Animal Communication: More on Interspecies Energetic Communication

What is animal communication?

At its most basic, it can be an awareness of the body language and facial expressions of a member of another species, and the ability to communicate with one’s own body language and facial expressions in such a way as to gain and communicate a deeper understanding of each other’s needs, wants and desires.

Beyond that it can be energetic. Horses have a sublime awareness of energy. They pick up on fear, hesitation, confidence, arrogance, anger, pain, grief, compassion, the desire to help, the desire to hurt. We can’t hide from them. We need to be congruent. Once we are, we can learn from them and help them.

And beyond that, it can be what might once have been called psychic or telepathic communication. And yes, I believe in that. And, to paraphrase neurologist Dr. Stephen Peters “Woowoo is science that we haven’t yet figured out.”

 

Eason at the clinic 

A clinic I attended last week was guided by Eason. I asked her if she wanted to go. She said, “If you listen.” 

“I always try to listen,” I told her.

“Really listen,” she said.

Now, before you all think I’m nuts, I know she’s not “speaking” in English. I’ve found horses often share their experiences or needs in pictures or video-like experiences, sometimes through feelings, and sometimes in “knowings,” but also sometimes in a way that seems to come through in words, even if clearly they don’t use words. I believe in all cases they are communicating via energy and the way it’s received can depend on …. What? The receiver? The kind of energy? I’m not sure. One communicator I know says she just gets words. I believe others get images or video-like experiences. “Knowings” are particularly strange. Suddenly I just KNOW the horse feels a certain way about something.

Anyway, when I create these very-human conversations, please don’t take them literally. Eason is not literally opening her mouth and speaking words, but her energy instills the knowledge in me that she needs or wants a particular thing. For my part, I often speak words to her, sometimes out loud but often just in my head. I also create images or videos in my head as a way of projecting my thoughts and ideas to her.

The day we left for the clinic, she marched onto the trailer without hesitation, loading herself as I tossed the rope over her back. She travelled beautifully and unloaded perfectly. After I’d set up her hay and water, I took her for a walk. We ended up being in a space where we were blocked off from getting away from the cows crossing from their holding pen to the arena, and her fear of cows sent her over-threshold, something I had not planned on. She was a flying kite as we navigated away from the cows and managed to find a route back to the pens. I used Tristan Tucker’s patterns to calm her, and once she took a breath, I brought her back into her pen. Unfortunately, as soon as I left the pen she started pacing frantically, spinning around and rearing, screaming for her former herdmate Echo, and otherwise showing extreme anxiety. Since I had “told” her that we wouldn’t stay if she didn’t want to, I asked her if she wanted to leave. She indicated “No,” despite her anxiety. When I asked her if I should bring the truck back in the morning in case she wanted to return home the following day, she also said no.

Once I had settled her down for the night, I left for home. (Her “mom” Jamie was staying at the clinic in her live-in trailer, so Eason had a chaperone for the night).

For those of you who don’t know me, prepare for some interesting woo. For those who do know me, you won’t be surprised. As I was driving home, I decided to check in on Eason. There’s a psychological method called “tapping” or emotional freedom technique and I decided to try it energetically. (Now, again, there is increasing interest in “paranormal” kinds of activities as a result of quantum physics. My own physicist father (worked at CERN) believed in multiple universes and told me once that more recent research was turning everything he had believed upside down). So I checked in with Eason, did EFT with her by using my energy, and encouraged her to drink some water and eat some hay. As I was doing the energetic tapping, I felt a shift in my own tension. I took an involuntary deep breath and felt tightness in my chest drift away. While I didn’t become immediately relaxed and totally calm, I felt a definite change. Interestingly the shift in tension didn’t fully feel like “my” change. I hadn’t felt particularly anxious other than in the context of Eason’s panic at being in a new place, and the palpable drop in heart rate and respiration felt almost like someone else’s change. I also found myself yawning, which is an equine response to dropping from the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system into the parasympathetic (rest and digest) nervous system -- even though I wasn’t in the least bit tired.

Right after I was done, I contacted Jamie. Her response was that Eason was still worried but was eating. The following morning, on my return to the clinic, I found Eason in her pen, totally calm and relaxed. She had almost finished her overstuffed slow feed haynet, drunk water and been replenished, and was happy to greet me and get her breakfast.

When it came time to go into our class, however, her response was an emphatic NO! I entered the pen with ScootBoots and she walked away and stood in the corner. “Don’t want your hoof boots?” I asked. She looked away.

Then I tried the halter. Another emphatic no. Some people would have “caught” her at that point, but I knew what she was saying. I told her we wouldn’t go into the class if she didn’t want to, and I left to watch the first part of the clinic.

I’ll follow up with more about the clinic in another post, but I wanted to note that we know horses can communicate and are highly aware of human emotions. They can indicate blanketing preferences by touching boards with sympols on them and they are excellent at reading faces. I believe learning the language of horses should be a prerequisite for owning them, and we should learn how very subtle their communications can be. The better we get at noticing the expressions and behaviors that communicate their state of mind and preferences, the closer we can get to interspecies energetic communication.