Talk Tracks Ep 7: Telepathy Between Species

Hi everyone, I'm Kai Dickens and I'm thrilled to welcome you to the Talk Tracks.

In this series, we dive deeper into the revelations, challenges, and unexpected truths from the telepathy tapes.

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This week on the talk tracks, we have someone extremely special, Anna Breitenbach, an inner species communicator who claims to have conversations with animals through a form of deep telepathic connection.

Her work has taken her into the wild with apex predators, across oceans with whales, and into the hearts of skeptics and believers alike.

Is it possible that animals of all sorts, even insects, have been speaking to us all along and we just haven't been listening?

What if communication didn't begin with words, but with presence?

What if beneath all of our language and noise, there was a quiet channel, one that connected us not just to each other, but to every living being?

This episode will invite you to soften your edges and tune into a different frequency, one where language isn't just spoken, it's felt.

So Anna, why don't you first start by telling me just who you are, what you do, how, or what you're known for.

Well, hi, everybody.

This is Anna Breitenbach and I'm delighted to be here to share a little bit today about the field of intuitive interspecies communication, which might sound like a mouthful like most words do, perhaps more commonly known in the world as telepathic animal communication, although it does actually literally apply to all species, not just the more than human animals.

But we humans come to the party mostly by connecting with other animals and relearning and remembering these skills that are actually our intuition.

It's actually part of the blueprint of our brain and how we are designed.

Nonetheless, when I hacked upon this about 25 years ago, it was a complete surprise to my logical left brain.

I was living and working in Silicon Valley at the time, fully into the mental IT world.

And I was finding ways to satisfy my love for nature and animals through volunteering in conservation education programs.

And that was all still quite worldly and orientated.

Activism and education and volunteering at wildlife shelters and becoming a big cat handler and the like.

But when I started doing my tracking training with the Wilderness Awareness School based out of Washington state, I started to have experiences I couldn't explain.

Because I grew up in my native South Africa and I didn't have a clue what the North American animals were,

much less what their feet or their footprints would look like.

So, the perfect track in dried mud was still completely mysterious to me.

And luckily, through the mentoring model that they employed, they weren't there just to tell us how to learn to identify certain tracks, but rather to help us see through native eyes or become deeply connected and to feel what was going on.

And I began getting spontaneous information that would later prove to be true in ways that my mind had no involvement with.

It was not a rational or thoughtful process or anything at all.

So I thought one of two things is happening.

Either I'm just going completely crazy and hallucinating, or there's something to this I need to investigate.

And I did the latter, I came across the work of Rupert Sheldrake and the entire field of quantum physics and new physics.

And in the US there are hundreds of teachers of animal communication.

I carefully chose to embark on studies through the Assisi International Animal Institute because of their three-pronged approach, which was

looking very deeply into the physics of it, but also engendering and living from that place of the more Buddhist principles of compassion and reverence for all life.

And the third angle in our research was all around the original peoples and how natural this was for them and the ways they used to live and move with their more than human kin on the earth.

So over the next couple of years, in between my day job, I used my grand total of 10 vacation days a year to do various courses to advancing levels and did a whole bunch of case studies to get coaching around that and to pursue certification.

In 2002 I moved back to South Africa and began offering workshops and consultations.

For the first 10 years or so I did pet consultations, animals with behavioral issues or helping vets diagnose something that was difficult to find out, you know, emotional issues, assisting with training and things like this.

For the last 10 years, I haven't done pet consultations at all, and I still do not.

There's just not enough time in the day, and there's so many wildlife causes that I care about that I assist with rehabilitation, rewilding,

rescue, your conservation, and the whole other list of wonderful ways and opportunities to meet beautiful brothers and sisters of different species.

Okay, I want to take a minute to help the audience catch up because you've mentioned so many amazing things here, but you know, it's all new to many of us.

So, first of all, I want to ask how you personally define telepathy and what is your understanding of how it has evolved over time?

Or has it even evolved?

Because one of the things I keep coming back to is maybe it's always been a part of us, and we've just moved away away from our ability to engage with it.

Telepathy as a concept has been around and being researched since the 1880s in the US and the UK.

In the 1880s, universities began studying and testing for telepathy between humans, obviously.

And of course the famed work of the scientist Rupert Sheldrake, with whom I've had many a lively discussion about this, proved the connection and the telepathy, the direct thought transference, let's say, between humans and their pets, particularly those with whom there's already an emotional bond and a long-standing relationship.

So one way to understand telepathy would be to call it just that, a thought transference, where we have the idea of a sender and a receiver, and perhaps a question and answer-based process.

But truth be told, that's a bit mechanical.

Because what's really happening,

even though our minds might need that sort of model to step into it and to bring our minds to the party, what's really happening is just a direct knowing in a much more than verbal way, even internally, or much more than a mental imagery way.

So like old telepathy experiments and telepathy tests were to, you know, with playing cards face down to tell what kind of card it was.

and remote viewing and all of these things, of course they are real.

But when we're dealing with another real live being, when it's that animal, that horse with a sore leg that we're connecting with, we're not just some impartial observer who is discerning what is.

There's a real heart-based and care-based connection with that being, and they know that you are

open to them and in a kind of a silent dialogue with them.

So,

over the years, I've come to understand this less as a sender and a receiver and a process of

information getting,

and more of just a simple merging with and becoming one with the truth of that other being.

And then our mind has to interrogate aspects of that truth, like their physical health, for example.

So if I'm silently in my mind asking a horse, you're where on your body are you experiencing discomfort?

I will know that on my body as a mapping of the horse's body.

So as a horse with a sore front left leg, my left arm will become sore in the sort of corresponding place and to a lesser degree.

So, there's many ways that I perceive the information, but it's not because the horse has decided to send a mental image or a physical sensation or the words, which is why this is all totally beyond and before and outside of words or language.

Early in your journey, were you doubted what you were experiencing, or were you always certain?

I remember that early in my journey, I'd often doubt what was coming through and the process for that matter.

I was raised in a very ordinary suburban upbringing, nothing special, no wild camping trips or anything fantastic like that.

And with my left brain logical side I was always questioning what I was receiving.

I'm so grateful that the protocol of the Institute was to do case studies that were double-blind case studies.

We had to communicate with animals we didn't know, who lived with people we'd never met before,

and had to ask a series of questions and write up and transcribe both sides of the conversation, so to speak.

And then the animal's person and the institute would vet all of that for accuracy or not, you know, and how we were doing.

And I must say, the doubting mind has amazing ways to try to explain away information that didn't originate from my own mind.

Just really does.

I would make myself believe that if I was seeing

a green tennis ball, it might be because my favorite color is green or I'd forgotten to make that tennis appointment.

Instead, it just really is

the dog's favorite toy.

But there was one moment that just really made me finally intend to drop that skepticism.

I was communicating with a dog who I'd never met, who lived far away outside Sacramento.

And

one of the standard questions we asked all these cats and dogs was, you know, is there anything missing from your life?

Obviously, trying to be helpful and give them whatever they might want.

Usual answers were, you know, more walks or different kind of food.

So that's the other problem in this matter of skepticism is we have some possible imagined answers already there.

And we have to, on

the sort of internal level within myself, I have to listen more deeply to the more subtle, soft voice that the intuition is bringing.

instead of the loud data of possible answers that my mind already has.

Anyway, I asked this dog, is there anything missing from your life?

Immediately, I got a very brief mental flash of a bald eagle flying through the sky and then the upper part of a man's arm.

And I sort of shook my head, rubbed my eyes, and asked again.

Nothing, just deafening silence.

So

embarrassed, I wrote it down.

I didn't want to write it down and get a pro-rating from my mentors for such rubbish, but I wrote it down and gave feedback to the lady who burst into tears.

Apparently, her young husband had died a year before in a car crash and he had had a tattoo of a bald eagle's head on his bicep.

And that was the dog showing me that the course who he was missing was the other man in his life by those unique identifiers and after that I thought goodness me, okay.

I'm just gonna

trust.

And I don't always get it right, it's a matter of fine-tuning and practice.

And if I don't understand it, that doesn't matter.

A lot of this work quite frankly, is work on self and continue to get my ego out of the way, my desire to know, my attachment to the outcome, my hoped-for answers, which is why it's often the most difficult to connect with our own animals, because we have such a vested interest emotionally in what their answers are.

No matter what your home language is as a human, you can connect with any being, no matter how large or small, and have a fully conscious exchange.

Sometimes I find it very refreshing when the animals ask me some questions also or give retorts to things that I'm saying.

And that's when I know it really isn't a live communication.

There are two parties in it.

Perhaps one could just say essence to essence, and in that moment, you are deeply related and you are knowing each other.

This is not just doing a psychic reading or remote viewing.

This is so powerfully emotional, just thinking of how beings can merge and connect across species.

And I wonder, when you've had animals ask you questions, what are the type of things they inquire about?

Well,

there's the kind of the good, bad, and the ugly, you know, on the emotional continuum, let's say.

So sometimes I get asked questions that are quite humorous, and sometimes, a lot of the time, given the nature of my work, I'm asked questions to which there is no positive answer.

Like, you know,

can you help us?

Can you open up the enclosure and let us run free?

Can you stop my

children being hunted and slaughtered for sports?

Because they know that I can deeply hear them with empathy.

And they want to know

can things change in whatever their setup is?

Will the

ecotourism business, where the animals are, will they prioritize the animals' welfare in their management decisions?

Will the zoos actually take care to give that tiger who's pacing?

Will they take care to give give him something to do, some mental stimulation.

So they're often asking for things for some help,

for some help, for some situation or input or healthier food or medical treatment even that just is not going to come.

And I've got to then go back to them and say, I'm sorry, this is not going to happen.

Another more uplifting example would be with the animals

being non-human, they have no reason to understand how we humans think and behave like we do.

And sometimes the questions I get from animals make me laugh out loud because

they point to some of our strange human habits that we take for granted or think are just fine.

And to them it's completely mystifying.

I can think of one example right now where I was consulting to a guest establishment out in the countryside who grew their own vegetables.

fully caged in a vegetable garden that was safe, you know, apparently impervious to other animals who would want some of the veggies, but very strong baboons, which is like a big, you know, sort of hairy primate species,

they would come and love to play on the fence like a trampoline.

And sometimes, after rainy weather, maybe they could pry their fence open and get into the vegetables.

And they would take what they wanted and then leave.

So clearly, I was asked to address this behavior of the baboons and ask them to stop.

And I explained that the humans needed that food for themselves, for the staff, and for when guests came.

And the message back from the Lee Baboon was like, Nope,

that's not true.

And I was like, well,

it is true.

He says, nope, nope, you don't eat it.

So I asked, well,

why do you feel humans don't need the food?

And he said, I watch.

He says, we watch you guys.

Humans come in when they're not hungry.

They walk through the vegetable gardens picking the best, the most ripe and ready fruit, and then they don't even eat it.

They take it away

and then they do something odd with it.

They either like leave it sitting around inside the walls of a building until it becomes beyond ripe and becomes rotten and no good for any creature to eat human or otherwise.

Or they do very strange things like change the food, put it in other weird things and then actually change it and kill it.

Like, why do you do that?

Why do you do that?

And I realized that he was talking about cooking, the cooking process.

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That's so funny.

I mean, I would never think about explaining to an animal why we rearrange and like cut up the food we eat.

Huh, it's cool.

I want to talk about being open to this sort of communication.

You know, I hear often from communication regulation partners who work with non-speakers that if you want to hear them back or the times they have received telepathy back from them, they were completely empty.

They didn't have an agenda, they weren't attaching their own words or ideas or thoughts to it, and they really had to be totally tuned in to them, yet empty.

And I'm just wondering if you can comment on that from your point of view, with your work.

It's so, so important to be as empty as possible, which is

another reflection of the fact that this is not a superpower or some mystical skill that one goes to a mystery school to achieve and achieve.

And I've been facilitating workshops and that now for over 20 years, and it really is just a remembering journey.

And we need to be still and just get out of the way.

And when spontaneous communications happen on the incoming, it's often when we are in that state.

We may be wandering around a bit of an alpha state, alpha brainwave state.

We're a bit more calm and open, and then we perceive things that are always there, but just we perceive them.

And when we want to be the one to initiate the conversation, we need to intentionally get ourselves into that state of mind, which is not a disembodied, you know, high spiritual state where you're about to vibrate off the planet.

It really is about sitting still and quiet, including having an awareness of the sounds around you.

I like to close my eyes so that I minimize mental distraction from what I'm seeing around me.

And watching my natural breathing rhythm is a lovely way to become anchored and present.

And I'm reminded now of a conversation I had with Lawrence Anthony, the elephant whisperer, who I know you've spoken about with your dad, actually, and in the telepathy tapes.

Oh what a what a dear man and what a dear woman Francois is his wife.

They invited me to his game reserve to Tula Tulim

in October of a particular year when I was in the area.

So I went there for a couple of days and over dinner one night he was asking me more about how this works and I spoke about having had to address an issue.

with some animals the previous day and he said wait a minute what do you mean did you go and start the conversation and I was like, well, yeah, that's what I was there to do.

He said, no way.

He says, I've had all these, you know, telepathic conversations

where the animal has initiated the elephants that had something they want me to know, or I finally sort of come to the party, or I can sense them, and I care about them, and I notice the subtle signs.

He says, do you mean that I could actually start a conversation?

I said, yes.

He was so gleeful with that idea.

They had recently acquired from the chief of neighboring land, they'd acquired access to a huge tract of additional land bordering on their reserve.

The fences had come down.

He had rehabilitated an old, old reservoir to become a beautiful water hole.

And this was in a time of drought where water was scarce.

And with the elephants' well-being and potential joy in mind, he'd rehabilitated this area.

And for the preceding two months, the elephants had not gone near there.

They hadn't stepped even a little toe onto the land at all.

And he was completely mystified by that.

So the next day he dashed off to go tell the elephants, you know,

this is for you.

And their response was, we're really, really scared.

We're scared of being hunted there.

And it turns out that land was where a lot of illegal hunting and poaching had been happening.

So together we gave the elephants the reassurance that this was now an extension of the reserve in which they were safe and guarded and well taken care of.

and that he was their protector and he would make sure that wouldn't happen to them there.

He encouraged them to go, sent them mental images, and within a few days, they were all splashing and bathing in that beautiful water hole that he'd been able to guide them to telepathically.

Ah, that's such a beautiful story.

I love that.

So, when you're asked to consult with wildlife, what type of organizations typically reach out to you for help?

When I'm asked to do wildlife consultations, it's only sometimes through an organization or in an official capacity.

Most of the time, it's from employees or staff members or volunteers there who are working on the ground.

And this is something interesting because, in our world, this is still not considered ordinary or necessarily something that somebody would spend money on.

It's something that's way out there on the edge of possibility.

And I'm often called in when all other methods have been exhausted.

They've tried everything.

They've tried vets and behaviorists and trainers and

curators and wildlife specialists.

And eventually somebody might say, oh gosh, well, okay, we've exhausted all possibility.

Let's try animal communication.

And sometimes the people who approach me, even if it is the wildlife vet or the game ranger or the land manager, they do so kind of in secret.

And when I give them the feedback from the animal, they find another way to present it to the team

who's making decisions.

And I understand all of that.

I've got compassion for that.

In my early days, I was also very sort of shy of it.

But it is such a shame that often the animal's truth gets diluted or even not conveyed because the human through whose mouth it has to go to other humans is afraid of looking stupid or admitting that they might believe in these more seen-to-be-esoteric topics.

I would imagine, though, that the reason that you keep getting sought out is because what you're coming back with bears out in some way to be true.

Can you talk about that?

Is what you're saying meaningful enough to them that they are believing in the animal telepathy?

Many times the people I work with in the wildlife space do come back and ask me to help with other animals in the future because they have seen it borne out in practice.

They've seen a change in the animal's behavior.

Or a classic example of what often happens is an injured animal, an injured wild animal, an injured seal who's you know, out on the rocks and the tide is coming in and too freaked out to be captured.

And when understanding, and if that seal does want medical assistance, it relaxes and allows people with the cage to come close enough and then we'll walk into the cage.

So when people see back in C2, they see things playing out on an animal's behavior change, then they think, wait a minute, there's a lot going on here.

One of the big obstacles for people, even the so-called believers, one of the big obstacles to them

using this more regularly is that when they see an animal changing behavior per the suggestions in the telepathic consultation, they have to confront the fact that that means the elephant is a fully self-aware sentient being capable of choices, capable of curtailing their behavior or their patterns, capable of cooperating with the people, you know.

And that's a big thing for people to swallow.

Even wildlife scientists and biologists who care a lot about the animals are still maybe not quite willing to say that these are fully sentient beings with cognitive and other skills.

But yes, many organizations do come and ask again and again, particularly for the more challenging cases where they can't find an animal under their care, they don't know if it's been hunted or killed or stuck in a snare somewhere and still alive and could be rescued or if it's fallen down a hole.

There's many, many people who do come back again and again.

And it's amazing to me how compassionate the animals are because often I'm working with animals in the wild who have experienced extraordinary hardship at the hand of humans.

If not where they were, then certainly before, or in the transport process, or wherever they came from.

The persecution, the hunting, the lack of food, or whatever is going on.

So the fact that they are willing to try to make it work in their new location and to understand that people mean well, and they're willing to try to adjust their behavior or to stop charging safari vehicles based on a previous trauma.

Stop charging safari vehicles because they understand now the game reserve, where they are, is willing to give them space and just wants to appreciate them wild.

It's amazing to me how the animals can shift their behavior.

One last thing to say about this, though, is that what the animal says and what they need, it does back in the practical world often require the humans to have to do something and

to honor that.

And a lot of humans will say, yes, fine, we'll give them more food or we'll, you know, we'll do whatever they're asking, and then it slips and slides or they forget or other priorities or, you know, lack of money come in and then there isn't follow-through.

And then, of course, the animal's not going to only keep up their end of the bargain.

So it's all quite a mix, like any negotiation where all parties would have to genuinely follow through on the actions of whatever agreements are reached.

Yeah,

it's so interesting because, especially that you're saying that they have a little bit of grace for us, because when you think about what humans have done to animals and their natural habitats and zoos and

hunting,

it feels as though

as a human race, we've almost enslaved and tortured

all the other beings on earth.

And so is there any, you don't, I mean, is there like a mass have you

I mean, I don't know if I don't know how to even ask this question, but is there a mass anger or even like hatred of us, or do you find to be

a compassion or a forgiveness that we don't maybe even deserve?

It does continue to amaze me and actually significantly humble me at how compassionate the animals are towards us.

They're not only forgiving in particular cases where they've been, you know,

tortured and had their family members butchered for their ivory and so on, and they're still willing to trust.

Not only that, but beyond the forgiveness, they really have compassion because, as I've mentioned, this form of connecting and being in that sort of communication space with an animal is a two-way thing.

They are sensing us as well, and they're always reading a person's energy field.

They know the difference between

different people on a safari vehicle.

They know the difference in the mood on any given day of the handlers at the animal sanctuary.

They understand energy in its pure, raw form, and they have such compassion for how we humans collectively have lost our way.

And

it's often at their expense, of course, in great tragedies on the micro scale and the macro scale, and the burning down of the forests and the homelessness.

And yet they feel for us because it's all because we've lost our way and the separation sickness we're suffering from.

And I do a lot of work with whales.

and try to support the Cove Guardians in Tai Chi and Japan,

you know, Sea Shepherd and the Dolphin Project, and a lot of work with animals that really are persecuted.

And I saw a cartoon once, just a one-frame cartoon of some beautiful big whale tails sticking up above the surface of the ocean.

And the whale tails are holding up a placard, a sign that says, save the humans.

And that's how it feels.

They are just continually witnessing

and

being available to us and available for loving connection regardless of the bigger context of the tragedy of the lives they live under on our watch.

Wow.

It's hard even to follow up with that answer and question, you know.

I guess on a more micro level now, have you noticed different languages or communication styles depending on the species or even the individual animal?

Different species have different

perhaps collective personalities, let's say, and different strengths and talents, right?

You know, they'll have certain focuses in their lives, depending on even on their anatomies.

You know, are they all about speed or stealth or stalking as a big cat species?

Are they more still like a sloth?

But in any individual communication with an animal, I'm literally connecting with that individual soul or that individual essence.

And so

it's a common trick that we need to not let the mind play on ourselves, the human, is to imagine that all sloths are slow and love sleeping, you know, or that all dogs of a certain breed would feel a certain way.

You are always dealing with an individual.

So I have found that any communication with any member of any species, there's no limit on the complexity and the intelligence and the expression of just their delightful selves that comes through.

I wouldn't even say there's a particular species personality because I'm dealing with that individual.

And yet, here's the amazing thing.

Every individual of the non-human animal species, they're also very aware of the collective consciousness to which they belong.

So, if I'm communicating with an individual bee, as I was just two days ago, who'd got stuck indoors overnight and I discovered her the next morning, she was quite weak.

So, I gave her a little bit of water with local honey.

It has to be local honey, otherwise, it might kill her.

And once she was revived, I took her outside just on my hand and

asked her, I wanted to be able to walk her a little closer to wherever

her home might be.

And I got a sense of which direction to move, just an impulse in my body.

But she also conveyed to me that none of her hive mates were out and about yet.

And so it was apparently still too cold.

They weren't out and about.

And she was quite happy to just be placed anywhere in the sun and she would wait for them to get active to sort of rejoin them because she could sense it was going to be really soon.

It was almost time that they would come out.

So she was tuned into that bee collective consciousness and awareness of the temperature that's needed.

And she was tuned into them, where they were and what they were doing, even though she was out alone, stuck on the fleshy finger of some woman she probably would have preferred not to meet.

It's so neat because I think often when people think about communication, they only think of

the animals that we think of, right, that are,

I don't know, we've identified as being sentient in some way, elephants or horses, and just the idea of talking with a bee who gets stuck inside the house.

I mean, it's just, it really is a reflection of this idea that we're all connected and that we're all conscious, all beings.

I guess with that in mind, do you think it stops with mammals and insects, or do you find that plants might have consciousness or other things that we don't realize?

The idea of consciousness that we humans have is also a bit of a construct.

In my experience,

everything,

and I deliberately say thing, everything is infused with this

life force, whether animate or seemingly inanimate.

It's all energy, it's all energy, and the density with which those energy sort of units are packed together are what makes something appear to be solid or liquid or ethereal or just apparently invisible.

So, our human idea of consciousness is more like the lens of our inquiry, as we're sort of looking in at one facet of the diamond of life.

But everything is part of that oneness and just pulsing with that.

Telepathic communication, therefore, doesn't stop with animals or insects or with single-celled organisms.

That's why I do refer to it as interspecies communication.

I've had many a conversation with plants and trees, you know, both wild growing and in orchards,

with rivers, with lakes, with ecosystems, even the micro-ecosystem of a vegetable garden that somebody is planning.

A permaculture friend asked me once to come help, so I just walked into the space and asked a general blanket question into the collective consciousness of the many species that were there, including the minerals and the elements in the soil.

And I asked, you know, what is needed, what is wished for for the most abundant wildlife here.

And I got a myriad of answers from different sort of layers in that ecosystem.

I've communicated with a cornfield where the

stems of corn that were at the edges of the rows were experiencing extreme hardship because of the unnatural formation and they were taking the full brunt of the oncoming wind or weather because their brothers and sisters were standing in a line behind them.

Instead of a more natural, organic shape that would have emerged, but they would share the load and distribute, you know, weather or or other issues that come in.

And so everything is consciousness in a non-unit kind of a way.

And we humans seem to have forgotten that as well.

I think a large part of my spiritual journey has been informed by and catalyzed by communicating with the more than human world and just sensing sensing

their is-ness, their natural divine spirit that's flowing through without impediment.

And there's absolutely no difference difference in the self-awareness or intelligence levels of any being.

The only issue is how we humans measure intelligence.

And then we turn around and project that onto making meaning of how intelligent something is or isn't.

But it doesn't take a mirror self-recognition test by a gorilla or an elephant to prove self-awareness.

The smallest aphid on the smallest flower is very self-aware, has a life that is meaningful to them and matters to them.

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Yeah, absolutely.

You know, and I'm guessing, you know, when you heard the telepathy tapes, it probably wasn't a shock to you, right, if someone doesn't have a voice that they're going to find a way.

Do you think that, you know, humans who do this, like we just did an episode on Alzheimer's patients who are connecting telepathically or non-speakers who

all over the world, their parents and teachers are saying are connecting telepathically.

I mean do you think they're just tapping to the same intuitive channel that you access with animals?

Many people do connect with other humans in this way.

I've had friends come in my workshops who have been volunteers in coma care with hospital patients and comas from which they're not expected to emerge.

And they've been able to direct even medical treatment and change the patient's environment in their ward based on their wishes.

And that then proves to make them a lot calmer with all the monitoring that's going on that can prove that in terms of their physiological and biofeedback metrics.

Yes, absolutely.

I consider myself lucky that I appear to be more wired to connecting with animals because I find humans quite complicated by comparison.

And in the sense of this essence-to-essence connection, I have that spontaneously flowing with the very, very closest sort of soul friends or people I'm really bonded to.

It flows automatically and naturally.

But otherwise, I found it a lot to get through, to wade through all the masks that all of us humans have and this and that and the mind stuff to get to the real person inside.

Somehow I seem more attuned to the animals who don't have those masks.

They just are themselves and that's very readily available.

But yes, I feel it is the same thing.

And whether it's even being to being or whether

coming from the field that we share and that we're tuning into and what's in the field, who knows?

And I used to be very interested in all of that and read all the books on new physics and so on.

And without wanting to regret anything, I do kind of wish I hadn't spent so many years reading that all because that was at the expense of just experiencing it and being out there, even on your own, when there's no one around to laugh at you.

or to have to tell or, you know, run the risk of looking foolish in front of whatever that means.

Just being out there and having these little hellos with the bird in the garden or the worm that I'm trying to turn upright who's upside down and asking him to help me because you know I've got my coffee cup in the other hand and I'd rather do it one-handed.

And these little

moment by moment seeming miracles are just the fabric of living a connected life in relationship.

And this experience is, I think, what it is to be fully alive where we are, where we are, even if it's in a room, in an apartment, you can bet there's a little spider or a bug somewhere.

The plant you have standing in the corner or the herbs that you're growing on your windowsill, talk to them, love them, feel them.

We are in relationship with everything around us and that amazing reciprocity that is available on the sweet everyday magic moment, that's a life worth living.

What a beautiful, beautiful sentiment.

Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, you talked about reading books and trying to maybe understand or explain this.

I mean, where have you landed on that, you know, and

how do you respond to skeptics who see telepathy as unscientific or something impossible to prove?

When it comes to skeptics and all the hate mail I receive, I have no desire or need to persuade anybody.

I don't need fans.

You know, some things are true whether we believe it or not.

And I can say that of myself early on with the case studies and so on.

Some things are true whether I believed it or not.

And I just had to get on with following what authentically

feels right or appropriate for me.

Even the word right is a bit loaded because it implies the polarity of there being a wrong.

So where I'm now at with the matter of all the reading and the science is I find it sort of vaguely interesting out there on the periphery.

But I no longer get excited about it at all.

I find that all all just food for the mind, and thankfully, my mind has just settled into a quieter space now.

And I feel that I move more with the spirit that's alive and everything.

And through

these wonderful doorways that nature connection and communication opened up for me, I hacked upon what's become my personal spiritual path, which doesn't really feel separate to life.

And I would loosely define that as non-duality.

And really exploring this matter of oneness, not as some meditation retreat only

inquiry once a year if I'd take a break from my daily life, but really my internal reactions to things,

being in oneness,

being connected to that essence

at the heart of the foundation of every expression of life.

And in this non-duality path,

it really is about not walking from a place of separation.

So

in this non-separate world, I too am not separate from the critics or the inner critic.

I was a big sceptic myself.

I've got compassion for that.

And I'm not on any personal mission.

I'm really not on a personal mission.

It's not about numbers or quantity.

And it's not about quantity either for the animals, by the way.

They are interested in quality of life and quality of connection.

So outcomes and projections and near-term extinction scenarios or

healing statistics and the numbers game just doesn't really speak to me anymore.

All we ever truly have is the present moment.

And I don't mean that as a fortune cookie or a high spiritual statement, but just truly, you know, nobody knows what's going to happen in the next minute.

I think really what's being asked of me certainly is to just be quiet enough that I can see what's being asked of me in the next minute.

I love that.

And we'll move off the skeptic thing.

But have there been a moment in your work that was so precise, so impossible to explain away, that it maybe gave a skeptical person pause that you were talking to or someone that you were working in service of pause?

In the area where I lived, there was a vet clinic quite far away

where I took my cats.

And

both the vets, who were co-owners of the practice, were not at all interested in me arriving and saying, My cat feels this and that.

They were just rolling their eyes and you could see their thought bubble.

Didn't need to be telepathic to to see their thought bubble.

It was just, oh, shut up.

You're not the expert, you know.

Nonetheless, it would play out to be true, and the cat did have this or that, or the other lump in the belly, or whatever.

And of course, it was just, you know, put down to guesswork.

But one of those vets, who was the biggest sceptic,

very

fundamental, fundamentally religious, and there was no place in her worldview for this, which she acknowledged.

And she set me up and let me know it wasn't set up.

She said, come down to my house and talk to my dogs and then we'll see about this, you know.

So I did.

I wasn't chuffed at the vibe of the whole thing, but I did go around and interviewed her Golden Shepherd and her beautiful retriever.

And they said whatever they said about, you know, their lives that I knew nothing about.

But, you know, being...

dogs who had a caring vet as their person, there wasn't much leading or lacking in their life.

So therefore, things they were saying, you know, could have been obvious or worked out.

They were fairly sort of ordinary and they just were just too happy to have anything material to say.

Then she said, oh, by the way, there's a cat locked in my laundry room, was surrendered to my practice, and the people just never, you know, never ever came back.

And I wasn't able to find her home, so she's just locked up there now, basically.

And

would you talk with her as well?

I'm like, okay.

I said, what's her name?

No, it hasn't got a name.

For now, I'm just saying Meow, but I'm not going to give her a name.

And so we went through to to the laundry and she locked me in the laundry with the cat,

who was traumatised,

clearly feeling unwanted, in distress at having dogs nearby, didn't know what was going on.

And

there was no plan for her as such.

But she did say

she would like a name.

That would help her feel like she belonged.

So I said, well, do you have

any ideas what name you'd like?

Knowing full well that animals often don't identify with name, but she'd asked for one.

I said, well, any idea what names you like?

She said, yes, I'd like to be called Menke or Leah.

So I wrote those down and shrugged and went back and gave feedback to her vet person who almost fainted.

Because apparently this vet's best friend from childhood's name was Minky and she had a daughter named Leah.

So somehow this cat had known that those were the people that mattered the most

to the vet and she was asking for the same name because she wanted to be that close to her.

So, my vet friend, she became a friend.

She dropped her skepticism and became a friend.

She kept the cat, and from time to time, she'd refer very difficult cases to me.

And she would tell their people, Look, I'm going to call in an animal communicator, and I'm just letting you know.

I don't say I believe in how it works, I don't know how it works, I don't want to know, but it works.

So, I really laud her courage for following the proof and following the heart of the matter, even though her mind could never really resolve how it works.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And then just a few more questions.

One thing that when I've been talking to parents and spelling communication partners with the non-speakers and teachers, they'll say

one of the biggest elements in the telepathic bond or communication is trust.

Not just trusting them,

that they're competent and they're in there.

Often I think so many non-speaking individuals deal with the same discrimination as animals do, right?

People might not think you're in there and

that you're cognizant of your surroundings.

So trusting that they are in there, but also trusting yourself.

And I'm just wondering if you would say the same.

Like, how important is trust to this ability to connect telepathically or energetically with another being?

Trust is super important

in both directions.

Well, in the sense that for us to communicate effectively and get over the inner skeptic, we do need to trust ourselves and give ourselves a break, just say we're trying our best, but to trust ourselves, to try our best,

to trust that there is

a sentience on the other side of it.

And I must say, the animals have to trust us as well.

They really do.

They have to trust us in the moment.

And that means our energetic integrity as well.

And our emotional state, if we are...

in the same environment as them and not working remotely.

We need to be managing our energy state and just basically being clean energetically.

If we have an ulterior motive, for example, that's not going to work.

Let's say someone's coming in to talk with, you know, have a communication connection with a non-speaking person or with an animal because they're going to record it and then be all like, look at me on social media, the animal's going to pick that up and not trust them and not open up.

We need to be absolutely clean energetically.

I've had a personal experience where I fell out of trust and the animal's behavior changed immediately right in front of me.

I had been been working in the wilds of Botswana and I'd fallen feverish and very ill in a way that couldn't be understood and was dangerous.

So I was waiting to be medically evacuated by a small bush plane that was going to be sent a couple of hours later.

So I was sitting on a chair by the cold fire pit of the morning.

Everyone else had gone off on their activities and just the camp

cook and assistant were in the background.

And a large bull elephant who was sauntering by, feeding, you know, a good sort of 200 feet away, he saw me sitting there,

picked up on how dejected I was feeling, and sort of backtracked and came towards me.

And elephants can display what's called displacement behavior, where they'll pretend to be casually doing something,

ordinary, but they're just trying to get close to you to give you a slap or to push you out of what they might consider to be their territory, or they might see you as a threat.

I didn't feel like I could come across as a threat because I was so weak and so sick and just in awe of this elephant.

You know, nonetheless, who knows what trauma they had.

They are refugees from neighboring countries where they've been persecuted and hunted and just horrible crimes against them.

So he was sort of slowly coming towards me, not too directly, feeding the trees along the way.

And when he came

close enough for it to be a possible concern, my training kicked in and I was like, well, you know, this could be displacement behavior, so best I get up and move.

So I got up, left the chair there, and I moved back to stand behind a dead snag that was twice my height, which would have taken the elephant up to about his eye.

And I just stood behind there just to create a bit of a safe barrier, but still stay, you know, on the scene.

And he gently came closer, a lot more gently than he had been browsing, just gently, just sort of leaning in a little.

And it felt to me like he was really concerned.

I'd been sitting there crying at my distress at having to leave.

And I really felt this compassion and this care for me.

And from the other side of this dead tree trunk, he slowly lifted his trunk to reach out towards me to have a bit of a sniff.

And

I caved in.

My mind said, this could go south really quickly.

If he's up to something else, or even just move suddenly.

Then it could be

injurious or fatal to me, which I don't really mind, but that's going to get the staff into trouble and the operator will lose their license and

this whole sort of house of cards, cards, yeah, this whole dominoes of consequences happened in my mind.

And so I stepped even further back, just four paces, so that I was then under the shelter of my tent.

He got so upset with me

for the first time.

He got so upset with me, stared at me because I'd stepped back.

I'd broken the connection and I had rejected his care based on a fear-based thought process, and I stepped away.

And he huffed and he puffed.

He didn't come any closer, but he tossed his head head and kicked up dust and just so, just so upset, so upset at me not receiving what he'd been offering.

Didn't mean he wanted to touch me, but I did not receive the energy he was offering.

And he stalked off and I was even more cheesed off with myself, you know, but that was a strong lesson for me.

Strong lesson.

And where are the boundaries?

You know, anything can change in a moment as well.

He might have got frightened by a pot being dropped from the back of camp while he was close to me.

So anything could have happened.

And I probably still made the right choice with my mind.

But in my heart, I just feel sad that I didn't at least maybe just acknowledge what he was offering and explain why I was being a silly human and going to step back.

At least then he might have understood.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess to end with, you know,

Do you think that humanity is beginning to wake up to these more subtle ways of knowing?

And if so, what signs are you seeing that point to that?

More humans do seem to be becoming aware of these more subtle ways of knowing.

And for that, we have a few things to thank, like the more modern sciences that are investigating this, like what you're doing and bringing forward everything to do with non-speaking people and the ways in which we have a more ordinary consensus reality.

So humans have our standards around what is or isn't you know okay.

Social media as well does help and the ways in which even we relate to our pets, I think during those lockdown years also,

people were at home more with their pets and maybe felt a bit more with them and appreciated what pets are in our lives.

A lot of pets are really properly chronically depressed because people are not with them.

People come home and they go straight onto, you know, know, watching a movie or documentary or being on their devices.

So it's like this hollow ghost.

The human body is there, but their presence and their awareness is not with the animal.

It's been waiting the whole day just for some of your time and attention.

But with things like social media and the kinds of documentaries that win awards these days, there are lovely

ways in which inspiration is accessible to people.

And yes,

the more light is shed upon the more subtle ways of knowing, the better.

And then there's no substitute for experience.

I've come to feel that experience is the only teacher.

And so I encourage anyone to just get out there and practice with it.

Whether it's a cool, you know, sort of, you can treat it as a guessing game, even if it isn't.

You know, the sort of telepathy test with yourself or your friends.

And better yet, just a heartfelt connection with your own animal, just saying silently inside your own mind, what do you want to show me?

And then trying to stay as still and as calm on the inside as possible to sense an answer.

Play with it yourselves.

If everyone just tries it out in the spirit of fun and playfulness, no pressure, that's when we start to rebuild this muscle that we were born with.

It is in our human design.

We just don't give it the time and attention that it deserves and that the world needs right now for reconnection and for walking away forward together with the other species.

Yeah, and

so it sounds like you're saying we all can do this, but if someone really wanted to do what you do for a living,

where do they start?

I mean, is there anyone that can help teach this or guide someone to really hone these abilities?

The workshops that I have run over the years are less about teaching and more about helping remember that folks can practice with this.

And like I've alluded to, most of the work is actually getting out of our own way.

The only online course I do have available I did with a colleague is called For the Love of Animals.

And it's six modules, self-paced.

One module is the telepathic connection technique, but the other are all around the necessary work for clarity and precision and effectiveness, which is getting out of our own way, including our emotional responses and the meaning we make, and so on.

For those who are considering becoming practitioners or who wanted to attend weekend workshops, I can highly recommend the website of Penelope Smith, who is regarded as the grandmother of interspecies communication.

Her website is animaltalk.net

and she has there on her website a very large database of professional animal communicators who have subscribed to a code of ethics she devised in 1990.

A very beautiful code of ethics that gives the sovereignty and the intelligence

credit to the animals as well.

So folks who are on her database have ascribed to that code of ethics and there you could find a consultant and or an animal communication, a teacher

around around the world.

There's a lot of U.S.

resources there as well.

And yeah, I just, again, I encourage people to play with this possibility.

It just makes for such beautiful encounters with all the beings who share the space with us.

Yeah.

And then the final wrap-up question: you know, when you think about maybe the deepest truths you've uncovered by being silent and still and communicating by all the different, you know,

conscious beings and

entities in this world.

What are those truths, those singular truths?

It seems to me that the non-humans have kind of got it nailed when it comes down to the enduring truths, not because they sit there and meditate in the lotus position on a high concept, but because they are living lives of presence.

I think presence with a capital P is what any animal is.

They're fully where they are, inhabiting their bodies and available to the moment.

Another great truth is actually truth, or shall we say, authenticity.

To be authentic is

not an issue for them.

They're not lying and pretending or trying to figure out who they are, they're just authentic.

And that comes without any judgment of where any being is on their path or on their development.

There are actually no goals.

There's just being.

And can we be real?

Can we be real to where and who we are now?

So

these qualities of authenticity and

presence.

Another truth that's often uncomfortable for people, but that I have learned myself from the animals as well, is that physical death is not an end to everything.

It's not a big disaster.

It's simply a transition in a state of being.

This deep understanding of oneself as energy and the inherent recycling in that for all of us as we disperse in whatever bodily form and go back to the soil or evaporate.

It's all just absolutely natural.

Natural, natural, natural.

Wonderful.

That was beautiful.

And I'm so thankful for you and your presence on the earth, the reassurance you're giving to all these animals and insects and beings.

And I'm just so glad that you are the ambassador for us humans who can be so sloppy and arrogant.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

Been lovely to explore this with you.

That's it for this episode of the Talk Tracks, but new episodes will now be released every other Sunday.

So stay tuned as we work to unravel all the threads, even the veiled ones, that knit together our reality.

Please remember to stay kind, stay curious, and that being a true skeptic requires an open mind.

Thank you to my amazing collaborators.

Original Music was created by Elizabeth P.W., Original Logo and Cover Art by Ben Kendora Design, the audio mix and finishing by Ben Campofrida, our amazing podcast coordinator, Jill Pachesnik, my amazing assistant, Catherine Ellis, and I'm Kai Dickens, your writer, creator, and host.

Thank you again for joining us.