer Gallery doors, turned left, and moved confidently down the stairs to the lower gallery, and there before me the whole great mass of this gathering spread out, and suddenly I woke up. Lost. The “pull” had stopped. Where was I supposed to go?
I found my Australian talking to a couple. He turned in apology. “I’m so sorry!” he said. “I was interrupted. How far did you get?”
I told him I’d made it to the entrance.
“And then a gentleman came up to talk to me,” he said. “I couldn’t do it anymore. But you got most of the way.” He was pleased with his success.
I never found out exactly how he “called” me to him or what he did to bring the dolphins to his side. It’s a gift you’d think would be useful. Particularly if you have children who tend to wander off.
DOLPHINS ARE ESPECIALLY TELEPATHIC. Once, sitting on a dock in Florida near a bottlenose dolphin pool, I “sent” the thought request for a dolphin to leap out of the water for me! I wanted to see him jump. No, that’s wrong. It was all about my ego. I wanted to see if he would pick up my telepathy and do what I asked. Could he hear me? I “beamed” and “beamed” at him. In vain. He swam on in his slow, bored circles.
Oh.
Finally I gave up. I pushed to my feet, started to move away, and just then saw him swimming in ever-faster circles round and round his pond, gaining speed—and he jumped! And jumped! And jumped again in front of me.
They get our messages.
The trick is, can we hear the ones they send to us?
MARIA KARMI is an animal intuitive in Finland. When she wants to communicate with an animal on behalf of the owner, or with her own animals, or with wild ones, she puts herself into a mode of deep listening. If she tries to guess what the problem is, she will fail, she says, but if she grows quiet and receptive, if she moves into the silence, the information comes. She does not push or strive for anything.
“That’s why communication is so easy. I just need to listen. The animal tells me what it wants me to know. All I need to do is trust the information that is given me.”
As a child, Maria spent hours alone on her grandparents’ farm. She was very sensitive to emotions and could “read” people around her, as well as the animals. In the silence of nature she felt a part of something larger. Later, when she was fifteen, her curiosity took her to out-of-body experiences so frightening that she promised herself and God in heaven that she would always stay connected to her own body and to the earth. Now she works as a physiotherapist, dedicated to mindfulness, Chinese medicine, and the practice of Being Here Now. Her body, she says, is her anchor, and to do any telepathic work with animals she must stay grounded and physically strong.
Six years ago she took a class in animal communication. She asked her dog Ruffe, a nine-year-old border collie, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He placed his paw on her knee and answered in clear Swedish (her native tongue): “Just try to love me. That’s all I need.” She was so overwhelmed that she wept for an hour. Her grey parrot Chino told her that he was afraid of the dark, after which she took care to leave a night-light on when it was time to sleep. Her rabbit XI said he was afraid of heights, and indeed she could feel how his little stomach twisted when she picked him up.
Later she took a course in communicating with problem horses and gained confidence by checking her intuitions with the owners. She was amazed how easy it was! “Since then,” she wrote to me, “I have had many amazing chats with animals of different species, and every one of them is different. It makes me very humble when they open up to me. I’m so grateful to be able to give them voice. We have so much to learn from the animals; they touch the human heart in ways that no therapy in the world can do.
“We meet at a soul level,” she continued. “If I close my eyes when communicating, I couldn’t tell you if I were listening to a human or an animal. The feelings are universal.”
I HAVE ONE LAST STORY concerning animals. I have a place in New Mexico. One summer while I was out there, I started horseback riding again. I was raised with horses but had stopped years before. Suddenly I felt an urge to ride. I was put on a half-Arabian three-year-old named Spring. She was amazing! I adored her. I know horses, and I felt somehow that she was special. The following summer I leased her for several months. We had such a deep connection that the stable owner urged me to buy her, but I refused. How could I keep a horse when I traveled so much, dividing my time between Washington and New Mexico? The horse would always be wherever I wasn’t. Still, I loved this animal, and I knew that she loved me.
A young woman named Danielle bought her. I arranged to lease her whenever I came to New Mexico—a happy compromise for me: I got to ride this lovely horse without the responsibility of owning her.
One morning in December 2007 I woke out of a deep sleep with the horrified premonition: “Spring is going to be sold, and this time she’ll move far away; I won’t ever see her again.”
I e-mailed the New Mexico stable. “If Spring is ever sold, will you let me know?”
The answer shot back: “I just learned that her owner has to leave Taos. She told me she wants to sell the horse.”
I put down an option to buy her and arranged to spend a month in New Mexico. I said I’d decide by the end of the month whether to buy the horse or not. And then came weeks of indecision! It made no sense whatsoever for me to buy a horse. It’s expensive. I travel. I’ve never wanted to own a horse. It’s easy to buy a horse and hard to sell one. Was she a good horse, anyway? I didn’t know. Just because I’d fallen in love with her, did that mean anything? She had a strange conformation, but an exquisite head and a sweetness of nature I’d never met before in a horse. When she saw me coming, she’d walk the length of the paddock to meet me. I loved to ride her. I loved her willingness, her lightness, her intelligence, her efforts to do whatever I asked.
But buying a horse made no sense!
I didn’t want a horse! Why did I feel I was “supposed” to buy her? That we were “supposed” to be together?
Believe me, this time I consulted not one psychic but two. One said there was a karmic connection between the two of us and, yes, buy her. The other said I should not. I believed the second.
Each time I made the decision to let Spring go, congratulating myself and experiencing a welcome sense of relief, I was struck an hour later by the nagging sense that the decision had to be revisited.
But buying a horse was nuts! I didn’t even know where I would keep her!
How could I afford a horse?
It would change my whole life!
And so I passed that month, waffling back and forth, until one day it occurred to me that every time I have followed an intuition that made no sense, it’s always worked out right and that I don’t have the prescience to foresee an outcome. That I must trust. Trust God. Trust these unexplained psychic powers. Trust my inner wisdom, the angels that bring me gifts or lessons that I don’t even know I want. Trust that if the Universe is giving me the horse, then it will also somehow provide the money to stable her, or if it doesn’t the horse could be sold. Or given away. Trust. I had to trust my guides, my God, the Beloved that bends, brooding, over us, offering us new ways.
I bought Spring. I have brought her to Virginia, where I ride, and she has given me more pleasure than I would have imagined possible. I don’t understand our connection; I don’t need to. One day, while I was grooming her magnificent hindquarters (and growing quiet under the spell of her sweet scent), she swung her tail around as if to switch a fly, draped it over my face and shoulders, and held it there, veiling me in her embrace.
Inviting Intuition II: Deep Listening
There are tried, true ways to develop intuition, but only the brave person is willing to undertake the path.
First, you go into stillness. Practice being alone and in silence.
Take a walk. Look around. Sit on a park bench. Be still.
In rest you experience heightened awareness, discernment, empathy, joy.
Close your eyes and listen to the wind. If it is possible to get out into the country, out into nature ... go!
Second, practice mindfulness and meditation. It doesn’t matter what form of meditation you are drawn to as long as you begin. (I give instructions in the appendix for anyone who wants them.) Sit for five or ten or twenty minutes once or twice a day. Close your eyes. Allow your thoughts to drift. Go inward, and watch your breathing (ʺIn ... out ...ʺ). Watch with attention. Gradually your stormy thoughts calm down. You grow still. Now you can sense the nudge of intuition, listen for “the still, small voice of God.” Do this every day. It is mind-training. It changes your brain waves. It’s not for nothing that some forms of meditation are called Insight Meditation.
Meditation alters the brain. It makes you happy!
One study of high school students found that those who meditated for only five or ten minutes twice a day showed prefrontal structural changes. The prefrontal part of the brain governs discernment, wisdom, and moral judgment. It’s the CEO of the brain. Computerized brain imaging has shown great cavities and gouges in the prefrontal brains of a good proportion of the youngsters being studied. Yet by meditating for only five minutes in the morning and again in the evening—and this was with no chanting of mantras, no religious practices, but simply sitting quietly, watching the breath for only two weeks—those gorges and caverns filled in.
Third, trust the messages you start to receive. Insight is different from the shivers of anxiety, worry, or fear, and it differs from conscious thought.
Keep a journal of intuitions or spiritual encounters. How does intuition present itself to you? You’ll soon come to trust your Inner Director, your guardian angels, your Higher Self.
Talk to it. Ask for help.
Then listen.
To increase intuition, avoid drugs, alcohol, and mind-altering substances. The clean brain is automatically intuitive.
BEING STILL
It takes courage to be quiet. I know people for whom this is easy. They are by nature introverts. They are often artists or scientists, exceptionally creative. They hike off to a hermitage without neighbors nearby. Or they go fishing on a beautiful river, camping alone, waking with the golden streaks of dawn and watching the light that sparkles off the water. They catch their breath at the beauty of a field of grass moving like ocean waves in the wind. They lie down in green pastures, they restore their soul in solitude.
I know other people to whom being alone is so painful they would rather hurl themselves at a ball on a squash court, bench-press massive weights, take math tests, lose chess games, toss pancakes in a fast-food diner—anything—rather than be imprisoned with their own thoughts.
“Why ever would I want to look inside? What if there’s nothing there?” cried one woman I know. Which would be funny except that she was serious. And another acquaintance, stiff with righteous resolve: “Meditation is so self-centered. I think you should be out doing things for someone else if you have so much time on your hands.”
It takes discipline to be still. Yet what you discover is a boundless expansion of awareness. Pure consciousness. Also, your brain works better. Studies indicate that meditation—being still—merely being eases stress, eases addictions, builds up the immune system, and provides physical and emotional well-being.
It also increases intuition. You know who is calling on the phone. You lose your car keys, search everywhere, then remember to pause and send out a silent plea to the Beloved, the Holy Spirit, your guides and guardians: “Help!” If you are open, then, you find yourself walking to a table and pulling the keys out from under a pile of papers. Intuition?
And one other thing about meditation: As you strengthen spiritually, as you increase your vibratory frequency, you shine with light. It’s called enlightenment.
Listen. I have seen light pouring off people and off grasses and trees, and animals, and children—off every living thing. It flames off us “like shining from shook foil,” as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, for we ourselves are composed of Divine fire, and this is why we can see spirits and guides when our spiritual eyes are opened. We are stardust. We are composed of the same structures and substance that blew out of the Big Bang, born of the “suchness” of God, the entangled photons that confuse and tease our physicists.
We are Divine.
Not long ago I saw a woman, praying. A shock of light passed over her, streaming from her skin. Light poured from her third eye, the spiritual center.
I have been witness many times to this phenomenon, although it is usually glimpsed in a veiled or shadowy way, a passing, fleeting quickening of light that flares up in a person and dies down again.
It is the light of love.