1. More than any other factor, your attitude toward animals influences how receptive you are to their communication and how willing they are to communicate to you.
Respect and revere animals as fellow beings – different in physical form than you but of the same spiritual essence and potential. If you approach animals with condescension, thinking they are inferior in intelligence, awareness, or substandard in any way, you limit your ability to perceive and understand them as they truly are. As you increasingly see and treat them as fellow intelligent beings, you allow them to express themselves more deeply and fully to you, and your relationship develops, matures, elevates, and expands.
Focusing only on the biological aspect of an animal, while fascinating and wondrous in itself, can place you in the ruts of conventional notions and inhibit true seeing of the spiritual essence and wisdom behind the physical form.
Admiring an animal’s spiritual qualities, such as sincerity, trust, love, devotion, appreciation, loyalty, empathy, kindness, honor, honesty, patience, integrity, humility, joy, unselfishness, wisdom… will help to transform your whole relationship, enhancing the two-way communication and understanding between you.
Be humble and receptive, and allow animals to teach you.
2. Believe in your own intuitive ability to give and receive telepathic communication. Don’t invalidate your perception of impressions, images, or messages in any form.
3. Be ready, receptive, mentally quiet and alert. If your mind is busy, full of thoughts and background static, you can’t listen and receive.
To get to this state may take considerable practice and changes in lifestyle. Avoid substances and environmental conditions that dull the mind or make it too agitated. Adopt habits that reduce stress and increase calmness, like balanced food, exercise and rest, yoga, meditation, spending quiet time with your animal friends and out in nature.
4. Cultivate flexibility – willingness to learn from all beings and to change your ideas. Watch for judgments and preconceptions that limit receptivity to what the animal is really communicating. Be open to surprises – the unexpected. Let go of conventional notions of human/animal communication.
Be ready for animals to communicate, and question them on any level – from what food they like, to what they can teach you to improve your life, to what they consider the most profound truths.
5. Be emotionally peaceful. Having an emotional investment in what animals say to you or how they should be can influence what you receive. If you require that animals like you or be affectionate before you can communicate with them, this can disturb them, block their true feelings or ideas or cloud your receptiveness to them.
In working with improving your two-way communication with animals, don’t flood animals with emotion, whether it’s love, fear, sadness or anger. If you are putting out strong emotion, you are generally not receptive to anything else, and you will get back only your own emotion or the animal’s response to it.
6. Be alert and calm. Don’t force the communication or try too hard. Notice your body posture and tension – leaning forward over the animal, straining forehead or facial muscles, breathing shallowly, tightening hands, manipulating or controlling the animal. Shift into the receptive mode. Lean back, open chest and hands, breathe slowly and deeply, relax, and listen.
7. Let communication assume its own form, whether it be feelings, images, impressions, thoughts, verbal messages, sounds, other sensations, or simply knowing. Get familiar with how you receive, so you recognize it and let it and other avenues open up.
Let the sense of meaning unfold by itself. Don’t analyze, evaluate or criticize. Remain innocent and nonjudgmental. Accept what you get, and acknowledge the communication. If in doubt, relax, and ask again, but don’t keep doubting and refusing to accept a communication impression, or you build your own walls.
Be willing to take risks – don’t be afraid to acknowledge whatever communication you get. Don’t worry about what other people will think or even what you will think!
8. Practice with a wide variety of animals in various situations. Step back from your normal routine and expectations, and be willing to learn and discover.
Have fun!
From the book Animal Talk by Penelope Smith.
Reproduced at the Animal Communicators Blog by kind permission of the author.
