What Animals Know, and We May Not...

Imagine going for your regular doctor's visit~ the nurse has seated you in the exam room and you're waiting (and waiting) for the doc to come in...

The door opens, and a big smile breaks out on your face! Every muscle relaxes and you feel a huge sense of well-being. The doctor comes close and simply by looking in your eyes sees that you've been worrying a lot lately.

The doctor may know that you're epileptic, or that you have developed cancer. Perhaps this doctor knows a better remedy than medication for high blood pressure, or lowering cholesterol, or reducing your risk of heart attack. This doctor may not rule out medications, but would also encourage you to take some unusual steps to imrove your health. And unlike the reaction to most regimens prescribed by doctors, this one would sound like a great idea. This doctor would have you heading home feeling positive and hopeful.

The doctor is a dog~ one we've overlooked as an integral part of people's health care, and our health care system. The doctor might also be a cat, fish, horse, or a myriad of other animals. The doctor doesn't even have to be domesticated to be highly effective.

Animals connect more closely with our spiritual nature, which is an essential part of our living and dying.

Here's a quote from Henry Beston's The Outermost House, first published in 1928.

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

If you have an 'in-house' doctor, take a moment to see what he or she can help you with...

they always give good advice, if we're willing to listen.