Welcome!

 

This site is a companion to the books, Animal Voices and Awakening to Animal Voices, which explore the wisdom and insights offered by animals of many different species: dogs, cats, horses and whales; humans, llamas, dolphins and snails ~ and more! From this site, you are welcome to read the Introductions and Chapter Excerpts, or check out the Reviews. You can browse the Resource section, which includes links to many animal-related sites, or learn more about the communicators who contributed to these books. There's even a little bit about me and my animals. I hope you enjoy your time here and benefit from the many ways our lives ~ and our world ~ are enriched as we open to a deeper, more expansive connection with animals, nature, each other and ourselves!

 

                     ~ Dawn Baumann Brunke

"Animal communication is very important now and in the upcoming years. The lives of humans must expand by communication with all life or they cannot grow spiritually. It is not for the animals – we already communicate. It is for you." 

 

 ~Briana (horse), through communicator  Anita Curtis

"If you talk to the animals, they will talk to you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them, and what you do not know you will fear. What one fears one destroys."

         ~Chief Dan George

 

Look about you. 

Take hold of the things that are here. Let them talk to you. You learn to talk to them.

    

      ~George Washington Carver

Can we really talk with animals?

 

In the larger expanse of human history, communicating with animals is nothing new. Our ancestors did it. Though, of course, the world was different then. Humans had not yet forgotten. We were still consciously connected to all — land and sky and water, wolf and buffalo, raven and sea turtle and spider and all other living things, which was everything because everything was alive. There was a single language of being, in which all aspects of life freely conversed and knew one another.

 

Some say we were all one peoples then. A Netsilik Eskimo song puts it thusly: 

In the very earliest time, 

when both people and animals lived on earth, 

a person could become an animal if he wanted to 

and an animal could become a human being. 

Sometimes they were people 

and sometimes animals 

and there was no difference. 

All spoke the same language. 

 

It is not exactly clear how it happened that we moved away from our natural ability to communicate with animals and the whole of nature. Perhaps we humans wanted to experience what it would be like to forget our connection so that we might remember ourselves in a new way. T. S. Eliot wrote that although we might never stop with our explorations, 

the end of all of our exploring 

will be to arrive where we started 

and know the place for the first time. 

Many people who open to animal communication and a deepened connection with nature say that it is like this: a sense of coming home, of suddenly knowing ourselves, and all our relations, in a more expansive way — in a way we always knew but somehow forgot. As we allow ourselves to sense with our bodies, hear with our heart, and see with our inner vision, we begin to experience the world in a very different way. 

 

 

Have you ever wondered what would it mean for humans to understand the world from another animal's perspective? What information could animals share from their own unique perceptions and ways of life? What might we learn from those animals we herald as bright and spiritual — such as dolphins and whales? What might the faithful, domesticated animals with whom we share our homes and lives — dogs, cats and birds — have to tell us? And what could we learn from the "shadow animals" that we so often have troubles with, whether from fear, learned hatred, or ignorance — rats, sharks, flies and mosquitoes?

 

In every instance, opening to animals is ultimately an opening to our own inner mystery. In a mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart connection with an animal, we expand our personal being. We experience another facet of the universe and recover another part of ourselves.

 

Let the journey begin!