Learn to Live From the Animals

 

animals teach us love, freedom, JOY!

Sufi Bird (view 1), mixed media, 20x17x5 inches

Lately, I’ve been “trolled” by dissers in social media, for speaking my mind about how I believe anti-vaxxers are not helping the larger family of humankind, but prolonging this never-ending pandemic. To my trolls I always reply, “How kind of you to share your thoughts.”

Why? Why do I not bark back when someone shoves me aside with an obvious (and to me, cowardly) act of meanness, hidden behind social media’s post comments?

For one reason alone.

No, it’s not  tat I think I’m right and I’m being smug about it.

LOVE OVER FEAR

I believe that when fear strikes out, whether it’s with words, with punches or social ammunition, there is no remedy more meaningful than giving the perpetrator as big a dose of love and acceptance as I can possibly muster.

I’ve found an act of kindness in retaliation to someone striking-out at me always results in the person being shocked at my unwillingness to engage in fighting them back. It gives that person pause—to receive love when they dish out judgment, harsh criticism, or anger because someone else thinks differently than they do.

I allow my dissers to be the jerks they are! They can’t help themselves (but I block them from WeR1Love, my private spiritual group sanctuary, join us if you like). It’s like Aesop’s tale of the swan and the scorpion. Scorpions can’t help themselves, they have to sting themselves and everyone around them. Even when they say, “trust me, I won’t sting you,” as scorpion did to swan in this ancient fable.

Animals always operate from their instincts, which is pure unconditional Love.

Unless a domesticated or captured animal has been abused, that is. And that poor animal then experiences terror, fear, neurosis just as many humans do. In that instance, the abused animals either cower, bite back, run away or curl up and die.

Unfortunately, a lot of human beings, the so-called highest in the mammalian family of animals, are traumatized these days. Many of us are victims of fear, resulting from within our own emotional/spiritual/physical lacks, or—from a plethora of stupid misunderstandings that get elevated by social media posts, or conspiracy groups of non-trusting individuals who feel similarly and shut out any other possibility for truth.

TRAUMA IS OUR MIDDLE NAME

Many of us are in trauma these days. The pandemic, climate change, racial unrest, and inflation—not to mention personal upheavals—has been tough on many. Some of us are diving deeply into the new, unprecedented opportunities presented by these social and economic upheavals. But others are in various stages of suffering.

Are you still suffering? Or are you healing from whatever trauma your life has experienced?

Whichever stage we are at, if we haven’t healed from trauma we are stuck in a state of fear. Love is the healing balm of any type of fear. Fear wears “masks” of anger, anxiety, depression, isolation, and worse of all in my opinion … suspicion.

LEARN TO LIVE FROM ANIMALS

HYBRID VIGOR: A True Reveal of Love (click here for your copy), is a nonfiction book about awareness in the human condition. In it I explore, with true-life portraits, the Awareness that develops into Self-Love. The more respect for our own self that we have, the less fear of “others” or “outside my comfort zone” affects us. Hybrid Vigor is about how I’ve learned to gain awareness from various animals’ behavior. In it I examine such animals as: bear, skunk, fish, dolphin, dog, and others, relating in dramatized scenes how they behave, and the qualities they demonstrate that I attempt to nurture in my own life.

A life of, for example, loyalty is based on what a dog brought to my life, who somehow managed to rescue me without ever having known me before, or after the crisis in which it discovered me in. A skunk, with its odoriferous repugnance, teaches me that I ought to be more discerning about who I let get close to me. These are just a few of the true events that happen, and as a result, I became a more awakened person.

AWAKE VS. WOKE

In this strange and challenging world of today, as we slowly recover from nearly two years of pandemic phobia, I find it very sad, how not only people’s opinions, but their use of words have become maddening. For instance, some people object to the word “jab” — how insane! Others, find the word “woke” has been usurped, now apparently distinguishing one side of a political leaning from another. To me, I’m so naive!, it means being a cousin of awake (and therefore, woke being a “form of that particular verb tense”), a state of heightened appreciation, as opposed to being “un-woke” as in asleep, or unaware.

And when I’m more awake, I am automatically made more aware of the fact that there are always different ways of looking at one thing. This is the Rashamon effect, made famous by Japanese master filmmaker Kurisawa’s eponymous film.

The effects of climate change, just to take an example, could (one day far in the future) be seen as a decades-coming, much-needed agent of change, with all its scary predictions and easy-to-see melting glaciers, flooding of rivers and oceans, and extreme weathers situations, from hurricanes to algae outbreaks resulting in humans with respiratory problems suffering—all these symptoms could have gone unheeded were it not for the fact that we are now in a serious state of trauma. Every trauma results is a change.

EARTH’S TRAUMA IS OURS TOO

Our Earth’s environment is traumatized from humanity’s ignoring earlier signs of the inevitable day of catastrophic environmental effects … which is now here.

And when trauma happens to our own body, like my neck now recuperating from having extensive neurosurgery to “fix” what’s been “broken,” bodies heal. As I now am heeding the lessons my traumatized neck has shown me.

I need to be as aware as I can be, to live a healthy and happy life.

I must spread the word to others that being awake (okay, not “woke” cuz that word’s sadly been hijacked and has forever been changed in our lexicon) is the answer to trauma. My neck, recently fixed with a complex neurosurgery, a discectomy, has been added to the roster of my life’s personal teachers. Recovering from the trauma of stem-cell disc implants (making my new C4-5-vertebrae disks) along with two titanium plates and six really really BIG and LONG titanium screws—are now teaching me how to slow down and pay more attention to my body’s fragility.

That’s why it’s so timely that my latest audiobook, HYBRID VIGOR (also available as paperback and Kindle) shares with the world some of the many lessons I’ve gotten, about becoming more whole, more healed, more awake. This book is about the insights I’ve gleaned from various animals that have made their wonderful, magical way into my own life.

Don’t forget to listen to our ZLORD podcast! It’s fun and informative, and cool.

And join my new public Facebook group: Love is the Weapon of Mass Illumination — and don’t forget to spread the word, share the Love!

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