Talking to wild animals is a bit different to talking to your loved ones and I think this story demonstrates what I mean nicely.
I was inspired to try to train a simple house fly, by a book called Kinship with all Life by J Allen Boon – a really lovely book, you’ll find an Amazon link to various versions of it below.
The first thing that came to me back then, was why would a fly WANT to be with me and “trained” by me?
I had spent my life swatting them, spraying them, shooing them off my face and body vigorously – with the attitude that the only good fly was a dead one.
When you think about what you’ve learned in the last three days about how animals can communicate mentally, emotionally, energetically, physically and with heart feel – with their own unique combinations of those Feels – what do you think my attitude was communicating to them? Hmmm… It’s no wonder flies pester people and don’t do anything people want them to do, hey?
So the first thing to do, was change my attitude. Because of the book, I was already intrigued and part way there.
I learned to slow my movements down around flies so as to not scare them – no more flapping my hands at them, no more fly swats, no more killing them. I started to develop an awareness of their purpose in life, the part that they play in the eco-system that sustains us and all other life on this planet.
I learned to ASK them to get off my face with the gentle and SLOW and conscious communication of a wipe of the edge of my hand instead and suggested they land on my back, on my clothes instead.
Then I started to feel this one particular fly who hung around more than the others and seemed to have a cheeky kind of personality. He started to land on my hand and I could bring my other hand across really slowly and almost touch him before he would fly off.
I wasn’t enjoying the tickle of his tiny feet on my hand so I started asking him to come on to my fingernail instead and in the first session we tried, we had some success with that. As I brought my fingernail close to where he was sitting on my hand, he would move off, cautious I guess after all the previous bad attitude – but gradually he was slower and slower about moving away, until eventually I paused my finger right next to him and invited him to jump on my fingernail.
Eureka! He did it! Over the next few days he got really good at coming when I called him in my mind and landing precisely on my fingernail. Sue McKibbin from next door took the photo above when I was showing her what he would do. Thank God for that or NOBODY would have believed me!
My family (who are NOT interested in being sympathetic to flies) named him Trevor and the generations of flies that came after him have also been known as Trevor. And although I haven’t had the same strong connection with another fly yet, I have had moments of mutual awareness with some of them and I still move my hand slowly to ask them to get off my face and sit on my back instead.
I am still the only person sitting at the outside table in the summer time, who doesn’t have flies bothering me. Is it coincidence? I don’t think so!
There’s various prices for the books here on Amazon. There’s one single new hardcover book with a huge price is because there is only one of them, there’s cheaper hardcovers second hand and cheaper again in paperback. It doesn’t appear available on kindle, but I did find Letters to Braveheart on kindle, by the same guy, so I’ve added that. Braveheart was the Hollywood dog star that started J Allen Boon’s listening to animals journey.
If you can’t see the Amazon links directly below, click on the tiny shield shape right in front of the www of the web address and allow the Amazon forms to load.
The sentience of insects
My FIRST experience of the sentience of insects was several years earlier than Trevor, with ants in the house and it was NOT two way communication, but it was a start. A little Korean girl who was staying with us witnessed this one. Her eyes were wide open with surprise when she realized they were listening to me. Actually I was surprised too!
The ants were driving me nuts – all over the sink, the inside garbage bin – this swarm of tiny ants everywhere. The last straw was when I found them trailing across the stove top and over to the fridge, with a half dozen of them actually staggering around slowly, freezing to death inside the fridge. (I guess it was the cold that slowed them down.)
“THAT’S IT!” I yelled as I drew a line with my finger across the stove top. “Any ant that steps over that line is getting brushed on to the floor”. And I was standing poised above them with my hand raised and small brush at the ready, to do just that. I laugh now at the image I must have made to this nice Korean girl who hardly spoke any English.
Well blow me down (that an Aussie expression for being VERY surprised) – well blow me down, nearly all the ants stopped at that line. They milled there for a bit and then most of them turned around and went back in the opposite direction – there was this trail of ants walking up to the line I had drawn with my finger on the stove, pausing there and turning around.There was only a few who were brave enough to challenge me and the brush and ended up on the floor.
From that day to this, I try not to step on ants when I’m out walking in the bush. I’ve had the insight that tiny ants can usually survive a human foot, but the bigger ants, the ones we call bull ants in Australia (they have a nasty bite) they get injured if we step on them and that’s part of the reason they’re so aggressive. They WANT us to be careful and take a wide step around them. I have an awareness of them when I’m walking and running on the bush tracks and I’ve noticed that they don’t rear up aggressively around me hardly ever.I’ve told you these two stories to get you thinking about animals in general.
If INSECTS, who I had previously thought of as being a lower life form and if I had thought of them at all I would have said “no… I don’t think insects have feelings”. If insects in fact DO have feelings – if they CAN hear us and understand us and respond to us, then what does that tell us about the rest of the animal kingdom?
Talking to wild animals
You could hear some of the wild animal keys to success in the fly story, couldn’t you?
Your horse, your dog, your cat, your captive bred bird, they DESIRE the communication with you – but with wild animals you have to CREATE the desire. And before you can create that desire, they have to feel SAFE. If I had still been flapping my hands around, scaring the flies off my face, killing flies at every opportunity, I don’t think Trevor would have had any desire to communicate with me at all. Does that make sense?
So to communicate with wild animals, you may need to sit out where they are – quiet and still – feeling into your Inner Awareness, finding that peaceful place inside you, connecting deliberately to Mother Earth and being AVAILABLE – communicating GENUINE peacefulness and feeling good. Why would they want to connect with us, if we’re communicating anything else? How could they develop confidence with us if we were communicating anything else?
I suspect for most people that will take practice. It did for me.
Here’s another very big deal – The situation is always going to be changing moment by moment, whether we’re communicating from a distance, a photo, or up close and personal. The situation will be constantly influenced by emotions and by things that are happening around us – with our own animals at home, as well as with wild animals.
With wild animals the situation can change very suddenly and in some cases very dangerously (they ARE wild after all!) – so if you’re going to get closer, you had better make sure they can get away easily and safely AND that they know it. It’s about BEing AND feeling safe. 🙂
Fixing the background noise
For me, it also took turning off some of that background vacuum cleaner noise that we talked about on Day 3 – the unattended to, unlistened to communications from my own body, mind and spirit that I had not understood and had been burying all these years.
There’s been a lovely flow through to my human relationships of my work with horses and other animals. The Carolyn I talked to in Day 3’s session yesterday, wrote to me saying she had been shocked that I had felt her desire to talk to me in a one on one session, when she “hadn’t been game” to put her hand up.
She made it sound like my understanding that she really wanted help, was something special. It’s not. I promise you, it’s not. This is a LEARNED SKILL. I didn’t used to have it. Or rather, I only had occasional flashes of stuff decades apart. I’ve developed this skill with animals and with people, by listening to my Inner Guidance system pretty much all the time, getting better and better at it as time has gone on. It makes my whole life sooo… much easier, so much happier… sooo much richer and better in every way.
If anyone’s interested in understanding and thus turning off more of that background noise and being happier for it as well, run a program called Practical Happiness for Animal Lovers. 🙂 I’m in the process of making that an on-going program that you can join in any time – so keep your eye out for that.
Thank God for the horses and thank God for the other animals too!
Click here for that Holding Space explanation I promised you. 🙂