This is a topic that’s been on the cusp of my “list” (such as I have one) for some time. I want to explore, just a little…since its the area of the great unknown…how we are energetically connected to our pets and how this can become a dance of many bizarre interactions, energetic signposts and trigger behaviours that can even influence our (and their) health.

Diving straight in, I have a 56 kilo Rhodesian Ridgeback called Rudi, yes a big boy, all muscle and legs yet he’s also an incredibly sensitive soul and always has been since I picked him, the least forward (and only one as-yet unselected) out of a boisterous litter of 11. For years, it’s as though the typical, somewhat anthropomorphic “parent and child” relationship of pet and owner has gone another step further between he and I. There seems to be an energetic codependency between us that, much of the time, drives me nuts since it is not at all like the relationship I had with my last happy-go-lucky dog Buster, though I set out to treat them both the same.

For no apparent reason, Rudi can become unhinged about “something going on” that no one else (except perhaps me…) can see and, when that happens, I’m in for an up-and-down evening, trying to get him back to his bed or to stop hassling me as I work; and always worse after sun-down. As I say, he’s acutely sensitive…not just to obvious things and to me…but to whatever the moon is doing, to geomagnetic variables, planetary events, the kind of intense “space weather” we’ve been having this last few days…you name it, he will “kick off” into bizarre behaviours exactly on cue with these broader spacial encounters. Many times, I’ve considered that there is just something about our house that drives him up the wall though, for my own health issues, I’ve done all the work, from geopathic surveys to psychic clearings. Yes, we have geopathic stress lines beneath our house and yes, I’ve had to move Rudi’s bed away from those (as well as doing some work to our own sleeping zone) but still he seems troubled, bizarrely jumpy and out-of-sorts at times (though right as rain all the rest of the time) which, I hate to admit it, could equally describe the ups and downs of my health.

Effects of geopathic stress on health and immunity are well-documented, especially their connection with cancer and long-term illnesses; yet cats (and bees – see article below) are meant to love the very fault lines that dogs can’t abide (which I find fascinating…probably why I am more of a dog person since I struggle with them too). Before I called in a geo-consultant, for my own health reasons, three years ago, I had read a compelling account of a family whose dogs wouldn’t sleep in their new house and acted most bizarrely until they had similar work done, so I knew about this animal link.

In the animal realm, most mammals instinctively avoid spending time over Sha streams, gravitating instead to Sheng Qi streams i.e. the healthy, free-flowing earth meridians. Dogs will instinctively avoid kennels and beds on GS lines, though obedience to their human’s instructions can be the death of them. Birds are reckoned to be most sensitive, and horses most resilient, though many chronically ill or injury-prone horses are found to be stabled on Sha streams.

Cats, owls, corvids, snakes, slugs and snails are however attracted to Sha streams, and a cat’s favourite sleeping place (in the absence of an obvious source of warmth) is very often a sure clue to the location of a Sha stream crossing. Local cats will gather in the neighbourhood GS hot-spot. A cat who regularly sleeps in the same spot on a bed is certainly performing a diagnostic, and possibly a protective function, though if the GS is too strong the cat will also suffer. Insects, parasites, bacteria and viruses also thrive on Sha streams, and ant and wasp nests invariably provide a similar clue: thus a Sha stream is the right location for a beehive. (Geopathic Stress by Richard Creightmore.)

Trips away from home can be even more fun if we risk taking Rudi with us. We stayed in a cottage on a headland in Wales once, in a converted mill with a water course still passing between two of its rooms and Rudi’s behaviour was more bizarre than displacement nerves from being away from home could explain. There were parts of the building that he seemed to go out of his way to give a very wide berth, a gangway he wouldn’t cross over, he paced all night and would suddenly act like he was in a chasing scene with an invisible assailant. Yet, I have to confess, it was one of the more “energetic” places I ever stayed in too; the only one where I ever felt like I was seeing (if that’s the right word) a whole hoast of aparitions crowded in my room at night…

Oh, and he can read minds; especially mine…knows when I’m thinking “lets go this way today for a change” even before I’ve given a clue, turning the very way I just decided. I only have to so much as email the dog sitter to say “could you have him for a few days…”  or think “must contact Lucy” and he displays a particular profile of behaviour to do with “oh no, they’re going on holiday again…”. So, yes, he is very sensitive.

Of course, I’ve had to consider, is this me influencing Rudi or him influencing me since I have these sensitivities too, as I’ve said (and written about copiously). Is one of us leading the other to more sensitivity or are we both picking up on the same things? Is having a dog who leaps from his bed and stares accusingly into space making me more self-conscious of my own inbuilt anomaly awareness? Would a dog who fixated on fetching balls and going for walks have balanced me more than one that is verging on hypochondriac, allowing me to be more trivial in my focus? Because, while I’m interested in this anomalous stuff, I never set-out to fixate on it, knowing that to do so could deplete all of life’s joy. Most people never have to give a thought to a need for geomancy in order to navigate their home environment so why should I have to? Am I meant to? Is there some purpose to this? Am I oversensitive? Is my dog mirroring me back at myself so I get to see this as an annoying trait (not that I seem to be able to choose not to have it)? I know the saying goes that owners end up looking like their dogs and vice versa but this is, surely, taking things to a new level.

I’m even forced to ask, has my dog (over his almost 9 years) been acting as my teacher, dialing me up to receive more unseeable data, with me becoming ever more sensitive to such anomalous experiences because he flags up to me what I might otherwise doubt if they only came from my own “peculiar” levels of perception? Because I have only become more and more sensitive to the unseeable over this same space of time and, to my knowledge, there are not many households where both owner and dog can tell you, in their own direct way, “oh, there’s  been a solar flare” and then cooberate that with the space news a few hours later.

Yes I know, you could say, it’s because I react to these things that he gets out of sorts; but often, I don’t show an obvious cue that I’m aware the moon is “new” of “full”, or that my body hurts a little more today because there are auroras kicking off 2000 miles away in Lapland. I just carry on as if this is my norm…because it is. Meanwhile, on these occasions, he jumps from his bed and stares around the room, he won’t sit down, he acts as though an invisible hand is prodding him, stands on the patio in the night and  just stares up at the sky. He runs around the house at bedtime or won’t leave my side. He picks up on changes in ionic atmosphere, incoming weather changes and storms (no less do I) well before they “arrive”, with upset stomachs to back them up (me too) and yes, he most certainly suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, to the point that its sometimes a contest to see who gets to sit in the most direct path of the SAD lamp…or brief moment of afternoon sunlight… in our house. The only thhing he does that I don’t is that he pulls weeds and eats them, obsessively, at these times; though I suppose you could equate this with my craving green juices…

Should either of us be able to detect any of these things? Oh yes, there’s a growing body of science pointing to how atmospheric changes such as in the polarity of airborne ions can influence seismic shifts deep under the earth and trigger very-real anxiety, feelings of dread and physical symptoms in people and animals…already measured as actual changes in blood plasma and brain fluid in rats and further speculated to induce temporal lobe microseizures the same way as atmospheric radiation does (Michael Persinger of Laurentian University, Ontario; mentioned by Michael A Jawer in The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense). Infrasound is indicated as a likely cause, Jawer reports, and many non-human species can hear below the supposed 20 hz threshold. For my own part, I speculate that its not just elephants, dolphins and whales that can do this but also (some?) dogs and even some of us humans. He goes on to describe exactly what I’ve had going on for years:

Some people seem to have an unusual reaction to the most spectacular of all atmospheric displays, the aurora borealis, also known as he northern lights. Over centuries –  and still documented today – a noise described as a hissing, swishing, rustling or cracking has been reported in connection with the northern lights…

Interestingly, the noise is not evident to everyone witnessing the aurora. One person might hear the popping and whooshing clearly while another, standing just a few yards away, hears nothing. The explanation presumably owes to something other than the imagination because several people have reported hearing aurora noise before seeing the display itself.

…aurora noise – assuming it is literally heard – may turn out to be at the high-frequency end of the human hearing range”. Michael Jawer –  The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: HowFeelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense.

As he says, it is already known that auroras generate infrasound….and infrasound has been reported to generate “anxious, unsettled, even sorrowful feelings” in those who are exposed to it. I would add, you don’t even need to be in the vicinity of the aurora to know it’s happening; you can be 100s of miles or more away, according to myself and my dog (so maybe it does have more to do with what is going in, in response, beneath the surface of the earth). Jawer goes on to speculate that there may be a similarity between the electromagnetic aspect of whatever the auroras trigger and the electromagnetic anomalies so-often reported in situations where “hauntings” are reported; which leads into the broader theme of his book, being how the emotional landscape hooks into this anamolous territory. Where there are emotions (especially stuck, bottled-up ones) there are electro-magnetic anomolies; and boy do emotions run high around my pooch.

So, getting back to his thread, the only time I get a break from all this is when Rudi goes to the dog sitter. For me, the emotional release of this temporary freedom from feeling responsible for his welfare can be immense because it’s as though I feel him looking to me for cues for how to react all the time when we are in close proximity. For once, I can breathe and be a “normal person” when we go away without him and, I’m told, he has a blast with his other doggy friends. I hear no reports of weird behaviour from his sitter…which could be because most people would probably attribute his strange behaviours to some other “logical” cause, as most people do by default; even when their determination to write things off and make them “normal” without further investigation seems most illogical.

Much as I love him to the “end” of the universe and back, it’s tough living with ups and downs like this, as with any highly-strung family member, so I’ve been noticing his sensitivities, and feeling all the more burdened by them, lately (no less mine…yes I see the undeniable pattern). Also, more curious than ever about their origins as Jawer’s book has just got to the bit where he considers that there could sometimes be an animal part played in human analogous experiences: “it shouldn’t be surprising that a dog could both apprehend feeling energy in the external environment and contribute to the anomalies itself”. Hmmmm….just  what I was almost cringing to conclude for myself; is my dog complicating what is already there in my environment? Is this why I relax so much more when he’s not around?

After all, pent-up emotion in the body is, as the book has already explored, a primary trigger of such experiences…what most people would term “poltergeist”, though the effects can be more subtle and commonplace than the kind of events the film industry likes to depict. I’ve already gone deep into consideration about how my own pent-up emotions, over a lifetime from babyhood onwards, have possibly contributed to my intense sensitivities and so why not in my dog’s case?  Why not indeed, suggest Jawer, given “it bears a neurobiological similarity (as a species) to human beings and holds a close emotional tie with one of more of its human family members”. Do we, as I have long suspected, complicate things for each other, Rudi and I? If so, I know my history (and have done so much release work I don’t feel pent-up with unspoken emotion anymore) so why is he so pent-up with emotion? Did I wire him up like this during my awakening years, when the intensity of what I was experiencing inside my own consciousness was, possibly, almost too much for his doggy psyche to handle as he empathed it? Would he have done better with a less high-vibe owner?

An interesting angle came to me quite spontaneously at this point. If such effects don’t necessarily cease at the end of life, as Jawer explores, then why am I not also considering the influence (upon our house, possibly upon Rudi, even though they never met…) of my last dog Buster who died 9 years ago? He had far more reason to be pent-up emotionally than Rudi, given how the sharp downturn in my life circumstances (divorce) turned his life upside down overnight. After that, he was subjected to a sharp alteration in his rhythms, from being my constant companionship for years to, suddenly, long days alone with me out at work all day, him left to the mercies of a professional “dogwalker” who, I discovered rather late, showed up only when she felt like it. In those last years, he became quite depressed and very unwell and, it occurred to me yesterday, it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he left this dimension with unfinished business. How did he feel when I “replaced” him so quickly with a young dog (I was, by then, no longer working in an office)? How did he feel about this house…which he never seemed to like, having lived most of his life in another one, his warm “den” nestled under the breakfast bar…to the degree he never found a favoured place to sleep in all the years after we moved here? Is he still, potentially, holding some pent-up energy in this space, which he didn’t like and wasn’t happy in, and where I still live, influencing how we experience the space ourselves, even making my current dog jump out of his skin? When this occurred to me, quite unexpectedly yesterday evening, rather than laughing it off as ridiculous, I knew it had more than a small ring of truth about it…

Yet if you’d asked me these questions a few years ago, I would have laughed a dismissive laugh and passed the theory by as hocus. Even the me a year ago would have paused and remained intellectually aloof, picking holes. These days, helped along by Jawers highly scientific approach to the topic, I find I stop and ponder when I encounter ideas to do with the effects of either flowing or hindered energy upon the sensory operating system of all sentient beings (not just humans)…and the way that so much more is always going on, under the energetic bonnet of life, than we tend to give ample consideration. I give it consideration because all of the most potent “answers” to my own health challenges have come from this source.

I should clarify, my dog Buster came up into my mind over the weekend, I believe, because we had been going through some old photos for a presentation my husband has to put together; and I noticed my reluctance to go into some of the corners of “the past” of that era when Buster was around. It was subtle but I picked up on it, like a charge in the air around my relationship with him, being the one relationship that hasn’t evolved since, given all the rest of us are still here and very much alive. It was as though I could detect a hurt, a feeling of exclusion and of unresolvedness around him…was it just that I still have his ashes in a carved box in the same cupboard as those photos (how did I never notice how macabre that is) because I never got around to deciding what to do with them; had I felt his cupboard “stuckness” in the corner of my house, demanding some attention?

So last night, as I lay in bed, I did some energetic clearing work on the topic of my dog Buster; the same as I would do with any other energy entangled with my own heart-field (an entanglement in the form of attached energy “strings” being very different to the unconditionality of love). I gently disentangled Buster’s frustrated energy from my field, that of our house, of my current dog; cleansing it and sending it back to him so that he could, hopefully, find peace and navigate his way to the light. You may assume this was just because I was expecting such but I did genuinely sense this process reach a conclusion of sorts as a feeling of neutrality swept in and I felt incredibly at peace, not to mention ready to go to sleep now after what had felt like a pressure cooker of energy a short time before. And, apart from some odd bangs in the night, which I was far too weary to explore, I slept very deeply.

When I got up, it was to hear the sounds my dog pacing at the bottom of the stairs and I could sense he was in distress; perhaps the source of those noises I’d failed to investigate. Rubbing my bleary eyes as I went down to him, I found he had made “a mess” all over the house, trailing from room to room. This is the kind of event that has only happened once or twice in his life, one of those when he was a very young puppy with a particularly nasty stomach bug, so it was hardly typical. He was hanging his head in shame, very quiet, in need of reassurance and I could tell he had been in this state for some time; probably half the night, working himself up into an upset while I slept through.

Once I’d cleared up the mess, washed all his bedding, settled him down (what a start to Monday morning) there was no weighing up to be done in my mind; my instincts told me this was related to the energetic work I did last night (not just to us exciting the solar wind stream, as we were at the time, or the new moon). By now, Rudi was fine, had eaten a hearty meal and gone to sleep, reassured that he wasn’t in trouble. In fact he has slept deeply all day and is as yet to show interest in a walk. Though I will keep an eye on him to make sure he’s alright, I feel like his physical upset was more like some sort of energy shift passing though that he was just the conduit for; a release of sorts.

In the light of day, bizarre as it sounds, I do feel as though I hit upon something last night and that the work I did with Buster was necessary…for us all. And perhaps there’s still a little more to be done. Cutting energetic strings with another is not about closing your heart to them…its more a case of  claiming back your energetic autonomy and allowing them theirs, which is just as important, especially for a soul that is needing to be set free from its physical trappings. Still, this task calls for sensitive handling, reassurance, a glut of love and appreciation to remind them that you are just so grateful for all that they (still) are to you, though you may be setting them free.

Its time I put him back in the picture of my story; took the time to look at those old photos properly, to remember all the good times, not the sadder ending, the misplaced guilt at feeling as though I let him down. Time to do something with those ashes, even if only to scatter them on the wind on one of his favourite walks. Time to put him back into place as the hero of a very tough time in my life. After all, he was the dog that was always there for me, through all the worst years of my former marriage and when I was all alone bringing up my daughter. Through all that, I often used to rest my head on his chest in the evenings, curled up by the fire with him, and all would feel better; he gave that to me.  This blockage in me had, perhaps, been the biggest pent-up thing in the room we still spend most of our time in and I intend to do what I now know I need to do to remedy this, spending some time in energetic communion with Buster to put things into balance since (as I know from my ongoing relationship with my father, who also passed-on at a disjointed point in our relationship) it is never too late to heal these wounds, even long after they have “gone”.

When these things come up (and I say this, perhaps, most vehemently, to my no-nonsense English readers), beware the tendency to brush them off as “dredging up old stuff”. Like when I shared this theory with my husband and he said “why bring all that up again, you did you best by Buster when he was alive given your circumstances, there’s no point worrying about that now, all these years later, it’s all water under the bridge and thinking about it won’t do you any good”.  He was missing the point, as many people do, especially around matters of “the dead”. The point isn’t to dredge up old feelings of guilt or to ruminate over old circumstances but, simply, to look them in the eye and clear them…to deal with them as stuck energy, nothing more. Bear witness to it, express gratitude, make clear that its time to part ways, clean up what you are about to release with your good intentions and let it go…that’s all you have to do. I’ve been doing this such a lot lately, with matters large and small, and its been having a remarkable effect.

One by one, we heal these emotional stuck points, setting the energy free, and then movement comes back into the space again…as it always longs to, just like water rushes to fill a void. Bit by bit, as we clear out old cupboards and empty out cluttered spaces and, no less, do the same work in ourselves, we set ourselves energetically free.

When we form human-strength relationships with anything, we play with energy. When we direct that energy at an animal, the force of energy that meets us in return is at least equal to ours, possibly even bigger, less reserved and far more dependent in certain ways. This is no small responsibility. All is well if that energy flows in the way that the heart knows best how to orchestrate, to the rhythm of a steady beat, back and forth, outwards and returned, in equal and open reciprocation. However, when energy gets cut-short, gets dammed-up or hidden away, when it is forced into a cul-de-sac of no release and held there “out of sight” as though done with (though energy can never be “done”), or when we cease to acknowledge it any more because we decide, with our minds, that we won’t give something another thought, then we create these energy bullets, within ourselves and others, that can explode in our faces later.

It happens in our bodies when pent-up emotions become later-life health issues and it also manifests as a degree of high sensitivity that experiences the kind of anomalous experiences that I seem to be an expert at having; and no less my dog. Such energy blockages happen, no less, in the spaces where we live, stored as undealt-with packages of association, conveyed from one being to another, picked up by the most sensitive amongst us, who dance elaborate dances around them, like invisible obstacles in a room. They say, energy goes where attention flows; that attention could constitute any kind of sticking point that preoccupies us, in this lifetime or any other; crossing over freely given the energetic realm lies outside the rules and regulations of linearity (a concept that trips the “logic” wire of most humans). Any wonder that it is often our animal companions who are the most affected by them. Perhaps Rudi has been teaching me something so very useful…all of this and more.

For some reason we seem to take this degree of sensitivity as a “given” about cats but, I put it out there, it could just as easily be a dog, pig, cow, turkey or a canary in a cage that picks up on the unseen subplot of the world we live in. In many ways, our creature companions are far more willingly tuned-in than us, being as obtuse and reliant on the explain-away of “logic” that we are. Owning this possibility about other creatures, yes, opens a whole other forum for discussing how we should respect all creatures far more than we currently do, not to mention taking better responsibility for what we put on them when we show the great inconsistencies that we do (friend to them one moment, slaughterer the next…), which is one of the reason I am vegan; I detected far too many inconsistencies in the choice to be otherwise. Energy, as I have said, has to go somewhere; even when we determine it to be inconvenient to believe so.  Inconsistencies and “out of sync”ness with the unconditionality of true love are classic reasons for energy flow to become curtailed and left to stagnate in pockets of distortion. Food for thought on this chilly Monday morning as I sit here with the door wide open watching my floor dry, hoping that the oak grain will recover from its unexpected onslaught; but then, when we don’t tend to our energy until we have left it too long (I couldn’t resist adding this), shit will occasionally fly to remind us that we must!

Useful resources:

The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: HowFeelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense – Michael A Jawer

Geovital – for geopathic and geobiological home surveys

ROY RIGGS BSc Electromagnetic & Geopathic Energy Consultant

Into the Light Home Healer – Emma Loveheart who conducts remote psychic home clearing (I can highly recommend, having used her three times, on two locations)

Evidence connecting geopathic stress to illness

Checking the fault lines in our lives  – Michael Kelly

Geopathic Stress – full article by Richard Creightmore.

Types of geopathic stress

Bee hives are healthy on geopathic stress lines

Some Dogs Are Angels – Mark Starmer

Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals – Rupert Sheldrake

 

Recreating Our Natural Electromagnetic Environment – Roy Riggs video