Understanding and practicing our connection with our animals makes it sooo… much easier to understand our connection with people and that’s just one of the things that makes animals such a valuable part of the Happiness program.
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There’s 2 short audios to make it easier
I’ve broken the session up into two audios, so that you can easily repeat the Quiet Mind section, which is the one people are most likely to want to listen to more than one time. The introduction contains another explanation of the five ways of feeling and there’s a written version of the notes for both audios below. We all learn differently and I do that specially because it can help those who have English as their second language. These are my notes and are not always exactly the same.
1. The Introduction to hear / connect / communicate with your animals
2. Here’s the Quiet Mind separate so you can repeat it easily if you want to.
Click here for an alternate audio player for the Quiet Mind
Written version of the audios
Quietening our mind is the first step
Before we can communicate with animals we need to be able to quieten our mind. Not having a quiet mind is why so many people think they can’t do this stuff. It’s bit like when the vacuum cleaner is going so loud that you can’t hear the telephone ringing. When OTHER things in your mind are busy busy busy, you can’t hear the animals – so learning how to Quieten our mind is the first thing that we do. We have to be aware of what’s going on in our OWN bodies, in our OWN selves first – that’s what makes it so easy for me to teach people to hear / connect / communicate with their animals. I call this Inner Awareness and it’s our Inner Guidance System.
Listening is the second step.
Once our mind is quiet, the next step is to LISTEN. Then we can feel our ANIMAL, and we’ll do that in tomorrow’s session.
So, let’s start with Quietening our mind and becoming aware of what US feels like. There are basically five different ways of feeling, and we all feel our own unique combination of those five feels. This Feel is utterly and absolutely unique to each of us. I doubt that I could say this too many times or in too many ways, it’s so important.
So many people think they can’t do this, because they’re trying to copy others
So many people think they can’t do or aren’t good at all kinds of things, specially this communicating with animals thing, because they’re trying to copy the teachers way of doing it, instead of working with their OWN unique strengths. You cannot copy someone else’s way of feeling / connecting / communicating and succeed – it HAS to come from INSIDE ourselves and that starts from becoming aware of what the inside of our self feels like.
Five different ways of feeling
These 5 different types of feel – ways in which we can feel ourselves AND others and if you’ve not come across this concept before, then bear with me – you’ll get a little taste of it today and then it will become even more obvious when you start connecting to your animal.
First we have Physical Feel – these include your sense of sound smell, sight, hearing and touch – all of these can feel more intense and sensitive when we’re being aware of what’s going on inside ourselves, – but here’s an addition to that – when we feel aches and pains and tensions – these are our physical feel at work too. With very rare exceptions, we feel our own aches and pains, but when physical feel is our strength, then we’ll feel OTHER peoples aches and pains, even our animals aches and pains, sometimes so strongly that we think it’s ours. Chill out, when this method of connecting / listening/ communicating is your thing, when it’s your natural strength, as soon as you figure it out, pfftt it’s gone – because it’s just a communication skill to know when someone else is in pain and where and how and this often leads us to some kind of healing skill to help that other being with their pain.
Then we have Emotional Feel. This was one of my original strengths. This is our fear, anger sadness, frustration, peacefulness, contentment, joy, happiness, excitement – you get my drift. This is the kind of empathy that most people are familiar with – very many of you will have walked into a room where someone was very sad – and you feel sad too. You’ve probably been somewhere where someone was angry and felt angry, picked up and felt other people’s frustration and so on. When we have Emotional Feel as a way of connection and communication it’s the same as physical – when you pick up on someone else’s emotions, as soon as you understand and take action on it if you have to, then pfft! with a click of the fingers it’s gone.
Then we have energetic Feel. One of the girls on my staff describes energetic feel as like being aware of radio waves – you can’t see them but you know they’re there because of what you get. Energetic Feel people can sometimes be aware of things around them that people with other strengths can’t see and often aren’t even aware of. If that’s you, no you’re not going mad. People with energetic feel can also feel the movement of energy inside their bodies – tingles and prickles of energy to start off with, leading to an awareness of the flowing and blockages of energy in themselves, in others, even between one person and another. Energy is how they feel the rightness and the “something is wrong here”.
Then we have Mental Feel – that’s people with mental feel as their strength. We’re really good at receiving thoughts and ideas in our connection to others and our animals too. A lot of people who enjoy academic / scientific type approach to things would be strong in mental feel. When mental feel is in overwhelm (this was another one of my own strengths), we can just about worry ourselves to an early grave, it can even be hard to get our minds to shut up enough to go to sleep.
Then we have what I call Heart Feel. These people have compassion on auto pilot. They have a tendency to see the best in people and animals easily. They look beyond the behaviour or problem in the person or animal and see what’s going on behind the issue fairly easily. They feel filled with expansive love in their hearts easily and they tend to be hurt in their hearts easily. Lots of people who are strong in heart feel have been really knocked around in our modern scientific society, that in many ways, has such an emphasis on mental feel. Caroline, one of my ladies on staff has an enormous natural strength in heart feel. She told me this story of herself as a little girl, walking into a stable with a very dangerous stallion and him being like a pussy cat with her. She was playing in there with him for quite some time before she was caught and forbidden to go back in. Animals LOVE Heart Feel – there’s a real feeling of safety for them around the strong Heart Feel people. I was envious of this automatic skill of Caroline’s and tried copying it – derr it doesn’t work to try and copy someone else’s feel! You’re going to hear me say this over and over again over the next three days because it’s critical to your success that you go INSIDE yourself for your communication skills not outside. I can ADMIRE Caroline’s heart feel and in fact I did and my focussing on my OWN natural strengths, gradually all the other ways of feeling started to expand for me too and now my Heart Feel is pretty strong. But again, that strength comes from INSIDE me.
Don’t forget we almost all have multiple ways of feeling, with some feels stronger than others and the more we practise being open to understanding the feelings that we feel easily, the more we’ll open to the other ways of feeling / connecting / communicating.
An important note about anti-depressants
Now I want to talk about Anti-depressants and their effect on the communication, because the use of anti depressants is so prevalent. Some people will find that their sense of feel , their sense of connection to their animal is dulled by anti-depressants – they’re designed to do that. But very often you’ll just experience it a bit differently than you would have otherwise – watching the animal while you work at the beginning might be even more important to you, for the validation they’ll give you.
The blurb on the sheet inside the box says anti-depressants are meant to be used short term while you work out what’s depressing you. And just a word of caution on the subject – DO NOT EVER stop taking anti depressants suddenly and definitely not without consultation with your doctor. Don’t think I am advocating that you shouldn’t be on them. The hormone and brain chemical change of a sudden stop is so drastic that it can send your whole body and mind and emotional into a tail spin and you do not need or want that to happen.
Written version of the Quiet Mind audio.
Today we’re going to notice what WE feel like and quieten our mind so that we can feel/hear/connect/communicate with our animal tomorrow.
Just a note about the difference between meditation and a Quiet Mind. There are layers of a quiet mind and layers of a meditative state. I prefer to use the words a Quiet Mind, because quietening our mind can be so very simple as looking up into the leaves of a tree moving in the wind, or watching the clouds in the sky. These are easy ways to quieten our mind out in nature. Then we can go all the way to the deeper layers of connection with the divine inside us which they talk about in advanced meditation, which feel expansive and such a strong sense of rightness and feeling good – all the way to euphoria sometimes.
We don’t START at advanced meditation and all we need to open ourselves up to connecting with our animals is a Quiet Mind – so we’re going after some simple and easy ways of doing that today, noticing what our own body feels like in the context of those different ways of feeling that I’ve just been talking about.
One of the things that makes us so very different here, is that we work on what’s behind our expanding our understanding.
One of these ways of dropping into a quiet mind will work for you better than others – so don’t worry if one of them feels difficult. Trying too hard is the single biggest thing that gets in the way of this stuff.
So … Pay gentle attention to your outward breath…
and to the way that the lower part of your ribs just squishes the air out of your lungs – don’t do that on purpose, just NOTICE the movement of the ribs.
BE GENTLE with yourself. notice what it feels like to decide to be gentle with yourself and if that idea doesn’t feel good, drop off the call and contact me by email and I’ll give you some other assistance. Bring gentle on ourselves is incredibly important.
Then see if you can feel your heart beating. And if you can’t quite feel that, then imagine that you can. And if heart feel turns out to be one of your natural strengths, you can afford to feel your heart now, because you know that it’s just a method of listening / connecting and communicating like all the other ways of listening/ connecting and communicating and you know now how beautiful it is. Just smile at the feelings around your heart and notice how that softens your eyes and feel how much better it feels to smile at those feelings.
Allow your attention to wander over your body, if you notice any tension or aches and pains just smile at them and notice how that softens your eyes and feels better.
Notice any energy moving through your body, any tingles or prickles of energy in your hands and feet. If you come across an energy stuck spot, just smile at it, notice how that softens your eyes and how much better that feels.
Trying too hard is the single biggest thing that gets in the way – what it feels like to try too hard – I call it squinty eyes. Smile with your eyes and allow them to relax and allow yourself to notice what the inside of your own body feels like …
Allow the thoughts and ideas to flow, just observe them, just notice them without judging them as good or bad, just allow the thoughts and ideas to flow across your mind. There’s gold at the bottom of those thoughts and ideas, there’s gold at the bottom of those worries too I promise, so just allow them to flow. Smile at your thoughts and notice how that allows the thoughts and ideas to flow the way they are meant to flow if this is one of your natural strengths.
Now we’re going to have a little treat. Stay feeling inside yourself, keep that awareness of what the inside of your body is feeling like and think about one of your animals. Keep feeling the inside of your own body mind and spirit and notice what changes in your own body as you think of this animal.
You feel your connection with your animals IN YOUR OWN SELF, in the feelings, the physical feelings, the emotional feelings, the energetic feelings, the thought and ideas, the beautiful sensitivity of that beautiful heart.
Keep that gentle noticing of your own body, stay looking and feeling and observing what’s going on in your own body and just decide to notice how YOU are feeling this connection with your animal. yes it’s subtle and yes it can take practice to get really good at noticing.
Yeah I did that on purpose – just slid that first tiny connection in so you wouldn’t try too hard, cos trying too hard is the biggest thing that gets in the way. Don’t worry if you didn’t get it today, you’ll get it tomorrow or the next day. That’s why I slipped the first tiny connection in now, to make it gradual and easy to expand our awareness over the three days. 🙂