How Animal Communication can Change Our World

"After a while, with the parrot's help, the Doctor got to learn the language of the animals so well that he could talk to them himself and understand everything they said."

The Story of Doctor Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting

The idea that humans and animals can connect to share feelings and thoughts has always been of great interest to me.

When I learned that there were people who actually did this for a living, however, I was more than a little surprised. Real life Doctor Dolittles? Who would imagine you could have such a job?

While researching the topic for various magazine articles and later a book, I spoke with many professional animal communicators and, through them, numerous animals. In time, I began having my own experiences of tuning in, hearing and actually communicating with another species.

The ways in which this heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind connection with an animal works may at first seem a bit mysterious. But what it entails is simple: relaxing our ordinary, logical mind and opening to a more intuitive, feeling-based state of being. We can receive information from animals in many different ways, such as through visual images, inner feelings and intuitive flashes. It is then up to the communicator to "translate" these inner impressions into words that humans can understand.

As a group, professional communicators are a remarkably diverse crowd. Many come from formal teaching backgrounds or have training as healers, naturalists, therapists, teachers and writers. There are now a few hundred full-time communicators in the United States.

Communicators can help humans learn more about their animals by voicing the animal's point of view. You might be astounded how a simple conversation may resolve behavioral problems, clarify health concerns or help bring a lost animal home. Animal communication also lends itself to wider educational opportunities, as animals – both domesticated and wild – share their unique perceptions of life. Many animals are also profound teachers and guides, willing to offer advice or share in exploring cosmic mysteries.

Is talking to animals really so strange? Our ancestors communicated freely and easily with all life, with creatures great and small. We all have access to that first, silent language. It is merely a matter of remembering our inherent connection with the web of life, of relaxing and recalling our natural abilities to hear the voices of animals all around us, all the time.

"My focus has been on helping people come home to realize who they are and to commune with all life," says Penelope Smith, one of the leading teachers in the animal communication field today. "The thrust is to restore this communion – this ability to be at one with and communicate with all life, whether it's animals, plants, rocks, the earth, the air, all the elements – and realize that everything is alive and we are all in kinship."

Indeed, once you open to the experience of knowing that every animal you see – brown bear, chickadee, dolphin, snake or honeybee – is a sentient, vital expression of spirit, with feelings and thoughts and ways of seeing the world that can be yours to share (if you are willing to listen), life is never quite the same.

J. Allen Boone, author of Kinship with All Life, wrote that everything that lives has something of value to share with us – whenever we are ready for the experience. Smith suggests that as humans embrace this experience and create deeper, more profound relationships with animals, the results will be nothing short of earth-altering. "It will change the evolution of the planet. It will change the destruction of the ecosystem into our loving the whole system, loving ourselves as part of the web of life instead of seeing ourselves as separate from nature. As we regain the ability to communicate with all life, we also tap into the great wealth of knowledge that is in all beings."

As we deepen our connection to others – be they two-legged, four-legged, winged or scaled – we open ourselves to a larger experience of life. We are all in this together; free to rediscover our fluency in the universal language of all beings whenever we choose. Now, what could be a cooler job than that?

By Dawn Baumann Brunke