Conceiving Divine Beings

My second year at USM has begun and a very visible component of the curriculum is a little thing they like to call "The Second Year Project." This project was one of the features that attracted me to the program initially, because USM says that through this project they help you make your dreams come true.

Really? Sign me up!

Because I have a dream. It's a crazy, irrational, secret dream that I've had since I was four or five years old: I want to be Dr. Doolittle. I want to talk with animals and hear what they have to say. I want to know what it's like to be in their skin, to live in their bodies. I want to feel what they feel and see what they see. I want to converse with them about topics both practical (what's their favorite food?) and esoteric (what worldviews do they have as a result of their biology that aren't in my human conceptual repertoire?). This Dr. Doolittle dream was so crazy to me that to this day, I've never said the words out loud. But this was the little spark of a dream that I hoped against hope I could make come true when I applied to USM.

When I got accepted to USM in the Spring of 2009, I took my first step toward making this dream come true: I signed up for a year-long psychic training program. Every Monday evening, I met with two teachers and six other students and learned practical tools for psychic and spiritual development, including improving my intuition, doing psychic readings and healings, and reading and balancing energy. I did this mainly on the QT because I had so many fears about failing (what if psychic abilities aren't actually real? what if my dream wasn't possible?) or being ostracized (coming from a scientific background, I didn't want to be seen as a wacky, airy-fairy, "out there," delusional weirdo). [So apologies to any of you who might feel slighted that you weren't in the loop on this little adventure.] I learned many concrete, practical tools for reading and working with energy and I now understand that psychic skills are just like any other skills - you start with some amount of raw talent (a lot or a little) but you can improve and hone your abilities with practice. Toward the end of the year, one of our topics was intuitive communication with animals and we spent one class "talking" with three dogs. I got confirmed correct information about a trip one dog had taken the day before, favorite foods, and a few other pieces of information. It was starting look like maybe my dream was actually possible.

My second step was to do an internship with a psychic friend who can communicate intuitively with animals. I've already spent two months working with her honing my skills. So far, I've communicated with horses, dogs, cats, praying mantises, spiders, a snail (!), and a snake in person. I communicated intuitively from my house in Chico with a dying dog in southern California who told me the day he would die and where he wanted to be buried, two things his owner was anxious about. (He did die on the day he said he would and his owner confirmed that the tree he showed me for his final resting place was in her backyard.) I was also able to talk to a cat who had died ten years ago and the spirit of an African elephant who was very angry about our species not respecting the traditions of her species. My "crazy, irrational" dream is actually coming true!

Meanwhile, my first year at USM was a time to clear the emotional and mental debris that clouded my ability to recognize and express my authentic self. A big part of this process was reclaiming my natural psychic abilities, abilities that today feel like part of my basic genetic make up. Another development through the year was my gradual awakening to two deeply held spiritual beliefs.

My first spiritual belief is that I'm not a human being who has occasional spiritual experiences, but that I am a spiritual being having a human experience. I think we're all here to learn spiritual lessons and each of us has a unique gift to offer the world. Our joys are our gifts and our challenges are our lessons. (As a dramatic example, I think of all the rock stars who made amazing music and touched so many lives (their gifts) but were tortured by depression or insecurity (their lessons) and drank themselves to death or overdosed on drugs or even killed themselves.)

Secondly, I believe that all beings, humans and animals alike, are spiritual beings. Scientists are doing really exciting and innovative research these days and they are discovering that animals are not that different from us biologically, genetically, mentally, or even emotionally. It's my contention that, like humans, animals have a soul. Like us, they are also spirits having unique experiences that include spiritual lessons and gifts.

For most of my adult life, I have felt like I've been ping ponging between two distinct selves: the scientific researcher and spiritual seeker. My psychic experiences happened mainly during those times that I was between science gigs (between college and master's degree and between master's and PhD) or with a circle of friends that was completely separate from and unrelated to my academic or scientific friends. I was in two different worlds and never did they meet. Until now.

Over the last several months, I started to get wisps of inspiration for my second year project. I created a dream drawing that was partly a photograph of a dolphin named Delphi that I used to work with at Marine World and partly a collection of words that streamed into my consciousness as I connected to his image. I recounted my experience of my mom's death (and some subsequent visits from her spirit) to classmates who marveled that I had direct experiential proof that we truly are spiritual beings, something they still questioned. I had a vision of how I could energetically bring my awareness into the form of an animal and feel what it felt like to be that animal, whether it be an alligator or a giraffe or a cat. And I started talking and listening to animals that I encountered - my friend's dog Molly, a snake in the park, dogs barking in a yard. Then I realized that my spiritual truth is still untested - I feel in my heart that animals are spiritual beings but why not find out? Right now my truth is a hypothesis. Time to gather some data.

I've decided that my second year project is going to be integrating my scientific and spiritual selves. I'm approaching my project like a scientific investigation: I'm going to be doing science on spirituality. This fall, I will be doing some background research and honing my Dr. Doolittle skills. The hypothesis I will be testing this winter is my spiritual truth, that animals are spiritual beings with their unique curriculum (spiritual learning) and gifts (service to the planet). To do this, I will be using my intuitive communication skills to interview individuals from 15-20 species of animals, asking them what their spiritual lessons and gifts are, and what messages they want to share with humans. Also, I want to experience the worldview of each animal and what it feels like to be in each of their body types by bringing my energetic awareness into their forms. Finally, I will be compiling my experiences and the animals' information and writing a book, Divine Beings ~ The Spiritual Lives and Lessons of Animals.

So, there you have it. The conception of my second year project and the integration of parts of myself that had long felt at odds with each other. Like both of my pregnancies, I expect that the upcoming gestation period will bring both the joy of discovery and the challenge of (potentially uncomfortable) transformation. Stay tuned - the birth of my baby is due on June 10, 2011.