Dr. Bernie S. Siegel - Love, Animals, and Miracles: Inspiring True Stories Celebrating the Healing Bond

More Praise for Love, Animals & Miracles

What an extraordinary book! Dr. Bernie Siegel offers unprecedented insights into human and animal consciousness. His familys personal stories combined with those hes collected from everyday people reveal comforting depths of spiritual connection. Miracles, synchronicity, interspecies relationships, reincarnation, dreams, afterlife encounters, and selfless service create a mosaic of love. This book will help you embrace what your heart understands about animals they not only befriend us; they are us.

Allen and Linda Anderson, New York Timesbestselling authors and founders of Angel Animals Network

There are great books written by doctors, and there are great books written by animal experts, but what happens when those worlds collide? A calamitous, hilarious, marvelous new dimension where the animals we love teach us about healing, helping, howling, and how to live a more joyous life present with all our love the way they live every moment. This book is an explosion of heart, written by Americas most beloved cancer surgeon, taking notions of healing to new levels where we honor our other doctors the ones who have paws, hooves, and wings. I can vouch for the authenticity of Dr. Bernie Siegels miracles, because Ive used his animals as spies for many many years.

Amelia Kinkade, author of Straight from the Horses Mouth: How to Talk to Animals and Get Answers and The Language of Miracles: A Celebrated Psychic Teaches You to Talk to Animals

Praise for A Book of Miracles by Dr. Bernie S. Siegel

As these stories show, love and magic can find us in any situation, no matter how difficult. This warm, uplifting book opens the door to seeing the miracles that are happening all around us, every day.

Gerald Jampolsky, MD, author of Love Is Letting Go of Fear

Those in pain or doubt will find this book a help, and those who arent may need it even more.

Booklist

Other Books by Dr. Bernie S. Siegel

101 Exercises for the Soul

365 Prescriptions for the Soul

The Art of Healing

A Book of Miracles

Faith, Hope & Healing

Help Me to Heal

How to Live between Office Visits

Love, Magic & Mudpies

Love, Medicine & Miracles

Peace, Love & Healing

Prescriptions for Living

CHILDRENS BOOKS

Buddys Candle

Smudge Bunny

POETRY

Words & Swords

Copyright 2015 by Bernie S. Siegel

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given nor liability taken. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

First printing, October 2015
ISBN 978-1-60868-334-5
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

T here are many gateways to healing our emotional, psychological, and physical bodies. Bernie Siegel has studied, explored, experienced, and written about many of these approaches. Now, in Love, Animals & Miracles, he shares stories about what I feel are some of the greatest assistants in healing: our animal companions.

I have been a great admirer and friend of Bernies for decades. As a matter of fact, my first book was titled Love, Miracles, and Animal Healing, a variation on the theme of his bestselling first books title, Love, Medicine & Miracles (with his blessings, of course). In my book, I wrote about my healing journey and how animals can help us heal. Bernie and I would sometimes discuss our experiences about the healing power of animals. Occasionally he would contact me for advice about his animal companions. Most of the time, though, he already knew the answers he sought; my answers were simply additional confirmation of what he inherently knew.

Our mutual love of animals manifested itself in different ways. His led him to share his home with many animals as well as help his patients see and utilize the healing power of animals. My love of animals guided me to become a holistic integrative veterinarian, pioneering innovative, natural, nontoxic approaches to healing, from acupuncture to natural supplements to manual therapies. Our individual journeys intertwined again as we both recognized the healing power of the human-animal bond, though we arrived at that awareness via two different careers two paths, two voices, yet one journey to the same destination, healing hearts, minds, and souls.

Our lives have paralleled each others in many ways. When my mother was in an assisted-living facility near Bernies home, whenever I visited her I heard all about Bernies last visit to the home and how much he had touched the hearts of many who resided there through his talks to his resident support groups.

One of Bernies lifes themes has been about healing hearts. The metaphor of turning swords into plowshares may be adapted to turning scalpels into love stories with regard to Bernies journey. During his personal spiritual journey, Bernies goal was to be a healer. This first led him to become a renowned pediatric and general surgeon at Yale University. Through his conversations with his patients he began to realize that there was more to healing hearts than surgery. Perhaps before patients actually needed physical open-heart surgery, he could assist them in metaphysically opening their hearts by helping them heal from past traumas and wounds. Even after open-heart surgery, perhaps he could help them further open their hearts by guiding them through healing conversations and introspective personal explorations of self-help and healing. In his previous books, he shared conversations and stories illustrating that people can heal their hearts, and heal their cancer and afflictions of all kinds, much more quickly, if they get in touch with old mental and emotional programming that affects their immune systems and general health in numerous ways.

Bernies stories in all his books are like lamps in the darkness, lighting a path of joy and hope for people dealing with the health challenges of cancer and other diseases. In this book, the stories shine a light on the healing power of the human-animal bond. They will bring a lightness of being to your day!

I love his stories about his family zoo. Sharing our homes with creatures great and small yields a deep intimacy. We learn so much from their individual behaviors and the beauty of how we communicate with one another every day. There are more multispecies households in the United States than ever before, and Bernie and Bobbies home has certainly produced lots of uplifting stories from the far end of that spectrum.