Kundalini Splendor

Stephanie Marohn is one of my oldest and dearest friends. She is an author, editor, animal lover, and energy medicine animal healer. She oversees her own animal rescue center located north of San Francisco, and I love visiting her there where she is surrounded by her beloved four leggeds--mostly large animals such as sheep, donkeys, and even a miniature horse, all of whom she has rescued from abusive or neglectful circumstances.

Stephanie has written a book on her experiences operating her shelter (now available everywhere, including bookstores and Amazon).. It has already attracted a lot of notice, and has even been adopted by some of the biggest book clubs. Stephanie is one who offers authentic love to the world and all of its creatures.

Here is an article and excerpt from her book. Be sure to buy it!
Also, visit her website at: http://www.stephaniemarohn.com/


What the Animals Taught Me: Stories of Love and Healing from a Farm Animal Sanctuary
by Stephanie Marohn
Posted by: DailyOM

What the Animals Taught Me is a collection of stories about rescued farm animals in a shelter in Sonoma County, California, and what these animals can teach us. Each story illuminates how animals can help us see and embrace others as they truly are and reconnect us with the natural world.

Wishing to escape the urban rat race, freelance writer and editor Stephanie Marohn moved to rural northern California in 1993. Life was sweet. She was a busy freelancer. In return for reduced rent, she fed and cared for two horses and a donkey. Her life was full.

And then, more farm animals started to appear: a miniature white horse, a donkey, sheep, chickens, followed by deer and other wildlife. Each one needed sanctuary either from abuse, physical injury, or neglect. Marohn took each animal in and gradually turned her 10-acre spread into an animal sanctuary.

Each chapter of What the Animals Taught Me focuses on the story of a particular animal that became part of Marohn's life. She shares what she learned from the sheep she rescued from an animal collector, the abused donkey she helped nurse back to health, and many others to remind us that animals have much to teach us about love, compassion, trust, and so many of the qualities we so often try to cultivate in ourselves.

A deeply inspiring collection, What the Animals Taught Me awakens our hearts and reminds us that our best life teachers sometimes come covered in fur.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1

Unconditional Love Lesson #1:
Letting Go of Control

It was twelve years ago t h at Pegasus began my training in the Way of the Horse and she is still my daily companion on that path. With her, I have learned how to walk the line between confidence and dominance. Like many animal lovers, I had always been reluctant to exert my wishes on the animals under my care. Who am I to decide what they need to do? I would say. You might be able to get away with that approach when it comes to a cat or a small dog. So the cat gets up on the table. So the dog doesn’t always come right away when called. No big deal when safety isn’t involved. But out in the pasture, with large animals who can hurt you, unintentionally or not, you have to step firmly into the leadership role.

With animals, what I had to learn was the difference between domination and wise guidance so I could be comfortable stepping up to the leadership plate. With Pegasus, I discovered that truly wise leadership operates through cooperation and harmony. Over time, I deepened my ability to create this with all the animals in my care.

Sadly, the concept of leading through cooperation and harmony is rare in the equestrian world. Many horse people are all about dominance and rule when it comes to their horses. Recently, I was walking with a friend on a forest trail when a woman in the saddle on an obviously distressed horse came down the trail toward us. The horse was wideeyed, neighing, dancing sideways, turning, and otherwise attempting to escape the tightly reined-in hold the rider was trying to maintain. As they passed us, the rider whipped the horse’s neck with a riding crop. I have always hated cruelty toward animals, and seeing it can send me into fierce rage.

In past years, before the animals opened my heart to all beings, I would probably have yelled at the woman, hotly berating her for her abusive treatment of the horse. In my righteous anger, I failed to see the irony of such a reaction— a person mistreating an animal, me mistreating that person. My heart was as closed to the person as the person’s was to the animal. In my deep upset over abuse of animals, I withdrew all caring for the human involved. I didn’t feel such a person deserved to be treated with respect.

But it was different on the trail that day. As the rider passed us, I sent love to the mare with the fervent prayer that the situation would change for her. I also sent love to the rider because I knew she was the one who needed to change. I have the animals to thank for this being my first and instinctual response. I had fully taken in what they had taught me about unconditional love.

Then the rider pulled the horse up just past us, forced the horse around, and struggled to keep her in place. I approached slowly and asked if I could greet the horse.
She nodded and I put a hand out to the mare. The mare was too agitated to interact and I could see her anxiety rising. She was nearly out of her head with it.

I began to talk quietly with the woman. In the conversation that followed, she expressed her frustration that the mare just wanted to get back to the barn and her herd and that she often resisted the woman’s commands. The woman was forcing the horse to stand facing back up the trail. She was determined that the horse would give in and relax before she turned her around and let her head for home. There was no way that horse was going to relax under all that anger flowing from the person astride her. I could see the situation was escalating as the angry rider continued to try to regain control and the horse became more upset.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your ultimate goal here?” I inquired, keeping my voice calm with no note of criticism.

“I win, win, win,” she said, without hesitation.

And there is the problem, I thought. But I said, “Have you considered that cooperation might be a better basis for a relationship?”

The woman must have taken that in some, because when I suggested that the situation might change if she dismounted and helped the mare calm down, she did. I was thinking how awful it must be for a horse to have on her back a rider whose motivation is to win, win, win, with no thought of what is good for the horse or how distressing that angry, controlling energy must feel coming through the saddle, the stirrups, the reins, and the riding crop into the horse’s body with no means for the horse to escape it aside from throwing the rider. The horse either cared enough about her rider not to do that or had been severely punished for it in the past.

When the woman dismounted, I saw the utter relief in the horse’s body. She began to calm immediately. Soon the woman allowed the horse to turn for the walk back to the barn.

Before the woman went, I thanked her for letting me talk with her. I was truly grateful for how open she had been. She didn’t know me, but yet she had been willing to listen, even in her own obvious distress. I think she was willing to listen to me because I approached her with caring and compassion, rather than with the need to teach her or berate her. What I felt toward her was real and she could feel it; it wouldn’t have worked if I had had rage in my heart, but I had put on a show of compassion. I wanted her to stop sending all that angry energy into the horse, but it would work no better with her than with the horse to get angry and yell at her, be fakely nice, or otherwise alienate her with attempts at control. I had to try to elicit her cooperation.

I succeeded to a point, but that woman and her horse stayed on my mind for the rest of that day and days afterward. I thought of all that I could have said, should have said to help her see another way of being with her horse.

This is what I wish I had said: Can any relationship with anybody—animal or human—work when the motivation of one of the members in the relationship is to win, win, win? That motivation is all about controlling the other, rather than considering what is in the other’s best interests. How can we feel good about a relationship when we know that the other just wants to win? That kind of win means someone has to lose. For a relationship to thrive, there must be a way for both members to win. And that winning can simply be defined as having found a way to work beautifully together. Cooperation and harmony, not control, is the motivation and the goal.

As I see it, humans’ attempts to control arise out of fear and pain or, more accurately, the desire to keep from feeling fear and pain. In the case of the rider on the trail, perhaps she did not know how afraid she was, trying and failing to control this large animal. Anger often covers fear. But the attempt to control another only makes us feel worse, as it further closes our hearts. To open our hearts, we must let go of control, of trying to control others and our circumstances. When we do this, we have taken the first step toward being able to love unconditionally, the ultimate in harmonious relationships. When we love unconditionally, everything just works better.

Loving unconditionally doesn’t mean, however, that we have no requirements in our relationships. I needed Pegasus to accept the halter so I could maintain her safety and her health. I needed to find another way besides force to reach that goal. Eliciting her cooperation by learning to speak her language, being clear in my objectives, and coming from a place of love and an open heart was that way. Getting angry at her seeming lack of acquiescence would only have entrenched us in a negative cycle that would have closed both our hearts and created years of problems (the woman on the trail was in such a negative cycle with her horse). At the same time, continuing to cry in the pasture, to fold before the task of building cooperation, would also have stalled (sorry!) our relationship.

Developing cooperation requires creativity. When I visited an animal sanctuary in New Zealand, I looked with wonder at all the animals accompanying the director and me as she showed me around—dogs, cats, chickens, baby goats, even rabbits. I asked how she had gotten the dogs not to chase the other animals. “I made what I was doing much more interesting,” she said.

Developing cooperation requires more time than ruling by coercion does, but the rewards are great and ever expanding. You may be quickly able to bend an animal to your will using fear and force, but once you see what horses (or dogs or any other beings) who exist in cooperation with humans rather than under their dominion are like, you will never be tempted to go back to the old way of control. (And after my experience with the rider on the trail, I also can’t imagine going back to my old way of raging at someone who is mistreating an animal.) Letting go of the need to dominate allows trust and love to blossom. It is a basic lesson in learning to open the heart and love unconditionally. Loving unconditionally means we do not predicate our love on the other doing what we want. Loving unconditionally means we work together for the highest good of both of us. To enter the realm of unconditional love, we let go of our desire to control, and focus instead on our desire to connect and communicate. And soon, a whole field of flowers is blooming before us.


Copyright © 2012 What the Animals Taught Me by Stephanie Marohn.