At Animal Reverence Our Mission is Simple
Deep attunement, with reverence, to the whole animal, mind, voice, heart, and spirit of animals and to restore balance, harmony, healing, and wise relationships with humans and their animal companions.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
-Mahatma Gandhi
Animal Reverence means respect, humility, and honor. At Animal Reverence, we recognize animals as sentient beings — aware, emotional, intelligent, and exceptionally responsive to their environments and relationships. Our work bridges science and sensitivity, psychology and intuition, behavior and energy.Our offering exists to honor and heal the profound emotional bond between humans and animals. These relationships are not secondary to our lives—they are formative, regulating, exquisitely meaningful, and mutually healing. When harm, grief, or disconnection enters the bond, it is felt on both sides.We offer deep presence rooted in benevolence, curiosity, and respect, where mutual healing can begin to unfold between species. Our mission is to tend the relationship itself, supporting both human and animal hearts as they find their way back to safety, connection, and mutual care. We currently offer services in the greater Eugene, Oregon area.
Animal Reverence IS:
A practice of deep mutual attunement between human and animal
Relational work that honors both the human and animal companion as participants in healing
Rooted in animal psychology, interspecies communication, and energetic and nervous system regulation
Complementary to holistic veterinary, nutrition, and rehabilitative care
Animal Reverence IS NOT:
Obedience training or behavioral correction
Exclusively focused on fixing the animal
A replacement for veterinary care
Predictive — we work with what is present now, not lines of trajectory or what is coming in the future
Click to book a session now or continue reading more below about our compassionate, integrative approach.
My Story
Inspiration
When Kitcat, my beloved cat and meditation companion passed in 2023 my promise to him was that I would continue my animal healing studies and expand my healing work with animals. Although my primary profession has been as a psychotherapist, I have always used alternative modalities including animal and equine assisted therapy. Through this work, I realized how the human-centric world of healing did not sufficiently consider the psychological wellbeing or healing of the animals. I envisioned and dedicated myself to creating an approach that promoted mutual healing, cultivation of wise relationships, and deep interconnectivity between humans and animals.
Philosophy
My lifelong resonance with animals has inspired formal training beyond animal and equine assisted therapy. I hold a post-graduate certificate in Applied Animal behavior and have pursued advanced training in animal communication, animal psychology, animal Reiki, and The Trust Technique. The work that I do with animals is a combination of evaluating the quality of the human/animal bond, the temperament of the animal, animal communication, animal psychology, and animal energy work. In our work together, I invite you as your animal’s human companion to be intimately involved in their healing—just as a parent is central to a child’s healing process. Our time together will consist of deep presence and guided visual and energetic practices individually and mutually. The primary goal in this work is to cultivate wise relationships between human and animal companions to foster healing for each human-animal pair but also to transform and evolve human and animal relationships in the world.
History
Growing up on an old homestead farm which backed to the national forest in rural Eastern Washington, we had farm animals like horses, chickens, pigs, dogs, and a barn full of feral cats. I spent my days outside in the pasture and the forest, immersed in the magical world of animals and nature. Animals were my daily companions and felt like family. I learned their animal language and I felt unconditionally welcome and understood by the animals without ever having to speak any words. Even though each of the animals and I all spoke different languages and often didn’t communicate with sounds at all, we seemed to understand each other and lived in harmony. Rather than experiencing myself as human and them as animals, I felt like another species with a different perspective and language. That magical interconnectivity and my deep love and kinship with animals has never faded.
Animal Psychology
Emotional and Conscious Life of Animals
Animals are not instinct-driven objects with behaviors to “fix”. Rather than targeting behaviors, we attend to what those behaviors are communicating—anxiety, reactivity, shutdown, hypervigilance, aggression, and grief as adaptive responses shaped by environment, history, and relational context.Animals are aware beings with perception, memory, attachment, emotions, preferences, relational bonds, and trauma responses. As sentient beings, animals feel, interpret, remember, form meaning, and respond to energy and intention.Animal Psychology focuses on:
The inner mind, heart, and life of your animal
Emotional complexity
Nervous system regulation
Attachment dynamics between animals and their human companions
Behavioral patterns shaped by lived experiences, relationships, and environments
Trauma imprinting and recovery
Our work helps uncover the why beneath the behavior so that true healing — not just management — can occur.“Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It’s not surprising that animals—especially, but not only, mammals—share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions. In many ways, human emotions are the gifts of our animal ancestors."
-Marc Bekoff, Animal Biologist, Ecologist, and AuthorFor more info, explore this research compiled by Marc Bekoff:
Animal Emotions: Exploring Passionate Natures
Animal Communication
Grounded, Resonant Interspecies Dialogue
Animal communication is often misunderstood as abstract or fantastical rather than real. At Animal Reverence, we approach it from an animist perspective—acknowledging that true understanding emerges from deep attunement and mutual trust and respect. Animals communicate with their own kind and other species through body language, behavioral shifts, emotional signaling, sensory awareness, and energetic resonance. To communicate with animals is to comprehend their language as whole and complete, releasing the assumption of human dominance and animal inferiority.Animal Communication focuses on:
Decreasing confusion and rebuilding trust
Clarifying behavioral misunderstandings
Understanding emotional and internal experiences
Identifying contextual stressors or environmental discomfort
Supporting transitions—new homes, grief, illness, end-of-life
Harmonizing human-animal relationships
Research has shown that birds, dogs, deer, plants, trees, mushrooms, and more all have the capability to understand interspecies communication when a predator is in the environment, when an animal is injured, or when there is food. Why wouldn’t it be possible for animals and humans to understand each other’s language? Can we get quiet enough inside and slow our energy, rhythm/pace, and our minds to listen, hear and understand and tend to each other’s needs.“It isn’t about healing animals, it is about healing the relationship between animals and humans. We need to realize that we were born on this Earth at the same time and there has been an agreement to be companions to each other and learn from and with each other.”
-Penelope Smith, Grandmother of Animal Communication and AuthorFor more info, explore this article from Natural Habitat Adventures and World Wildlife Fund:
8 Quirky Ways that Animals Communicate
Animal Energy Healing
Regulating the Nervous System & Restoring Coherence
Animals are highly sensitive to environmental, relational, and energetic shifts. Intuitive perception allows us to sense what is not immediately visible — emotional undercurrents, relational tension, internal states, or energetic holding patterns that behavior alone may not fully express. We use Reiki (universal life-force energy) and other forms of energy healing in our practice.Stress accumulates not only psychologically but physiologically and energetically. This work is gentle and non-invasive and focuses on restoring energetic coherence and balance. This shift in energy then supports the animal’s return to balance physically, psychologically, behaviorally and relationally improving the human animal connection.Animal energy healing supports:
Energetic balance
Somatic emotional release
Nervous system regulation
Comfort from pain
Post-surgical or illness healing
End-of-life comfort
Ultimately, Reiki encourages humans and animals to release anger, worry, fear, and stress to uncover their optimal inner qualities of peace, gratitude, and compassion to support healing.“This is not about techniques to fix animals. It’s about becoming a calm, grounded, compassionate presence they choose to trust…that allows them to relax and feel safe enough for their bodies and minds to begin healing from within.”
-Kathleen Prasad, Reiki Master, Founder of Let Animals Lead, Shelter Animal Reiki Association (SARA), and Animal Reiki Source, and AuthorFor more info explore this research about the benefits of Reiki:
Reiki Is Better Than Placebo and Has Broad Potential as a Complementary Health Therapy
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