PREFACE

I was fascinated with chakras since the first time I heard about them in a yoga class at the age of 17. I couldn’t really get a true grasp on this concept. As I deepened my meditation practice, there they were again, chakras. They were so exotic, yet to hear a westerner speak—the oversimplified meanings left me a little disappointed in the explanation I was given, leaving me hungry for more.

By the late 1980s I was living in Los Angeles, with my theatre degree, my acting training from NYC and the UK—I had stars in my eyes. I would eventually write screenplays, do a ton of theatre and some odd film work here and there . . . only to end up becoming an animal communicator.

Many people who end up working within the intuitive circles are first drawn to the arts because it is a community of outliers. Arts reflect the world, society as a whole and culture. Empaths can get pummeled by the world, until they find that north star.

My own personal gravitational pull was to the animals and that is where I landed and grounded eventually. It always was and continues to be the north star for me, my mission and purpose. Meanwhile, my journey to find my anchor, my pull, my own purpose was a circuitous, painful—yet fun—route full of laughter and my own healing.

While I should have been at weekend workshops on acting and such, rather, I was learning Tellington TTouch (a type of bodywork for animals) and attending workshops by such luminaries as Barbara Ann Brennan and Rosalyn Bruyere. And more, I was doing sweat lodges, working on healing horses with geodes during a full moon by the Los Angeles River, while a sweat lodge was happening simultaneously offering healing prayers led by my friend, Butch Artichoker of the Lakota Sioux in South Dakota. I mean, I went all in with the healing thing.

And it kept coming back to learning more about chakras. The Bodhi Tree Bookstore was within walking distance of my apartment. It was a mecca for all things world religions, metaphysics, intuition, and more. I found myself there weekly. I devoured Hands of Light (Bantam, 1988) by Barbara Ann Brennan, and Rosalyn Bruyere’s book Wheels of Light (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1989). I was hooked. In fact, from here I can see the Hands of Light book, it is so tattered, it is almost broken in half. It became like a bible for me when it came to horses with injuries, diseases, and more.

As I transitioned over to becoming an animal communicator and leaving my film world union dues behind, energy healing took on an even bigger role in my life.

I have always been one to meditate, workout, and ride or hike before anything happens in the day. In the 80s and 90s that meant driving to the barn where I boarded my horse(s). On the drive, I listened to audio tapes—yes, I said it, tapes—and one that I drilled into my head all the way from West Hollywood to Atwater Village in Los Angeles was Caroline Myss’ Anatomy of the Spirit: Seven Stages of Power and Healing (Bantam, 1997). I can still hear her Chicago accent as I come up over Los FelÍz with the Sierras lightly covered in snow in the distance. The brilliance of what I was hearing was accented by the early light and the beauty around me. I would have an enlightened time with my horses and drive all the way back, now through massive traffic, and wouldn’t even notice because her words had me transported.

As my own animal communication practice was taking off and my medical intuition was blossoming into being something unique—especially for horse and rider—I was thrilled to hear that Caroline Myss and Dr. Norman Shealy were putting together a medical intuition course in St. Louis.

And so, I signed up. And then I signed up for the Ph.D. program in Energy Medicine. I was in the program for a little over a year when in 2000 I had to drop out due to getting married, taking on step-kids, and the busyness of life. But I loved every second of being in that energy, the energy that I and select friends embodied on our own. To be in a ballroom with 250 other people was thrilling.

My big challenge in that program was that I had to translate everything from human to animal, without a veterinary degree. Things like Energetic Psychopharmacology was super great, and tryptophan was a great alternative to Prozac but was it going to show up in a blood test in the horse or dog show ring? That could ultimately get the animal disqualified as if they were drugged. Some herbs would be fatal for cats, some minerals were of no help to dogs. I had some hurdles in the program.

I kept separate notebooks for dogs and cats and another one for horses. My brain exploded because there weren’t volumes of information for animals. Fortunately, Dr. Shealy and his wife had horses. Mary Charlotte Shealy was a Centered Riding instructor, so gaits, motion, health, and well-being were everything to them. And so, each day after class I practiced privately with Dr. Shealy and his horses, and he reviewed my notes and correlations.

While I never finished that degree, I never stopped taking notes, looking for patterns, formulating ideas, typing up stories, and filing it all away—in a very big notebook. It is fun to revisit all the research I did and mingle with the stories I wrote up years ago.

Some of this book is metaphorical, some of it is allegorical, and there are big overarching themes around each chakra and animal. What I always say to my students is that even if we are looking at the pattern of the chakra regarding an animal, we are still looking at an individual. We always want to make room for the unique character standing before us.

I am dedicated and driven beyond measure to help humanity understand that animals have souls, they have big feelings, purpose, karma, wounding, healing, and their lives have meaning. Animals are part of our family. Nature and wildlife are cousins in a larger familial ecosystem. Animals are not commodities; they are living beings who deserve agency. It is the underlying theme to everything I do, whether it is a private one-on-one session with a client about their animal, teaching in my school Communication With All Life University (CWALU), any speaking event, including my TEDx talk, and each of my books that I’ve authored. It colors every minute of every day that I enjoy my animal family as they express their essence and beingness in their daily lives as part of a multi-species family.

This mission is layered into every word of this book. As long as one species (or many) are oppressed, our collective well-being is out of balance. The sooner we see animals as their own beings, the sooner we will elevate the whole world.

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS ALL THIS CHAKRA TALK?

Wheel, lotus, vortex, all of these describe the word “chakra.” In this mysterious history of the chakra’s origin, what we have come to know through the Indian Vedic texts, Upanishads, or through the Tantric lens is that the physical body has energy centers. The number of centers is as mysterious as the origin of the chakra. The Buddhist texts mentioned four or five, whereas the Hindus believed six or seven. The number of chakras goes up to 114. Twelve chakras is bandied about by some schools of chakra-thought but most agree upon the traditional seven chakras in the body.

This chakra system was also found in ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese cultures. Traditional Chinese Medicine has invisible maps known as the meridians that run throughout the body system, connected to the organs and emotions. It is believed that the Native Americans had a system; the Pueblo Nation was said to have a connection to the Creator and the Earth and several vortexes in between.

Worldwide, ancient cultures recognized mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects to our lives and that intuition and creativity was involved also. They recognized that there needs to be balance and flow. This was largely done through yoga, mantras, prayer, breathwork, meditation, and visualization.

If you are completely new to energy and chakras, imagine the physical body with spinning wheels or discs, like a vortex, a whirling, three-dimensional mass, or a cone-shaped funnel extending from the body. Chakras are located in the physical body, along the spine that extends outward beyond the body. The chakras are associated with areas and organs in the physical body and with themes. Think of it this way: each chakra, in either you or your animal, holds specific information based on individual history, and it also contains the potential of what each chakra represents.