What in the world does Velcro have to do with animal communication?! Well, nothing, really. The “Velcro Effect” is just what I call something that happens a lot between people and animals, or between people and other people for that matter.
It has to do with empathy. As defined by the online Mirriam-Webster dictionary, “empathy” is the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.
I’ve talked a lot about empathy in previous posts, but in this post I want to describe how empathy can be like Velcro, so first I will tell you about my own experience when how this works was brought home to me in a BIG way. And it happened in an advanced animal communication workshop.
We were doing an exercise that we were not told the purpose of. Nine of us sat in a circle and each of us looked at the person on our left — naturally at the back of their head, since they too were looking to their left. We were to focus on the person for about 20 or 30 seconds and jot down the first 2, 3, or 4 impressions that came to us. We were not to wonder why, just jot down the impressions.
Suddenly the young woman on my right, someone I had never met before, burst into tears. She was so deeply aggrieved that she had to leave the circle and indeed was incapacitated for several hours following the exercise. Since I, like everyone else, still had no idea what this exercise was about, I didn’t know what had happened.
Once our instructor had helped this girl find a level of comfort and settle down in another room, she came back and we finished the exercise. We went around the circle, each of us reporting the impressions we had received while looking at the person on our left. Most of the words were things like “joy,” “nurturing,” “sadness,” “playfulness,” “service,” etc. Our teacher then asked me if I was grieving. I said no, but that I had been through a very deep and serious period of grief during the previous year.
She then explained what it was we were to learn from the exercise. I paraphrase here (and the Velcro analogy is mine):
When you are tuned-in to another being, the vibrations the two of you share the most at that time will come to the forefront and will be what each of you notices most about the other. Those vibrations magnetize each other and kind of stick together, like Velcro.
She then explained that the girl to my right was in a very deep period of grief, and, since I still had vestiges of grief left in my vibrational field, that is what she picked up the most. My grief, although quelled and in the past, triggered hers actively and caused her to fall apart.
Gee, did I feel terrible. But wow, what a lesson we all learned from that exercise.
How does this apply to animal communication? Well, if you are an empath, or one who has a lot of empathy, it means you are very tuned in to peoples’ and animals’ feelings. And, unfortunately, until you have learned how to control and manage your empathic ability, you are going to experience and feel the emotions and vibrations your subject and you share the most, which may have nothing to do with the subject at hand.
This is not a bad thing, and empathy is a great asset in animal communication. But it is really, really important to understand how it works and to beware of the Velcro Effect, since it kind of has a life of its own and can therefore interfere with what it is you are trying to learn from the animal you are talking to.
In my next post I will relate a very sad story indeed, about someone whose level of empathy became her undoing. Stay tuned.
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