To help with meditating, becoming still, and accessing and trusting intuitively derived information:

Angelica: (FES)

Helps to spiritualize thinking forces, to make thinking activity more meditative and spiritual . May be helpful for those who tend to have primarily rational and analytical views of the world and wish to open to spiritual perspectives.

Hound's Tongue: (FES)

Enhances holistic thinking for those who may want to believe in animal communication but still may find it hard to believe in anything less than the scientific, or the measurable.Hound's Tongue restores a sense of wonder and reverence for life, while also helping the soul to think in clear and specific ways about the spiritual dimensions of the physical world. Helps us synthesize left and right brain functions. Enhances spiritual perception of the natural world.

Star Tulip: (FES)

Softens resistance to the spiritual realm; ability to feel soul communion with higher spiritual forces; receptivity to spiritual worlds; especially listening to one's inner voice

Lotus: (FES)

Enhancing and opening spiritual consciousness; openness to higher spiritual awareness

Deerbrush: (FES)

Opens the heart to greater attunement and sensitivity to nature

A Way to the GodSelf: (Desert Alchemy)

This helps us connect with our Higher Self and inner guidance, and to communicate directly with it. This essence also helps heal crises of faith.

Queen of the Night Cactus: (Desert Alchemy)

Facilitates an integrated sense of natural, deep intuition, sensing and feeling, and being in touch with deep inner wisdom. Helps create a sense of deep understanding to our connection with all of creation through sensing and feeling. Helps us trust our intuition and to access the intuitive root of our being to ground subtle energies.

To help connect with souls of animal loved ones on other side:

Forget me Not: (FES)

Deepens our awareness of our spiritual connection with those who have physically died and helps us develop telepathic communication with them. Also facilitates openness to connection with spiritual guides.

To help focus and stay grounded, not get distracted or spacey:

Madia: (FES)

Helps brings about disciplined focus and concentration, to focus and direct energy in a clear and direct manner.

Mugwort: (FES)

Helps us keep grounded and balanced, versus overwhelmed, overly emotional, or out of touch with the physical world while doing psychic work. Keeps us balanced as intuitive faculties open.

To help in general with telepathy:

Cosmos: (FES)

Encourages interspecies communication; helps establish psychic bonds in one-on-one relationships. Harmonizes the thinking and speaking (including telepathic) patterns with the high soul functions, so that the true spirit can shine forth from the personality during conversation.

To help prevent or re-balance distortion and projection when receiving messages:

Queen Anne's Lace: (FES)

In any psychic communication, such as with the animals, distortion and projection can get in the way of receiving clear images and messages. Sometimes our own emotional imbalances can inadvertently get in the way. This essence helps us be emotionally clear and objective in the insight and images we perceive telepathically.

To support having a healthy relationship with our psychic sensitivity:

Sangre de Drago: (Desert Alchemy)

Helps heal wounds we have about opening into our psychic abilities by harmonizing any fear about it. Helps us understand this natural part of us without fearing or repressing it, and trusting our own intuitive sense. It helps us use our psychic abilities with appropriate boundaries and ethics in two ways.

• One, it helps protect us from being bombarded helplessly by psychic information and impressions about others. It supports the appropriate intention to use psychic abilities only when we choose to do so. It helps us learn how to decide what to let into our conscious awareness and what to keep out.

• Two, it helps us not overstep our bounds in gathering psychic information about others without their request that we do so. An extremely important ethic in animal communication work is to not initiate, gather or even be open to information from domestic animals unless their human asks us to do so. This essence supports this ethic and helps the person who is having trouble turning their psychic abilities on and off to do so with conscious discernment.

To deepen empathy:

Yellow Star Tulip: (FES)

This lovely essence helps us experience deep empathy and receptivity to the feelings and experiences of others. It enable us to make sensitive contact with others and truly learn from them. It helps us intuit the deeper meaning and messages of other beings.

Vine: (FES)

Can help clear blocks to communication for those who may still see animals as hierarchically lower than humans, feel a need to be dominant over them most of the time, or are more comfortable making command vs. collaborative decisions. These views of our relationship with animals can block receiving clear messages and resolving problems over the long term.

To provide protection from the emotions and energy of others:

Golden Yarrow: (FES)

This essence is not as much about taking on others' energy, as the Pink Yarrow is, but more about helping us not feel drained in the face of so much energy of others. Very sensitive souls at times may shy away from exposure to and intimacy with others because doing so often makes them feel as if they lose part of themselves in the process. Golden Yarrow helps us know that we can preserve the integrity of the Self, even when involved with others, that we don't have to isolate and withdraw to feel safely ourselves.

Pink Yarrow: (FES)

This is a classic essence for emotional protection. For those of us who can be sponges for others' energy, who are naturally empathic or sensitive, it helps us create appropriate emotional boundaries. It allows us to feel authentic compassion and connection with others (animals and people) without dysfunctional merging with, or taking on their pain or other energy.

To help with overwhelm when witnessing harm to animals, or taking on
their pain as one's responsibility:

Glassy Hyacinth: (FES)

This essence has been used successfully to help both survivors and relief workers in war zones. For those who witness or hear about abhorrent cruelty, violence, depravity or carnage, it restores strength and hope to the soul. Because of the overwhelming and horrific nature of many traumas, it's normal to block our deepest feelings of response. But internalizing the horror of trauma can only be short term, it is bound to come back later as more complicated post traumatic stress. There is no escaping the need to process the emotional pain of seeing or hearing about terrible things that happen to animals. Glassy Hyacinth helps us process our pain with gentleness. It restores our equilibrium, heals our hearts so we can feel inner peace despite the unfinished work of changing the world for animals.

Cow Parsnip: (Desert Alchemy)

The cow parsnip personality has a highly caring nature and often takes on the feelings, thoughts and even physical energy of others. They can't bear to see others suffer and often feel a deep inner need to change or fix others and feel responsible for making the world conform to their own sense of rightness. It's hard for them to accept that they cannot and should not attempt to intervene in every situation of suffering they come across. This essence helps teach sensitive individuals with strong psychic or telepathic skills to learn to use these abilities with appropriate boundaries, rather than imposing their knowledge or help on others. It brings a deep sense of inner strength and trust in the universe to provide help to others when it is not appropriate for us to do so.

Red Chestnut: (FES)

Is very helpful when we feel obsessive fear or worry that we have not done enough, that it's our job to help every animal we hear about and that if we don't we've failed. It is also particularly helpful for those who feel they must “save them all” and feel guilty when they can't. Red Chestnut helps us let go of an over-exaggerated sense of obligation that goes beyond what any one person can do, or a drive to help others at the cost of ourselves. It helps us know when we've “done enough”--for that day, or for that animal. It helps us remember that it is OK for us to have a life for ourselves, beyond giving to animals or others. Red Chestnut can also deepen and restore our trust in a Divine source of support for the animals we love, helping us remember we are not their only source support. Helps us trust in the wisdom of the other's soul.