Summary
Anna Breytenbach explains animal communication as a two-way, intuitive connection based on empathy, presence, and direct knowing. She explores how animals and the natural world can teach humans about non-separation, collective consciousness, and releasing personal projections.
Questions This Interview Explores
- What is animal communication, and how does it work?
- How can connecting with animals support spiritual awakening?
- How can people become more present and receptive to subtle forms of communication?
- What is collective consciousness, and how do individuals influence it?
Key takeaways
- Animal communication requires a clear, receptive state rather than a special supernatural ability.
- Animals model presence, awareness, acceptance, and authenticity.
- Personal desires and assumptions can distort what we perceive from another being.
- Mindful breathing helps quiet mental noise and support deeper listening.
- Animals communicate as individual sentient beings, not merely as representatives of their species.
- Inner spiritual work can influence the wider web of life without becoming an act of rescue or ego.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done nearly 500 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see all the previous ones archived in various ways. You’ll also see a few other things, such as a link to an audio podcast and email notification of future interviews and things like that.
This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it to any degree, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site.
My guest today is someone whom I’ve been aware of for quite some time and had been wanting to interview: Anna Breytenbach. Welcome, Anna.
Anna: Thank you. Good to be here.
Rick: Anna is a South Africa-based professional animal communicator. She’s going to explain what that means in a few minutes. She’s been practicing this art for 18 years in South Africa, Europe, and the US, with both domestic and wild animals.
She was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where she is now, and she holds a degree in psychology, economics, and marketing from the University of Cape Town. She was trained in tracking and mentoring at the Wilderness Awareness School in the US. She also mentors children and adults in nature awareness, based on the ways of the Native American and San Bushmen peoples.
As a qualified and experienced master training facilitator, focusing on bringing forth participants’ skills through coaching and mentoring in a practical manner, she consults exclusively with wildlife and offers workshops around Southern Africa, occasionally touring Australia, Europe, and the US. She travels a lot.
Her work includes working with wild dolphins and whales, leading animal communication safaris, interspecies projects at permaculture and organic farms, and giving numerous public talks. Her pro bono work focuses on conservation projects such as elephant management, anti-poaching assistance, baboon rehabilitation, whale and dolphin research, and predator conservation.
She’s also the subject of the feature documentary movie The Animal Communicator, on interspecies communication. Incidentally, I’ll link to several lovely documentaries and videos of Anna’s work that have been posted on YouTube on her page on batgap.com. I highly recommend that you watch those, since she may not be communicating with any animals during this interview other than me, but it’s beautiful to watch her do her work.
Some of you may be wondering, is this Buddha at the Gas Pump? What does this have to do with spiritual awakening, the usual types of themes that you discuss on this show? I think Anna can give us a very good answer to that.
So maybe, in one go, let me ask you two questions: What is animal communication, and what is its spiritual significance? Why should people who are interested in enlightenment and awakening and all that stuff be interested in animal communication?
What animal communication means
Anna: Well, animal or interspecies communication really is the term that’s come to be used to describe the energetic transference of direct knowing and shared experience. Usually, the setup is that this happens between two beings who are focused on each other and connecting in a state of empathy, to be able to understand and really deeply understand each other.
Another way to describe it, using more technical language, would be telepathic communication, which has been well described and, in fact, researched between humans since the 1880s in both the UK and the US. In more recent decades, the scientist Rupert Sheldrake proved telepathy between animals and humans, specifically people and their dogs. He has experiments and books about it, and various things available online to watch as well. The title of his study was Dogs Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.
Rick: Rupert was on the show a couple of months ago. We talked about that a little bit.
Anna: Brilliant, brilliant. So, with all of that empirical experiment design, it’s been proved beyond statistical probability or guesswork alone that telepathy does happen between different beings.
So that’s what interspecies communication is. It’s deliberate and focused—literally, a communication—and it is two-way, I must emphasize. Some people think this is a form of psychometry, or doing a psychic reading or channeling. I’m certainly not a medium in that way at all. It really is live, clear, and present two-way communication between myself and the animal in question.
It’s not limited to just animals. As much as I might be feeling or conveying a question or desired behavior to the animal, so too can they ask us questions. Perhaps later we can discuss more about the seeming mechanics of it.
📚 Animals as spiritual teachers
But to answer the second part of your question about what on earth this has to do with awakening, I have found that the animals and the natural world at large have been my greatest spiritual teaching. This is even in the context of sitting for over ten years with a sangha and all sorts of other forays into the spiritual realm, broadly speaking.
“The animals and the natural world at large have been my greatest spiritual teaching.”
If what can be regarded as spiritual qualities across any discipline include states of being like presence, awareness, and absolute acceptance of what is, then the nonhuman animals have got that. As the sentient beings that they are—which can be defined as self-aware, which they are—they have these qualities readily available to them in their shining, present authenticity.
If what can be regarded as spiritual qualities across any discipline include states of being like presence, awareness, and absolute acceptance of what is, then the nonhuman animals have got that. As the sentient beings that they are—which can be defined as self-aware, which they are—they have these qualities readily available to them in their shining, present authenticity.
This is why it has a lot to do with awakening to self, or at least clearing out ego stuff and things that have nothing to do with the present moment or the collective good, for that matter. We humans, when we connect with the nonhumans, pick up on almost a feeling of that limbic resonance. We get to bathe in their states of being, and that can deeply affect us. It certainly does affect us in all sorts of positive ways.
Another way, or another reason, that this has a lot to do with awakening is that it really is about actually remembering our native states. This is about us humans remembering our original wiring—how our brains, and how the intelligence of our hearts, more importantly, were once in our conscious awareness, deeply wired to the collective: to all the beings in our immediate environment, the very particles of soil under our feet, the spider and her web, the leaf on every tree, the root under the ground, or the deer species in the distance.
As we again remember through communication and connection, we literally again become members of greater collectives. We learn more and more about those unified states of shared awareness, and we experience ourselves less and less as separate from the web of life.
Rick: Excuse me, I had to cough. I remember hearing a story—it might have been a Sufi story—about someone who got enlightened or awakened by sitting and watching a cat watching a mouse hole, and just tuning into the presence and alertness of the cat. He kind of became attuned to it, and it triggered his awakening.
Anna: Absolutely. It is that presence and awareness. The nonhumans show up as probably the best themselves here, in each and every moment. Most of us get to experience that briefly through living with pets. Just think of any dog, with the wagging tail and the aliveness in the moment.
Most of us get to experience it through animals. We get reminded of our own nature and of non-separation.
Rick: I want to remind those who are watching live that if you have a question for Anna, you can post it on the forum on the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com. Down at the bottom of that page, there’s a forum through which you can post a question.
What sangha have you been sitting with for ten years? What sort of—
Anna: Advaita Vedanta?
Rick: Under whose auspices or tutelage or whatever?
Anna: Oh, there’s a teacher here in South Africa who was with Ramana Maharshi in the old days. And that is the path of nonduality, which I discovered about ten years after I had been doing interspecies communication. It really, really resonated with me.
This work, this passion, and this joy—that is what I’m up to in this lifetime. It’s been an ongoing, and remains an ongoing, inner work. I have to do the inner tracking to keep watching where my belief systems are getting in the way of the truth of the other, where my very paradigms are getting in the way.
This form of communication has nothing at all to do with knowledge about a certain species, which could lead us to project onto any individual member of their species some beliefs or generalizations. That’s not appropriate at all. We’re dealing with a sentient being after sentient being after sentient being when we’re dealing with individuals.
Neutrality as a Condition for Animal Communication
So it behooves me to constantly be looking at who I am in that equation. Because if I am to know the truth—the real thoughts and feelings, and what’s moving for that other—I need to be a clean slate and as neutral as possible on the inside.
This is why this form of interspecies connection is not really about learning some fancy technique, having a magic wand, or having one’s 27th strand of DNA activated. It’s nothing unnatural like that. It really is about clearing out the baggage and continuing to clear it out.
Well, if we had all reached that stage, we wouldn’t even be having this call—none of us. So it’s not about having achieved that. But it is about inner awareness, again, the inner tracking, so that I can notice when even my desire for a wishful answer from the animal is getting in the way of me clearly hearing their answer.
Imagine if I’m saying to one of my cats, “Do you want to move with me and kind of live in a new location?” I would love that answer from them to be yes. I would love that. I am personally invested in that outcome. And this actually happened a few months ago. One of my cats said, “Nope, not at all.” He wanted to stay where we had been living, on the forest edge.
For me to hear that no, I had to get beyond my own inner yes and my emotional investment in that. It wasn’t that I didn’t have my wishes as an attached human being. It was that I could sit still enough, long enough, to subtly pick up on his feeling of no existing through the filter of my yes that was in the field for me.
Clearing the mind to listen
Rick: One of the things I found most fascinating about the videos I watched on YouTube of you doing your work is the expression on your face while you’re doing it. You just settled into this really innocent, clear, settled state, which is really evident on your face. And then the communication takes place.
That was as fascinating as whatever content you were coming up with in the communication. I mention that because of what you just said: that you have to be totally clear and centered and balanced, without any kind of static, in order to do this.
Anna: Mm-hmm. Indeed, actually, my grandmother commented on that the first time she saw it. She phoned me from the semi-arid high desert, where she was living. She was like, “Hello, Anna dear, your face looks so different. You look like an angel in church.”
Of course, I’m completely unaware of it, because I’m not trying to be anything or be in an elevated state. It’s just about dropping and dropping. But I do get that feedback when I have people around me, and in nature, or in front of an animal and connecting, I get that feedback afterwards.
But during the communication, I am largely unaware of self. I really don’t know. The persona drops away, and my ego-based identity takes a little bit of the background. The inner narration and the dialogue—the internal critic that’s going—is just background noise. I don’t bother trying to push that away, because, as Carl Jung rightly said, what we resist persists.
So I don’t bother to give my attention and my focus to those thoughts that I’m finding unhelpful. Instead, I just stay with the moment and stay with the moment. The best way I know how to do that, from my animal communication tools, is mindful breathing: simply watching my natural breathing rhythm.
So I don’t bother to give my attention and my focus to those thoughts that I’m finding unhelpful. Instead, I just stay with the moment and stay with the moment. The best way I know how to do that, from my animal communication tools, is mindful breathing: simply watching my natural breathing rhythm.
Seeing as the mind insists on being busy, something may as well tell it to run along and watch the breathing, which presumably I’m doing anyway.
Rick: It also looks like when you’re doing the animal communication, you’re not even looking at the animal. You’re kind of—I mean, your eyes are downcast. You seem very inward.
Anna: Indeed. I am very inward and being with that very fine, fine-tuned inner listening. I don’t mean clairaudient, necessarily, but a very fine inner awareness.
Also, I often have my eyes closed or downturned so that my busy mind is not distracted by my physical surroundings, or by any movement or things that may be happening for this monkey mind to attach to and start to wonder about.
Another reason not to hold direct eye contact with the animal is that, from that animal’s cultural perspective and within their species, being stared at by a human might not be such a grand thing. It may not put them at ease—in fact, quite the opposite.
With the exception of a cat, which really doesn’t care about being stared at—no one can win a staring competition with a cat—looking deeply into an animal’s eyes can just kind of freak them out.
As humans, we have this thing about eye contact meaning deep and intimate connection. It’s not at all necessary and can actually be counterproductive in communication. It can make an animal feel like they’re going to be on the back foot, which may make them less open to relaxing into a free flow of communication as well.
Rick: I gather you don’t even have to be in the presence of the animal. I heard some accounts of you communicating with whales and sharks that were not in your immediate vicinity. So it’s sort of a long-distance attunement.
Anna: It is. Telepathy, as has been proved, works over long distance. It works as easily remotely as if the animal is right in front of me. There’s no loss or weakening of the signal because of distance, mountain ranges, or big-city buildings being in the way.
Again, for the sake of my very busy mind, I sometimes find it easier to be clear when I’m connecting remotely, because I don’t have things like the animal’s facial expression or body language to lead me down the path of some interpretations.
My cognitive interpretation of the dog—its mouth open and tongue hanging out—would be, “Happy dog face.” And perhaps the dog really is happy to be connected with me in that moment. But perhaps what I’m inquiring about is some deeply traumatic part of its past, and the dog is conveying to me the abuse that it suffered as a puppy.
My greater awareness is going to be less available for the details of the sadness when my mind is busy processing its happy face in that moment. So remote can often be easier because we don’t have that other interference for our thinking brains to be having a party with.
✨ Collective consciousness and the web of life
Rick: Yeah. Are you aware that in the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali talks about one of the siddhis, or attainments, as being the ability to understand the language of animals?
Anna: Yes, I am. I’ve met a couple of spiritual teachers along my path, one of whom is Leslie Temple-Thurston, whom you and I were just mentioning recently. In the 1980s, she was gifted with one of the siddhis as well and would so dearly have loved to have made that her focus. But she was guided that her work is with humans.
We found each other about 12 or 15 years ago, and we created some sacred activism initiatives together, both of us tuning in to another layer of communication that’s possible, which is into the collective consciousness.
So far, we’ve been talking about individual communications, as if it’s a walkie-talkie set, or a radio, or a tin can to the ear with a string between the two. That’s just a metaphor for a mechanical process; it isn’t actually mechanical at all. It’s about us, as receptive beings, really being open and being coherent, so that we can be aware of anything, really.
Particularly, we can be aware of the aspects of creation where the light of our attention is calling, a bit like a lighthouse beam. Whatever we choose to focus on is where we, through this vessel of the human brain and being, get a clearer kind of reception signal, to put it that way.
We can also connect with any layer of existence. We can connect with the collective consciousness of a certain species, which is what Leslie and I did with elephants, along with a couple of other people at that time.
When we deeply tuned into the collective consciousness of elephants and asked how we could help at this time of their extreme, dire need and their possible imminent extinction, we imagined we might be given advice by that collective consciousness about some practical things we could do—petitions or projects, or very specific, location-based assistance.
Instead, the energy and the message we got from the collective consciousness was that it’s almost really too late to do anything practical. What they really wanted people who cared around the world to do was to hold them, to hold solidarity with them, and to hold them in compassion.
“They wanted us to visualize them roaming free and having space, and being the fullest versions of their most wonderful selves.”
They wanted people to visualize them roaming free and having space, and being the fullest versions of their most wonderful selves. They wanted us to bring that positive energy in, holding them in the light, holding them in that way, instead of working against the terribly unpleasant things that are happening to them around the planet.
So we can connect at that collective level as well. There are many ways to slice and dice the idea of a collective consciousness.
Just last weekend, I was facilitating some things at Africa’s largest reforestation initiative—a festival with workshops and the planting of thousands of trees in an area that was otherwise really inhospitable and struggling. There, the collective consciousness that the team connected with was the planting site of the forest, which, of course, comprises many different species.
That forest, and the planting sites too, have a very specific collective personality.
Rick: That’s very interesting. Let’s talk about that a little bit more. Firstly, I want to mention that Leslie Temple-Thurston, whom we mentioned, has been on BatGap. You can find her in the Past Interviews menu. Also, Andrew Harvey does work in South Africa with lions and all. You’re probably connected with him, are you?
Anna: Yes, indeed. I’m a big fan of his sacred activism work and wisdom. We’ve had a few conversations about, again, the work on self that’s required for us to be truly helpful and truly clear.
Spiritual Work Beyond the Hero Complex
It really does come down to our own spiritual work—not even for the sake of others. By just doing that work on ourselves, we are automatically being that. We are literally vibrating out into the world. We have to be careful that we’re not doing it to be the hero, to be the rescuer, or for the sake of spiritual ego.
Rick: Yeah, it’s not about us. But this notion of collective consciousness, I think, is very interesting, and I think it’s something that spiritually inclined people would want to understand more clearly—and probably most of them do.
What you’re saying, I believe—I’ll let you say what you’re saying, but just to get you started—is that there are all sorts of different arrangements of collective consciousness. Rupert Sheldrake was talking about it in his interview in terms of morphogenetic fields. Even different species each have their own field, as do geographic locations. A city or a nation, or the whole world, has a collective consciousness.
These can be influenced reciprocally by us. We can have an influence on them, and the ambient field has an influence on us. So why don’t you elaborate on that a little bit?
Anna: Yes. Another very eloquent scholar who speaks about this and writes about it is Gregg Braden.
Rick: Right.
Anna: He’s looked at quantum physics and the very ancient principles and practices in a number of the Eastern wisdom traditions. Of course, this influence on the collective, and the influence of the collective on us, is absolutely provable. In fact, there’s even a formula for it.
All those experiments involving large group meditations in the mid-1970s, outside Chicago and in other cities, were proof of this.
Rick: I was in them.
Anna: Fantastic, fantastic. So it literally takes the square root of 1% of the population to cause a real 3D result in the experience of the rest of the population. And that’s all just numbers, either interesting or not. But what it is, is that—let’s think of it this way—even ourselves as a seemingly individual human, we have several roles that we play in our life. We’re a child, we’re perhaps a sibling, we’re a niece or a nephew, maybe we’re a parent, we’re a colleague, we’re a student, we are a teacher, we are a friend.
And these are several roles that we have embraced within our sort of biological units, skin bags going around acting out these different roles and these different expressions of our truth. You know, it’s not a mask that we’re putting on. It’s just a role that we genuinely arise to in the constellation of things, the constellation of our lives.
And we are part of the constellation of the biome, whether that’s on the real macro level close to home. We are related to that spider in the garden who knows us and recognizes our energy field. We are related to that bird who migrates and comes to visit once a year. We are related to the clouds that go by, and we are in a constellation.
And even as we play out our different roles, so we too could be said to be part of different collectives. We’re part of our family collective, we’re part of our workspace collective. And it’s not like a pie that only has a finite number of slices that are possible. This whole way of looking at it is really simply the human mind’s attempt to try to grapple with the enormity of life itself.
And we forget that we’re not separate. We forget that we are holographically a representation of that life, not as a symbolic act, but as a very real energetic fact. We are vibrating with that same pulse that is vibrating through everything.
And as we can bring some self-regulation, perhaps, to how we are vibrating, so too those ripples are going to go out in concentric circles from the pebble of us that is dropped into the pond of life. And those concentric rings will go out into infinity, vibrating through and affecting everything they touch. Any other perceptive being in the universe is able to perceive and know who we’re being.
So as humans are able to, again, connect with those ways of knowing ourselves, as we walk into a field where some horses are grazing, we are literally giving off the electromagnetic signals of various of our roles. We might be thinking about our work week, we might be walking with a family member, and we might be feeling something happening with our body because it’s a bit sore—we haven’t been outdoors lately. And all of these things are being radiated from us.
And all those horses in the field are getting us loud and clear. They are knowing all aspects of us. Haven’t you noticed it’s impossible to fake it with an animal? We can’t pretend to, for example, be not afraid of them if we really are. We can’t pretend to be kind if we actually have ulterior motives, when the dog gets to us and we’re going to give them a spanking.
“Who we are being is being broadcast.”
So who we are being is being broadcast. And it’s for us humans to be able to receive the broadcast of all of life around us again, when we so choose. So there are many different ways to group the idea of a collective, in whichever way, whichever constellation we choose to, because it is our idea. Life is just simply being itself, with no hierarchy and no value difference between the smallest and the biggest, between the seen and the unseen.
Are some beings more evolved than others?
Rick: Okay, your last comment triggers a question that had been in the back of my mind. Various spiritual teachers and traditions kind of offer a hierarchical arrangement of levels of evolution, which kind of parallels even biological evolution as it’s understood.
In other words, they would say that a rock is fairly primitive soul, if it has a soul, and that a microbe is more evolved, and an ant is more evolved, and a turtle is more evolved than a monkey, and so on. And this is kind of paralleled by development of the brain and the nervous system. A human brain and nervous system is much more sophisticated than that of a turtle, or even a horse, or even a monkey.
So would it stand to reason that the subjective experience of all these beings is similarly arranged, and that, you know, it’s much more simplistic and primitive, in a sense, in a so-called lower species than it is in the more evolved ones?
And I don’t want to make this question too long. But when you’re communicating with, let’s say, any kind of animal—a dog or a cat or a turtle, or whatever kind of animals you communicate with—it’s not like you’re communicating with a human mind, which behaves and functions the way the human mind does. Aren’t you communicating with something sort of much more rudimentary, in a sense?
Anna: Thank goodness I’m not communicating with the mind in those other nonhumans. That would just be an absolute circus. And nothing more rudimentary—no, the idea is connecting with the nonmind, connecting with the essence. And I’ll speak more about that in a bit.
But when we are connecting with any other being, we’re connecting with their essence, completely unrelated to brain size or function. And biologists like to measure intelligence by brain size-to-body ratios, these sorts of things that have completely—
Rick: Cerebral cortex and all that.
Anna: Absolutely. And if intelligence were based on brain size, we’d be in a spot of bother, because there are several species that have brains larger than ours. And neuroscientists still barely understand how our own brain functions, actually, as humans.
And they still don’t know how the melon-shaped organ deep in the dolphins’ and whales’ brains functions, or how that serves them through echolocation. They can’t figure it out.
So yes, there might be a hierarchy in one measurement system, looking at brain function, but that’s got nothing at all to do with intelligence, or with sentience, or with subjective experience, to come back to the first part of your question.
So subjective experience has got nothing to do with brain function, or even the presence of the brain. There’s as much experience available to a rock that has been in place for eons as there is available to a tree that’s been standing perhaps a few decades, or, if they’re lucky, a little bit longer, and as there is to a passing ant or butterfly who’s going to live for just weeks.
So subjective experience is just that: it’s subjective, through the filter of that being’s range of experience that’s possible. And I do mean their sensory experience as well. So there may be some limitations or some additions compared to us humans.
Animals’ Expanded Sensory Worlds
For example, insects like bees can see in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum as an ordinary sighted phenomenon, and we can’t. So their subjective experience is already much more expanded on the visual front than that of us humans.
Nonetheless, we are connecting with the essence of that being, and intelligence is not something that can be measured. Intelligence is not relative. Intelligence is a simple expression and a knowing of perhaps a version of self, or at least the expression of this thing that comes through self. And at the same time, one is connected to the whole.
Let’s go back to bees. I’ve communicated a lot with individual bees. In fact, where I live, a particular bee with a certain little kink in his left front wing comes in to ask me for help when they’re really, really angry. There’s been drought here for a few years, and there aren’t flowering plants for them.
A certain bee appears to have drawn the short straw and been the one who has to go in and call the human out to come and fill up the bee feeder. So that bee is very clearly individually individuated, firstly, and individually able to make a beeline for the kitchen, or wherever I’m in the house, and come find me.
But at the same time, this bee is very present in the bee collective consciousness. There can be 50,000 or more bees in any hive. These individuals are very aware that what they’re doing through their roles in the community is for the greater good of the hive.
And so if we were to warn one individual bee that they’re going to be killed or, God forbid, sprayed with insect repellent if they stay inside the house, that bee’s probably not going to care too much about that. They don’t have a selfish desire to stay alive as long as possible, because what they’re doing with their life that day and in that moment is what they’re doing for the collective good. And they are on purpose.
So let’s ask ourselves the question of intelligence again. Imagine if we humans were doing what we are doing as individual units going around our days for the greater good, for the collective good. Even humankind might deem that quite a high state of intelligence. And I see that much more in the insects than I do in humans nowadays.
One last thing to say about this is that when we are connecting with the essence of the other, it’s actually our essence that’s connecting with them as well.
So I happen to have to use my brain to get focused and all those sorts of things, and watch my breathing and become calm, and essentially try to dehumanize myself in that moment, so that my humanness can fall away and not interrupt things, and not interrupt my ability to be with the other and be with the moment.
So my essence—that mysterious, unnameable and perhaps indescribable aspect of self—is what is really doing the connecting and the communication. It is my essence that is receiving the experience of the other and receiving that knowing.
But I don’t know about it consciously until my unconscious intuitive data that I’ve received has run against my mental database of stored life experiences, vocabulary words, and sensory stimuli that I have stored in my brain. And when that incoming intuitive data finds a match in my brain, then a little flag goes up and a word pops into my head, or a smell or mental image. And that’s when I know that I’ve received data for the first time. But I’ve already received it at my essence level before that time.
Rick: I think you and I would agree that we all have the same essence. And there are verses in various scriptures, like the Gita, that say that the yogi sees all beings in the Self and the Self in all beings. Essentially, the idea is that there’s only one Self, ultimately, one essence, ultimately, and that we’re all just sort of manifestations of that, or we reflect that to differing degrees and in different ways, right? Are we on the same page so far?
Anna: Yes, we are. I agree.
Rick: Okay, so let’s take humans, for example. I mean, there’s a difference between someone with an IQ of 80 and Albert Einstein, in terms of their abilities and in terms of their understanding. And there’s a difference between someone who is illiterate and William Shakespeare. There’s a vast range of capabilities or expression, even though all those types of people—all those people, and many others we can mention—all have the same Self, capital S, the same ultimate essence. Obviously, it reflects or expresses very differently through different vehicles.
Anna: Yes, it does. And there’s no difference in the value of those different expressions.
Rick: Yeah, we don’t—I mean, obviously, they have different impacts on society. But everything has its place. All is well and wisely put; things, everyone has their dharma, everything exists for a reason. So we wouldn’t be saying here that animals are less valuable than people.
Although, I mean, is the life of 1,000 mosquitoes less valuable than the life of one person who gets malaria?
Anna: No. What’s the problem with us getting malaria? I’ve had it.
Rick: I’m sure you didn’t enjoy it…
Anna: I didn’t enjoy it.
Rick: And it kills a lot of people every year, and we try to prevent that from happening by killing mosquitoes or using mosquito nets, anyway.
Anna: I know. But you see, we humans have so far lost our way that we have a problem with physical death as well. Now we’ve become very attached to staying alive as long as possible, as if physical death isn’t the end of everything. And why should we lengthen our number of days on this planet at the expense of the number of days that another being is busy living, just because we come and interrupt things?
So, yeah, I’ve got liters of blood, last time I checked, and I can spare a few drops for mosquitoes. It’s only female mosquitoes who bite, and it’s not food for them. They need the blood to complete the reproductive cycle of their eggs hatching. And it’s not the mosquitoes’ fault or responsibility if…
Rick: They’re just doing their thing.
Anna: They’re doing their thing. And if they happen to be infected with the malaria parasite, which is again a parasite infecting them, it’s not intrinsic to their own physiology. Well, that’s just potentially bad luck for me.
So, in this great mystery and the continual recycling of energy, the moment we humans are born, we start to decay and become recycled. And one day we’ll be pushing up… Well, isn’t this interesting, too? The phrase, certainly in the more English-oriented world where I grew up, is “pushing up the daisies.” And we use that as a nice colloquial term. And perhaps we fancy ourselves as artists appreciating lovely pictures of daisies…
Rick: They become mulch.
Anna: They’ll also become mulch, feeding the earthworms, and people go, “Oh, don’t want to feed the earthworms,” you know. We have ideas about things. So there’s no less value in an individual mosquito compared to an individual human life at all. There’s no value difference.
“We’re just here to simply be.”
You know, that whole thing of “before enlightenment, scrub toilets; after enlightenment, scrub toilets.” We’re just here to simply be. And if we are really in a state of presence that is having us be, we wouldn’t think—and here’s the key word as well—of doing. We wouldn’t think of doing. We would naturally arise into a state of being, and whatever is possible for both beings to navigate with in those moments would arise.
Sometimes these things that are inconvenient for us or unpleasant, or may lead to disease, are things we can simply take preventative measures around. And we modern humans have become so disconnected from nature that we find it inconvenient or too troublesome to wear natural mosquito repellents, for example, or to find out which herbs we could rub on our skin, or use essential oils.
Somewhere along the line, in our mass disconnection, we seem to have come to believe that we are more highly ordained and supposed to be rulers of the planet, or at least that we have a greater right to life. And somewhere along the line, we began to see all the other beings—vegetable, plant, mineral, and animal—as resources for ourselves, instead of as equal brothers and sisters in this wave of life, as if from different nations.
Living consciously with plants and animals
Rick: I don’t mean to sound persnickety, but, for instance, before we started, you mentioned that after being a vegan for many, many years, you now eat some meat. We can explain a little bit—you can talk about that a little bit.
But do certain animals have to die in order for you and others to have that kind of food? If we’re all exactly equal, would you be cool with feeding people to animals in order to make sure that they’re eating properly? This sounds like a weird question, but I’m just trying to get to the heart of this issue.
Because, in my perhaps biased opinion, I do see a sort of hierarchy of values. A lot of the worst plagues and diseases that have afflicted mankind have been solved by sacrificing, in many cases, microscopic forms of life, or sacrificing other sorts of life so that our life may thrive.
Nature’s Wisdom and Human Ecological Imbalance
Anna: And why should our life thrive? You see, perhaps those plagues and scourges that have come along and affected humankind are part of the wisdom of nature, figuring herself out, and perhaps even redressing an imbalance when human population or impact in a certain environment has gone way out of balance and become significantly detrimental to the collective good.
These scourges, these plagues, these times of famine, are all part of a rebalancing act in the greater good. And it’s not only some animals that physically stop living their biological lives so that we humans may eat, myself included; it’s also plants.
You see, in my experience through direct interspecies communication, I’ve come to learn—really through direct experience—that there’s no difference in consciousness between a member of a plant species and an animal species.
And this is where I reached a kind of crisis of conscience. I had been vegetarian first and then vegan for a number of years. Then I was taking my advanced training in interspecies communication and began having conscious conversations with my lettuce leaves and my tomatoes. I thought, “Oh no, what am I to do now?”
I’m certainly nowhere near, you know, seeking or attaining anything that resembles a level of awakening that allows me to be breatharian. And I’m amazed that those people can, but I’m definitely not there.
So, as we’re walking every day, we’re squishing insects under our feet. As we’re favoring plant foods, we’re ignoring the sentience and the beautiful wisdom and intelligence of those plant species.
I’ve had some chats with some plants who’ve grown in the agricultural fields that are covering the planet and deforesting the very lungs of ours. And those plants are having a dastardly, very unpleasant time in their experience of existence.
Pesticides, unnatural growing environments, being grown in straight rows—that is so unkind to them and their families. They don’t have a sense of community. They’re taking the brunt and the full frontal force of the elements coming at them when they grow in unnatural configurations.
So the world is very full of pretty unhappy plants as well as animals. And I would certainly never support agriculture as it stands in the commercial sense. Personally, I never support factory farming, either, because of the quality of life of the plants and the animals while they are embodied.
And in the great recycling that this Earth is, all plants and all animals, including ourselves, do just feed back into the system.
Rick: Yeah. Apropos of this point, one time I was in a lecture with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and he said, “If you have to eat somebody, eat lesser-evolved life.” So he kind of bought into that sort of Hindu paradigm of there being levels of evolution of species. But I guess maybe his implication was that nature has less invested in a lettuce leaf than it does in a cow or something.
Anna: Yes, yes. And there are different paradigms, too—different belief systems that have hierarchical structures. That just hasn’t been my experience in connecting with plants as well.
Interspecies communication is quite literally that. It’s happening out there the whole time between different species, not just us, you know, kind of high-minded humans who come along and get to connect with another. Interspecies communication is alive and well out there.
I remember once noticing a bunch of bees around a single, solitary sunflower that was on the edge of the field. Unknowingly at the time, I was projecting. The question I asked the sunflower when I connected with it was, “Aren’t the bees bothering you?” Because, to my mind, if I had imagined myself with that many bees incoming, clearly I was feeling a bit like that would bother me. I had inadvertently created that projection even in the asking of my question.
Rick: It probably loved it.
Anna: Probably loved it. It did love it. The answer came back from the sunflower. It’s so hard to put words to these things, but the energy of it that my brain could best give words to was, “The bees kiss me with their awareness.” And what a beautiful dance of mutual being they are in that moment.
Rick: They’re probably pollinating the sunflower.
Anna: Yeah.
Rick: Or taking its pollen elsewhere or something.
Anna: Exactly. Again, the greater good.
Rick: Yeah. A couple of questions have come in that I want to ask, and then I have a lot of other things I want to talk to you about. So we’ll jump around a little bit topic-wise here while I interject a couple of questions.
One is from Irene. She says, “I’ve always felt a very strong connection to animals. Some people did not seem to have much or any connection. I, in turn, did not resonate with those people in general. Any clue as to why some people just do not have a connection or feeling for animals?”
Anna: I don’t really know why. Yeah, animals and nature are one way in which we can open ourselves to the collective and also to our own animal bodies, to become more embodied in our own practices and our own awareness.
I don’t know why some are and some aren’t. There are many different spiritual traditions, and there are many different ways for humans to become more conscious. So I don’t have an answer for that. Sorry.
Rick: Maybe it’s a faculty that some people haven’t developed very well. Some people have a really good ear for music. We all have ears, and we can hear, but some people just tune into that. They’ve enlivened that ability.
Anna: Yeah.
Rick: And here’s one from Nike—or Nick—Home from Hartbeespoort, South Africa. He wants to know: “I wanted to know if perhaps you have any experience with regard to sacrificial animals. Here in South Africa, in the ancient sangoma traditional healer tradition, it is stated that the animal divined for sacrifice has given its consent. This is done by appearing in the apprentice’s dreams or being chosen in other ways. It is very similar to the old ways of Native Americans, where a special bond existed between them and the animals whose lives they took.”
Anna: Yes, in the shamanic cultures here, if a person is going to be called, get the calling sickness, or just be called to trust or become a sangoma or shaman, they will receive an animal in their dreams more than once. The animal will have certain physical features that are identifiable, and it’s the person’s job to then go and find that particular animal, to comb the countryside. These are often long-distance travels.
They will know when they find that one, not only by how it looks, but also because of the resonance with that one. Some small backyard farmers or people who keep their own livestock have a very similar experience when they actually have to eat some animal flesh. They might be growing some vegetables and raising some animals.
Derrick Jensen, by the way, describes this very well in his book, whose title I can’t remember right now, but I’ll think of it. Derrick Jensen is a fantastic environmental activist and a very eloquent writer on behalf of the Earth. He speaks about having had this major epiphany, where he would walk out into the yard and essentially ask a duck or a chicken that might be ready, if it was the right time for all concerned, to volunteer itself for the chopping block.
If it was the right time, invariably, one duck or one chicken would come forward and follow him into the barn, peacefully lie down with no restraint needed, and look him in the eye as he put down the chopping knife.
So this kind of conscious relating and this conscious giving of life is something that is well known to Indigenous people. It’s something that’s absolutely available to all of us. If only we could be that conscious with our eating of our plant and animal beings and fellows, that would be just absolutely fantastic.
Rick: I looked him up just now, and there’s one book, The Myth of Human Supremacy. Is that the one you’re thinking of?
There’s another one called Endgame, and another one called A Language Older Than something or other.
Anna: That’s A Language Older Than Words.
Rick: I see.
Anna: Yes. A Language Older Than Words is his rather skeptical and reluctant discovery of interspecies communication, and getting direct impulses from even the forests and ecosystems that he was fighting for. He began to realize that in his fighting for Earth’s rights, he was actually being violent. That whole angry activist thing, as Andrew Harvey explains, really isn’t going to work in the outcome and along the way as a process either.
Rick: It’s just sort of infusing a lot of anger into the environment. Yeah.
Anna: While we’re on the topic of such things, may I also recommend David Abram, A-B-R-A-M, who has written beautiful, beautiful books: The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal. He’s really deeply in touch with the relational space that is available all around us, even with seemingly inanimate things like the walls of our own home.
He has had some interesting encounters with traditional shamans from around the world, with mosquitoes, and with his own house that he lived in. So all of life around us is very aware and in this constant dynamic relating with us. We’re just so distracted most of the time that we don’t notice.
Rick: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, people who are into Advaita and all would say, “Oh, yes, it’s all one,” you know, nonduality. So you look at the wall, and you see yourself, and so on. But I guess we’re taking this a step further and saying that not only in its sort of ultimate nature is the one, is the wall, ourself, but in some little bit more manifest forms, there’s a certain sentience to everything.
Anna: Yes, yeah. There absolutely is. That rises and falls like the waves of the tides themselves, in terms of the dynamic interchange. The interchange rises and falls.
The simple act of noticing something that you’re walking past is an energetic connection. It’s laying down a gossamer-thin thread of connection between the two of you. Noticing something is a version of acknowledgment; your awareness has gone there.
The simple act of noticing something that you’re walking past is an energetic connection. It’s laying down a gossamer-thin thread of connection between the two of you. Noticing something is a version of acknowledgment; your awareness has gone there.
If we just add a little more of an intentional greeting from our heart space, or just an inner bow, something along those lines, it’s amazing how nature responds to us and relaxes in our presence.
Rick: Quantum mechanics would probably have something to say about that in terms of the attention influencing the observed, or the observer influencing the observed. If you think about it, I mean, a rock, a wall—these apparently inanimate, insentient things—if you look at them microscopically, there’s this amazing dance of intelligence going on, just that we don’t even fully understand. There’s this marvel of forces or laws of nature doing their thing, maintaining the structure of the thing, and tremendous dynamism in something that appears inert and nondynamic.
Anna: There really, really is, and this is also at the root of the whole debate around intelligence and my view that there is no difference or hierarchy. Any expression of anything that appears to be form is, of course, not really solid. It’s just how densely packed together the energy particles are, for want of a better term.
Any expression of anything—any ant or elephant, any cougar or moth, any human or cat—is just a temporary holding pattern of molecules. So we are all intrinsically made of the same stuff. We really are, which is not stuff.
“We’re just differently arranged holding patterns. That’s all.”
Of course, there’s going to be a common language and commonality, and beautiful coherence is possible. We’re just differently arranged holding patterns. That’s all.
From corporate life to animal communication
Rick: Yeah. Brother Sun, Sister Moon. So let’s shift gears a bit. You have training in what was it here? Marketing—
Anna: Tracking—
Rick: —initially psychology, economics, marketing, kind of mundane stuff. And then you shifted gears and got into tracking, and then this ability dawned. Tell us a little bit about how you made that transition.
Anna: Slowly and painfully. I had a very ordinary, mundane, suburban upbringing. Just to be clear, I didn’t run around the plains of Africa riding lions. We never went camping, went on safari, or anything at all. It was a very ordinary suburban upbringing, followed by university, a business degree, and then straight into a corporate job to pay off the student loan.
All the way along, I’d been fascinated by animals and wished my family could have afforded to send me to vet school, but they couldn’t. It’s just as well, because that very scientific and narrow approach might not have allowed for these wider things to come about.
At school, even during high school, I would make any project I could about the big-cat species. I volunteered at a vet and did things like this. But only when I was living and working in Silicon Valley at the end of the ’90s did I finally realize something had to give. I was burning the candle at both ends and in the middle, working fourteen-hour days and then volunteering on weekends with cheetah conservation and with a wolf sanctuary when I lived outside Seattle.
I’m very pleased that I chose to do my tracking training in the United States, because I grew up in South Africa. Looking outside Seattle at the dried mud or perfect wet sand and the most beautiful footprints, I didn’t have a clue what animals might have left those footprints, because I didn’t know my North American species.
That was such a blessing because my normally very active mind couldn’t figure it out and couldn’t try to analyze the data. Most fortunately, I was under the guidance of the Wilderness Awareness School, which is very passionate about helping people see through native eyes, as they would put it.
They bring about the cultural mentoring and the nature-awareness routines that have been common to original peoples all around the globe: South Pacific Islanders, San Bushmen here in Africa, Aboriginals, and First Americans.
When I couldn’t figure it out, they didn’t just tell me the answer or give me a book to study. They would say things like, “Close your eyes and see what happens. Hold your hand over the track and see what happens.” Which I did.
I began to get sudden, spontaneous mental images or flashes of a coyote’s face. Then I asked, “What is this animal that has a face like a jackal, bigger than a fox?” They said, “Yes, well done. Those are coyote tracks.” And I was like, “What’s a coyote?”
Discovering Telepathic Interspecies Communication
So I had that empirical proof again and again when I wasn’t looking for it. I realized either I was completely losing my mind or hallucinating. But when it began to happen so often that I couldn’t discount it as lucky guesses anymore, I researched this field and discovered telepathic interspecies communication.
I used my vacation days from my corporate job to study with the International Animal Institute and the most beautiful mentor, Dr. Jerry Ryan, who is herself a psychologist. She and her institute combined the Buddhist teachings of compassion and respect for all life with the new physics as it was at that time, and also with the fundamentals that Saint Francis of Assisi was all about.
I really took this multidisciplinary approach to exploring this phenomenon. Still, it took me three years between knowing I really wanted to, and in fact just had to, get out of corporate life and actually doing it. There was all the fear about changing fields completely, particularly when I was qualified for a certain track that I was on.
Eventually, eventually, the call of the wild got so strong that I had to answer. I was on a work-based visa in the United States, so when I left my corporate job and my IT career, I left the United States as well and came back to South Africa in 2002.
I have the animals to thank for this, really. It was those times sitting with the captive cheetahs I was working with. It was those times spent on the sandbank on a Saturday morning beside a river, mulling over tracks. It was those times sleeping under the stars and being present to the beautiful soundscape. Those experiences deeply informed my subconscious and unconscious.
Those moved me more than the very stimulating mental days at work. But what really moved me was this call back to nature. Little did I know at the time that it could help me come back to my own nature, which is true for all of us: our own innate nature as human animals, as deeply connected beings, and as intuitive beings.
Rick: Let’s have you tell a couple of stories. I’m going to strongly recommend that people watching this watch some of your YouTube videos, and I will link to them, as I said in the beginning.
There are two that jumped out at me, and you can either talk about these or talk about other ones that you’d rather talk about. One was the story of Diablo, the jaguar who was renamed Spirit. The other was the story of Koko the parrot.
If you like telling those, just so people have a more vivid sense of what actually takes place during animal communication and what its utility is.
Anna: The keepers at an animal park had a black leopard who had come from a European zoo. He had recently moved into their custody and was snarling and angry. One night, when they were checking on him, he actually propelled himself through two layers of electric fence that were switched on, just punched a hole in the fences, flattened the six-foot-four keeper, and bit through his arm, which put the fellow in ICU for a while.
Very clearly, the leopard could have killed him if he had wanted to. But he went back through the open fence. They were wondering what to do with this animal. They were caring and kind at that facility, and they would take tours around, with no petting or engagement with the animal at all. But even from a distance, he was obviously very unhappy and wouldn’t come out of his night shelter at all, which is a small concrete room, really the size of a typical small bathroom.
So he was obviously very unhappy, and they didn’t understand what was going on. I went by and connected with this leopard. In the tours that they were doing at that facility, they’d been speaking about how aggressive he was. The name he had come with was Diablo, and of course there were all the associations with that name: demolition, satanic, wild, and so on.
When I connected with him, he said that he was really, really, really tired of being held in their paradigm. He was not charged with all the associations with his name and those being projected onto him. He was just living up to this expectation. It was a chicken-and-egg situation and a vicious cycle.
He really wanted to be identified not with that, and not with the story of having had an abusive past in the zoo and being wild, aggressive, and angry. He wanted to be acknowledged for his essence and for the large spirit that he actually has—an extensive spirit without the story.
Rick: Now, when he had communicated all that to you, what was your subjective experience of receiving that information? I presume it wasn’t English words coming into your head. How did you actually know that he wanted or was trying to say all that?
Anna: Well, I simply imagined the words in my own mind in English, asking, “What is bothering you?” How I received the information back was in this unconscious, intuitive state, before my mind’s aware of it, just as a feeling. And then, yes, I did get some words in my mind. I got words that he wasn’t sending, because he’s not sending English words. But that internal translation I spoke about earlier is what happens. So I got the words…
Rick: So you’re getting feelings, intuitive flashes, perhaps visual images even, sometimes.
Anna: Yes. In this case, I remember the moment where I got a feeling of his expansive self, his real essence. I felt myself as him, because when we’re in communication and connection with another, we are borrowing their experience and what they’re speaking about.
So I felt myself expand and just be this calm, expansive spirit spreading out across the land and the area there. At the same time, the words in my mind were translating his upset at being identified with the other—the angry one. The words that came to my mind were, “I’m not angry, and I’m not aggressive.”
They weren’t in some booming voice in my ear. They were simply soundless words in my awareness, my brain’s way to interpret the incoming intuitive information. So at the same moment, I felt what he is and the commentary on what he isn’t.
Then he also said he was very worried about two leopard cubs, two ordinarily colored leopard cubs who he had been with before. They were youngsters, and he was worried for their well-being. He asked me, “Do I know what’s happened to them?”
Now, you might ask, why would he ask me when all other species are connected all the time to everywhere? What he had been perceiving remotely across distance was their distress, their immense distress, and he wanted to know what kind of human zoo environment they were in, because he could sense their distress.
I didn’t know. The keepers didn’t know anything about him having been with cubs before, and it took a couple of weeks for the keepers to follow the trail, to follow the paper trail, and find out that the cubs who had been in the enclosure alongside him had gone to a zoo as well.
Rick: It just occurred to me there’s more to this story, but do panthers and other such animals use a form of telepathy to hunt? Do they telepathically know that there’s a deer a mile away and that, if they go in this direction, they will find it? Or do they just use their sense of smell and all that?
Anna: They predominantly use their physical senses, but they will also be picking up telepathically, intuitively, on the quantum signature—the signature frequency—of a deer moving through.
The prey animal will also be picking up telepathically on the fact that it’s being stalked and hunted. Take a group of deer standing in a meadow. They might suddenly all lift their heads, and that’s because there is a large cat, let’s say a mountain lion, in the grass that they can’t see or smell.
You’ll see what the deer are doing: They are immediately testing all directions with their senses, sniffing at the breeze this way and that, moving their ears around, and swiveling their heads to look in all directions. If they had had any sensory proof of their predator, they’d all be looking or smelling in the same direction, but they’re not. They’re looking around and scanning for five-sensory information about the location of the threat, and the intensity and intention of their predator, which they can pick up on.
So a leopard or a mountain lion strolling through, even unseen, is not sending off that kind of energetic intention. The electromagnetics, which can be photographed by Kirlian photography, by the way, would look very different when it is there and even more hidden on the sensory level. That was intent. It’s literally broadcasting that intention, and that’s what the deer are picking up on telepathically.
Rick: I wonder if predators try to hide their broadcast or dampen it, just as they try to hide their physical body so as not to broadcast so loudly.
Anna: They don’t, because they’re just way too authentic and are simply being themselves in the moment.
Rick: Can’t help it. Right.
Anna: Yeah, yeah, just being. Like, we can’t really hide it. We can think we’re hiding something. At best, we can perhaps distract ourselves.
Rick: Okay, so continue with the story of Spirit. It was a nice outcome. What happened next?
Anna: Yes. Well, the keepers, thank goodness, although they thought this was an entirely last-resort, completely mad move, called in an animal psychic. They were really desperate, and they were sort of rolling their eyes: “Yeah, sure, he’s upset with his name,” or whatever, until I said that thing about the two leopard cubs.
“Oh, wait a minute,” they said, because the wife of the keeper remembered vaguely, I think from one of the photos, that there were two cubs next door to him months before this.
We left with the film crew, and that afternoon, the keeper went outside Spirit’s enclosure and outside the night shelter, quietly, where no one was watching and there were no members of the public around. The black cat was in this dark night shelter, and you could barely see him.
He quietly conveyed to him energetically and mentally, saying, “I’m very sorry that we’ve been continuing to tell your bad and sad story and call you aggressive just because you’ve been behaving from a place of upset. I’m so sorry. We acknowledge you for the spirit that you are. We need to change your name. We’re going to call you Spirit, so that people will project that onto you.
“We want you to know we’re never going to ask anything of you here, like at the zoo where you came from. There were so many demands on you. You don’t even have to come out of this night shelter ever. We’re sorry that we’ve been asking you to. You can do exactly as you please. We will take care of you unconditionally.”
Because he wasn’t attached to coming out of the night shelter, Spirit then did. He walked out of his night shelter right there, the first time out in sunlight in six or seven months, and has been a happy cat ever since.
And there is more to the story that’s not known in the public forum yet. But…
Rick: What’s that?
Anna: Fast-forward about five years. Spirit and these other 54 big-cat companions had all moved premises to a fantastic, beautifully lush area where they could all hide from humans, if they wanted to, without being seen.
A zoo elsewhere in South Africa was closing down and had five-year-old leopard sisters they needed to get rid of. They came to the sanctuary, and the sisters were put in an enclosure where Spirit could see them.
Leopards are solitary cats; they don’t ever live together in the wild. If you try and put two leopards together, they will fight to the death until one of them is dead. That’s why there was a healthy distance between these two new leopards’ enclosure and Spirit’s enclosure.
But they noticed that the leopards showed interest in each other and seemed quite friendly across the distance. You can see where this is going, right?
Rick: Right. Romance.
Anna: So he phoned me and asked me to communicate with all three, because he felt that they should put them together. But all the vets and conservationists were saying, “No way. You’re going to have dead leopards strewn about the place.”
All three leopards said, “Hello, we are friends from back then. We are the ones.” So, very bravely, the keepers and managers went against the advice of all the scientists and put them in the same enclosure, where they’ve been living together happily ever after.
Rick: Good. Have they had babies?
Anna: Oh, no, no, not at all. It’s highly unethical for any animal sanctuaries to be breeding and creating more captive animals. No, there’s no breeding allowed at all.
Rick: I see. So they must neuter or spay the animals.
Anna: Either oral contraceptives or injectable contraceptives for the females, or, yes, vasectomies and neutering.
Rick: I see. And I presume—this is a dumb question—but I presume that, having been raised in captivity, there’s no way these animals could be released into the wild. They just wouldn’t be able to manage it, right?
Anna: Generally speaking, what you say is correct. There have been some exceptions to this, where animals raised in captivity, like one of the white lions I’ve worked with, have been reintroduced into the wild. This white lion, in particular, was 11 years old when he was reintroduced, after living on a stud farm and being made to sire lots of other lion cubs.
But, you see, it takes an incredible number of years of work and effort to essentially teach the animal how to hunt successfully. All of these large predators will have the chasing instinct, and they certainly know how to chase something, but they wouldn’t know what to do with it when they catch up with it. They don’t actually know how to kill or hunt.
In some cases with reintroductions, the people—the animal carers—have been involved in telepathically giving some instruction to the animal on how to hunt, which species to avoid, which ones to chase, and their concerns about it. So it is possible.
But goodness knows, there are so many wild animals in situ who are wild, and the conservation effort should be going there rather than toward captive animals.
Receiving intuitive communication
Rick: Sure. Irene sent over another question. She’s sitting right here, but it’s easier for me if she sends it by email. She’s had some experiences where animal sounds, such as a meow or a bark, will translate into English within herself. In other words, she knows in those rare moments that they are wanting to communicate in English. I’m reading it: “This has always happened when I am in between waking and sleep, in the gap. But the experience is clear. There must be many different ways communications can come through, depending on the person?”
Anna: Yes, exactly. It does depend on the person. And it’s interesting what she says, too, about it happening more easily when you’re between waking and sleep. That is absolutely when we are our most diffuse, and when our awareness is the most dispersed and the most open, before we’ve picked up the thinking mind and gone and closed ourselves down.
So this can be lovely for anyone on this call to practice, perhaps when you’re falling asleep later or waking up in the morning. Just have an intention, or have an invitation to yourself and to life, to put your awareness out there and invite any incoming messages from any being that may want to show you something.
Rick: Yeah.
Anna: So, yeah, it could be that the animal’s making a sound or not, but the impressions that come through, for example, in English, in our minds, depend on us, the receiving device, if you like.
If there were three people sitting in front of the same dog, all silently and telepathically inquiring of the dog, “What is your favorite toy?” person one might get the words “green tennis ball” suddenly in their mind in English. Person two might get the mental image of a green tennis ball hanging in front of them in their mind’s eye. And the third person might get the dreadful smell of a really wet, damp, spit-filled, chewed-up old tennis ball.
All three ways would be equally valid ways to receive the information. And that does depend on the person. Some people are more cognitive, wordy, and analytical; they may get words. Some people are more kinesthetic and tactile and may get physical sensations, feelings, or smells. And some people are more visual. Artists will get mental images much more often.
Typically, it happens in a range of ways. We, as the human receiver, should never worry about or try to determine which way we should be receiving information, because we’re actually receiving it in its pure quantum form. The internal translation is what makes it come about as one of those internal senses for ourselves. We don’t have any say over that. And if we try to direct that, we’re taking our attention there instead of allowing our awareness to be open to actually receiving.
Human impact and nature’s forgiveness
Rick: In the notes you sent us, you suggested that one of the things we might discuss is what the nonhumans are feeling about the current status of human-caused destruction. And a question came in related to this from Parthena in Sebastian, Florida. She asks:
“I feel that we humans are an invasive species and are not the best stewards of the planet.”
It’s kind of an understatement. “The only thing I feel good about at this point is that nature will survive us and that the Earth will recover from our being here. What could nature as a collective possibly think about being free from our existence?”
Anna: Hmm. That’s a very, very good question. I am quite sure they would be delighted to be free of our existence—not as a concept and not as a future projection, but, you know, all the nature kingdoms are very acutely aware that the difficulties they’re experiencing in their daily lives are because of human influence.
That may be on the large scale, like the climate chaos we’re experiencing or the plastics that are just infusing the oceans, even at the microplastic level. Or it may be at a very local level, like the way you’re spraying pesticides on the vegetables outside your back door.
So all of nature is very aware that the troubles they’re experiencing are because of human influence. And to my absolute astonishment, they haven’t just risen up in some kind of Orwellian, you know, “Animal Farm” mass movement against us. There are several species who could really harm us if they wanted to, certainly the larger ones here in Africa. The elephants could just go on a trampling rampage.
But the level of forgiveness that is emanating from the natural world is quite astounding. You see, they know. They know that behind what we’re doing, we’ve really lost our way. And the consequences for them are dire. But they also know that the consequences for ourselves are dire, too. And they appear to have an incredible level of compassion for how lost we are.
And then again, what I said earlier on: there’s also this quality of acceptance with things the way they are. And there are different kinds of acceptance, right? There’s that sort of passive, “be a doormat,” resigned kind of acceptance. And that’s not the kind I’m talking about. I’m talking about that much more expanded state of surrender as a spiritual quality of acceptance. They have that. They have a trust in the process.
For sure, individually and even collectively, they would really wish—and often ask me in my communications—for things to be different, for things to be changed, for humans to behave differently, for something to be changed about human actions.
Again and again, my answer to them is, “Well, you know, humans don’t agree.” I often relay messages from wildlife to the humans who are influencing those environments, and the humans are shut down or think they don’t have the material resources to make a change and are not willing to look to their inner resources.
Part of the problem is that humans collectively really work up. If we worked up to the scale of the effects of what we’re doing, I think that wall of grief would be quite overwhelming. In our modern cultures, we don’t have a way to process grief. We’ve become so unrelated to one another, and even to ourselves, that we don’t know how to process the grief that’s just waiting under the lid of Pandora’s box.
If we acknowledged that message from one particular environment, or from that one shark that was washed up and gaffed, or from that one pesticide-filled insect in the field—if we were to deeply acknowledge, feel, hear, and know that that is real—it would call into question our entire paradigm of modern living.
We would be present to the effects, and most people just can’t go there. It’s just better to keep the blinkers on. And the nonhumans allow us that latitude. They allow us to remain blind and unseeing.
Rick: I don’t know if they have much choice. And, you know, obviously, our paradigm needs shifting. I don’t know quite what it’s going to take to shift it. It seems like we don’t change until we’re utterly forced to. Obviously, just taking the whole climate-change thing, some people see it coming, and others get money from the oil companies to vote in favor of doing nothing about it. So there’s a sort of blindness or stubbornness as we watch the Titanic head towards the iceberg.
Anna: There is. And the unraveling—the falling apart of systems, whether those be conceptual, economic, or infrastructural—is what’s happening. And that’s already been happening for the nonhumans. We have unraveled their migration routes. The forests in the Pacific Northwest have dried up the last mountain caribou. We are causing so many extinctions.
Life as we know it—in quantity, in location, and in quality—has been unraveling for a long time. So it’s inevitable that we, too, are going to fall prey to that phenomenon. We’re not above it.
And in the unraveling, your energy is recycled. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. So there’s such an opportunity for new paradigms to come about. But it’s not going to be through technology or through our thinking minds. It’s going to be through different aspects of our being that are going to have to come forward and stand in front of our thinking minds and our rational approaches.
Rick: Are you optimistic? Pessimistic? Do you feel like we’re doomed? Or do you feel like some people do—that there’s some sort of spiritual renaissance taking place in the world, and all these people are getting interested in spirituality and having spiritual awakenings, and that somehow is going to percolate up in terms of changes in social structures, economic policies, environmental concerns, and all that kind of thing?
I tend to think that way myself, but I don’t know for sure. It’s just a comforting thought.
Anna: It is. It is a comforting thought. And change is incremental, which implies it’s still operating within the same construct. This change, too, is incremental, and it’s still dealing with adjusting the current known world and working with criteria that are already known.
So I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic, because I don’t tend to take a future view on this. Things are just happening as they’re happening. I tend to think of myself as realistic, which I suppose anyone in this objective view would say about themselves.
But, yeah, we are way beyond the tipping point. For sure, we really are. A near-term extinction is upon us—of our own species, as well. Personally, I don’t have a problem with that.
And I also deeply know that a co-created solution is more than possible. It’s there. It’s already available. But that would take us humans playing our part in the “co” part of that, really co-creating with other species, with the river systems, with the wisdom of the mountains, and with any other unseen forces that may be players that we don’t even know about currently.
So I absolutely know that this is possible. And whether or not that happens is just sheer conjecture. I do know about the level of forgiveness and tolerance that the nonhumans display towards us. And I know about critical mass, and there are some changes happening.
Awakening to a New Paradigm
But I think it’s too late, on the level of numbers, predictions, and extrapolations, for there to be a change within the paradigms we currently know. What is absolutely possible is a whole new paradigm, if we can again awaken to the wisdom of our heart and our greater being—our essence.
But I think it’s too late, on the level of numbers, predictions, and extrapolations, for there to be a change within the paradigms we currently know. What is absolutely possible is a whole new paradigm, if we can again awaken to the wisdom of our heart and our greater being—our essence.
Who knows what amazingly creative solutions can be found? And I am very, very delighted at that prospect, whether it comes to pass or not.
Rick: Yeah, I’m sure everyone understands the word paradigm—just the framework of our thinking. The scientific paradigm, for instance, is sometimes called the materialistic paradigm: the notion that the world is fundamentally material, that there is no sort of spirit, and that when the body dies, that’s the end of you, that kind of thing.
It’s a way of thinking, and in science, over and over again, throughout the several centuries that science has existed, paradigms have been upended by new information or anomalies, as they’re called, that conflict with the existing paradigm and eventually shake it to the point where it has to crumble and the new one takes its place. Anyway, that’s a summation of that word.
Here’s an interesting question from a fellow in Mumbai, initials K. P. So, one of my teachers tells us that he has had an experience of dogs and even a bat telling him that they would like a human body so that they could work for liberation. They also suggest that humans don’t seem to be doing enough with the body. I wonder if that means not doing enough for liberation in their human body. Does this sort of spiritual perception or desire in animals resonate with you? Have you noticed something like this?
Anna: I’m going to make an assumption about what K. P. says: that by liberation, he means your spiritual liberation, enlightenment…
Rick: Enlightenment, that kind of thing. Yeah.
Anna: Enlightenment. Yeah, yeah. It’s been my experience that nonhumans don’t need a human body to expand their sense of self or sentience. So, no, I really don’t think humans are at the pinnacle of pre-enlightenment incarnation, or a place to aspire to.
I’ve honestly received as much wisdom, transformational information, and perception from a horsefly as I have from a sheep or an elephant. So that has not been my experience—that they would want a human body.
What has been my experience is that, let’s call it a soul for want of a better definition, a soul can incarnate many times in many different species’ bodies, in many different species’ forms. But the way I’ve experienced it is more like the Native Americans’ way of understanding these things: a soul will show up in a particular species’ physical vessel for the sake of practicing and integrating those qualities in that given lifetime.
We’re perhaps all just on the journey of accumulating things into our toolkit, and whatever is appropriate—not only for the self, because even the idea of individual progression is kind of strange to me, as it can often be overlaid with a somewhat self-motivated agenda—but let’s say that there is a degree of appropriateness.
If we are all just threads playing our part, then perhaps whatever is appropriate in a given incarnation for the self as a macrocosm, including our contribution to the collective, can go this way, and that way, sideways, and up or down—whatever ideas we have across the species boundaries.
I’ve communicated with a cat who, in a previous incarnation, was the human mother of her present guardian. And it wasn’t a demotion or downgrade.
Rick: Yeah, sometimes I’ve used the metaphor—I don’t know if you’ll agree with this or not, and I don’t think I originated it—that animals are, in a sense, like children. They’re innocent and spontaneous, and they don’t have a whole lot of freedom to operate outside of their instincts and their nature, just as children are innocent and spontaneous and pretty much have to live within the confines, the constraints, of what their parents dictate.
But humans in general are more like teenagers who’ve gained some independence and free will, and they begin playing with it and exercising it and very often get themselves into all kinds of trouble. Many don’t survive that phase.
Whereas enlightened people, if we want to use that term, are more like adults who have made it through the teenage phase and gained some wisdom. They still have their free will and their independence, but they’ve somehow come back—while retaining those qualities—to the innocence and spontaneity of children.
Anna: I love that metaphor. Yes, yes, absolutely. And there is that spontaneity with the openness of children. Again, at the other end of a typical human lifetime, when the elder is sitting there quietly, just sagely—not having to be important or even give pearls of wisdom anymore, just sitting there and being with all around and all those other stages of humans as they are. Yeah, beautiful.
Rick: Okay. Well, the reason I didn’t know if you’d agree with that metaphor is that it sort of implies a progression: that humans are somehow progressing beyond the stage at which the animals are and then eventually arriving at an even further stage, which kind of recapitulates the innocence of animals or children, using the metaphor, but incorporates new knowledge.
Anna: Yeah, yeah. I think for me, the metaphor is about us coming in basically clean. Then we get distracted, we go off track, and most of us get educated out of knowingness. We get educated out of our direct perception of things, and we get taught to evaluate and think about all these things.
“Lose your mind and come to your senses.”
Hopefully, if we live alive long enough in these bodies, we can begin to lose the mind again. All the better. As my tracking mentor, John Young, says, “Lose your mind and come to your senses.”
Rick: Is that the fellow in that video of you out with this fellow tracking an eland, I believe it was?
Anna: Yes.
Rick: That’s an amazing one. I’m going to link to that one on your BatGap page, too. It was really cool.
Anna: Yeah.
Tracking intuition in everyday life
Rick: In fact, he was—you can talk about this a little bit—saying that he actually sees a sort of line on the ground, a line of light, and then just begins to follow that line, and his body can only go in that direction. Maybe he doesn’t see the line the entire time, but when he needs to see it again, it shows up again, and then he keeps following it.
Anna: That’s right. He sees those as the silver lines, which is common to some of the oldest trackers. They’re tracking in such an intuitive way. They’re no longer looking at footprints and analyzing things and trying to scan with their eyes to see where the next footprint in the trail is.
That comes from John Young, who’s the founder of the Wilderness Awareness School, by the way, and other deep-nature-connection movements. It comes from him really opening to that one, connecting with the track, and opening his heart and his being to a feeling for that one.
He then is in tune with the almost energetic trail that the animal would have left when it passed there. Again, him seeing silver lines is somewhere that his brain is interpreting the energy to give him a conscious awareness of it. So he’s got something to go on, quite literally.
His body—his own animal body—is responding in that matrix of connectedness. His own animal body is responding and wants to go that way. It’s like a leaning on impulse that can’t be ignored.
You know, we modern humans have this sometimes in everyday life, too. Probably not every day, though, because usually it only happens when our life is really in danger and that instinct kicks in.
So we’re sitting at the traffic lights, and they’re red. Then they turn green, and we’re ready to pull away, but something makes us not go. The cars behind us are on their horns and hooting, but we still can’t go. We don’t know why; we’re just sitting there completely statuesque. Then suddenly, a car comes across the intersection from the other direction, running a red light. Had we pulled forward into the intersection in that moment, we would have been flattened.
So there are these things where we suddenly know something. We suddenly feel not to go in a certain direction, or to go in a certain direction. The parent who suddenly, in an afternoon, wonders where their child is will find themselves walking down to the riverbank and around the tree, suddenly sensing where there’s a need or where one of their connections is.
We have these feelings embodied as our intuition, helping to guide us, and we can use this every day. It’s a great, fun way to play with developing our intuitive thoughts.
You can play with this walking into the coffee shop, walking into the office, or getting into your car in the mornings. Just notice little things about where your body wants to go and what your body wants to pay attention to.
Close your eyes when you walk into that restaurant or daily coffee shop. Close your eyes as you enter and let yourself notice which way your body wants to go, having asked where there’s an empty seat. Open your eyes, and you might find that you’re heading for the only empty table in the place.
It’s meant to be fun. This is childlike. This is us at our innocent, unprogrammed best. So play with it.
Rick: Sometimes I like to cross-reference interviews. I interviewed a fellow last October named Ishtar, whose name is also Thomas Howell, and he had that very experience you just described about the traffic light.
He was maybe ten or eleven years old or something. He had all kinds of intuitive experiences throughout his life, but he had this really strong feeling that his mother shouldn’t go anywhere. He begged her, “Don’t go anywhere tomorrow. You absolutely have to stay home.” She kind of ignored him.
Then he broke his arm or something playing football, and she had to take him to the doctor. They were on the way, and they went through a green light, as they were entitled to do, and some car whizzed through. His mother died. He lived, but it was this demanding intuition that he somehow got overridden by circumstances.
Here’s a question that came in from Robert McHugh in Kalamazoo, Michigan:
“I have a Great Pyrenees dog that belonged to my wife, who has now passed. I have used the pendulum to find Jasmine the dog when she got scared and took off one day. I have used Emotion Code to remove emotional blocks. I am a healer, and not as powerful as some, but I have seen qigong used on big animals. Do you use it?
“I also talk to Jasmine, but not telepathically. She watches my lips and blinks, makes gestures with her mouth, or shouts at me if she’s impatient. How can I develop the telepathy part? Thanks for all you do.”
Anna: Well, Robert, I’m sure you are communicating telepathically, but only because you don’t believe you are. Jasmine knows that you don’t have that self-belief, so she’s resorting to the blinking and the physical cues.
This often happens with our domesticated animals, where we are in a constant telepathic exchange with them. But they don’t really make small talk just for the sake of it. When something meaningful to them is being spoken about, at least something relevant, they’re projecting to us telepathically what’s going on for them. Only if we don’t get it, or they know that we don’t think we’re getting them, do they then resort to body language or vocalizing, or kind of getting very obvious with us.
So I’m sure that telepathy is happening in the background. And about the other part of the question around using a pendulum or some coding system or kinesiology: I personally don’t use it because I’m fortunate enough to be able to just sit in the center of myself and be quite clear about what I’m getting through.
But if I have a very important question, like a real yes-or-no, literally life-or-death thing—like, is it the right time to assist one of my own animals to leave her body, to euthanize her?—it’s pretty important that I get that one right, in the sense that I hear her choice correctly.
Given that it’s one of my own animal companions, I’m not going to be as clear or centered because I’m emotionally involved. If I’m feeling a doubt about it, yes or no, I might then use a pendulum myself, simply to allow my body to become another way to confirm the message.
Without the pendulum or without the coding system, it would just be my conscious brain knowing my intuition. So there is a place for that, as long as those things are not becoming an intermediary in themselves. This isn’t a form of psychometry, where we need a piece of the dog’s hair or need to use anything, because we’re not channeling from yet another party in the construct. It’s really directly from the animal. But as a way to help us become clearer, yes, absolutely—whatever works.
Also, when we are asking for information or asking an animal to show us what they want us to know, we might get very frustrated and feel like nothing is coming. All we are aware of is the random other stuff in our brains, like the grocery list, previous conversations on the phone, or work stuff. We may get exasperated.
It might be that several hours later, while you’re washing the dishes or doing something fairly mindless, a sense comes to your awareness about that previous question to the animal. And you shouldn’t discard it if it comes through later. It doesn’t mean that they are communicating with you at that future moment. It means that it’s just taken that long for your own inner awareness to clock what you received earlier during the intuitive communication.
Rick: Okay. Good answer. Here’s one that came in. This is a follow-up question from someone named Jan in the UK. She said, “Thank you so much for all you’re doing. I’ve been so moved by your work and today by your words.” You know, Spirit the leopard—were his new companions, those two females, I believe, former companions of his? I guess she’s alluding to the ones that were with him in that other zoo. She didn’t quite understand that point and wanted it clarified.
Anna: Yes. They were former companions, about five or six years before, when they were cubs and he was already an adult. They had been in the adjoining enclosure.
Rick: But the ones who came to live with him finally, more recently—are those the very same two that he had?
Anna: Yes, the very same two. The very same two.
Rick: Oh, awesome. I’m glad she asked, because I didn’t get that either.
Anna: Yeah, the very same two. It took, again, a few months for the paper trail to be followed. At first, the keeper said, “No, these can’t be the same two. We have to make up the check to ABC.”
Then, when the zoo got closed down and the paperwork was wrapped up, and the trust was closed and all of that, when they came to actually make the payments, by then things had changed. As they made the payments to the actual owners of the leopards, they were told it was XYZ, which was the name of the original place.
So, yeah, again, we know there’s always some other greater mystery at play. Something had conspired to make them be reunited. This doesn’t mean that we can go around selfishly wishing for things to happen, or wishing to see our deceased animals come back to us again, reincarnated to come live with us again, because we’d like that. That doesn’t really carry a lot of weight in the universal wishes.
Rick: It’d be nice to think that Spirit’s concern about those two cats and his intention, his concern for them, somehow orchestrated the reunion.
Anna: Certainly. There are threads, bonds of being that would have been strengthened by his concern for them. The tuning in would have helped strengthen the network of connection, which might have just been pulled upon to bring them back.
Rick: Yeah. Another follow-up question. Dan Tuttle from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is wondering: would you be able to tell the story of the wisdom you received from the horsefly that you mentioned?
Anna: I can’t remember. Sorry.
Rick: All right. I had a feeling that would be asking a bit much to remember that.
Anna: Yeah, yeah. So many animals, so many conversations. Yeah, I can’t remember the details.
Rick: One thing I was wondering is, I’m sure you don’t feel this with all humans, but are there certain humans who are on your wavelength, with whom you have the intuitive gifts that you have with animals also apply, such that you tune into them and just kind of know things that they are thinking or feeling without having to speak?
Anna: Yes, there are a few handfuls of trusted friends around the world. And it’s certainly not easy for me with humans at all. Generally, when I speak to colleagues as well, it really is more difficult to connect intuitively with the essence of a human because we’re all humans. We all have our masks that we wear, our roles that we play. There’s lots of stuff and mental noise to get through before you get to the real being right on the inside.
I think if you are going to be intentionally doing this with any other human, then it’s important to get their waking, conscious consent to this. And it certainly does call for trust in the relationship.
So, yes, I’ve played telepathic games with a friend in California. We were like this in years gone by. And again, it happens spontaneously between two people who are already emotionally connected.
When you have a feeling—you might be having just a fine and peachy day, and suddenly a mental picture of your brother comes to mind—you just suddenly feel down, and then you know that that’s his feeling in that moment. You’re feeling it on his behalf.
So there are these things that happen spontaneously, and yes, there are a few humans with whom we have overtly given our permission to have no boundaries.
Rick: How about babies and little children? You must have an easy connection with them.
Anna: Absolutely. It’s easy and seamless, and I can’t walk through a shopping mall or through a parking lot without babies craning their necks to stare or look to check it out. I don’t know—the parents must think I’m some kind of stalker or something, because the way that kids stare at me. It’s kind of—yeah.
That’s because it is about being on the same wavelength. The more open we are, the more others who are open recognize that, and it’s just hanging out on the same wavelength, quite literally.
The origin of that expression, meaning good communication, is because on the quantum level we’re literally resonating at congruent frequencies. We’re literally on the same wavelength. Then we can understand and know so much more of each other because we’re fully occupying and sharing the same states of being. We’re not at different frequencies. It’s very easy.
Rick: Yeah, I remember interviewing somebody years ago who was in an airport or something. Fifty or sixty feet away, he saw somebody in baggage claim who just stood out. He couldn’t hear much or anything, or even see much about the person, but the guy just stood out. He said, “This guy is some kind of master.” So he walked over and introduced himself. He wasn’t dressed unusually or anything, but it turned out this guy was a spiritual teacher, with some—right?
Okay, so is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to say, that I haven’t thought to ask or the listeners haven’t thought to ask?
Practicing intuitive communication
Anna: I would just like to encourage everyone to really practice with this and to play with it. It mustn’t become a heady kind of concentration that has smoke coming out of your ears. It really is fun.
We’ve just been speaking about babies and animals, who are authentic and in the moment and being themselves. So it really helps if you are wanting to practice with this form of intuitive communication to set up some things that look like games. Practice with other humans, sending and receiving objects. Tune in with your own animals who may live with you, although that can be more difficult because we are so close to them already. It can be tough for new information to stand out on our internal radar screen as being new, and because we’re usually very invested in their responses as well.
So it can be a good idea to ask friends or neighbors who have domesticated animals living with them if you could practice with their animals, even by using a photograph or something, and ask questions of the animals telepathically that a human can corroborate the answers for. That’s the way to build confidence.
There’s also another website of a beautiful elder in this field. She’s regarded as the grandmother of interspecies communication. Her name is Penelope Smith, and she has fantastic downloadable resources and amazing articles, CDs, and instructional material on her website, which is animaltalk.net.
At animaltalk.net, you can get all the resources for your self-paced journeys. She’s a very wise woman. She was the mentor of my mentor, and she really speaks deeply about the sentience and soul nature of animals.
So use your intuition when you’re exploring this field. There’s a whole continuum of people in the psychic arts and a whole range of people on the continuum of animal communicators. Some might still have a very dominant worldview that we’re just here to tell animals what to do or to train them better for obedience.
Use your intuition to navigate this realm and find what resonates with you as well.
Rick: Yeah, I remember seeing a show about Temple Grandin. You probably know her story. It was—
Anna: Yeah.
Rick: I guess she was autistic, or is, but she had this sense of animals. She was able to make the sort of animal industry more humane by changing the way pens and things were designed. But ultimately, it still sounded like a little bit of an unpleasant scene, that she was just trying to put a little polish on.
Anna: Sometimes that’s all that we can do practically. All that we can do is make a small amendment in a situation where people have this weird idea of ownership of animals, or where things are not going to change.
Even if we are connecting with animals who are having a really hard time or are being abused, or worse, just connecting with them, even from afar, and sitting witness to that, does improve their emotional experience of their life, even if their circumstances are really awful. They feel seen, they feel your compassion, they feel your empathy. That is very helpful and is very much appreciated by them. So it’s not always about having to change things practically.
Rick: Yeah, I live in Iowa. We have about three million people in the state and about 22 million pigs, most of whom are in these animal-confinement facilities, with 1,200 in a single building. I shudder to think what the morphic field around here is with all those animals in there. But there’s a whole group in my town that is always actively trying to do something about that situation.
Anna: Great. And even for those who aren’t in Iowa, we could all just open our hearts and hold those pigs in their highest selves. Thank them for the beings that they are; thank them for their essential nature. When that aspect of themselves is consciously tuned in with, they can much more easily cope with the personality and physiological experiences of the conditions they live in.
Food, ethics, and embodied life
Rick: Yeah, we mentioned it earlier, and we might as well tie up this little bit so people don’t have lingering questions. You had been a vegan for many, many years, and then you eventually got to the point where you felt, perhaps for health reasons or whatever, that you needed to eat some meat. How did you make that transition? And for someone who says, “Oh my God, she eats meat? How could you do that?” how would you reconcile that with everything else you’ve said today?
Anna: What I say to vegetarians is, “Why do you practice cruelty to vegetables?”
But to answer seriously, the transition was slow. I’m very careful and pedantic about where my food comes from—all my food, vegetable matter and plant matter. With vegetables, I only eat organic produce from local farmers where I know the vegetables have been well treated. They have been grown with kindness, regarded with respect, and gently harvested.
The same goes for the little bit of meat that I eat. I make sure that I have been to the places from which it comes. In the rare cases where it isn’t free-range, it’s literally wild-caught. Even then, it is about the hunting practices. Is this more of a sacred hunt, or are they just being very, very unkind?
It’s up to each of us to make our choices within whatever context our version of integrity looks like. All we can do is be the best we can be for wherever we’re at, and judge neither ourselves nor others. We also need to listen to our own animal bodies—really listen to our own animal bodies—and ask what forms of sustenance we need.
So I look for vegetables and animals that have had a kind and loving life and an easy transition away from physical life, so they may be recycled into the energy cycle.
Rick: Some would say that that’s not only an ethical and compassionate motivation on your part, but that the way a plant or an animal has been treated throughout its life, the way it’s harvested or killed, even the way it’s cooked, and even the consciousness of the cook who cooks it, all sort of go into the vibration or subtle influence that it’s going to have when it’s eaten or imbibed.
Anna: Exactly. There is that, too.
Rick: Which then forms and influences our makeup, our mentality, and our consciousness.
Anna: I think that basically summarizes it: it’s much less about what we’re eating or what we’re doing. It’s about how—how are we being when we’re busy with whatever is happening in our lives? How are we being?
Closing thoughts and resources
Rick: All right. Well, it’s been wonderful talking to you. I really appreciate what you’re doing. I find it very inspiring, as I think many people watching, and many people who will watch, do.
As I said, I’ll link to a bunch of things that people can watch if they want. If they just search for your name on YouTube, they’ll find all kinds of things, but I’ll link to some of the ones that I personally found most interesting and inspiring, and to your website.
Do you have any kind of way that people listening to this show might interact with you? Let’s say they think, “All right, I want Anna to talk to my dog,” or “I want Anna to do something about my farm animals,” or whatever. How do you interact with the public in ways that people listening to this show might relate to or might need as a service from you?
Anna: I don’t do domestic-animal consultations at all. In the last few years, I haven’t worked with farm animals other than rats locally. I focus exclusively on wildlife, human-wildlife conflict areas, and research and conservation projects, which in itself is all pro bono work, for free, because it’s for sanctuaries, organizations, or conservation initiatives that are not well funded.
Rick: How do you support yourself?
Anna: I exhaust myself to the point of illness. It’s a struggle as a self-employed single person; it really is. So I ask for donations via my website for the wildlife work that I do.
The bread and butter comes from the workshops that I run. I want to take some time this year to develop online teaching materials, since I’m not able to travel internationally at the moment. The workshops—helping other people remember how to do this themselves—are the only way that I earn. It’s also my passion: having people join in this incredible journey of reconnection.
So I’m not available for consultations. I’ve got a long list of wild animals and interventions waiting for my attention when I can get to them.
Rick: If you run in-person workshops in South Africa, people could come there for a workshop if they wanted to?
Anna: Yes, I do run in-person workshops in South Africa. It’s not yet known whether I will ever be able to travel internationally again or not. I’ve just come through a year of immense physical challenges, and I’ve managed to survive physically, which is beautiful.
Rick: I’m glad you did.
Anna: Thank you. I’m still in the convalescent phase. I don’t know if I’ll be able to travel internationally, but I do run things from time to time within South Africa. There’s nothing currently scheduled, but there may be something toward the end of the year.
There will be webinars and other online events. If people want to subscribe to my newsletter, that would be the best way to be informed of future events when they roll around. That is simply at my website, animalspirit.org.
At animalspirit.org, on the homepage, you can subscribe to the newsletter to receive any articles that I may write every couple of months and to be notified well in advance of any workshops, including the online workshops that will be developed over the course of the rest of this year.
Rick: Okay. If someone is driving their car while they’re listening to this, you don’t need to pull over and write that down. I’ll put a link to that on Anna’s page on batgap.com.
All right, well, thanks, Anna. I am glad you pulled through whatever physical challenge you’ve been through. That might be why I wasn’t able to interview you the last time I reached out; you might have been going through that. Hang in there and stay with us for a long time, because what you’re doing is wonderful. We need you.
Anna: I will. It’s worth staying alive for the sheer body joy of it, really. It doesn’t have to be for some big purpose at all. We’re all here for being exactly who we are in any moment. All we ever really have is just this moment.
“All we ever really have is just this moment.”
Rick: Good. Well put. All right, thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. Next week, I’ll be re-interviewing a fellow named Lincoln Gergar, who’s a very interesting young man. You might want to watch his first interview on BatGap before I do the second one, just so you get up to speed on what he’s all about.
We’ll see you then. And thanks again, Anna.
Anna: Thank you, Rick. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
Rick: All right, it takes me a minute to disconnect everything, but you can hang up if you want to, because I have to go through some steps and stuff.
Anna: Okay-dokes. Thanks so much. And thanks for dealing with all the tech issues, too.
Rick: Sure. And if there’s anything that comes up—if you want me to add something to your page at some point, like a link or some book you’ve written or something like that—just get in touch and I’ll add it.
Anna: All right, thanks for that. Great. Thanks so much. I appreciate all that you’re doing in the world. Thank you. Thank you.
Rick: It’s fun. All right, talk to you later.
Anna: Take care.
Rick: Bye-bye.
Anna: Thanks to Irene as well. Okay, thanks.
Rick: Yeah.
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