Energy Healing for Animals

Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Joan Ranquet. Joan Ranquet is an animal communicator and energy healer who teaches basic and advanced workshops nationwide. She’s the author of Communication with All Life and the founder of Communication with All Life University.

With Sounds True, Joan Ranquet has written a new book called Energy Healing for Animals: A Hands-On Guide for Enhancing the Health, Longevity, and Happiness of Your Pets, where she offers an essential guide for enhancing your pets’ health and quality of life, deepening your connection with your beloved companions.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Joan and I spoke about animal communication—how it works and the evidence for it. We also talked about how animals have an energy body similar to the way humans have an energy body in terms of meridians, chakras, and how Joan works with animals as an energy healer. We talked about how to apply energy healing in different circumstances such as when one is moving from one household to another or when one’s experiencing a particularly difficult time—such as a loss or a divorce—[as well as] how to work with energy healing when an animal is going through the death process. Finally, I asked Joan what the one most important thing [is that] she’s learned in working with animals as an energy healer and an animal communicator. Here’s my conversation with Joan Ranquet:

Joan, as an animal communicator, part of the core of your work is using the language of telepathy. You teach that this is a language that is actually innate to all of us. So, I wanted to begin by talking some about telepathy—what it means to you, how you work with it.

I’m hoping you’re going to use words to answer my question. You can describe other ways of communicating, but just use words when you answer, please.

Joan Ranquet: OK. So, you didn’t get that message just now? I’m kidding.

So, telepathy is the transference of pictures, words, and feelings. It is the language that we use—actually, let me back up. It’s the communication when we first come into the world as babies. That communication starts to break down as we learn language.

Our animals have an ability to—of course, they can get our attention by barking or meowing, or a horse can neigh. We can also understand what’s going on with them by watching physical signs and body language.

But, the thing, the tool I use—and everybody’s using it whether they know it or not—is telepathy. So, it’s picking up on the pictures, words, and feelings of our animal companions. A lot of times, people don’t even realize they’re doing it. Yet, they’re participating by continuing to picture a naughty behavior or maybe an animal not getting better. They’re actually accidentally compounding the situation.

So, I love for people to have a big awareness of how this is actually—to me—step one in energy medicine for animals is [to] start understanding how telepathic you are and how intense that relationship is.

TS: Now, why do you say that’s step one in energy healing for animals?

JR: When I look at someone’s situation and if I am there as the animal communicator—now, mind you, my morning starts with rituals. I meditate and there’s prayer and I work out. I like to say that I get my frequency as high as I can so that I can come to the session later in the day with a high frequency, and be available for things to shift.

I think that when we have awareness of something—so, someone understood why their dog was chewing its paws, or why their horse was bucking at going into the canter, or why their cat was meowing incessantly at four in the morning—then that awareness starts to shift the perception from the guardian’s standpoint, and that’s going to shift for the animal companion.

TS: OK. When I think of telepathic communication with animals, I have a pretty high level of comfort with sending pictures, words, images, and hoping that an animal will pick up on it. But, when it comes to receiving telepathic information, I often feel like I’m just making it up. I have no confidence at all. I think, “I’m just making that up. I have no idea. Sure—I just made up a whole film strip of what my dog was saying to me.”

But, I can’t tell the difference between receiving a telepathic message and the power of my imagination.

JR: It’s so funny, because when I was married and I had little step-kids at the time who are now grown up, they always used to say, “Let’s talk to the animals!” Then my stepdaughter would always say, “I think I’m just making this up.” It turns out now that she’s in a philosophy class at the University of San Francisco and she’s doing her paper on telepathy.

So, sometimes even when we’re making it up, it still sticks with us. You probably aren’t making it up.

So, the reason I teach—and why I really highly recommend being in a class setting—is [that] when we are doing the receiving part—and it’s not like it’s some big verb. But, when we are open and allow information to come through, it often doesn’t feel real. It does feel like an imagined movie strip—or your getting some obvious word that’s like, “That doesn’t even make sense.”

So, that’s the sort of thing that I call “a telepathic muscle.” That is like you’re starting to feel into what it would be like to get this information even though it feels like it’s imagined. But, you didn’t have that image three minutes ago. So, there might be some validity to it.

But, one of the best ways to kind of sink into it is to be in a class setting or somewhere where you can have the information verified. In my classes, I have people keep one journal just for their animal communication experiences—because at the end of the day, when they start doubting themselves, they can look at that journal as physical proof that they have had several successful animal communication sessions.

So, it’s building a muscle and it’s trusting yourself. It takes practice and it takes a lot of being around open people to let you kind of practice with their animals before you come home and try the more arduous task of talking to your own dog. It’s easier with someone else’s.

TS: How did your own gifts as an animal communicator come online? How did you discover that this was something you were gifted at?

JR: Well, I had the horse of my dreams. [It] was a thoroughbred that I got in Los Angeles in actually the late ‘80s. I actually used an animal communicator then, and I was enthralled with it. I was in the film business at the time. I really loved acting and writing, and there was no way I was going to give that up. But, I would follow this woman around.

At that time in my life, I was videoing everything. So, anytime she came to the barn, I would video it and video the experience. Then I’d make copies for people if their horses were talked to or their dogs were talked to. As I was making copies of the video, I would watch and say, “I knew that about that horse. How did I know that about that horse?” I’d kind of shrug it off.

So, I would stalk her—the woman—when she was at our barn, and just ask her a lot of questions about it. She just kept saying, “You can do it too.”

Well, I lost the mare—the horse of my dreams—the night she gave birth. I didn’t actually lose her, but she had to go into surgery. So, I really did lose her and the connection that I had that night. Her body stayed alive for another two months. She was in the ICU and I had to—she had been pregnant [and] she gave birth that night. I had an orphan colt on my hands.

So, I was suddenly no longer living in West Hollywood apartment, but staying in a stall with an orphan colt. That was in ‘93. I had some challenges with him and I also had another horse. I started having challenges with her, and I tried to find that animal communicator’s phone number because both of them were physical problems that no vet was solving. I could not find the phone number for that particular animal communicator. The next day, by chance, I saw a flyer for an animal communication class.

So, I went to the class and it turns out I was pretty good. It was fun. I just kept studying and practicing—and when I say I practiced, I could go talk to people’s animals all day long. I loved it so much.

TS: Let me ask you a question, Joan. When you say that you discovered that you were pretty good, what was the feedback or the evidence that you were good?

JR: So, this is why a class is great for somebody—and I love to teach, because I love watching the light bulb go off. If you were to talk to my dog right now—OK, here’s a great example. I have a lab. I have three dogs—two border collie crosses and a lab. My lab is probably the only lab that doesn’t like to swim.

So, in a class setting, if I were to bring the lab in or have everybody look at the picture of her and somebody said—it was their first time, and they came up with something like, “She’s fun. She’s funny. She’s goofy around the house. And she doesn’t like to swim,” I would say, “Well, that is amazingly accurate,” because they got a number of things.

So, I always tell people in classes, “You’re not right or wrong, but you’re going for accuracy.” So, when I was pretty good, it was that I had picked up on a number of things about the teacher’s dog—and then her horse. Then we did one more animal and I was sold.

TS: Yes, that makes sense to me.

OK, now I want to talk some about animal emotions—because as we move into this topic of energy healing for animals, working with the emotions of animals is of course important. So, what do we know about working with—let’s say—horses, cats, and dogs, which are the three animals you focus on in your new book? What do we know about their emotions compared to human emotions?

JR: Well, obviously, if we look at a National Geographic story and we see that elephants will grieve over the loss of an elephant and they’ve created community and they will communally grieve, obviously they feel feelings as deeply as we do. They just have something very different at stake, and that is survival. So, they can’t spend their whole next year over the place where the baby elephant died.

So, they can feel as deeply, but they also have an ability to move on in a way that we often don’t. Certainly things can trigger a bad memory. If someone will say to me, “Something must have happened to my dog with a guy with a hat, because my dog hates guys with hats.” So, they can still be traumatized by certain things.

But, I like to think of it [as]: part of animals’ abilities to move emotion is also to physically move. So, I like this example: if there’s a duck in a pond and it sees a fox at the edge of the pond, and the fox is getting near, all that fear and terror can rise up in that duck. But, the duck can almost release it by flying away. That terror doesn’t stay with that duck in the same way that terror might stay with us as we continue to replay memories or are reminded by people in our lives about certain events.

Then I’ll also say that what happens—going back to that telepathic example at the very beginning, when we were talking about how people can often compound a challenging situation by accident because they’ll feel badly for their animal—or my favorite is they take their dog to the dog park, and every time they turn around and say, “This is my rescue. He had this terrible, terrible background.” We retell the story over and over.

In those situations, often an animal is continually reminded in the same way that we remind. So, they might hang onto the emotion in the same way.

But, for us, we also have a lot more complex emotions. I could sit here and think about something where I might have guilt and I might be angry. I might have three or four things running for myself—whereas an animal [is] going to be pretty simple. I’m really not meaning to diminish their feelings at all, but they aren’t going to run guilt and anger at the same time. They’re pretty clean. They’re going to stay in their rage or their need to protect, but they’re not going to feel guilty about that.

Whereas if I accidentally said something that sounded protective and then realized that I didn’t need to protect, I’m not going to—if a dog goes and charges somebody, is barking in protection, [and] realizes it’s a friend, they don’t have 16 emotions involved in that. If I went out and yelled at the mailman and then realized it was the mailman, I would be like, “Oh my God.” I’d feel dumb. I’d feel a bunch of things quickly.

But, [for animals,] it’s very simple and clean. They move on from it very simply and cleanly. We could come up with a million emotions for us. Whereas for animals—there’s a guy. I can’t say his name, but he’s got some sort of a Northern European name. He’s a doctor at the Washington State University and he studies behavior.

He says that, really, animals have a very—we share with them seeking. We share rage. We share fear, panic, lust, care, play, and grief. There might a couple of others. I know that Dr. Mark Bekoff says that you could also add embarrassment and a couple of other things there.

I don’t think he added embarrassment. I think I added embarrassment. But, I’ve seen animals be embarrassed for a minute, and then they move on.

If you throw the ball to the dog and it was the best catcher on the planet, and one minute the dog didn’t catch the ball, it might be embarrassed for a moment, but it’s going to still go chase the ball. Whereas we might get stuck in that embarrassment and it might affect our performance. Ours resonate out differently. They’re able to move through it more quickly.

Does that make sense?

TS: It does. It actually sounds to me that we could learn a lot about processing our emotions from animals. Do you think that’s true?

JR: I think we could learn a ton from them—and also little kids do that. I love to watch—I have a few—I’ve got a lot of animals.

TS: How many animals do you have?

JR: OK. I have ten. I have three horses, four cats, and three dogs. That is endless entertainment.

But, one of the things I watch is—I love to show people this—one of my cats can be very—you could look at two of my cats and say that the one cat is holding a grudge against the other cat. I would argue that’s just not true. Watch. It’s that she’s protective of her space. In that, she doesn’t like this one cat—her brother—to come and sit on top of the refrigerator if she’s there. She’s a little territorial about the top of the refrigerator. She’s a little bit territorial about a spot in my bedroom. But, when they’re outside, they always appear to be on a caper together.

So, I think a lot of times, we assign big things like, “Oh, they hate each other,” or, “Oh, they’re jealous of each other,” when it really might be [protectiveness] over somebody’s lap for a minute. But, in other settings, it’s a whole different experience.

So, we could really learn also from that—not assigning these big patterns to each other. Like, “Oh, they’re negative.” There’s so many ways that we could learn from watching how, yes, in this situation, she is protective. It’s not a grudge. In this situation, she loves to play with her brother.

So, I think it’s endlessly fascinating—what we can learn from them.

TS: Have you seen some examples where people put human ways of dealing with emotions onto animals and where they’re really just off base?

JR: Yes. Jealousy is my favorite one to talk about because—I think that a lot of times—I’ve seen people—I’ve gotten people to drop the idea of—they’ll have me talk to their two cats that aren’t getting along. They’ll say, “Well, they’re jealous of each other,” and I’ll say, “OK.”

So, I get quiet and I connect with the one cat and find out what’s going on with that cat. Then I connect with the other cat and find out what’s going on with that cat. If I can find out who they are in the best of circumstances and not go into the drama that’s been placed on them, then I can ask the person, “You know, this cat seems very gregarious in these situations, and this cat seems very gregarious in this situation. Yet, they can’t seem to be that together. Is there a chance you could really—?” It’s almost like working the archetype—like really bring out this “mama’s boy” in him in this situation and, with the other cat, bring out another aspect of him where he might be the protector of the house—and let them really define themselves differently. If you could drop the concept of jealousy, they might have a chance of working it out.

Does that make sense?

TS: Yes, it does. It does.

It brings me to one of the key points you make at the very beginning of your book, Energy Healing for Animals. You talk about how—whoever the human leader is the household—that that person is the emotional leader of the entire multi-species household. So, I’d love to hear more about that—what you mean by this idea of being the emotional leader and why a human [has] that role. Which human [is it] when you have a couple in a house? I mean, that’s an interesting question.

JR: Yes. Well, so that little example I gave just now—to me—is a pretty good example of what I’m talking about because—if the human is putting on just constantly, “Oh my God, my cats are jealous,” and gets on the phone [with], “My cats are jealous.” [They] talk to their friends at the store. “My cats are jealous. No, my cats can’t be in the same room. They’re jealous.” It just goes on and on and on, and there’s almost like a wall that’s built up.

So, that person has created a story that is now creating a reality. If she could collapse that story and drop that story, her cats could have a different experience. Actually, one of the techniques I talk about in the book—”EFT: Emotional Freedom Technique”—is so great for helping to drop that emotional story.

So, getting back to the leadership: I love Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. [He] talks about the morphic resonance—he’s usually talking about people. People come together [and] it creates a morphic resonance. Their fields of energies have merged, and now that field of energy has its own intelligence and its own emotions, so to speak, and its own kind of signature in the universe.

I think of our households—our multi-species households—as having their own emotional leadership. So, if for example someone is having a really hard day and they come in, their hard day is going to affect the household. If the person understands how much of a leader they are, they might make different choices about how they would affect the household.

I’ll tell a little story. I had my dog, who’s about to be 14 in a week. I got her when I was married. Then I got separated from my ex-husband twice. The second time ended in divorce. We had little kids that were her kids. She’s a border collie cross, so she took care of everything.

So, we were sad. We grieved. We lost the marriage. She lost her dad figure. We lost the kids. We lost that home. There was a lot of loss.

Then I moved to the Seattle area because my dad was sick. I didn’t bring her with me to see my dad. On occasion, my dad came out to the farm. I pretty much would go and attend to him.

Somewhere in there, I lost a cat. So, the dog and I grieved the loss of the cat.

So, we were familiar with being in each other’s field of grief. So, then I get a new dog. This dog comes and life goes on. We have a couple of good years. Then my dad dies. So, I watched my dog go into grief again with me. I just had to look at her and say, “You know what? This one is my grief. I get to have this grief. I need you guys to be the dogs—to be the really fun dogs [and] the dogs that get me out of the house, get me out having fun, get me out of my head. You don’t know my dad that well. You don’t get to grieve him.”

So, it really shifted the household and created a balance. So, I could still have my grief, but I took leadership in identifying it, watching them start to morph into this grief with me, recognize that they have different jobs entirely and I need those jobs performed more than anything because I could lie on the couch for a year. So, I needed them to help me get up [and] go out. I mean, I had to feed horses of course. It’s like, “Help me be cheerful about chores. Help me in that way.”

So, even though I was still grieving, I was managing how the household stayed. I hope that’s clear.

TS: Yes. That is. I want to circle back to something you said. You said that there’s an EFT—Emotional Freedom Technique—that can be quite effective [and] that you can use with a challenge with your multi-species household. What’s that technique? How do you use it?

JR: OK. So, the technique is EFT tapping, where you’re tapping on the meridians. So, you’re tapping on acupressure points on the meridians. So, for humans, we tap around the eye, under the eye, and there’s about six other points. Each of those points are connected to an organ. Well, they’re connected to a meridian that’s named after an organ system and every organ system and/or meridian is attached to an emotion.

So, what I started doing was using those same points on animals. It’s been profound. I know there’s a couple other people that are doing it as well, but I’m one of the few people that really does it a lot and teaches it as much as I can because I can’t even tell you the miracles that have happened with watching people’s households shift.

So, for example, let’s say you went and adopted a dog at the shelter—I just have to say a raven just made the most spectacular landing in my front yard right now. So, I think that’s auspicious. Anyway.

So, let’s say somebody goes and adopts a dog from the shelter. The dog seems perfectly easygoing. The human is going about their life. Everything seems really great. The human comes home one day and the couch has been chewed—like eaten.

So, what set the dog up to do the chewing may be anxiety. Let’s just assign that emotion for the moment. So, for the dog, it’s anxiety. Whether the dog picked up on anxiety from the human [or] whether the dog came to the household with anxiety is of no difference. Either way, there’s a big emotion for the animal. It’s not of no difference, but in this case we wouldn’t have to look at that so much. We just have to look at the dog’s experience of anxiety.

If you look at the human, the human is going to feel a number of feelings. They’re going to feel guilty that they left the dog home because they had to go to work. They’re going to feel angry because they just didn’t know what to do. Or they might feel sad about the couch. They’re going to feel a bunch of things.

And let’s say a couple more events happen. The next week it’s the favorite chair or it’s the curtains got shredded. Whatever it is.

So, the dog is feeling more anxiety. The human is feeling all those feelings. It just kind of gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until it can’t even fit in the room. I would start with tapping probably on the dog and doing a number of the things that are in that book—a lot of grounding things to help release some of the anxiety, give the dog some confidence, [and] maybe jobs—and I would probably tap on the dog for anxiety.

I would separately tap on the human for all those emotions that they felt the first day they saw that couch shredded like that. My guess is I would probably start digging around to see how much guilt the person had too—because often human guilt can elevate an anxiety or an underlying feeling in a dog. It doesn’t usually go well.

TS: So, when you talk about tapping on an animal—whether it’s a dog or a horse or a cat—they have meridians just like we do?

JR: They have meridians just like we do. One of the best things every human could ever find out about is the bladder meridian, which runs from the top of the head down their legs. Sometimes just stroking an animal from the top of the head to the tip of the tail along the bladder meridian can be a great way to start or end any sort of healing session, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. It can also be a really calming thing. It can also—if your dog is older and is losing its hind end, it can just remind that hind end to be alive again.

The thing about the bladder meridian is that—like I was saying with all those points, especially [if] you couldn’t touch a dog’s face or a horse’s face or a cat’s face—tapping along the bladder meridian can really be just as effective because each one of the acupressure points along the bladder meridian has an association with the different organs systems as well. So, you can hit a stomach meridian and kind of alleviate some fear or worry. It’s almost as effective as tapping on those points.

TS: Now, Joan, it seems like when it comes to humans, it’s pretty well accepted at this point that acupressure, acupuncture, [and] working with the meridians is effective. I think that’s pretty much accepted by people—that what we know from Chinese medicine about these flows in the body [and] that we work with them, we’re going to create healing circulation, etc. But, what’s the evidence or what’s the research behind saying, “Oh yes, and these animals have meridians as well. We can map on in this way.”

JR: Apparently, Dr. Cheryl Schwartz—who endorsed the book, and is an author and acupuncturist and a vet—she said that they actually as way back as almost—they say that acupuncture started 6,000 years ago—almost that far back, they mapped it out on an elephant that had a stomachache. That was actually the first known acupuncture case. It was actually an elephant with a big, bad tummy ache.

So, it was mapped out a long time ago. It’s similar on the one hand. But, obviously being only bipedal—we’ve only got two legs—some of the points end on what would be their hind legs and our legs. Then some run down what are our arms or their front legs.

The ting points are also similar, which are good for stimulating the immune system. So, the ting points are kind of on our nail beds on our hands and feet. It’s the same for the dogs. It’s similar.

It’s funny, because I think back on the early ‘90s, when I had some challenges with my horses and how I ended up on this whole path. I actually started a little bit more with energy work than I did animal communication. One of the things I did was acupuncture and chiropractic. I always liked acupuncture, but I can remember having friends actually go to the acupuncturist because it worked on their horse.

So, sometimes our animals get us to do—sometimes it works the opposite. It’s so well understood with the animals that people are willing to try it.

TS: Have you found that there are certain conditions that respond best to an energy healing approach?

JR: Yes. Well, first and foremost, I think—especially practitioners—if we have a good practice —like for my students in my program. I’m constantly having them create practices in their day that raise their frequency. It’s almost like an animal communication session itself can be a healing, because information is revealed and we stayed calm and helped shift the energy that way.

So, I think almost anything does well with energy healing. I think some things like kidney disease and liver disease—I’ve seen them do really well with energy healing. I’ve seen tumors go down with energy healing. I think that energy healing is actually great for those anxious dogs or cats or horses.

At the bottom of all healing is relaxation—a sense of getting into the parasympathetic nervous system. For animals, they are more quickly—because they are fight or flight—they can kind of amp up quicker. Again, that’s their survival instinct.

So, bringing that down and being able to really calm the system down is—even if it isn’t a cure for cancer—it at the very least gets the animal’s system to relax. And when you can relax, then healing can take place.

That’s true—I believe—also with behavior. So, I like them together. It doesn’t matter if it’s behavior or a wellness challenge. Energy healing will be calming and a shift can occur.

TS: Now, Joan, we talked briefly about meridians and how animals have meridians as well as humans. I know in your book, Energy Healing for Animals, you also talk about the chakras and how we can work with an animal’s chakras just like we work with our own or with another person’s chakras in an energy healing session.

So, talk a little bit about that. How do the human chakras map onto animals?

JR: This is such a fun subject. So, if we look at where their—one my favorite things to watch is when animals meet. If we look at their first chakra, it’s where their tail is. We are about the only species that meets head on, eye to eye, and shakes people’s hands. If you watch dogs at the dog park, they’ve got to smell each other’s butts. Horses swing their butts around so quick when they first meet each other. Every single species practically has some element of meeting and greeting with their first chakra. It is absolutely just built in.

That first chakra—you know how it represents our human tribes, our families, and what have you? For them, it can represent their herds and their packs and their flocks and their prides or colonies. So, even cats for example will—they’ve got pheromones. Everybody checks in with each other that way. It’s not in any way, shape, or form how we function.

So, watching animals and their hind ends—it’s endlessly fascinating. The other piece of that is that first chakra also—you can see the animals that aren’t really confident, where their tail is dropped. Things like that. You can see where they might fit in their pack. So, you might work with that first chakra to really help an animal get a little more confidence within their dog pack or even in the household with other humans.

Then that second chakra is very much like the human chakra, except that they don’t have money involved. You watch older dogs as they lose their hind end—a lot of times the creativity, their purpose, their relationship is shifting. Things like that. It starts—well, some of it starts in the third chakra, but there’s a lot of stuff that can break down there as they get older [and] as their purpose changes.

It goes all the way through to the first chakra very similarly with the human chakra system. I often think about that the sixth chakra for them is I think pretty interesting because there’s so many animals that have sonar. I take people on wild dolphin swims. Watching the dolphins echolocate their food is—I could spend days. And I do spend days watching that.

So, I feel like the third eye on an animal is even more pronounced because I’ve seen, for example, dogs that are blind. It’s almost as if they can still see. They’re utilizing their senses in a bigger way than we do, but I also feel like there’s almost a sonar that goes on for them—like a made-up sonar that they’re like tracking the energy of what’s in front of them.

TS: How do you sense or diagnose a chakra imbalance in an animal as part of an energy healing session. What, for example—just to give an example—might you do about it?

JR: Well, when I teach workshops, I let people take a pendulum and go over each of the chakras so they can see. But, if they’ve studied with me for a long time, then I’ll take that pendulum away and have tune in because we work a lot with the medical intuition and scanning animals that way.

So, one of the things that I would say that you can do—I teach a technique called the Scalar Wave. So, the first part is running energy through the whole system and getting a feel for the system. The second part is spinning the chakras and imagining them in perfect balance. So, you might see the color and see the shape and see the size, really making sure that it’s all working. Then that technique would bring in the energy—bring in the scalar energy.

With seeing just the mind’s eye, it’s really interesting. If you think of all the organs that are—you’ve got your third chakra, [which] is where all the digestive organs are. It’s also our gut instinct. So, if we look at our animals and maybe they’re not as—again, going back to the confidence piece—at the very least, you could do what I like to call a little “chakra massage.” That is: place your hand right over there and really on the third chakra mid-back and get that, almost like you’re massaging it clockwise—to just get it going again.

That’s a great way to start to sense it. But, it’s interesting when you look at your own animal—and people have a tough time believing me when I say this, except then they start to look and go, “Oh my God.” You’ll actually see—let’s say you have a dog that’s the warrior. We’ll just say it’s a warrior. It worries emotionally about their human. It also has digestive disorders. So, those two things go hand in hand, say. So, the physical reality of that chakra and the emotional reality of that chakra.

Obviously, you could treat that chakra with a probiotic or enzymes—something to get the digestion better. But, you’d also be treating that chakra emotionally and saying to the dog, “Look, you don’t have to worry about me. I know my life looks crazy, but it’s all good.” Or whatever it is that you want to say to the dog. Then you could do that chakra massage or some more involved things.

But, what people never believe me [about] is you can actually look at your dog, and my guess is if you have one of those worriers with bad digestion, you’re doing to actually see the difference in the coat. From the top of the head down to the shoulders, probably pretty smooth. And then the coat will be ruffled or different, and not lay the same way on the stomach area, on the ribs, on the side right there at the third chakra, mid-back area. Then the coat will even back out at the flank and on down the legs.

It’s the same with horses. You’ll see [that] they might have a really shiny neck and then shiny coat on the shoulder, and then it’ll be kind of rough over the ribcage. Then it’ll pick back up and be shiny again on the hind end.

Cats: it’s the same thing. You might see where they don’t groom as well around that stomach area.

That’s just one example. But even with lamenesses and things like that, you can see the coat ruffling.

TS: Let’s move now, Joan, to talking about how we might apply energy healing in different circumstances with our animal companions. So, let’s take an example. Let’s pretend you’re moving from one house to another. What could you do—and you mentioned that you made a big move not that long ago—what could you do to help the animals in your family feel OK about a big move?

JR: Well, that’s a great question because I think that’s something that gets very slippery—so to speak—for people. So, the first thing that I like to remind people of is whether you’re moving or traveling even, a lot of times what happens is—again—they’re picking up on our pictures, words, and feelings—telepathy—and they’re always tracking the leader, so to speak—or the leaders of the household.

What happens when we do something like get ready to move is we go into a thousand details. All of a sudden, the animal doesn’t see themselves in all these pictures. We might be thinking about math. We might be thinking about whether the furniture is going to fit. We can have a million thoughts in a move. And we might worry about how the animals are going to do.

So, they’re picking up on these pictures that don’t include them and then feelings that are not their favorite—not safe. So, then they start to get worried.

So, the first thing I have people do is to picture the outcome, which would be—if it’s a cat—all the favorite sun spots that the cat might find in the new house. If it’s a dog, maybe all the new, perfect walks that the people and the dog would do. If it’s a horse, what the new stall or arrangements would look like. I actually have a funny story about that.

Then, the next thing I would do is maybe some massage, some body work that puts them in their body and doesn’t have them be up in their head and all worried. Then, maybe something like essential oils—something really calming but also grounding. I would just walk them through. Every time you’re even going to look at a house, I usually have clients just describe where they’ve been to the dog. “In the new house, there’s no stairs.” Or, “In this house that we looked at today, there’s lots of windows to lie by when we put the furniture in.” Just walk them through the whole thing as if, “You know, we are all in this together.” Really calm and cool and collected about the whole thing.

I actually had a—I moved in 1999 or 2000. I moved one of my horses up from Los Angeles to the Seattle area. I’ve moved them several times to Florida and Denver and back to Seattle. But, the first big move with my one horse, I had told her exactly what the place looked like that, when she got off the trailer, there would be a barn on either side and she would be in the first stall on the left side in the new barn to the right. The pasture was straight ahead. I just constantly described the place to her.

So, of all things, the haulers—I paid this big professional service—they lost her somewhere in like Bakersfield. I don’t even know if she ended up in the wrong truck and went to San Francisco. But, for three days, she was missing.

So, every night, I sent her messages of, “I know I’m going to find you. When you get off the trailer, your stall will be the first stall on the left in the barn on the right.” I just kept describing and picturing. “You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”

So, when they finally located her and told me that she’d be in the Seattle area in the next day or so, I met the truck when the truck arrived. She got off that trailer like, “Well! That took a long time!” and just marched straight to her stall.

So, we can really set up a proactive, positive experience about moving.

TS: Now, when you mention that the animals in our life are picking up on the inner pictures that we have—what’s going on inside of us, if you will—what about when we’re going through a difficult time? Like maybe we’re going through a divorce or really career change. How do we help our animals, who are probably trying to help us?

JR: Yes, they are definitely trying to help us. That is one of my favorite topics, and a very, very great question. I love to think of a household—that is has a pH, right? That we want to be setting the thermostat, so to speak, so that the pH of the household has the potential for harmony.

So, if we have a pretty even leadership about what’s going on in general, we’re allowed to have a hard time and it doesn’t have to affect them. I tell this story actually in the book: My dog Olivia and I went through a divorce. We lost my step-kids, the husband, the household, and we were grieving. Then we lost my beloved cat and we were grieving. We went almost into a grief track together.

Then, when my father died a few years ago, as I was grieving, I watched Olivia going into grief. I thought, “Wow, you know what? You didn’t really know my dad. You met him a handful of times, but this isn’t yours to grieve. I understand you’re feeling badly for me, but right now I need you to be the dog. I need you to get me out of the house. I need you to get me going because our relationship needs to be fun.”

So, I think really identifying [and] being aware of your own feelings, and aware of what’s going on for your animal at the time, is a really important thing. When I was telling her to be the dog, I put her in a little bubble and I kept myself in a little bubble as far as like, “These are my feelings. Even though we’ve got this giant energy field of all of the combined animals—that has a oneness to it or a morphic resonance—but we’re all individuals in this. We get to be autonomous and have our own feelings about things.”

So, for Olivia, I needed her to really be the fun and the joy that she normally is, and I was allowed to grieve. So, I think identifying our feelings, identifying who they are in this—like if maybe somebody’s a real entertainer. Maybe you’ve got a dog that loves to do tricks or a cat that’s hilarious. Just really encourage them to be who they are naturally, and that’s an important part of your struggle—to kind of come out of your head. So, you need them to stay who they are.

And sometimes I think putting a bubble around them is a good thing—just imagining a little imaginary bubble and that they’re protected from the highs and lows of what we’re going through. Then remind them that it’s people stuff—that we’re going through something, but they still get to be fine.

TS: Joan, it seems like in both of these examples about energy healing in action—if you will—with our animals, really the core of it is having confidence that if I send a message through a picture or an image, or have a conversation inside myself with the animal—that really having confidence that this communication is being received—that’s really important.

JR: It’s hugely important. That confidence will translate for the animal [into], “Everything’s OK.”

TS: Yes. Let’s take an example when I imagine somebody would really want to pick up a book like Energy Healing for Animals—their companion animal is injured in some way. Let’s just take an example of a broken leg or something like that. How do I use energy healing—I’ve gone to the traditional route and my animal’s lying here in a cast. What can I do?

JR: Well, there’s a million little things in the book that would [definitely] help. So, first and foremost you have a broken leg and animals tend to be reactive. What you need is that animal to be resting and calm in order for the leg to heal. Because they’re so instinctual, if you have even just the least amount of a bouncy dog, you’re still going to be continuing to stress the leg out. You might be prolonging the healing if you can’t keep the dog quiet.

When we think about it, animals and humans share a need for safety. Once there’s some safety, we can relax. Once we relax, we can heal.

So, the first thing I would do would be to be putting that dog constantly in a very calm state. So, you might use homeopathics. You might use—again—essential oils.

Then, if you’re looking at, say, a broken leg on the front left, you’re going to eventually have a compensation pattern of more use on that right shoulder. So, the other thing is that you want to make sure that—I like to think that the two things you’re going to deal with with a broken leg is you want to have redistribution (so to speak) of the energy. So, all the attention would be on that front left leg. So, I’d be doing a lot of massaging and—what I talk about in the book—the bladder sweep, which is going along the bladder meridian, which runs from the top of the head to their hind end. I’d be doing a lot of stroking and imagining—using my intention that I’m keeping the energy even throughout the entire body. I would do some acupressure points on the hind feet, which I describe in the book. Then I would be really massaging that right shoulder that’s taking the brunt of the compensation pattern there.

So, all the work on the hind end is not only taking the energy away from all the focus being on that front leg, but it also aids in the circulation. Any time you have relaxation and good circulation, you’ll heal an injury pretty quickly.

TS: I think one of the things I’ve seen here—especially living in Boulder, Colorado—is huge industries that now exist to support people in taking good care of their animals—from bakeries for pets and all kinds of—

JR: Clothes.

TS: Yes, the whole thing. I’m curious: Do you think that energy healing for animals is a new industry, if you will, that’s going to come on online?

JR: I think so. I know that—even just a few years ago—I think people are really open to it, more so right now than they ever have been. I’ve been in it for a long time and I believe that—even down to the divine timing of when this book actually came out—I think the timing is really good because I feel like there have been other books out there that haven’t gone in as much detail and aren’t as well known. I think this is really going to start to take a hold for people and really become not just a career, but something that everybody’s talking about.

I really believe that things like just good food as fuel is energy medicine when we think about it. Water, exercise—all of that. What we put our energy into with our animals.

Soon, energy healing for animals is going to be a much bigger conversation as people start to understand it. So, I think it’s definitely going to be coming into awareness for a lot more people.

TS: I’m imagining shelves of homeopathic remedies for animals and that kind of thing.

JR: Yes. Definitely.

But you know, it’s funny because I feel like there’s so many people that really—at least, I remember in the ‘90s, when people would do things for their horses, they would end up doing stuff for themselves that they wouldn’t normally do. So, sometimes our animals get us to take a deeper look at something that might work.

So, here you might go and try some herbs for the dog and think, “Wow, that worked really well! So, maybe I’ll try it too.” It really opens up a conversation for all of us to be a little healthier.

TS: Yes. Now, Joan, there’s one last area that I want to explore with you, which has to do with how we might use energy healing when our animal companion is going through the death process—approaching death and dying—and what your experience is with that.

JR: Well, my experience is—as you know, I’ve lost several animals and family members and friends. It’s a weird thing to say, but it’s probably one of the most precious times of our lives—to be witness and to be in what I call “that state of grace” with another being—in particular our animals.

I think that there is something so beautiful about that time. People just take a moment to look—and I understand some people can’t go there. It’s too hard. Part of that is there isn’t a discussion—certainly in our culture, here in the United States—about grief and about dying. We do anything we can to not look at it. Yet, I think there’s times when we feel more alive than we ever do when we’re facing that with someone else as they’re leaving.

So, with our animals, one of the things that I find is sometimes people will say something like, “Oh, they were hanging on to that animal for too long.” I like to remind people: we are just not that powerful. If that animal is still around against all odds, it’s probably because the person took time out, didn’t go to work for a few days, laid around on the floor with them, and the love that is created and unhindered by anything else around—no other distractions—that love is so delicious, it’s hard to leave.

So, I call that the state of grace—where it’s just this beautiful existence almost tethered by love. It’s nice if people are around to bring dinner by or allowing friends—human and otherwise—to come say goodbye. But otherwise, there’s no distraction at that time. So, I think that that’s a really beautiful blessing.

So, some of the things that really would help—all of the energy work ideas in [the book] help, because—again—if it’s been a painful disease or injury, you want the animal to be as comfortable as they can be.

But the other thing—and I know people go through this too—there seems to be a certain point at the end of the life that pain isn’t really part of the equation. It becomes—as I said—this really beautiful state of grace that’s tethered by love. When you’re in that place, you almost can’t feel pain.

So, there’s some real magical periods—almost everybody I know that’s gone through that with their animal has said, “As painful as it was, it was the most beautiful thing on the planet and there were a lot of blessings in that loss.” So, I really encourage people to take that time.

Again, any of the healing modalities in there would be really wonderful and delicious. Then, a lot of self-care is important, because that’s hard to go through no matter what.

TS: This question, Joan, to finish is a little odd, but I know in your work as a animal communicator you’ve conversed—if you will—with probably at this point thousands of animals. I’m curious: if you were to boil down the communication that our animal companions overall want us humans to hear that we’re not getting—like, “God, the humans just don’t seem to get this.” Is there a way [that you can] do that? Can you boil down the pith of it for me?

JR: You know what? I would love to, because if I were to boil it down, it would be: Look through your dog’s eyes. Look through your cat’s eyes. Look through your horse’s eyes. If the horse bucks because its back is sore, they’re not betraying you. If the dog is biting the neighbor because the neighbor came into the yard and you are taking that personally, don’t.

There’s so many things that we take personally and we compound because we don’t know how to water it down a little bit. So, for example, the animals get very confused by our emotional state that may be a result of their behavior, but they don’t get that.

So, if your dog is doing something naughty, they’re not doing it because of you. They’re doing it, and you feel a million feelings about it. Those feelings aren’t necessarily going to help.

I don’t know if I’m making any sense, but I’m trying to—I just see the confusion from animals all the time. Then the people will say to me, “Doesn’t he understand that if he gets three bites, then he’s going to be euthanized by the state?” It’s like, “No, he doesn’t understand that. How could he understand that? He’s a dog.”

TS: Yes. Really looking through their eyes. I think that’s a beautiful point to summarize it.

I’ve been speaking with Joan Ranquet. She is the author of a beautiful new book—a hands-on guide for enhancing the health, longevity, and happiness of your pets. [It’s] a book called Energy Healing for Animals. Joan, congratulations on its publication. You really put a lot into it. It’s really packed with techniques, ideas, and suggestions for people.

JR: Well, thank you. And thank you for having faith in it.

TS: I very much do. Energy Healing for Animals, with Joan Ranquet.

SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.

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