Animal Communication 101

I was raised between Paris and a Spanish island called Formentera, one of the Balearic chain, whose better known sister isles are Majorca, Minorca, and Ibiza.

Formentara, Spain

While we were in Formentera, we lived on a farm with an island lady named Manuela. She was a payesa which is what the local women were called. The language they spoke was Payes, a derivative of Catalan. As I was a foreigner though, I spoke Castilian Spanish with the island people, but I understood Payes.

On the farm, there were goats, donkeys, sheep, pigs, rabbits and chickens. Animals were raised to be used for farm work or eaten. There was no other purpose for having an animal. Even the dog and the cats were not real pets, they had a duty: to protect and chase mice.

When I was small, I could "sense" the thoughts and feelings of these animals. I never thought of it as something special or different. It was completely normal to me. That was how the world was supposed to be. This "sensing" would appear in my consciousness either as images or feelings in my body, sometimes as whole sentences. The animals didn't speak to me in English or Spanish; my brain translated these sensations into sentences.

As a young kid, my beloved island was my playground and I was immersed in playing, going to the beach, bathing in the sea with my twin brother and a Spanish girl of our age, Carmen. We would spend hours searching for sugus (spanish candy) that our parents hid in the stone walls, making beaded necklaces from the seeds of the trees called Sabinas, which we sold to the tourists in the restaurants on the beach for a few pesetas, playing games with pieces of wood we found in the field. Anything would do, as our imaginations could turn anything into a game.

My parents would often read or write, or spend the warm summer evenings outside discussing philosophy with friends.

Yet, my brother and I lived in Manuela's house. We shared the island meals and listened to the adult conversations, which had nothing to do with the world of my parents.

Manuela was a peasant; she couldn't read, although she was learning to by reading the Bible, a Spanish translation of the King James Version. Painfully, she stumbled over each sentence. To her, the world of the Bible was very true, as if it existed parallel in time to her simple existence on the farm. She could not differentiate past and present history, fantasy and reality. Oddly enough, on the island the payes only spoke in the present, the simple past and future. To her, the Second World War had not ended. This threw us all into a strange time warp. My mum would desperately try to give them some history lessons, always in vain.

As I was assimilating this richness of colors and different cultural ways of thinking, my consciousness would always extend to the animals. I could feel them even when I lay down in bed at night gazing at the ceiling. I would sleep in the room where they fermented grapes in big bowls to make wine. Through the bubbly sounds and the acrid scent of the fermented grapes, I could extend my spirit across the courtyard to the spirit of all of the animals on the farm.

I sensed how they were at that moment, what they were thinking and feeling, and if they were suffering. Unfortunately, I couldn't do much for their discomfort, or change their fate; all I could do was understand.

In those days I never really thought about the origin of this ability, nor did I analyze it, as to me it was natural. My spirit was able to float softly far away, around and into the spirits of animals, plants, and even people. This energy continuum we experienced together was beyond time and space, it was a beautiful intangible, ethereal, a luminous dimension where understanding and connectedness pervaded.

I loved going "there;" it felt so fluid — far away from the density of my body and "waking time." It felt more "real" than than "real time," deeper and more profound. Sometimes I would be gifted with receiving a perception, an actual understanding of "being-ness," or the actual essence of an animal. I called it the "signature." This perception would appear like a shooting star, extremely beautiful, yet impermanent, a brief glimpse of how all life is interconnected! I desperately tried to grasp its luminescence, but it would quickly escape me.

Yet this signature — this "essence" — that I so briefly perceived remained inside me as the lingering scent of a flower. I sought for it all my life and I seek it in my avatar as an animal communicator healing extremely sick animals. It bloomed through extraordinary blissful experiences, but its fragrance is impossible to hold on to.

Today, as an animal communicator, I am asked to resolve situations: cats that are scared or peeing, dogs that are jealous, aggressive horses that refuse to jump or spook easily.

The situations are often reflections of the deep unspoken emotions of the humans around them. My role is to reveal the source of the "issue" by penetrating many layers of blocked emotion. I love doing this, it's like peeling an onion to get to the core.

Yet, what fascinates me and keeps me going is the uncharted territory below the issues — the thoughts, the emotions, the feelings of people and animals alike couched in that impossible-to-grasp signature — the essence of being, the energy behind all nature, the most beautiful thing you could ever dream of.