Animal Magic - How Animal Thinking Can Transform Our Hearts and Relationships with OtherHuman Being

“Every time I lose one of my dogs, they take a piece of my heart. When a new dog comes in, they give me a piece of their heart. My hope is that I will live long enough so that all the pieces of my heart are dog. Then I can be as loyal, generous, and loving as my dogs are.”

Cowboy Zane on TikTok

Animals are wound healers. They are shepherds of the Soul. This is the Hero’s Journey. In

working with animals and the people who care for them, I find the following comments to be

commonplace:

“The animals calm my sense of anxiety.”

“My horse/dog saved my life.”

“I feel a sense of purpose in taking care of animals.”  

There is no doubt that people intuit animals possess the ability to heal wounds within others that our human counterparts seem to be inefficient at healing. But why is this – what is it we lack inside ourselves which makes our magic inferior to that of animals in comforting our human counterparts?

What are the systems we live under which animals don’t, that have caused such a sense of human separation and lack of compassion between us? And how can we learn from

animals in ways that allow us to be disentangled from these systems and deepen our own being and the nature of our relationships?

What is it that makes animals magic? If you pose this question to others, you may hear this

common response – “Animals don’t think. They are feeling creatures. They are vulnerable, and

not capable of harming another.”

All of these statements are true with the exception of the statement, “animals don’t think.”

Anyone who is interested in animals or who reads literature or studies surrounding the

psychology of animals understands they do indeed think. The difference is that their thinking

cannot be tracked like our own on a neurological level. Why is this? The reason is simple. Our

currency-based survival system puts us in competition and at odds with one another, creating

feelings of separation in the effort that we may stay ahead of the curve and not be eaten by our equally hungry pack members.

Our currency based survival system is so conditioned and ingrained within us through sociopolitical and economic propaganda that every feeling we have, and all thoughts arising out of feelings or desire, is first negotiated within our neurology before the appropriate action to secure our sense of survival is determined. Our brains ask – how will I be perceived if I act on this feeling or desire? How will it impact my relationships and my personal interests? This is the stop gap in the human brain – this inner dialog and negotiation humans experience which allows thinking to be tracked. Animals, on the other hand, trust their feelings. They lack the ego identity of self-importance, associated with our currency-based survival system, and which has the ability to hijack intuition on behalf of strategy. Because life is not a strategy, or a race, or competition, they can focus on the experience of living in the moment, without the need or desire to invest in a specific long-range outcome.

The ability to be present to each moment creates clarity. There are no distractions of a heinous future which will haunt them should they make the wrong decision.

They are only within the now, as if this very moment means as much as a whole life.

For animals, their feelings act as intuition, insights, truth, and most importantly, they are the

foundation of decision making. Their feelings are instructions. Feeling states for animals are

equivalent to the human brain, but without the stop gap that allows what we refer to as

“thinking” to be tracked in the brain.

But animals teach us that there are other ways of thinking –min fact, more efficient and productive ways of thinking. An animal’s ability to trust their senses completely and without question means that thought is processed directly from feeling states into action, with no stop gap, because feelings process so much more quickly than thought. Plainly speaking, if human beings could learn to hold this trust for the intuition found within their own senses, there is absolutely no mountain we could not move.  

Our ability to self-reflect, in some part, emerged out of our currency-based survival system.

Currency provided avenues which didn’t exist prior to its creation to harm our relationships, thus causing a necessity to analyze our behavior and consider how we might be perceived by others – how we might impact or be impacted by others. Complex thinking - the need to present ourselves favorably, to strategize and negotiate, not only in business but often even in our personal relationships, in large part also emerged out of our currency-based survival system.

Complex thinking naturally creates symbiotic relationships when it is possessed by self-reflectivity, and not attached to ego identity. The question is, when it is attached to ego, and absent of self-reflectivity, how much does our complex thinking help us verses harm us? Many might say that our global wars, the income gap, poverty, high levels of divorce, crime, the incarceration rate within our prisons, the privatization of the penal industry – that these things signify that something has gone awry with how we have been conditioned to think – that the kind of thinking we do (sometimes absent of feeling or self-reflectivity ) has the potential to do as much harm as good.

Animal magic – the ability to heal others, is a product of their feeling states, the trust they hold

for their feelings, and to be innocently responsive to the world around them (playfulness,

offerings of affection, unadulterated cuteness and the need we associate with cuteness). But it goes deeper yet. Animal magic is also rooted in their ability to be vulnerable – something we fear holding in ourselves (also a product in large part of our currency-based survival system.) It’s no coincidence that in barter and trade times before currency, wars were far fewer, and fought over territory. The creation of currency in 1792 resulted in explosions of war across the globe, for everything from territory, colonization on behalf of political and economic influence, natural resources, technology, etc.…

We instinctually know that our currency-based survival system makes expressions of

vulnerability… maybe not such a good idea. But without vulnerability, we can also never be

authentic. We can never be safe with one another. We can never have truly bonded relationship based within a hunger to hold the fears or burdens of one another. We can never create uniquely and unapologetically. Vulnerability is the deepest prayer – that which calls upon cosmic forces to enter our being. We know deep down that our estrangement from vulnerability comes at the greatest cost to living freely, passionately, and truly abundantly.

We hunger for someone to mirror this to us bravely and restore that within us which has been lost. Enter thy animal companions! When we rescue or provide care for animals, we are not only attending to their vulnerability, but to that vulnerability within ourselves, that has been disowned because of fear. Animals are mirrors for the things that we need to look at, and feel, to be whole and connected not only to our own hearts, but that of others. Their ability to offer us and trust us with their vulnerability is what creates these powerful bonds between animals and humans, and which provides us a template for unconditional love with one another. These bonds between animals and humans are notmaccidental. They are not coincidence, or a byproduct of the animal’s experience, but based within predestined soul pacts, designed to bring us back into alignment with our highest and best selves.

This is The Animals Hero’s Journey!

The Humane Society has one of the best calls to action I have ever read – Save Them All! This is the way that humans feel about animals. Might it be, somehow in ways we can’t fully understand or comprehend, that it is also the way animals feel about humans?

Sarah Burns, Published March 16, 2023