Soul Healing with Our Animal Companions: The Hidden Keys to a Deeper Animal-Human Connection
By: Tammy Billups / Narrated By: Henrietta Weekes
Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
Billups is preaching to the choir here!
This book on healing by Tammy Billups starts off with quite a bit of a bang… or a shock might be a better word. She recounts being a child and seeing a cat struggling in vain to escape a man’s tight grip—this cat is about to be thrown into a fire, burned alive. Billups is ready to tune this out, after all, where she’s growing up, it’s pretty much safer to dissociate when witnessing rampant acts of animal cruelty, but this case is different. Billups gazes directly into the cat’s eyes, and a communication occurs: She sees, she feels, that the cat is telling her that it is resigned to its fate, is ready to die and go onto the next phase of being.
So right away I was gasping because you KNOW I wasn’t sensing a peaceful resignation but was, rather, in the cat’s body, feeling the terror, soon to feel the excruciating physical agony.
-BUT-
Then we go on…
Billups says it’s the first time she registered what she’d come to know intimately in the future, this animal/human bond, this sensitivity, this knowing of another. After her rocky start in life, and after Life threw her a few curveballs, Billups found her way to her true calling as an intuitive and insightful energy healer of our animal companions.
Yeh yeh yeh—Billups does stuff like gives us the five core types of emotional wounds in animals, which seems all analytical. But this isn’t really an analytical or technical type of book. Rather it’s chock full of case studies of her previous clients, and the lessons she’s gleaned on the way.
It gets a trifle wu wu, for lack of a better word, but considering I listened to, liked, and reviewed an audiobook prior to this called The Amazing Afterlife of Animals, I think it can safely be said that I’m totally open to wu wu… I’m the type of person who DOES believe that we’ve lessons to learn from animals. It’s just that I never really thought that there might be things our companions are learning from us… cuz we’re dolts and all that.
But there are parts where Billups posits that certain animals have made choices prior to coming into this life whereby they’ll work rapidly, experience MUCH, in order to more quickly evolve spiritually. A wild animal choosing to throw in its lot with a human is working and evolving at a greater pace, seeing as it’s going against natural laws of wildlife. Things like that had me scratching m’ head, but there you are.
And there’s always a good reason and a good outcome from stuff like horrific animal cruelty: It makes us aware of such cases, spurs us to act in the name of a greater good, etc etc. Seriously, I don’t look the other way when I see cruelty or suffering, but I don’t particularly liiiiiiiike to see it in the first place. Can’t I work on behalf of the greater good wiTHOUt some poor person or animal having to suffer to get my attention? I swear I’ll LOOK and be vigilant, just enough with the cruelty!
… hmmmm… But I s’pose the world doesn’t revolve around me…
Except when it does, as when Billups says my pet’s ailments are mirroring wounds within my own body and soul. And most animals apparently do this: This is how we learn; this is how we come to heal, by acknowledging this in our companions. If we learn this, if we heal ourselves, we can help our animals. And if we reach out to heal our animals, maybe we can learn and make the effort to heal ourselves. I particularly enjoyed one case study where an over-loving dog mom got her dog EVERY toy and plush and treat the dog could ever want. But it’d been getting aggressive, had even started biting her. She’d called Billups in, and Billups tried to get the woman to look at her own behavior, this buying of love, this smothering, as a way of helping her dog. THIS the woman did NOT appreciate, changed not a bit, and chose to put the dog on Prozac instead for the rest of its life.
Wu wu, ‘twould appear, is not for everyone.
Narrator Henrietta Weekes does a fine job, portraying the thoughts and words and experiences of Billups as tho’ she’s Billups herself. In fact, I had to check a few times to make sure this wasn’t an author doing her own work as Weekes adds enough emotional depth to what could be technical case studies that I thought I was listening to the very personal experiences of the author. And noooooo, this wasn’t like the aforementioned The Amazing Afterlife of Animals in that THAT AWEsome book had ATROCIOUS narration. So here I felt that I’d dodged a bullet with Weekes taking a soulful account and making it full of pathos rather than an ear-grating horror show. So… PHEW!
There’s quite a bit to be learned from this under 6-hour Listen. If for nothing else, the parts about when our beloveds are dying, how to part, how to deal with some of the grief that comes after is ALWAYS good to hear, even if this book isn’t about grieving. She says we’ll know when to help our companions out when the time comes: We’ll know, no need to get a too-human animal communicator chiming their two bits in. Dunno about that—never had an animal communicator “guide” me, but NEVER felt I just KNEW—have always second and third and fourth-guessed that horrible decision… Still, a reassuring way to wrap up a fairly decent book.
If you’re looking for a How-To book, wellllll, maaaaaybe this isn’t the best as it’s full of delineations and categories. But! Billups does indeed throw in some guided exercises that I found to be helpful. Sometimes I just feel so helpless, that I know these exercises will come in handy as they’ll give me SOMEthing to do, SOMEthing to try.
So maybe this wasn’t exactly what I thought I was gonna get (Thought there’d be more How To, plus more guidance on When It’s Time to Let Go…), but the bits and pieces that stuck reeeeally stuck.
And it made me wanna apologize proFUSEly to all the furry loved ones in my past who were ill cuz apparently they were mirroring my frazzled state. Poor babies deserved better than what I presented as throughout these decades.
Good to know my difficulties were opportunities for them to evolve.
So… PHEW!
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