Madeleine Walker is the kind of person who, when she dreams about being a priestess in ancient Egypt and then coincidentally receives an advertisement for tours to Karnack, books a flight and goes. With An Exchange of Love she asks the reader too to be open to a journey, this one of the mind and imagination.
We must consent to what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief” (or, as Walker herself puts it, “remove the doubting ego”) while we listen to these accounts of animals’ messages about their present illnesses and past lives.
“This may sound like a hallucination,” says Walker at one point, and indeed some readers will dismiss her message as such. Yet all she is working with is “the power of the mind to move and change energy,” and anyone familiar with the writings of the likes of Larry Dossey, Rupert Sheldrake and Deepak Chopra will have no trouble acknowledging that power.
If we look at evolution and trace it backwards in time to the primitive ancestors common to all species (to bacteria, if you trace right back about four billion years to the beginnings of life on Earth), we see that all animals are related. We humans have evolved verbal communication, but we descend from pre-verbal antecedents which still live within us and which we can still access by quieting the chattering mind and awakening other forms of perception.
Many people have experienced intense wordless communication with their pets. “Everyone who is open to the concept of telepathic communication can learn to communicate with every living thing on the planet,” says Walker. Once we grasp the concept that consciousness operates outside time and space (the “non-locality” of mind) then receiving information from past or “parallel” lives seems less unlikely.
Those of us who have experienced apparent past-life visions or sudden messages from the mind of an animal, are often surprised at how quickly such experiences go from seeming preposterous to seeming normal. The very aura of ordinariness, which they quickly acquire, seems to be one of the hallmarks of their genuineness. It is in a tone of ordinariness that Madeline Walker describes her animal communications. There was the dog, for instance, who barked and leapt obsessively at “invisible fears” in the streets of the ancient British town where he lives. He “told” Madeleine that in a past life he worked with a bomb disposal team that had been blown apart. He is aware of “the energies of people that had died” and “trapped spirits” pervading his town and home.
Many of Walker’s subjects are horses, and many transmit mental pictures of being shot, hacked to death and blown up in wars. Walker’s descriptions of horses who hauled weaponry in the trenches of the First War World are heart-rending. Some might theorize that she spontaneously uses her rapport with animals to get at her own unconscious which then serves up a particularly vivid array of imagery. Walker’s own feeling is that the animals are teachers. “I am just a conduit or a vehicle for the information to be relayed.”
What does she then do with this information, which puts her on “a rollercoaster of emotions, ranging from the hilarious to the tragic”? She has learned upon receiving telepathic messages of past or present life experiences of injury and grief, to visualize re-integration of the wounded fragment of body or mind and to transmit energy that calms, acknowledges, re-assures and changes behavior in the animal which stands before her in the present. This process she calls soul-retrieval.
She is doing this work also with the animals’ guardians. They phone her up in the first place of course, and it is often to do with some fear or neurosis within their human companions that the animals are reacting. Time after time Walker is contacted by frantic horsewomen or dog-lovers whose animals suddenly become irrational or unruly, and Walker describes how the animal acts as a medium through which she learns about the owner’s problems or past traumas. Somehow emotion is transmitted spontaneously mind to mind, whether the consciousness that sustains it like a medium harboring cell growth, flickers within a human’s or another animal’s present incarnation.
An Exchange of Love describes dozens of these interactions with Walker’s clients’ animals. She doesn’t use a lot of space to discuss theory, merely explaining that her purpose is “to fully integrate all the pieces of our soul’s evolving jigsaw puzzle.” Some readers might be inspired to look further into the scientific literature dealing with the phenomena that Walker works with, while others might enjoy this book simply as a series of intriguing animal stories. Either way, the book nudges us toward a realization that we are surrounded by other minds that, were we not so narrowly focused on “human reason,” could open new worlds of understanding for us.
Walker ends with an account of swimming with the ones whose minds evolved in the element of Planet Ocean which is still but a dark mystery to us: the dolphins and whales. The cetaceans developed advanced social life and subtle means of communication millions of years before our primate ancestors even ventured out of the trees of Africa. What Walker picked up from the whales was inspiration to work for the good of the planet itself and all its life forms which are in fact unified into what may be called the Greater Life. “The biggest message from the whales,” says Walker, “is to love the greater love.”
Order this book on Amazon.com - An Exchange of Love
Visit: http://www.anexchangeoflove.com/
Publisher: O Books
188 Pages
GreenMuze.com Rating: 
Barbara Julian gives Creative Visualization workshops as a hypnotherapist in Victoria, Canada. Her website is www.ninshupress.ca
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written by Tom , January 21, 2010