Danielle MacKinnon - Animal Lessons: Discovering Your Spiritual Connection with Animals

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Animal Lessons: Discovering Your Spiritual Connection with Animals 2017 by Danielle MacKinnon.

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First e-book edition 2017

E-book ISBN: 9780738752938

Cover photo: Getty Images 127543971, OPIFICIO 42

Cover design: Lisa Novak

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending)

ISBN: 978-0-7387-5135-1

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

An animal heart does not have the same boundaries or conditions as the human heart. It is more tolerant, more transparent. The human is to learn to remove the limits on her heart. The animal is to show her how.

Amy Weiss

I could not have written this book without the unconditional love of each and every animal Ive ever known.

In gratitude ...

Dedicated to Kev

Contents

The System of Animal Lessons

The Life Cycle of an Animal Lesson

Step 1: Determine How Your Animal Is Helping You

Step 2: Determine the Lesson

Step 3: Find Your Work-Arounds

Step 4: The Decision-Making Process

Step 5: Mastery

Energy Management

How to Communicate Better with Animals

: Common Animal Lessons

INTRODUCTION

You may have picked up this book because youre a huge animal lover and thought it sounded pretty cool when you read that its possible to work with your pet to create a better you. Or perhaps you are at your wits end dealing with a pets behavior problem and are willing to try anythingand this book represents that. You may be thinking, however, that the concept of helping an animal by helping yourself does seem a little crazy. Well, I completely understand this (and would have thought the same thing myself had I not witnessed it working with thousands of people over the past decade and a half).

Many books have been written about the love of a good pet, but none have yet shown how that love (inherent to all animals) fulfills a greater purpose: specifically helping people evolve into the best possible humans they can be while at the same time helping animals live better lives, become better behaved, and experience better treatment. Countless books have tackled curing behavior problems and mastering animal training, but none have demonstrated how working on yourself is actually the key to a positive, healthy, problem-free relationship with an animal in your life. To fix problems, most books focus on animal training, which means they miss the main point: if we pay attention, our pets (and other animals, whether wild, farm, or domesticated) can catalyze our emotional, spiritual, and mental growthall of which result in better jobs, more love, better loves, kinder friends, more fun, happier days, and, not to mention, behavior challenges fading away!

Animals are already creating tremendous shifts in people in mainstream society. Animal Planet, for example, features a reality TV program called Pit Bulls & Parolees about an animal rescue center that hires parolees and works with a very misunderstood breed of dog: pit bulls. Through the act of rehabilitating and caring for abused and forgotten dogs, the inmates learn responsibility, respect, self-care, and more. Programs like this are so successful at helping inmates become happier, healthier people that there are many of them taking place in prisons around the country, and this isnt even the tip of the iceberg!

Additionally, equine-assisted therapy programs that use horses as a system of treatment for children with autism have become very popular around the world. This is a form of care that uses the rhythmic movement of riding a horse to help children focus better through their body. Then, the healing is pushed even further ahead as the children learn how to take care of the horse. Autistic children in these types of programs typically become more communicative, calmer, and even happier.

The Pit Bulls & Parolees TV show, equine-assisted therapy programs, and numerous other programs have achieved great successes, and much of the world is embracing methods such as these. But what if it were possible to take these ideas even further? What if animals could understand what you need, what you want to express, and what will help you move through a troubling period, and then through this understanding, they could even assist you in changing your beliefs?

What if your pet could actually play the role of your therapist?

We are all familiar with the idea that animals are extra sensitive to their surroundings. Housecats know when their humans are sad, dogs sense when excitement is in the air, wild birds know when danger is approaching, and elephants are aware of the near or far location of their entire family. But have you considered that animals might be even more in tune with their surroundings than previously thought?

Animal Lessons

The animals in your life are so very connected to you and to their environment that they understand if you dont feel safe in the world, if deep down you dont like yourself very much, or if you dont feel worthy of a loving, caring, nurturing relationship. Animals can understand these things about you better than, perhaps, you currently understand yourself. Because of all this knowledge animals have about us humans, animals are then able to modify their behavior (positively or negatively) in order to force us to address these deep-down, negative feelings about ourselves, thereby improving the quality of our lives more than we ever thought possible before.

Through my work with animals as an animal intuitive, Ive learned that animals are acting as our therapists, our trainers, our mentors, and our teachers, guiding (and sometimes pushing) us to take leaps in order to move to the next step in our own evolution. Want to stand up to your tyrant mother? Look to your aggressive dog. Want to find love? Pay attention to the anxious squirrel in your backyard. Is your job sucking the life out of you? Check out what your sick horse is showing you. Yes, it may sound crazy, but our animals are giving us the answersevery single day.