5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Career as an Animal Healer

Soulful border collie portrait view

Do you feel like you’re naturally good with animals? Are you the kind of person who has dogs come over to them and hear their owners say “She is never friendly with strangers, she really likes you!”?

If you’re naturally gifted at connecting with animals and want to help them, then maybe you’ve considered becoming some kind of animal healer as a career. With so many ways of helping animals, how does one pick a path? If someone already feels this is their calling, how do they get started?

Becoming an animal healer can be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life. It can also be one of the scariest and most confusing.

Not knowing where to start, what to expect, or how to proceed is normal. Who do you learn from? How do you choose a method? There’s no FAQ page with all the answers.

Here are 5 things that I wish I knew before becoming an animal healer.

1. Learning is a Lifelong Process

Becoming an animal healer is a process, not an event. The longer you do it, the better you’ll get at it. It’s not about learning a specific skill; it’s a way of thinking. The more animals you help, the more you see what you are lacking. You learn new things every day – and that’s the beauty of it.

Even if you have a natural gift for healing work, you’ll see a big difference in your abilities after 3 years of practice as opposed to 1 year. Veterinarians attend conferences to learn the newest methods. New technology comes along every year, allowing us to heal animals faster. 

At first, for me, it was overwhelming to find out that the more I learned, the less I knew!

Every new course or method opened up new paths that I didn’t even know existed.

An anatomy course that covered the basics showed me that there’s more to the body than I thought.

When learning about reiki, I discovered that animals have chakras, too. 

As I learned and applied acupressure techniques, I felt issues that I wanted to learn how to help.

Massage techniques opened the doors to the importance of understanding fascia.

To this day, after over 30 years of horse education, I’m still learning something new every day! And the more animals I see the more I realize I need to learn. That’s because there’s more to learning than studying books and taking courses.

casual dog owner strolling with group of dogs of different breeds on leashes on rural road in sunny countryside

2. The Animals Are the Best Teachers

If you want a career as an animal healer, the best way to start is to get out there and start helping animals as soon as you can.

Learn how to listen to what they have to say. Study their movement and learn how to see when something is wrong. Ask questions of other professionals. You’ll learn more from an hour with a horse than in a whole year of lectures.

The more time you spend with animals and their humans, the more you’ll understand how the animal’s issues can stem from the owner.

Most animals will teach you how to help them. Others have been let down by people and have put up walls that you need to respect. This can be a humbling experience. You’re not going to know everything right away, and the things you’ve learned already might need to be unlearned.

When I first started learning about energy healing for animals, I didn’t always ask the animal if it was okay for me to work on it. I assumed I knew and jumped right in.

By the time I began studying acupressure, I knew to give the animal time to consider my request to be in its space, and to understand that I was asking and not telling.

Learn to speak the animal’s language

Learning animal body language is extremely important! Knowing when a dog is afraid or anxious will protect you from getting snapped at. If you work with large animals, you must always be keeping yourself safe. Horses especially communicate with subtle signals and if you miss the first couple of hints, you might be met with a more dangerous statement.

I remember one time when I was walking with someone who was leading my horse. I saw my horse flick one ear towards my friend, then give him a specific look, then moved his nose closer.

Before I could say anything, my friend’s sleeve ended up in my horse’s mouth. If I had been leading my horse, I would have corrected the behavior right from the first cue without thinking about it, because I understood what he was saying. 

If you’re worried about making the right choice as to whether a career in animal healing is for you, go out and get your hands on some animals. Ask them to show you what’s wrong. Watch them walk or run, feel their body, connect with their energy. And listen to what they say.

A smiling animal healer wearing a ball cap and black hoodie holding a miniature horse foal.

3. You’ll Believe In Yourself

Starting down the path of learning how to be a healer for animals, you’ll be overwhelmed with options. Once you find where you’re meant to be, you will naturally start to believe even more deeply that this is what you’re meant to do.

Luckily, animals know what they need even better than humans do. We overthink and make assumptions and are easily swayed by what we read on the internet.

A horse knows that something hurts so it moves differently to avoid it. You notice it’s moving oddly. You discover what’s wrong, often with the help of the horse. Once you get the horse out of pain, it quickly moves on.

And seeing an animal who is no longer in pain, or no longer anxious, one that you helped get there, is one of the best feelings in the world! 

You have so much potential – you have to believe in yourself to reach it.

And you don’t need to know exactly where you’re going in order to start! As you take one step at a time, the next steps on the path will appear.

Animals don’t care about what you’re wearing, what kind of day you’re having, or what school you went to. They want to be healed. They want to feel better. They want to know that they’re not alone and that they’re not going to suffer.

Once you realize you have the skills and gifts to improve an animal’s quality of life, you can’t help but believe in yourself!

4. The Best Have Been Where You Are Now

Especially in today’s age of instant information on the internet, it’s easy to compare yourself to others. No matter what you want to do, someone else is already out there doing it.

And if they’ve been at it for a while, it might seem daunting and as though you shouldn’t even bother starting. Believe me, I’ve had some of the worst cases of comparisonitis. Even 30+ years later.

Remember this: everyone was a beginner once. Everyone, even the best and most gifted animal healers, have been where you are now. They all took that first step, to open themselves up to realizing how much they still need to learn.

It’s okay to not have all the answers right now! That’s where you start – where you are now. Once you start thinking that way, everything else gets easier. 

As you start to collect knowledge, each new thing you learn gets easier.

After studying the anatomy of a horse, if you decide to go to massage school, you’ll be able to learn how to work on muscles easier.

Being a dog trainer and deeply understanding a dog’s body language will make it easier to learn acupressure later.

The best animal healers out there were not only beginners at the start, but they also keep a beginner’s mindset with everything new they learn. And, as mentioned earlier, they never stop learning. So don’t be afraid to start just because someone else seems to be so far ahead.

A painting of the Northern Lights represented in a rainbow of colors, reflecting on a lake with mountains in the background, three people wading in the lake.

5. There’s No Need to Wait For the Right Time

I think this is possibly one of the most important things to remember.

There is no right time to become an animal healer.

You can’t wait for the perfect client or the right opportunity. You must create the right opportunities. That means finding people to learn from. Ask people who are already doing what you want to do how they learned, and research the school or instructor.

Years ago, I saw a video of someone getting the most amazing relaxation signs from a horse. I asked her where she learned her methods, researched the places she mentioned, and ended up attending the acupressure school that she recommended.

I also remember that she said how the “horses are the best teachers”, which helped direct my approach to learning ever since. 

The world is always changing, and there’s no guarantee about what tomorrow will be like. If you wait to dive into animal healing until you feel ready, you may never start. Trust me, there will never feel like a perfect time. The time for you to start will always be now.

Being authentic and true to yourself will open many doors. Why wait another day to help an animal feel better? Find a way to help animals where you are now, and you’ll find a way to help them in the future.

What are you going to learn today?

At the end of the day, I never say that I wish I’d waited longer to start following my passion of helping animals as a career. It is very much the opposite; I wish I’d started sooner.

Becoming an animal healer is the most rewarding thing you’ll ever do. It takes a lot of courage to step into the unknown, and the personal satisfaction far outweighs any risks.

You’re going to run into people who don’t believe in you, maybe in your own family.

You’re going to meet clients who don’t think you’re able to help their animal.

You’re going to doubt yourself, and be tempted to give up on making a career out of being an animal healer.

I hope it helps to hear that no matter the path you take, it is 100% worth the effort. Going in with an attitude of learning from the animals themselves, and never being done learning, will take you far.

Photo of an equine bodywork practitioner with their hands on the hind end of a brown horse. The horse's face is relaxed.

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