Thursday, May 22, 2014

What Do Animals Teach Us about Being Better Humans?


I don’t know about you but some days we look around us and wonder just what the heck mankind is doing.  It is easy to lose hope and to feel lost.  We look around at the destruction of our environment, the horrific ways many of the animals are mistreated or disregarded.  It is easy to see so much that is negative.  Great calamities wrought by a changing climate, weather patterns reeking havoc all over the world – floods, fires, mudslides, drought.  We seem to live in a world of great extremes. 

Yet, the animals have been lovingly guiding us and filling us with hope.  How?  Why?  Because they tell us that they see potential in the human heart that is beyond anything we fully realize.  Many days when I personally lose faith and trust in humanity, my animals will require me to look a little closer.  If anyone deserves the right to have lost faith in us humans, it is the animals.  Yet, they haven’t.  They still believe in opening hearts and trusting.  They still love unconditionally and without judgment.  Those of you with animals in your lives know exactly what we mean.  For many of us, we let animals in our hearts far more deeply than other humans.  I ask people this question a lot.  Why do we let animals in so deeply?  Inevitably they answer, “Because we can trust them.  They love us for who we are.  They don’t judge us.” 

Of course those answers are all true.  But the animals have asked us to look even deeper by asking us these questions – “Why not learn to love each other as we love you?  Why not believe in one another as we believe in you? Why not trust each other, love each other, help each other, believe in one another?  Why do you give up on each other?”

The animals have never separated themselves apart from nature, the environment, the planet, or one another.  They walk this earth knowing that all is connected.  It is humanity that has ostracized itself, disconnected from, and all but forgotten that we are all One and all connected and in this together.  But that can change.  We are awakening to something greater than we understand or comprehend.  When the human heart opens and is allowed to breathe of its true nature, we find our connection and Oneness with all.  The rest of Nature hasn’t walked away from us.  We walked away from that Oneness ourselves. 

And the amazing thing is that all the rest of Nature is waiting to welcome us back into the fold.  In spite of the havoc our indifference causes and has caused, there truly is no separation other than what humanity has perceived of itself for the past millennia.  The animals are looking to us to reach past our own inner pain and suffering and to remember the love and the hope and the Oneness of Life.  And, like the loyal canine companion awaiting our return home, they prepare to welcome us home with freedom and wild abandon of their hearts – celebrating that we are all together again – whole. 


With all the pain we cause them, often thinking that if they can’t speak they must not feel it, or that they do not understand or are less than humans, even with all of that, they still find hope and a reason to bestow their unconditional love on our hearts and try to help us find our way home.  It's as if they try to show us the best of who we are so that we can one day be the best that we can be and to remember the truth of Life – that we are all One.