Quiet yourself and listen... ~Declan
Animal communication a breakthrough for veterinarians and pet-lovers
BY JAMIE HALL, EDMONTON JOURNAL JUNE 3, 2013 As Posted on edmonton journal
ST PHOTOS ( 3 )
Veterinarian Jodie Santarossa works primarily with race horses like Annie O at Northlands Park.
Photograph by: Ed Kaiser , Ed Kaiser
EDMONTON - Carol Gurney says talking to animals isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Not necessarily in the Dr. Doolittle sense — although she’s been called that many times over the years — but telepathically, through physical sensations and images, almost like watching a slide show.
“It’s just like learning any other foreign language,” says Gurney. “If we met a person who spoke French, we would have to resort to some primitive techniques to communicate with them, like sign language, until we learned to become fluent in their language.
“Animal communication is like that; if you’re curious, you want to find out how to speak the language.”
Gurney is the author of The Language of Animals: 7 Steps to Communicating with Animals. She’s also the founder of the California-based Gurney Institute of Animal Communication, which offers the only professional animal communication certification program in the world.
Gurney was in Edmonton recently to conduct an introductory workshop which proved to be so successful she already has plans to return in October.
Gurney was in Edmonton recently to conduct an introductory workshop which proved to be so successful she already has plans to return in October.
“The people in Edmonton were so wonderful,” Gurney said in an interview from her acreage in Agoura, 20 minutes inland from Malibu. “It was absolutely magical to have so many people up there interested in what I do.”
Among those who attended the two-day workshop in Edmonton were trainers, breeders and pet-owners who simply wanted to develop a deeper understanding of their pet.
For Jodie Santarossa, it was tantamount to coming out of the closet, complete with all the attendant emotions. There was fear, of course, but there was an overriding sense of relief at finally proclaiming her belief in animal communication.
Santarossa is a veterinarian, so she is a woman of science first and foremost. But in the preceding years she has had a professional and spiritual awakening that has left her with a very different world view.
Following vet school, she undertook a surgical internship and for the next decade focused primarily on race horse medicine. In 2007, after years of practising western-based veterinary medicine, she took a course in veterinary acupuncture. It was then she first heard about the field of animal communication from one of her lab instructors.
“I have to be honest,” says Santarossa, 37. “I thought it was a bunch of hooey at first. I didn’t believe in it at all.”
Still, she started incorporating acupuncture into her practice and soon developed a deeper level of awareness of complementary therapies that took her beyond the bounds of traditional veterinary medicine.
“I became exposed to a whole profession of healing of which I was previously unaware,” she says. “It’s commonly referred to as vibrational medicine because it essentially works on the body’s energy, its nervous system.”
Two years ago, she decided to focus all of her efforts on rehabilitation and physiotherapy, adopting a holistic approach that integrated the best of eastern and western medicine to heal her equine charges.
Animal communication seemed like a natural extension of her interests. In its simplest form, she says, it’s the art of being able to learn and read an animal’s energy in much the same way a mother intuits the needs of her newborn.
“When my daughter was a baby she couldn’t speak to me, but I knew she was trying to communicate with me and I became really mindful,” says Santarossa. “I learned to understand her and to know when she wanted the red duck and not the blue teddy bear.
“You develop an awareness, a sense of intuition.”
She says animal communication is a balance between an art and a science. It’s about learning how to feel an animal’s energy, through sensations or a perceived thought.
“I can go into a stall and touch a horse and my vision might cloud, I might feel a migraine, or have sensations of gastric reflux,” says Santarossa, who works mainly with thoroughbred race horses at Northlands. “ I’m perceiving the energy in the environment around me.
“The biggest challenge right now is to provide validity to the field of animal communication, and Carol is doing that. It’s not magic. There’s science-based, concrete evidence to prove why we can do what we do.”
Santarossa says one of the most powerful experiences she has had since adopting her new-found beliefs involved a former client who asked her to travel to Calgary to euthanize her horse, an old mare who was suffering.
“I remember getting in my car to drive down there and I felt suddenly very emotional,” says Santarossa. “And there was this thought: ‘I’m ready to go; I’ll be here waiting for you.’ It was the horse. I felt that so strongly.
“When I got there, I saw she had an injury and really was suffering and had been for a long time. She said she was ready to go. I started to administer the drugs that cause death, and before I had administered a 10th of the dose she just collapsed. As she fell to the ground, I felt her energy change, and I felt her spirit leave her body. It was a physical force that literally blew my hair back.
“By the time I got to the end of the driveway as I was leaving, I got this overwhelming sense of glee and joy and gratitude. It was the horse. She was no longer in that beat-up crappy body and she was dancing. I cried all the way home from Calgary.”
Gurney says veterinarians like Santarossa are probably her fastest-growing client base.
“A lot of times vets are stumped,” she says. “They don’t know what’s going on with the animals. The animals can tell us what they’re experiencing in their body, but they can’t diagnose themselves.”
It was Gurney’s concern for her own cat in 1980 that led her to explore animal communication in the first place. At the time, she was living in New York, and working for one of the city’s biggest advertising agencies. Inexplicably, the cat, 16 at the time, had started urinating randomly in the house, which she had never done before. When Gurney’s vet couldn’t find a medical reason for it, he suggested it was likely an emotional issue and suggested she seek the services of an animal communicator.
“My mouth just hung open,” recalls Gurney, laughing. “You talk about skepticism. I had never heard of such a thing. I didn’t know animals had thoughts or feelings like us.”
In the end, the woman whose advice she sought determined the cat’s behaviour was a result of tension between Gurney and her husband, but didn’t tell her how it could be resolved. Still, Gurney’s curiosity was piqued.
“I thought, if there was a way I could hear what my animals were thinking or feeling, that would be a dream come true.”
At the time, information and resources on the topic were limited. She took a workshop but walked away disappointed. It wasn’t until she got her horse Tullanny two years later that she truly started to understand the notion of connecting with animals.
“When I found my horse my life totally changed,” says Gurney. “When I was with him, I felt differently. I felt more peaceful, more quiet, more relaxed. And so after I would ride him I would take a chair and sit in the corral and be with him. I was able to still my mind and really connect with him.”
Just like learning a new language takes time and practice, says Gurney, so too does the skill of being able to communicate with animals. It takes an open heart, and an open mind. Gurney is now internationally known for her work in the field. In addition to her book, she has appeared on dozens of TV programs and made several CDs on the subject, including The Beginner’s Guide to Animal Communication. She travels throughout North America to conduct workshops and does on-site and long-distance consultations.
“One of the primary reasons that our pets are in our life is to teach us how to love ourselves they way they love us, unconditionally,” says Gurney. “For me, after 25 years of working with thousands of animals, I see that they’re our greatest teachers and our greatest role models.”
Watch Gurney talk about her work in animal communication on YouTube.
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