I connected early and easily with animals. Four leggeds vibed on a frequency that I understood often better than people (still, to be fair). I felt their language, the energy of their compromise. Some of that connection rooted in mutual grief over the loss of their freedoms, in ways I likened to the loss of my own wildness. There was an escape for me in the natural world, the same way there is an escape in hiking or yoga. Animals, horses in particular, taught me the ways of being that people could not.
A square peg to the bone, animals redirected me around the things society insisted I needed. Things like community, friends, a lovers touch, understanding. Instead, I found with animals, that isolation, of a sort, offered this beautiful tapestry winding me through a landmine of things and delivering me neatly to the platform of what I am.
And what I am, the four-leggeds assured me, is enough.
This has become my most profound learning.
Within a frenetically spinning society in a constant state of hovering over and highlighting all that we are not, animals exist in the stillness of what is. Here, they teach that we are the lens through which our own perceptions lie, and we have the ability to shift from what we lack, to embrace, without resistance, what is.
Not just what we think is (no, they are not always the same).
Animals teach the path of the mindful by inviting us to step into the reality of our reality. There is no rat race here, or problems that need solving. There is only now, only the transaction between what is and us. Here we loosen our white knuckled grip on what we perceive and instead focus on how we receive. Information. Behaviors. People in our life.
Right now.
The chafing between us and life can only be seen through the lens of resistance because here, right now, we have the power to embrace what we have, and consciously let go of what might have us. We recognize that what might present as a problem or trigger merely offers an insight into a, perhaps, outdated belief we have to have about ourselves in order for it to have the power to trigger us. Of course that doesn’t mean that everything is golden all the time. What would be the point in that? The planes of life are vast and certainly we all take our turn with struggle; but the struggle, like everything, passes. Animal medicine invites us to be our own visionaries. Visionary, in the sense of being called to explore what is rather than what we see. Here we can glean, from our very present, what we’re choosing to co-create and walk the path of that purpose.
But the walking happens now.
In a present unencumbered by the past and resisting the trap of desired outcomes. Now lets us see through the wide eyed lens of a child; so that we gaze upon more than we ever have and understand so much less. Unbound and protected divinely, we are that which we see. We understand that life comes from us, not at us and as creationists, we take that responsibility seriously.
In stillness, animals assure us that what we cannot see we can feel. Right now, intuition is harmonizing energy to a frequency that draws those who resonate with us, to us. So resonate well, friends; we call to this leg of the journey, our soul family.
The medicine of the animal embeds at a nuclear level all that they are with all that we have to potential to be. We have only to be still and know. To be still long enough to know.
But it’s the stillness that gets us.
In a time where we have never been more disconnected from the natural world, the animals wait for us to remember. Remember that we are not separate from the earth, but dependent upon her cycles. That when technology and productivity reign supreme the price is isolation and disconnection. In the exchange of instinct and intuition for data and logical reasoning, we step away from harmony and offer up the inner balance of what we used to know.
Four-leggeds remind us, with a cautious gaze, that with each step sacrificed, our arms open to chronic stress and anxiety. We put ourselves on the path to illness and then wonder why we are unwell.
Animals invite us back to the energetic flow of now channeled between the earth and our divine (whatever that is for each of us). They remind us that we are the alchemists of gratitude charged with transmuting appreciation into all that is in each single moment.
Even the hard ones.
Animals remind us that difficulty is the internal indicator of resistance and acceptance drops us into the harmonic flow of now. That here, right now, we can thrive, we can be peaceful.
We have only to make the choice that we deserve it.
The question friends, has always been: Do we, or don’t we?
Deserve it?
*Speaking of deserve, this week gift certificates go up for sale on the website. Purchase for yourself or a friend. Buy now, use when the timing is right.
*For those who do not know, The Sanctuary is a group wide guided offering on Sundays. The zoom link becomes available after purchase. The room opens at 11:10 and we begin at 11:15. The Sanctuary is an hour of mindfulness ie meditation, tapping whatever the timing and energy calls for. Consider coming to co-create with us.
