Books with Spirit - Horse Riding

Not about horses, this article, but lifting the heart of animal lovers everywhere!

When I was in New Zealand, I was privileged to see three mighty sperm whales on the surface building up their air for the next deep dive into the Kaikoura canyon for feeding.  Oh, the absolute wonder of them!

Towards the end of the tour the expert whale guide was telling us about dumped whale meat being sold in some school canteen (I think that’s what he said, my memory could be affected by my stomach heaving at the time) for $3 a burger (that bit I remember clearly!)  At first I was horrified and then later I realized what this means.

Congratulations to the Japanese people!  So many of them have obviously rejected the expensive delicacy of whale meat (voting with their wallets), that the sellers of the whale meat had to dump it cheaply to get rid of it.  This voting with their wallets will make it economically unviable to hunt the whales.

That means that the consumer decisions of the Japanese people IS starting to work to get the result that we’re all after – the stopping of wholesale hunting and slaughtering of whales by Japan.  Good on them, keep up the good work! 

If the school kids reject it too, that will speed up the process of making commercial whaling extinct. The power of our wallets is HUGE. 

Send this blog around the world and let’s get behind the wonderful Japanese people who are doing this and encourage more to join them. 

Wooo…..hoooo!

Apples is a sweet, generous and very quiet standardbred, used by my New Zealand host Cheryl McCullagh as the mainstay of her Ponyblue program, bringing troubled kids and police together.   Apples is that horse that you can have kids crawling around in perfect confidence because he’s both kindly aware of them and consummately gentle.

I did a healing session on Apples as part of my thankyou to Cheryl for hosting the clinic.  And I was about half way through the session, just about to do a Bowen move on him when he kicked me.  It was a sharp, shocking kick, but not hard enough to leave a mark and there was no warning that I noticed. 

Click here to read about why he did that and what I learned.

Well, New Zealand certainly put out the Kia Ora for me!  (That’s welcome for those like me who didn’t know that!)

A whole bunch of stuff combined to make this New Zealand trip one that I will remember for the rest of my life.  From the amazing bunch of people in the clinic to the outcomes they got and how they went about those outcomes, to my fabulous hosts Cheryl McCullagh and her Mum Sue, to Mrs Heenan who baked yummy goodies for us to eat every day to the delightful customer in the bank (Jimmy) who on overhearing that this was my first trip to New Zealand said “Welcome to New Zealand!” in the warmest tone imaginable and just made my day, to an amazing spiritual experience with the beautiful Maori healer Tiriana at Wainuiomata, to an awesome continuation of that experience with my friends in Otaki, Rob Green and his Mum Sue, to a communication experience with a wild seal at Kaikoura where I proved to myself beyond doubt that I can understand the wild animals too and they can understand me. Whew!  That was a big sentence covering a wide range of stuff!

For those of you who are just busting to hear about how I got on with my whale experience, I was too nauseous to connect with the three whales that we saw that day - bugger!  I did re-connect with one of them later that day, but because I couldn’t see him, I didn’t get the physical validation of two way communication that I had been hoping for.  Next time I talk to a whale it will be from something a lot more stable that a wildly pitching small boat in the middle of the open ocean!!  But the experience with the wild seal more than made up for it.

Lets go through this wonderful New Zealand experience one by one.  Click here to read about the clinic.