The Deepest relationship
The deepest relationship we can have is a relationship with an animal, and I don’t mean having a “pet.”
I mean, a relationship with an animal.
That may sound crazy, and to be honest, 20 years ago I would have said the same thing. I would have said that it is the relationship with our children that has the potential to be the deepest. I have spent the entirety of the past 22 and 17 years, respectively, devoting my life, my heart, my work, my time, my energy and my love to my daughter and son.
Not a single day has passed where I haven’t told them how much I love them.
Not a single day have I ever felt like being a mother was “too much.”
I have loved my children with all my heart and soul from the moment their soul connected to my body at conception.
When our kids are young, they are completely dependent on us. They require care 24/7 and they are completely vulnerable. But eventually, they grow up. They become strong and empowered and independent - if you parented them the right way. It’s not that they don’t need anything, they surely do. But they become capable beings as they embrace their own sovereignty and empowerment as they reach adulthood.
As parents we open the doorway to this world for our children at birth. Then we raise, guide, love and watch them grow into magnificent adults. And when the time comes, they help us close the doorway to this world as we leave them behind to carry on their soul’s journey.
A relationship with an animal is profoundly different. Most animals have shorter lives than us. If we bring them into our home, we care for them from the early stages of their lives, and continue to care for them as they get older, age, decline and then pass on. And we KNOW this. We already know that in the normal course of things, we will outlive them. Animals are ALWAYS vulnerable. They are ALWAYS at our mercy, dependent on our kindness, our love, our protection, our care, for their ENTIRE lives…unlike our children. Children are vulnerable as children, but then they reach adulthood. As an adult you get to make choices on who is and is not in your life. If your parents were abusive, don’t respect you, or otherwise engage in toxic behavior, you have the power to cut all ties and create a life of safety and peace away from the oppressors.
Animals don’t have that power.
Humans abuse animals for entertainment (horseback riding, circuses, aquariums, equestrian sports, rodeo), to make money (backyard breeders, greyhound racing, horse racing), for experiments (animal testing on consumer products and in medical schools) and the obvious, to consume their flesh in order to satisfy a gluttonous blood lust.
It is BECAUSE animals are forever vulnerable that allows humans to abuse them the way they do. Unlike humans, animals never grow out of the vulnerability regardless of their age.
Animals show us the heart of darkness within humanity
There are hundreds of millions of people with pets who “love” and care for them. In many homes the animal is a fun thing to have, to play with, and to connect with. But the animal is not looked at as a teacher, a guide, a wayshower to the heart of unconditional love. I live next door to a couple who have a dog. They also have adult children who live on the mainland. They seem to care for their dog and I see them walk her frequently. She appears healthy, and they take her kayaking at the beach. When they first got her they were with her all the time. She was like the child they wanted after they became empty nesters. Their bond seemed tight.
But then, their daughter had a child. They’re grandparents now and they travel to the mainland quite a bit. And when they do they leave their dog at home. Alone. A neighborhood boy comes by twice a day to walk, feed and play with her. During the day she barks a lot. You can hear the fear in her voice. The loneliness. She spends almost the whole day without anyone. My heart breaks. Most people would say “this dog has it good, she lives in a multimillion dollar house, has healthy food, parents who love her and who make sure she is taken care of when they’re gone.”
But the truth is, these parents have missed the plot. Their dog is not a thing to be “dealt with” when they go away. She is a living, breathing, unconditionally loving being here to MIRROR for them all of their failures. And yes I mean failures. I am speaking from experience here. I was a failure too, for which I am sad, heartbroken and have found it excruciatingly hard to forgive myself.
My ex-husband and I had two dogs when I was in law school. We “loved” them. They were both shih-tzu/Lhasa mix dogs that we got at a pet store. At the time I had zero idea about the abuses that go on behind the scenes of pet stores, and thankfully in most places they are now banned. We got our female dog first and had no intention of getting a second. But one day we were at the mall and had seen a puppy who seemed way to big for his cage behind glass. He was much bigger than the other dogs even though he was a small breed dog. He could barely turn around in the cage. The store manager told me that his feet were deformed and that he was 6 months old, whereas most of the other puppies were only 8 weeks old. That’s why he was so big. I asked to have him taken out. When I put him on the floor he could barely walk. His paws were facing inwards towards each other because he had been standing on the metal grate inside the cage, rather than a flat surface. And, as he grew, there was no room for him to have normal movement. We took him home that night.
Withing a few weeks his paws straightened out and he was the most gentle, loveable and playful puppy you could imagine. We spent as much time as we could with him and when I was in school I would often come home during the day to play with both dogs in between classes. Fast forward 3 years and I was working on Wall Street. There was no coming home in the middle of the day. There was only mornings and nights with our fur babies. During the huge gap in between, they were alone in the apartment. My ex-husband was working full time and he commuted for work so his travel time added hours to his already long day. My days were endlessly long.
I felt “bad” but also thought there’s nothing I can do and went on with my life and career. No one batted an eyelash because most people thought our dogs were" “spoiled” and “overly” taken care of.
But when my daughter was born a month after 9/11, the MOMENT I looked into her eyes, I knew things had shifted. After my maternity leave which was 6 months, and then un-used vacation time tacked on to the end of that for another several months, I went back to work when my daughter was almost a year old, thinking everything would be back to “normal.” But I realized on day one I could not be away from her all day, so I had my husband bring her to me so I could breastfeed her at the office. They would both end up hanging out in my office for most of the day and I found it impossible to get any work done.
All I wanted to do was love my child.
Needless to say that lasted only a couple of weeks. I wasn’t willing to leave my daughter for a 70+ hour week. And I wasn’t willing to pass of the role of caretaking to a complete stranger like the other women at my law firm had done. No. This was my CHILD. I felt her soul and her heart with all my being and I could feel that my lifepath had now been dramatically altered by God. What was once so important to me failed to have meaning anymore. Her life meant more to me than my own and somehow the idea of closing 50 billion dollar deals for Mobil and Exxon held zero relevance anymore.
It seemed perfectly understandable to me at the time that motherhood - including pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding - would be so profoundly impactful that I would leave my job. It is likely that anyone would have considered me insane had I done something like that for a dog. In fact, many people thought it was insane that I did it for my own baby. By far, and I mean by REALLY far, leaving that career and making the choice to focus on LOVE was the best decision I could have ever made. It was the decision that catapulted me into my dream life that I once believed I could only live once I was old and retired. But that decision to choose LOVING ANOTHER BEING allowed God to open the doorway to the past 20 years of living my dreams in paradise with so much love, abundance, passion and joy.
My dad taught me to ALWAYS CHOOSE LOVE
My dad always told me that every important decision in life would present a conflict between heart and mind. Love and Ego. Always choose love he would tell me, no matter what. And I always thought I did.
But I was Wrong.
I only chose love when it was glaringly obvious. I only chose love when it smacked me in the face. The explosion of love that I felt when I looked into my daughter’s eyes made it easy to leave my life as a Wall Street Attorney, and the explosion - both literal and figurative - of 9/11 helped. I could feel so viscerally that God was moving me out of that timeline and into a new one. Childbirth for me was a radical mind-altering journey into the depths of my soul. The prestige, honor, money and excitement of Wall Street couldn’t hold a candle to motherhood. It was as if I had been swimming in a shallow pool before, and now I was diving into an ocean of unknowable depths.
I teach that children are our Buddha’s because motherhood is not about us doing them any favors by being great mothers. Our children do US the favor by allowing us to plumb the depths of our own souls, finding things that are only discoverable when you birth a whole being into this plane of existence.
So where did I NOT choose LOVE? With my dogs. I never even gave it a second thought to be honest. It seemed so normal and acceptable to leave my dogs at home all day every day. I was ignorant and blind. I was unaware that they were my teachers. But I know 100% I failed them. No one could ever convince me different. My husband has said to me “but you loved them and they had a great life. you rescued Dakota from the cage and he probably would have been killed if you hadn’t adopted him.”
Sure. Those statements have some truth. But two truths can coexist, and the second truth that will never not be true is that I failed them. And ultimately I failed myself for not seeing my own ego in it all. I was already a vegan for God’s sake. I had already realized that murdering animals for gluttony was evil and dark. But here’s the thing. Often when we become “enlightened” on a subject, it makes us even more blind to deeper nuances and lessons on that very same subject. I thought that because I donated a lot of money to animal causes, spoke about my veganism openly, and refused to buy household or cosmetic products that were tested on animals I was “doing my part.”
But even the idea of “doing our part” is an egoic myth. It’s something that makes us feel better about ourselves, which is ego, EVEN WHEN WE ARE DOING IT FOR THE RIGHT REASONS. We are not here to do our part. If you haven’t heard me say this, I’m saying it again: Neither earth nor animals NEED us to “help them” or “save them.” We are here to HEAL OURSELVES. We are here to SEE OUR DARKNESS and ERADICATE IT.
We are not saviors of the vulnerable. The vulnerable would have nothing to worry about, ever, if we as humans healed our shit. That’s the reality that so few seem to understand.
There would be no animal abuse, no child abuse, no domestic violence, no war, no poverty, and no slavery if every single human had the courage to dive into the depths of their soul and bring all of their shadow to the surface where it can be healed in the light of day.
We would live in true peace and harmony if every person chose love over ego every single time
That is why a relationship with an animal is the deepest relationship we can have. Choosing love over ego when it comes to an animal is a lot harder in this world. It is somewhat socially acceptable to choose loving your child over everything else. I say somewhat because it’s still not widely encouraged.
Many people balk at the idea of homeschool, creating every excuse in the book, ignoring the indoctrination, and saying things like “my kids don’t want that.” Many people still send their kids off to babysitters, camps and daycares, all of which are socially acceptable and often encouraged. It is not lost on me that there are many single parents who are responsible for feeding their children and who believe that it’s not possible to choose love in every situation when it comes to their kids. But I know different. I have a student who was a very poor single mother of four children, who was also a victim of domestic violence, who had escaped a wacko abusive Christian cult, who chose love, homeschooled all four of her kids, created her own business, and today has four of the most amazing young adults/teenagers of anyone I know.
But the point here is that even with CHILDREN, the dark heart of humanity makes it difficult for people to choose love in every situation, and with animals, it’s even harder. That’s why animals have the ability to offer us our deepest relationships. Choosing to care for an animal who remains vulnerable for their ENTIRE lives is a profound journey to the depths if you are able to understand the gift you are being given. Once you can reframe your ego and understand that you are not doing something miraculous for that animal. Caring for an animal is nothing worthy of praise on your part, it is a blessing to have the chance to explore your own limitations on love, your own darkness, and to root out the places in your ego where you still feel superior.
You see, that’s the fundamental flaw with humanity - that we believe we are superior. That we believe our lives are more meaningful than non humans.
This flaw provides the foundation for all the ills in society. Rich people who believe their lives are more valuable than poor people. White people who believe their lives are more valuable than black people or vice versa. Educated people believing they are superior to uneducated people. One religion believing it is special and chosen and is justified in murdering others in the name of “god.” Parents believing they are superior to their children. Society believing youth is superior to the elderly.
We have systematically woven darkness into every fabric of our existence by buying into the delusion that we matter more. Than anyone.
Animals are here to show us, to teach us, to lead us and to guide us into - and hopefully out of - our own contributions to the evil in this world. None of us likes to think of ourselves as purveyors of evil. But as humans, we ARE. The Luciferian Agenda makes sure of it. When Lucifer left God’s side it was because he believed in his superiority. He was in fact brilliant and the most light-bearing angel in God’s domain. In fact, his very name means light bearer. He allowed his magnificence to blind him to the truth - that he was not superior to anyone. He had just been given GIFTS. He abused those gifts, just like we as humans abuse ours. We are encouraged to abuse our gifts in the 3D world and it takes a willingness to humble ourselves to get out of that trap.
That’s why I will never lose sight of my personal failures when it comes to animals.
I have learned to forgive myself, but I will never forget how I chose ego over love. The irony in all of this is that it actually SERVES us when we choose love. We just can’t see until after we have made the choice. My decision to choose loving my daughter over my career is the ONLY WAY God was able to usher me into my current timeline. A timeline I once only thought was a dream. Every bit of radical joy, abundance, prosperity, happiness, fun, passion and love I have in my life is BECAUSE I chose LOVE.
And my relationships with animals since that time has profoundly expanded my work, my vision, my lifepath, and mostly, my peace.
I truly believe that when we are really ready to master our spiritual path, we enter into a profoundly different relationship with animals. If you are one of the truly lucky ones, you will get to have a deep relationship with an animal who will show you all the places your ego still rules you. This relationship will purge any remnants of darkness in your shadow and you will experience love in ways that only an animal can teach you.
“As we free others, we become free; as we love others, we are loved; as we encourage others, we are encouraged; as we bless others, we are blessed; as we bring joy and healing to others, we find joy and healing in our lives.”
― Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony