Cooperation with animals

Learn how we can restore a sense of community with all that lives and enter into right relations, especially with our more-than-human relatives.

Overview

We see respectful, nonviolent cooperation with animals, even the smallest and even those usually condemned as “pests,” as an essential key to building a genuine peace culture. Led by Heike Kessler and Barbara Kovats who both hold extensive experience in these fields, you’ll get an intimate insight into our many years of research of interspecies communication, as part of building a Healing Biotope.

We’ll share our experiences and practical examples and work with exercises. We’ve been many times surprised and moved by the depth of animals’s willingness to cooperate with us, once they can feel that our attitude of trust and nonviolence is authentic. Despite everything that people have done to them.
We are honoured to tell you that we will also have external teachers that join via zoom: Anna Breytenbach, Brad Laughlin, Eike Braunroth (see below).

This course is an intellectual and experiential space, where we’ll rediscover our belonging to the great family of life and perceive how deeply we’re related with animals on a soul level and that we humans will suffer as long as animals suffer.

We know that we’re often limited in our ability to cooperate in the human realms, which affects our ability to communicate with the more-than-human world. So you’ll also learn about building lasting communication and trust between people, and how this leads the way to communicating with animals, mainly through experiencing Forum.

Who is the course for?

• Anyone interested in communicating with animals
• People who love and work with animals
• Animal rights activists
• People interested in documenting our work with animals in Tamera

What you’ll learn

• Our experiences in communicating with animals, both domesticated and wild – making visible the far-reaching possibilities of cooperation
• Our overall vision and philosophy of “Healing Biotopes” and how cooperation with animals is part of our work towards a regenerative peace culture.
• The sacred matrix and its logic of interdependence that prompts synergy and cooperation between all beings as spiritual teachers
• Our basic principles and practices of community and trust-building.
• The correlations between our erotic and ecological relations: How consciousness work in sexuality and bringing light into suppressed parts, enables us to encounter wildlife without fear
• Reviewing our complicity in animal suffering and how it’s linked with the climate emergency

As a course participant, you can join our morning offers, which can include things like Yoga and Qi Gong. You’ll also be able to join in whole community events, like our Sunday matinee, the Ring of Power and Political Cafes.

Course content

• Morning seminars and Q&As
• Visiting and getting to know Terra Deva
• Guided tours and visits our dog shelter, chicken flock and rat temple
• Walks with our dogs
• Wild boar exploration walks, studying the experiences made in Tamera in the field of cooperation with them
• Spaces for deeper conversation, intimate sharing and community building among the participants, including Forum
• Creative and spiritual exercises
• Practical community service, also for the animal world

Content from guest teachers

• Anna Breytenbach will join for a 90min Q&A session
• Brad Laughlin will share some unique, simple yet powerfully transformational practices that you can do anytime, anywhere to assist on this path.
• Eike Braunroth will join for a zoom session