PART TWO of the Mutually Empowering Relational Conversation
:: Direct Experiencing, Seeing What Is, Learning a New Way of Relating
Part Two of this exploration focuses on ways of interacting with your animal through instinctive awareness or awareness in the now. This kind of awareness might be called animal psychology. We have much more freedom of movement when relaxing into What Is (seeing things plainly as they are). When we view the same situation through human psychology or the lens of conceptual thought and interpretations, we often find a constriction or a stressor ~ something that requires a complex management precisely because we are not seeing things simply or plainly as they are.
Looking here at how we can interact with the environment in new ways is the key to opening up the relational conversation. Through that and through interacting with our animal consistently in a fresh way, we begin to redirect our animal’s brain from the conditioning that has had a part in setting up the patterns of behavior that we are seeing acted out through the animal’s energy.
Animals are true ‘instinctually aware beings’, as animals do not have the mixed blessing of having the function of the brain (neo-cortex) that conceptualizes and rationalizes. That tendency to conceptualize is simultaneously panacea for and the origin of our most common dis-ease. (Dis-ease: when we don’t recognize we are lost in or dominated by our own conceptualizing.)
- In our relationships with animals, we are being offered the possibility of conscious direct experiencing and the natural expansion of the awareness field we share with them.
- See if you can notice what part of your experience (felt sense or sensate capacity of the body) that you share with your animal companion: quality of light, temperature, connection, touch, relationship to the space or outdoors, smells, activity or lack of activity in the area, instinctual perception of the surrounds.
- As changes occur around you while in proximity to an animal, notice the direct relationship that animal has to the subtle differences and changes going on, sometimes imperceptible to you.
Life Being Life 