A little while ago, I opened up a space for you to share something with me.
A question you’d been sitting with. A situation you weren’t sure how to navigate. An experience that had stayed with you and you weren’t quite sure why. I didn’t ask for perfectly formed thoughts – I asked for whatever was on your mind.
Four of you wrote in.
I want to tell you what happened when I read what you sent.
I’d planned to approach this methodically. Read each submission, note the themes, begin thinking about how to respond to each one individually. That was the plan.
But somewhere in the middle of reading, I found myself doing something different.
I found myself slowing down.
Not because the questions were difficult – though some of them carried real weight – but because something kept catching my attention. A feeling that kept returning as I moved from one submission to the next. Something underneath the words that felt familiar, though I couldn’t quite name it yet.
So I went back to the beginning and read them all again.
The first person who wrote to me is an animal communicator. She works with clients, and she finds herself in uncomfortable territory sometimes – those moments when what the animal shares could land heavily on the guardian. When the animal’s truth might make the person on the other side of the conversation feel responsible. Guilty, even. She wanted to know how to stay true to what she receives without causing harm in the delivery. How to honour the animal’s voice without wounding the person who loves them.
The second person is also on the communicator path, though her questions were more like observations she was turning over in her mind. Can we actually change an animal’s instinct through communication? What about their personality, their fear? And what about us – our own anxiety, our own emotional state – how much does that shape what we receive? She was asking, in her thoughtful way, about everything that gets between us and a clear connection. All the places where we might be the interference, even when we’re trying so hard not to be.
The third person is a pet parent. Her dog has been changing – becoming more reactive, more overwhelmed, withdrawing from situations that used to feel manageable. She’d been trying to understand it through animal communication and not getting clear answers. She wasn’t asking me to fix anything. She was asking how to do right by her animal. How to truly see what her dog needed, even when the picture wasn’t coming through clearly.
And the fourth person is also a pet parent, navigating separation anxiety with her dog. She’d been thinking carefully about how to phrase things – what words to use, how to communicate something reassuring without it landing the wrong way. She knew her own anxiety was part of the dynamic. She wasn’t asking me to solve the behaviour. She was asking how to reach him. How to make sure he understood.
Four people. Two pet parents, two communicators. Different animals, different situations, different places on the journey.
And I sat with all four of them together, and something became very clear to me.
None of these questions are really about technique.
They’re not asking me for a formula, or a script, or a better method. Underneath every single submission – underneath the specific details, the different contexts, the varying levels of experience – I found the same quiet, aching wish.
I don’t want to let them down.
The communicator who worries her delivery will harm the guardian – she doesn’t want to let the animal down by softening what they shared, and she doesn’t want to let the guardian down by delivering it clumsily.
The communicator sitting with questions about instinct and interference – underneath all of it, she’s asking: am I enough of a clear channel? Am I doing right by the animals I sit with?
The pet parent who can’t get a clear read on her dog – she’s not frustrated by the silence. She’s afraid that in that silence she might miss something important. That she might get it wrong for him.
And the pet parent crafting her words so carefully – she’s trying to reach across the space between species with something that feels like a promise. I will always come back. She wants him to feel that, not just hear it.
Different questions. One wish.
I’ve been doing this work for a long time now. And one of the things I’ve come to understand – slowly, and not always comfortably – is that this wish, not to let them down, is both our greatest strength and sometimes our greatest obstacle.
It’s our greatest strength because it means we care. Deeply. It means we’re not going through the motions. It means we show up for our animals, for our clients, for the animals of our clients, with our whole hearts present. That matters. It is, in many ways, the foundation of everything.
But it can also become the very thing that gets in the way.
When we’re so afraid of letting them down that we second-guess what we receive. When we’re so focused on not causing harm that we soften something that needed to be heard clearly. When we’re so anxious about getting it right that our own emotional field becomes the loudest thing in the room. When we’re so determined to understand that we forget to simply listen.
The wish to honour them can, without us realising it, become a kind of pressure. And pressure, in this work, rarely helps anyone – least of all the animal we’re trying to reach.
So what do we do with that?
I don’t think the answer is to care less. I don’t think it’s to become detached, or clinical, or to stop feeling the weight of what we’re holding. That’s not what this work asks of us.
I think the answer is to learn to hold the wish more lightly.
To let I don’t want to let them down be the thing that brought you to the conversation – and then set it gently to one side once you’re in it. Because the animal in front of you, whether you’re their guardian or their communicator, doesn’t need your fear of getting it wrong. They need your presence. Your willingness to listen without an agenda. Your ability to receive what’s actually there, rather than what you hoped or feared you might find.
The wish is the doorway. But you can’t do the work standing in the doorway.
To the four of you who wrote in – I hope you recognise yourselves in here, and I hope what I’ve reflected back feels useful. Your questions weren’t small. They were honest. And honest questions, in my experience, are always the ones worth sitting with.
To everyone reading – I’d love to know whether this resonates. Is this the wish that brought you here too?
Thank you, Joanne. I really like your thread of connecting all 4 of these question, as it was becoming more obvious with each question that I read. There appears to be a 'wanting' to get it right, for the highest good of everyone involved, whenever I work with animal communication and the tie in with these questions feels very real.
My yoga teacher training reminds me in this moment to remember that non-attachment is not at all a lack of caring but an invitation to do our very best in every situation, knowing that we are truly not in control of any outcome from our service, whatever it may be at the time. For me, this allows me to relax into the moment, knowing that when I get out of the way, the pathway gets more clear and my understanding of what I receive is without the static of my own fears of not doing enough, or getting it right.
Perhaps it is possible that we are only receiving small amounts of information for a reason, so we can go back and reexamine each question more deeply when the animal is ready and more open.
Connecting the thread in this situation feels very grounded. Thank you again.