continued, “It has only been five weeks. She’s getting better every day. We can help her; it’s time to do more physical therapy.”
I wrapped my fingers around Apache’s hind limbs to feel her femoral pulses. I looked at the color of her tongue and placed the appropriate needles in her back, hind limbs, and paws, then I connected the electro-acupuncture wires to send a current through the needles. Apache relaxed and enjoyed the attention as Dawn stroked her head.
I hoped to hear some good news and asked about Dawn’s horse. “How’s Poco doing since the horseshoeing clinic?”
“He’s lame. He threw the shoe off his bad foot.”
I had treated Poco off and on for about a year, and he still had an intermittent left front lameness and stood with that foot pointing out in front of the other. I had referred the horse to a lameness expert and horseshoer, who applied a special shoe that Poco promptly threw. The thought of my inability to diagnose and treat Poco’s problem gave me a stomachache. Due to my anxiety over unhealed patients, and the worries of clients, I probably had an ulcer; my heart palpitated; I had chest pain and shortness of breath; and all my joints ached. One of my legs was shorter than the other, and my lower back was in spasms all the time from a protruding disc. I was a mess, and if what the clairvoyant, Dana Xavier, had taught me was true, I needed to heal myself by allowing animals and their humans to accept responsibility for themselves.
Pain educates; we learn best from hard lessons. Sometimes conditions do not heal, and as long as I do the best job I can and have the best intentions, a lack of healing is not my fault. Conversely, I cannot take credit for a cure. I do not heal my patients; healing happens from inside each being, just as skin cells grow to fill in a wound. I am not healing the wound; I am not in control. I do the best I can to clean and protect the wound. I nurture and support the process while trusting that the innate capacity to heal occurs.
That day, I began to accept that I am not responsible for healing. I do the best I can and know that people and animals are working together to learn and may have other plans. I started to let go of judgments about my inability to fix every ailment; higher forces are at work beyond my best intentions. I left praying that Dawn, Candy, Apache, and Poco would receive the healing they each wanted. At the end of Dawn’s long, gravel driveway, a huge snake slithered out of the grass in front of my truck. I stopped and went over to check it out. A bull snake, about five feet in length, turned to face me. He curled with his mouth open and shook his tail like a rattlesnake, a common tactic of the bull snake. He knew that behavior scares things away. He made me look twice — no rattles. He was beautiful and fat, as big around as my arm. Then I saw why he was so defensive. Something had taken a bite out of his side, leaving a hole the size of a chicken egg. Flies hovered over it, the parents of the tiny maggots moving inside the wound.
Part of me wanted to catch him and clean his wound. Yet a deeper part of me knew better, and I heard a voice in my head say, Let it be. There was no redness or swelling, and the skin around the wound was shiny and smooth. He was a healthy fellow. The maggots were keeping infection away, and the clay packed in the lesion made the perfect bandage, like a flexible plaster cast. Nature was healing the bull snake just fine without my help. So, I let him be, knowing that healing is part of the intrinsic quality of life. Snakes entwine the staff in the medical and veterinary emblems, symbolizing healing and transformation. Perhaps this snake was a wounded symbol of healing, an omen intended for me as well as my patients.
A veterinarian faces fear every time he or she meets a vicious dog, a screaming cat, or an aggressive horse. Fear on the animal’s part drives defensive behavior, so we make an effort to proceed gently to calm the animal. I will not win a fight with a horse. Somehow, we animal doctors have to stay calm and confident and convince our patients to cooperate. Animals sense people’s energy. When horses sense fear from a person or other animal, they take advantage and push the other around, biting and such. I learned as a child to hide my fear from horses and act tough. It takes fortitude to keep fear at bay. Thankfully, the majority of animals allow veterinarians to treat them even when the procedures, such as injections, do not feel good. All horses, by virtue of their size, are dangerous. They can knock a person down, bite, kick, strike, and step on feet. A new horse patient often tests me. I have always been amazed at, and grateful for, the many horses that respond to simple verbal commands, like “Stand” or “Quit.” They get the message that I am not intimidated by them, and they obey. The same is true for dogs. A stern, one-word command works like a charm. There have been times when I have been intimidated by uncooperative horses and something unpremeditated has taken over me. Some kind of fortitude sparks a focused energy I send through my eyes and voice so intensely that it convinces those horses to stop misbehaving, and they obey me. Every veterinarian in practice is familiar with the fortitude required to face unfamiliar, growling dogs, hissing cats, and rearing horses.
Fortitude exists in all beings, human and animal, and does not arise out of an intellectual process. It springs from spirit, the invisible force we feel in ourselves and others. It emerges most forcefully when we face danger or a threat. Ever try to restrain an angry cat? Watch out! A cat can channel the fortitude to make two Doberman pinschers back away without touching the feline. The spirit flows through the eyes, and the voice tells those dogs to “back off,” and they do.
In other words, I’ve discovered firsthand that there is more to living beasts than fur and feathers and physical parts, and my journey to explore the spiritual nature of animals is in part an attempt to understand this important component of life.
I first discovered this spirit in myself through martial arts training. By the late 1980s, I had earned a red belt in karate, and I was looking for a new teacher, or sensei, to take me to the brown belt level. The man I hoped would train me was well respected by other karate students in town. He had a fourth-degree black belt in Shotokan karate and was a master of tai qi chuan. He had also been a mercenary soldier. I met him to ask if he would teach me, and he said he wanted to spar. I was not experienced in fighting, especially not against such a powerful man. He stood over six feet tall, with a shaved head and camouflage fatigues. Still, I agreed. Though we wore padded gloves, it still stung when he popped me in the forehead. The blow hurt my neck, which made me mad, and I charged at him with my fists flying. He crossed his arms in front of his face, laughing. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, okay. . . . I’ll teach you. You have brown belt spirit.”
Spirit was the term my teacher used to describe the energy that moved me to go after someone I could never beat. That energy came from inside me without conscious choice. The same energy has exploded out of me at times when a horse behaves dangerously. In moments of intense fear, thought stops and something takes over me, just as it happened when my teacher hit me. I will look the horse in the eye and command, “You stand still!” in an eruption of intense, palpable energy that even frightens me — after the event. Amazingly, the majority of horses obey, stop rearing or pushing me, and I pet them and tell them, “You’re okay.” I understand that they are frightened, too, and they seem to bond with me as if I were their leader. My reactions feel like spirit that arises from some nonmental instinct rather than a learned skill, and it is directed through my eyes and voice, just like an angry cat.
Fear is our first opponent in a fight. It paralyzes us and must be overcome. In karate, I was taught to fight with “no mind.” Thought is too slow; during a fight, there is no time to think about what to do, so the body is trained with hours of repetitive moves to learn how to react when attacked. Furthermore, when I stop thinking, fear dissolves. Whenever I sparred in a no-mind manner, I did not remember what happened. The only memory I had was of the first technique after the command to start and of the last technique before the order to stop. The men in class would tell me how my opponent had me cornered, yet I landed a spinning back fist followed by a back kick, and so on, none of which I could recall.
I also
