What are the boundaries we put between ourselves and connecting with others? In this episode, Ina Gjikondi and Bonnie Buckner talk with Anna Breytenbach, an internationally acclaimed interspecies communicator. Anna guides people worldwide to rediscover and develop their natural senses and connection with all species in an honoring manner through the art of interspecies communication. In our episode, Anna talks about stepping into the imaginative space of connecting with animals and plants, going deep into telepathic intuitive communication, and understanding collective consciousness. Join us and learn more about the deep connection of the rich life forms around us.
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A Conversation On The Art Of Interspecies Communication With Anna Breytenbach
In this episode, we have a wonderful guest, Anna Breytenbach, who is an Internationally-Acclaimed Professional Interspecies Communicator. Anna is based in Europe and she’s been practicing for many years on several continents. She’s a native of South Africa and holds a degree in Psychology and studied Telepathic Animal Communication with the Assisi Institute in California, as well as tracking and mentoring at the Wilderness Awareness School in Seattle.
Her work is the subject of the documentary The Animal Communicator watched by millions of people and is available on YouTube. As an experienced master facilitator, Anna focuses on mentoring in a practical manner that reminds us humans of the ways of indigenous nature awareness. She has guided thousands of people to rediscover and develop their natural senses and connection with all species in an honoring manner.
Anna’s consultation work is exclusive to wild places and beings and facilitates peaceful interventions globally via remote work. This includes predator research, wilderness protection, anti-poaching assistance, reforestation initiatives, wildlife management and rehabilitation, as well as numerous public awareness appearances as an inspirational speaker. Anna is inspired by being a voice for animals and natural environments sharing wild wisdom. We are thrilled that you are with us, Anna and we look forward to exploring the wisdom in space together.
Anna has been someone that both Bonnie and I have been following for some time. Bonnie was the first scout. She found Anna. In our teachings together at George Washington University, we often, Anna, bring up some of your conversations and insights. They have grounded us in our teachings. We’re very happy to have you with us here, and we will jump right in. This conversation that Bonnie and I are hosting is called Into An Ecology Of Wholeness. We’d love to learn a little bit about where you are, where is your heart now, where is your heart showing up, and how might it relate to wholeness.
Thank you for the work that you do and the reconnection. I appreciate when humans turn their awareness to this bridge building and remembering because I’m very clear that we all have these capacities for ways of knowing and relating that are hardwired into our DNA and represented in the blueprint of our brain.
Human brains haven’t changed that much at all anatomically speaking over the ages. We don’t use a large percentage of them in our daily life. I don’t believe we’re dragging around another 90% of dead weight that has no purpose. A lot is going on that neuroscience hasn’t yet been able to measure and therefore can’t describe and doesn’t get the air time or acknowledgment as being real and functional in the ways it is.
I like the way you ask your opening question: where is my heart now because the intelligence of the heart, both as an organ and as an awareness center, is the seat of our greater knowing. Even if we are going to talk about the mind, which is a useful tool, that’s not located anywhere. That’s a concept bigger than the brain. There’s something in the holistic sense that we, humans, embody. We are so connected in ways we don’t even know and couldn’t perceive all that is around us all the time. Part of the reason we can’t perceive it or apprehended it with our minds is that it’s too much data. Our thinking brain can only process 24 bits of data per second and there’s a whole lot more going on at any moment.
The subtleties of the air moisture content, the direction of the breeze and the sense might be brimming with the information that they imply. The internal health state of our organs, the chemicals in our bloodstream, never mind our thoughts and emotions or interactions with the critters on the ground or other people around the clouds or the weather. There’s so much to notice and be aware of. Our attention only goes to a very small percentage of that.
The other animals, the non-human animals, reside much more in a full-bodied state of presence. It’s present with themselves, with their environment, feeling and knowing every little thing and not obsessing about the past or always planning for the future. They have a memory of the past. They are aware of moving towards the future as well and can strategize things like this.
Their primary state of being is present. This is the key state of being as a doorway for us humans to access those states of our naturalness. Our naturalness is including us being part of the whole. I’m sure in your discourse and workloads of folks who are participating, this is the exploration because as we will know from that cliche, the wholeness is greater than the sum of the parts.
When we humans can align ourselves with ourselves, we discover that we are not simply a being in an environment who is observing in some disconnected way. There’s a very dynamic situation going on. This is my absolute delight and I’ve been so grateful to have the animal teachers along the way to exude this state of presence, convey their absolute authentic truth, nothing less will do and be great role models for living more intuitively.
One of the things that strike me about what you teach is stepping into the animal situation, the skin of the animal and that imaginative space of being in the animal situation. I would love to hear you speak about the idea of stepping into another shoe for a moment and what that entails.
One definition of empathy can be to know and understand the other’s perspective and truth. That leads to all sorts of wonderful things, not just the understanding itself but often something is triggered in our heart center. A sense of compassion, care for and an ongoing awareness of. Empathy, as an imagined act of stepping into the pause or the perspective of the animal, is something I’m always recommending.
As an opening and widening of the scope of what we might otherwise imagine or feel we could experience from the animal directly. We can’t help being human and therefore every possible connection or communication even is already hamstrung. It’s already potentially blinkered and defined by the scope of centric considerations. One little example might be if I’m communicating with a bee and bees can see in the ultraviolet range of the color spectrum, we, humans, can’t.
When I’m communicating with the bee about their choices of which flowers or plants to use as food or how they navigate, I’m borrowing the experience of the bee. For those moments, in my mind’s eye, I can see a whole lot more visually than my human eyes and brain are capable of. Had I not been able to settle into the bee’s perspective, I might have missed all of that and stuck only with the more gross level of things that humans can perceive.
One thing I do want to be clear about is that if we are stepping into the perspective of the other is that we should do it 1 of 2 ways. There’s another way we should not do it and that’s not to imagine entering their body. An animal or plant is directly in front of us to imagine stepping in or walking in. Those things are possible and that’s highly invasive energetically. I don’t enter the body of the bee, the crow or the dog. I will either do it through communication and ask them to show me as a question or a request.
I’ll ask them to show me their body on mine and then my body becomes a mapping for that. If I’m communicating with a bee who has a sore middle leg on the left side, it’s amazing. Somewhere between my left arm and my leg, I will feel the pain as if I had a third limb on my left side coming out from the middle of my body.
We inherit the energetic map. My arms become wings for birds. That’s through communication if they show me their body or show me how they see. We are borrowing their vision or body’s sense. Another very good way that you pointed to, Bonnie, is as an imagined act. That’s a lovely doorway to step through. It also puts us under less pressure.
We don’t have high expectations of ourselves and get into all the second-guessing. If we can imagine what it might be like to be the dog in the car on the way to the vet or a little owlet who’s in the nest and hasn’t fledged yet whose parent doesn’t come home because they were hit by a car that was speeding at night and what the slow process of starvation over a couple of days feels like, when we imagine these things, imagine ourselves from their perspective.
We can start by imagining some of their physical characteristics in the case of the owls. How it might feel to have feathers, the nesting material and to be more active and awake at night. These things that we can know from some book knowledge or what science can show us become a doorway into which we can know more and experience more fully what it might be like to be that other being. Right away, it’s helpful on several levels. Firstly, if there’s a particular being that we are emphasizing and having some consideration of, they will know that, receive that and be grateful for the connection of us expanding our understanding.
Secondly, it’s very practical. Certainly, animals who are in our lives don’t need to be wondering what’s going to happen in the next moment, why they’re in the car or what’s going on. We can reassure them and project to them what’s going to happen. Once we are imagining being in their perspective, we’ll know more about what matters to them and what might scare them living so much closer to the ground with loud noises or unexpected things. We’ll also know how to guide them if they’re in trouble because we’ll know which senses are primary to them. I had a case. I’ve moved to new accommodation and one of my cats got herself lost and stuck behind a 3-meter-high fence that stuck deep into the ground in very thick dry clay that’s impossible to loosen.
Once we imagine being in their perspective, we’ll know more about what matters to them.
I found her with my flashlight eventually a couple of hundred meters away from the house. She couldn’t get back because it was a long fence. She was violently trying to dig from her side to get back out. I was trying from my side and it wasn’t working. Thank goodness for telepathic communication, I was able to ask her to walk in one direction away from me along the fence line on her side. I went the other way so that we could maximize our time. We walked away from each other at 180 degrees and each went at least 100 to 200 meters. I found a gap first. I found a gate too high to climb but wide enough bars that she could slip through. I let her know telepathically that I found a way and asked her to do a U-turn and come to me.
I was shining my flashlight and calling her but I heard nothing. I kept on calling and heard nothing and then I said to her in my mind, “Are you coming? I come to try to find you. I can’t see you. I don’t know whether to wait here or better use my time to come and try to find you.” She said, “You’re in front of me.” I said, “I can’t see you.” She said, “I can see you. You’re right in front of me.” She was still some distance away and she said, “I can see you. Why can’t you see me? Why are you still calling?” I found myself having to explain. I said, “I’m a human. I can’t see as well as you can at night so I can’t see you. Could you please use your voice?”
Immediately, I heard this meowing from a few hundred meters ahead of me, dead ahead. Two things happened there. She’d expected me, as any species would, to have the same abilities that she did and to be able to operate per her software. When I explained that I couldn’t and suggested an alternative, she right away emphasized with me and did that to help me out as the compromised human who doesn’t have those talents.
I love that story. To tack onto that, one of my practices and I’ve done this a long time, I grew up on a farm in Texas and raised animals, is physically putting myself in a place that an animal is. I have a feral cat that’s hanging out with me and likes to hide in the tall grasses. I’m putting myself hidden flat on my belly in the tall grasses and seeing the world from that perspective.
On a hot day, I’m putting my hands on the pavement to see if it is too hot to walk the dog on a certain path, which brings us back to this place of the senses. It is also an important part of stepping into the other shoes of developing that embodied awareness of all of our senses. Other species have developed other senses much more than some of the senses we lean on, though we can develop ours much more.
Particularly with this matter of telepathic intuitive communication, far too quickly, people make it a mystery school thing or imagine it to be very esoteric in a way that becomes disembodied. The so-called Sixth Sense runs the risk of minimizing the importance of not including the other five senses. In some scientific realms or anthropologists who looked back into where the indigenous hunters and gatherers have operated, they’ve wondered whether their so-called sixth sense or intuition.
It is potentially something that arises out of a very high functioning five senses. That becomes then a beautiful matrix of cooperation between the senses and that can arise. The connections and the intelligence is always a sixth sense, something separate. Even if it is separate which I don’t, the non-human animals know this.
They’re fully au courant. They’re in their bodies and their beings. They don’t make a concept of telepathy or knowing things with their ‘spidey’ sense. They don’t make a concept of it. They are still going to be living their best-embodied life in very instinctive ways. Somewhere along the line too, this word instinct has developed a bit of a bad reputation. I’ve often heard in veterinary or animal training circles that dogs are acting out of instinct as if it’s a lower form of intelligence.
How I wish that I, myself, as a human, were more instinctive because it would imply that I was, at any moment, able to very quickly know what the spontaneous right action is. Both for myself and that was contextually appropriate taking into account the entire circumstance faster than could be analyzed, and moving in accordance with what is best at that moment, not only for me selfishly.
There’s something to that. My tracking and nature connection mentor, John Young, speaks to what you mentioned, Bonnie, to lie down in the bed of the deer and soak yourself in the sensory environment. It was David Abram who called it the spell of the sensuous to get into that. Not because you have a goal in mind but because it’s such a joy to experience that full-throttle life in a five-sensory way. It’s such a privilege.
One of the things we do in the coaching program is first they get to work with clients but the very first client they get to work with is a non-human. It’s a plant. They have this practice for eight weeks where they fully engage and there are some inquiries and questions. It becomes quite an opening experience in many ways and so many shifts in that process. I’m curious, from your perspective, how do you prepare and bring yourself to stay open in that space so that you can fully listen and be present?
This isn’t a superpower, even though when Craig Foster, the filmmaker who made the documentary, The Animal Communicator, took his seven-year-old son at that time to the movies to see the X-Men movie. In the end, his son was sitting there still staring at the credits that were rolling. Craig thought, “That’s my boy. Filmmaker in the making. He’s interested in the credits.” The credit then stopped and the lights went up and Tom was still sitting there. He was like, “Maybe that’s not it. What are you doing?” Tom said, “Daddy, I’ve had a realization.” He said, “What?” He said, “I’ve realized Anna B is a mutant.” This isn’t some turn-on or turn-off skill. It’s something that we have to simply access.
I need to bring myself into that state so that I can tap into that baseline of connectedness. It’s there all the time but it’s covered over with my thinking and doing. It’s not a turn-on or turn-off thing. It’s not a mechanistic process. It does require me simply come back to myself, which sounds a lot easier than it is. I find that whatever practice somebody may have for becoming present is the way to go. An important thing about that is it must feel natural to you, not too contrived. Some people might be yoga practitioners and working with prime or breath as a way to become present. Some may have a movement practice, contemplation, a color or a beautiful imagined sunset scene.
Whatever practice somebody may have for becoming present is the way to go.
Some might use semantic or body awareness processes. I like to sit quietly and close my eyes so that I’m not going to be too busy in my mind and distracted by what I’m seeing in my surroundings. The way that I was shown at the Assisi Animal Institute and Animal Communication and the way it works for me is to simply watch my natural breathing rhythm. It’s also called Mindful Breathing. I don’t make an effort to breathe in a certain way, which can become another doing. I simply watch my natural breathing with the rise and the fall of my chest, which I find calms the analytical mind. Another thing is I don’t set the bar high for myself.
I don’t imagine that my mind has to go blissfully quiet and into some nirvana estate. I acknowledge that there’s still going to be chatter, the grocery list popping into my thoughts, ideas about what I’m about to do or connect with an animal or not. Let that all be. Let it be background noise because we have the power of choosing where our attention goes. I distinguish between awareness and attention. If I’m in a broader state of awareness, then I can let all these things be there. The rag tags, grocery list and the emotional tension about the animal I’m about to connect with. I can let all of those things be there and not let my attention go there, which would be me investing in it in some way.
Let them all be there like a background condition. The third aspect that I find powerful in preparing myself is to have a clear intention for myself about connection. Intention for myself, not for the animal. I don’t say I want the animal to listen to me or move away from the fire to the safe field. That’s a wish but my intention for myself that helps focus my attention is around the clarity of what I’m setting to do and what my resolution is.
I usually phrase it for myself so that I will experience clear communication. That also speaks to two-way communication. I simply say I will experience clear communication. I have conjured a sense of gentle resolve with that. It’s not the tense push energy behind it. That would be based on my doubt that I’m not going to be able to do it. It’s not a Law of Attraction or banging the drum to invoke the mysterious powers. It’s not a big megaphone step into myself. It’s a heart intention. I will experience clear communication and whenever any of those background things I mentioned become louder on my inner landscape, I come back to say that to myself.
These are the things. It can be helpful in the beginning to make sure your environment is conducive to quieting off all of those obvious things. Practically speaking, often I’m meeting to communicate with a non-human animal that’s been hit on the road or a critical patient that’s walked into the vet’s waiting room. There are going to be things going on. When we practice becoming quiet and present, very quickly we build that muscle and we can get there by intending to. Even in the storm with things going on or people dashing around to get swabs for wounds and so on, I can still, in any way, access that place on the inside. Much like going to the gym for physical muscles, very quickly, that muscle gets strengthened.
I’m curious, Anna, where is that place of discernment in this space that this is me and this is the animal or whoever is the being that I’m hearing?
That’s very important too because practically speaking, I’m not going to be in a clean, uninformed neutral state. I’ll have some ideas about the situation and the possible causes of the injury. If I can switch to plants for a moment, this is interspecies communication. I was asked by a lady in Scotland to go and communicate with her little patch of the primordial forest because most of the oak trees were sick and a lot had died. She had all sorts of modernists and swirl experts. People came and nobody could figure out what was ailing the trees. She dropped me off from one side of the forest and she placed me two hours later on the other side.
I took a walk-through and was looking for physical signs of any differences aside from the dying leaves and so on if anything different with their trunks, their bark and all of this. She’d mentioned a whole lot of possibilities that were in my head. I couldn’t white lie that and make it all disappear. That becomes a little problematic because my mind has already got those possible answers from the trees. If I want to hear the authentic answers from the tree, I have to listen beyond that. As Carl Jung so wisely says, “What you resist persists.” If I try to push away those theories she had, they’re only going to come back fighting harder for my attention. Again, I have to let them be there.
I make sure I also don’t go in right away trying to check for those theories and this yes/no closed question way. “Is it this? Is it that? Is it root growth? Is it a virus?” A great way to help you gather information beyond what you might know is to ask very open questions to sign a question in your mind. How are you feeling in your body? Is there anything troubling you? You might get the response in feelings, thoughts, words or whatever your brain’s particular makeup is.
You might get senses from something that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought to ask about. It’s important to ask very broad open questions about it. It’s invoking some empathy for how they might be feeling from their perspective and there comes a time for some more drill-down-specific questions for sure. I let that information be there, the possibilities and I still ask open and broad and 1 of 2 things happens.
Either one of those possibilities that I already knew about mentally suddenly stands out on the radar screen, like head and shoulders above the others. It gets a little boost, which means it’s stepping forward from the list of possibilities. It becomes a relative thing. That’s probably what’s going on in which case I will ask for confirmation from the one I’m communicating with. Remember, this is a two-way sending and receiving. This is not me in some psychometric way or whatever doing a psychic reading of the tree or the animal.
It’s a conscious present-moment communication. If something appears to me to be the strongest possibility, I’ll ask a reflective question. I’ll say, “Is it your roots that are struggling?” I then listen inside myself for a feeling of yes or no. That’s one way that can happen where one of the existing possibilities stands out more loudly relative to the others.
Also, what happens is that some other feeling, not amongst the possibilities that I previously knew or thought will ever so gently keep coming up and repeat itself a few times and then I know that that’s the one to pay attention to. The surefire way to know you’re getting something that wasn’t from your mind is when something surprising happens out of the left field. Those moments are great because you know you couldn’t have imagined that. It can only have been coming from the other. Often, I use confirmation to check.
The sure-fire way to know you’re getting something that wasn’t from your mind is when something completely surprising happens.
The work I do is dreaming and imagery. There is a group of us who’ve been doing it for a long time who work with healing long distance. We do our imagery work and then afterwards write down and say out loud what we’ve seen. You mentioned in an interview that this was part of your work at the Assisi Institute. It was striking that many people would have the same experience when doing that. Can you speak to that a little bit on the topic of confirmation?
When I run events in wild places or wild animals that don’t have a human carer who could confirm the accuracy of our information, I use this method as well from a mentoring or coaching point of view. It’s because I experienced this at the Assisi Institute. Several people are sent out to communicate with the same being or collective consciousness. Mind you, maybe I speak about that next. We then come back and compare our answers.
The corroboration and similarities become the corroboration and validation. I can give an example from a three-day workshop I was running at Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, otherwise more famously known as Findhorn Garden, which over 50 years ago was established in the Erraid dunes on the North Sea where nothing should be able to grow and they produced record-breaking 40-pound cabbages and so on.
The scientists were mystified by it. They shrugged their shoulders and preferred not to think about it again. They are communicating with nature and several of their gardeners. Both staff and volunteers were at the workshop and they’ve come up with some concerns about vegetable production, particularly around some of the plants being destroyed, as they put it, which is already a loaded word being destroyed by caterpillars.
A lot of the seeds were being eaten by pigeons. They wanted this behavior to stop, which is something we had to look at in a place that is consciously co-creating with nature so we divided the workshop group into half. Half of the folks went to chat with the pigeons and half the folks went to chat with the caterpillar.
We had decided ahead of time on some questions about what motivates the animals to do these things. That could be an attraction towards the things in the garden. It could be a push factor because they don’t have enough or there’s something harmful to them outside of the garden, for example. We asked all these broad questions and when we came back together as a group, it was amazing the sameness in the answers.
Everyone who’d spoken to the pigeons got the same answer that was surprising to each of them. The pigeons told at least 6 or 7 people, “When we come and take only some seeds from what you’ve sewn, we are usually taking the seeds that are not viable. In the act of us picking around for the seeds, we’re iterating the soil that is part of our function and that in turn, allows the other seeds to grow. We’re turning the soil and iterating.”
That’s something that none of the gardeners would ever have thought of or entered into the perspective of what the pigeon’s job might be or their gift back. Everything is cyclical and reciprocal. That is maybe a better word. In nature, everything is reciprocal towards greater harmony. The folks in the workshop, their spirits were so buoyed by this confirmation of getting the same answers. This happens whether I’m running a Safari in South Africa and getting the same answers from an elephant about how she’s feeling.
This becomes corroboration. We, humans, tend to need that to believe in it ourselves. With the Assisi Institute, we had to do something like 60 case studies, double-blind working with animals we didn’t know and people we didn’t know. We had to do this over whatever period, self-paced, to achieve certification. We were then mentored around these case studies. We would write up our entire conversation and the person would also give feedback to the institute about how accurate we were or weren’t and where we’d gone off and all of these things.
Those were the best things for my analytical mind. For at least the first 50 case studies, I managed to talk myself out of the possibility that real communication was happening. I would find the most amazing psychological justifications and excuses for how I got specific information from animals. I write down while imagining that I might have passed a billboard on the highway earlier that day that might have had an image of the cow with the sore tooth.
Maybe that’s why my mind was thinking this cow had a sore tooth. It’s amazing the gymnastics my mind would go through to avoid losing control or being the originator of the information. There’s nothing more than the ego-based mind hates more than not being the source of all things. It was finally only case study number 51 that I couldn’t find any reasonable excuse. I communicated with somebody’s dog outside of Sacramento. These are all remotely live photos. I never met him. One of the standard questions was to ask, “Is there anything missing in your life?” Some dogs would want to change their food, walks or a toy. Immediately, I asked this question of the right island.
I got a mental image of a bald eagle flying through the sky and then suddenly a flash of the upper part of a man’s very well-built arm. It was so quick and meant nothing to me at all that I would’ve not mentioned it to the lady if it weren’t the protocol of the institute that we had to write down everything and report it. I wrote it all down and gave her feedback.
We then had a phone call and she was in tears because her young husband had died the year before at the age of 34 in a car crash. He had a tattoo of a bald eagle on his bicep and the dog was missing the man of the house. That one I couldn’t explain away and it’s only when I am very analytical. For me, I had to get to that point where I couldn’t explain it away to believe that this is real. I spent so many months not believing even while I was doing it.
That’s such a beautiful and profound story. I’m curious how did you let go to move into the trust? What was your process for that?
It felt so out of the left field or not something that was certainly part of my day job reality at all. I kept it still very quiet and almost secret on the inside and would continue to communicate with animals of all sorts secretly or the beauty of arty if it was silent, quietly wherever I was. One of the big things that made me step into this some more was the belief and the faith in me that was exhibited by my mentor, Dr. Jeri Ryan. She left her body in 2022 and founded the Assisi Animal Institute.
At one of the ongoing education workshops that I was attending, she called me aside and said, “I know you like to work with wildlife in this so the same setup doesn’t apply where there aren’t humans to confirm all your answers and you’re not going to be getting as many confirmations from outside sources. Your heart is honored, accurate and will carry you. You are a shining light in this field. Don’t keep that light small.” I was like, “Definitely not. You knew me and all of that.”
You are a shining light in this field. Don’t keep that light small.
It still took me another year to leave my day job and come back to South Africa. I worked in conservation for two years before I finally leaped. The benefit of the coaching and the mentoring like you guys are offering is what builds continuity and belief in what is real. I found that so helpful. Slowly, I found new human friends who also believed in this. It’s so important to have a sense of community around it.
It’s unlikely for most to be their existing families and social connections or colleagues but it’s so important for us to be reflected to, witnessed, heard and tell our stories. When I was telling stories around the campfire on occasion, I also learned to develop the attitude inside myself that this is a story. It didn’t matter to me whether folks believed it or not. A story may as well be fantastical. A lot of these connections and intuitive communications do feel like being a child again.
I’m a child again in the middle of the most amazing theory story with the fireflies and seeing the world through the grasses. As you mentioned, Bonnie, lying down where the animal lies. It feels like that because that is the more full spectrum of reality. I treated my recounting of some of these things as a story that the people could take or leave it. The very important thing I learned along the way is that it’s not my message to edit.
Out of any sense of shyness, fear of repercussions or looking bad, if I were holding back from retailing an animal’s truth when it needs to be known, then I’m not in integrity. Ultimately, that love for the animal, the plant or the environment is what kept me saying and putting myself out on the limb. Who am I to stop and impede the flow of truth when it needs to be passed on in case something might be able to be done or more understanding can be gained by the parties concerned?
That’s so important. That brings us back to this collective consciousness. You said we’ll come back and talk about that. Maybe this is a moment to talk about that.
Firstly, I majored in Psychology back in the day. I believe that Freud and Jung were good friends and colleagues. They then fell out around this matter of this collective unconscious that Jung was describing and pointing to in so many ways in humans. This was too much for Freud. On some famous train journey, they became sworn enemies. We, humans, are part of the collective unconscious. It’s pretty obvious, particularly in times of pandemic, post-pandemic, mob behavior and all these sorts of things. It’s very well described in humans and it exists elsewhere too. It’s quantum reality. If I am experiencing a procession of ants in my kitchen, I’m not going to have 1,000 individual conversations with 1,000 individual ants.
I will initiate communication from a human perspective. It might feel a bit like a broadcast message. I also, all of life, cannot pick up on our intentions that they can feel and read our heart field. They were here first. I’m living in a rural area, why wouldn’t they be here and why shouldn’t they be here? They get to come in, sterilize everything and destroy nature. I would love to at least live a bit more cooperatively. They have their space and I have mine.
As a broadcast message, I give this feeling of, “Can we find a solution because it’s problematic for my food if you are here?” I’ll ask what their needs are like, “Why are they coming into the house? What’s making them come in?” In this particular case, it’s extreme thirst and dehydration. I then make a plan and I meet their needs in a place that’s more convenient for me.
I go and put out the water every morning and evening for the ants, needing to get into their perspective. I’m not going to put out a dish of water that is deep because they’re going to drown. That’s why I have to do it twice a day because it’s a very shallow plate of water across which our labor is twigs and grasses so that they can find their way to safety, climb out or climb in, stand on the twig and drink from there. There’s some consideration but connecting into a collective unconscious is still a communication.
You’re essentially communicating into the field. All non-humans are very aware of what’s happening in their species collectors, as well as their manifest realities. For example, in the late ‘90s, I trained as a cheetah handler and worked with cheetahs who were in a conservation education program. Cheetahs had been born in captivity so they’d never known free-range life.
Quite frankly, they could think of nothing scarier because they haven’t learned how to hunt and they wouldn’t know how to feed themselves. They were in a very ethical place with plenty of space and so on. Yet when I’m communicating with them, they were very aware of the plight of wild cheetahs and their population numbers plummeting. The threats that the habitat distraction was bringing upon them.
Four of the cheetahs that I worked with were very clear that they wanted to step up and be ambassadors for the sake of their wild cousins and cheetahs in general. They were aware of the life and environmental challenges facing wild cheetahs in different countries than South Africa. It’s the same when communicating with whales. These animals who are living wild are very aware of the conditions in which they’re kind and their veterans are living.
Connecting with the collective consciousness is a great way to understand the themes and challenges or motivations or even their original instructions. What it is they are here to embody? In addition, their individual lived lives. A whale mother who’s busy trying to raise a calf and Puget sound are doing that as well as being connected to consciousness in general and having this more sacred embodiment in this anatomy, life form and condition.
Anna, when you were describing how you entered the space, you close your eyes and find a quiet space. Bonnie, I would love if we could maybe take a moment in the space and invite you may be to do a small imagery exercise with us and see perhaps a picture of what is it that we want to see in this, not humanity, dream.
Not for the whole of humanity but all beings. Sometimes, we often talk about humans. What is the dream for humanity but what about all the other beings? What about all the animals, plants, water and minerals? I wonder if we took a moment to do that. I’ll leave you the space to guide perhaps even a question around that.
I speak image. When you were describing how you work with getting messages, there are different ways that people get different messages. We can do an imagery exercise to see what image and feel it is. It may come in different ways to each of us. We can close our eyes if you want to, Anna. It’s up to you. Watching your breathing, letting it return to its normal rhythm, knowing when we breathe that is normal rhythm and things that have fallen out of place tend to fall back into place.
When we breathe at our normal rhythm, things that have become disordered tend to return to being in order. Imagine that we’re breathing as the three of us being in the same room. We’re holding hands and breathing with each other in this way and feeling the energy moving between us as we breathe. Imagine that we’re breathing with the animals and plants that we love, the still beings, the mineral beings, close friends, family and the people around us that we love, all of the Earth and all that is in it.
The feeling of this moving as we’re holding this space together and holding hands as if we’re in a circle together. As we’re breathing together, look into the center of the circle and see the image or hear what you hear when looking into the center of the circle and see what happens in the center of the circle. When you’ve seen or heard, you can breathe out. Open your eyes see this image for a moment and hold it with open eyes.
Thank you, Bonnie.
I could share what was coming for me. The immediate picture that I had was two circles, almost connected and then I was seeing a bit more and we were four circles together. I kept seeing, what are these four circles? The color was almost burgundy pink, then I heard the word clover. I’m a clover. I typically see green. I don’t know if there is such a color. That was the picture that showed up right away for me. How interesting. There is the word lover in it if you take the C. That was what came up for me.
Anna, what do you want to say?
I had a beautiful image that by virtue of us being in a circle, we somehow grew to represent the whole of humanity. The circle was holding space for. It didn’t feel tight. What was happening in the circle was there were bears and two grasshoppers playing. It felt like, within this circle, there was beautiful freedom and spaciousness. Not just geographical land space but absence strikes space in that for the wild ones, the small and the large to play. It was bringing a lot of joy to us and the humans who were standing behind us, like a giggling joy, beautiful witnessing of play and the animals had the freedom to play.
It’s beautiful. I see a very tall figure that feels very female to me. That becomes this very rooted and tall tree. It’s an open tree for all to be in. There are a lot of beings, birds, insects, fruits and things in the trees. It’s like a tree for all, not a specific kind of tree. It’s very beautiful and bathes in light.
Anna, I have a young son, Adrian. We’ve been having lots of conversations about school, how he goes to school, his attention is not there and how he feels bored. We had to have this conversation with the teacher. He’s not finding himself in the space to settle. He has this constant boldness. He said, “Mom, I know what it is that I want. I’m very clear on that.” I said, “What is it? “I want more play. The school is so boring. I don’t understand why they removed play out of school.”
I had to say it because of what you brought in. What you were also saying about how this work connects you with that child-like energy with that energy. I feel like as we’ve grown up in life, become adults and organized ourselves in organizations and structures, we somehow lose that connection. We lost that sense of play and joy. This is the most important work that we need as humans to engage in at this time.
A joyful heart is important. In my lineage, you can’t work with dreams and with people without a joyful heart.
We could go into so many more depths and conversations here. I wonder, as we close, Anna, if there is any practice or invitation. We can go back to the heart. What is the heart wanting to offer at this moment? What are your calls and invitations?
It is for people to become present and dedicate even one ten-minute slot in a day. It’s ironic to have to structure in unstructured time but just ten minutes to be present. Many of us who live with animals too in recent years have become so imprisoned with them. We get home eventually from our busy days and then get straight onto our devices. We are not there. We’re like these hollow shells. We’re ghosts in the room busy with our machines and the animals might be next to us or watching us.
Be with the non-human realm simply with your attention. If you’re in a twelve-story apartment block, you could be with the sky outside.
We’ve given up on ourselves and they’d be lying off in the corner somewhere because our bodies are there but we are not. Our attention is elsewhere. My invitation is for each to take ten minutes out of a cup of tea and a device. Preferably sitting outdoors, even if it’s on your patio or a chair at your apartment window. Be with the non-human realm simply with your attention. If you’re in a twelve-story apartment block, you could be with the sky outside. Be with that with no devices. Resist the urge to take a photograph over and post it to Instagram. It’s just ten minutes a day being where you are.
Thank you again for being with us.
Thank you very much, Anna.
It’s a great pleasure. It’s beautiful to have these conversations. Bless you and your work. Thank you.
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About Anna Breytenbach
Anna Breytenbach is an internationally acclaimed professional interspecies communicator, based in Europe and practising for 20 years on several continents. Native to South Africa, she holds a degree in Psychology and studied telepathic animal communication with the Assisi Institute in California as well as tracking and mentoring at the Wilderness Awareness School in Seattle. Her work is the subject of the documentary “The Animal Communicator”, watched by millions of people and available on YouTube.
As an experienced master facilitator, Anna focuses on mentoring in a practical manner that reminds us humans of the ways of indigenous nature awareness. She has guided thousands of people to rediscover and develop their natural senses and connection with all species in an honouring manner.
Anna’s consultation work is exclusively with wild places and beings, facilitating peaceful interventions globally via remote work. This includes predator research, wilderness protection, anti-poaching assistance, reforestation initiatives, wildlife management and rehabilitation as well as numerous public appearances as an inspirational speaker.
Anna is inspired by being a voice for animals and natural environments, sharing wild wisdoms for the benefit of all.