• Are YOU an animal?

  • We are ALL animals! We are just mammals with great big noggins and handy dandy opposable thumbs, but we have more in common with farm animals than you might think!

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• Mammals

  • All of the animals you will meet here are mammals with the exception of one. Let’s see if you can figure out who!

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• Same/different

  • How are the farm animals the same or different from us?

  • How do they communicate?

  • What do they eat?

  • Do they have personalities?

  • Do they feel emotions?

  • Can you tell what they are thinking and feeling?

  • Do they belong to family groups?

  • Do they play?

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• Predator/prey

  • What is a predator? What is a prey animal? Are YOU a predator?

  • All of the animals you will meet here are prey animals except for 2. Can you tell us which ones?

  • Horses are the world’s largest prey animals. The survival of prey species depends on their ability to sense danger and flee danger, making them experts at reading body language. Their lives depend on it! Evolved to be good at sensing danger and reacting appropriately. They also practice it. We can practice it, too!

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• Body language

  • Only 10% of communicating ideas and meaning in any conversation is actually verbal. The rest, we get from body language or non-verbal communication.

  • What does a happy, calm animal look like?

  • What does fear look like? How should we react?

 

• Pressure – what it looks like with the animals. How to put more or less pressure on an animal with our eyes, posture, body angle, body language, voice

 

• Emotions

  • The science of emotions

  • They are measurable! Who’d a thunk it?

  • How they transfer

  • Their purpose

  • Emotional Message Chart

  • What do they FEEL like?

  • Do you feel emotions in your body? Where?

  • How we can take control of our emotions

  • Choices, perspective

  • Choosing a feeling/memory

  • Calming exercises

 

• Our Polyvagal System  – Poly-WHAAAAT???

  • Essentially, we have an internal switch that we can control to change our emotional state. We learn an exercise to ‘flip the switch’!

  • We practice this self regulation and use the HeartMath monitors while interacting with the animals. When we ‘go red’, we stop. We only go forward with an animal when we ‘go green’! It will measure success and be like a game, with the reward being a great interaction with an animal that otherwise will just not happen.

  • Self-regulation is a buildable muscle, if we know how to support its exercise!

  • Our emotions affect others – in fact we can help to co-regulate others.

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• HeartMath

  • The heart is more than a pump!

  • Energetic field

  • Heart smart! It talks to the brain – a two-way street!

  • Quick coherence method

  • Getting ‘in the green zone’ for the animals

  • My example (I have plenty of spazzy Paige stories and they just keep coming! Conversely, I can also whisper any critically injured mammal into some sort of Zen zone – so plenty of opportunities to learn!)

  • Exercises with the animals:

    • Notice, what happens when you are in the red?

    • How do they react when you are in the green?

    • Are there differences between the sheep, horses, chickens?

    • Are some more sensitive than others?

    • What about in your Human world?

 

• Human body language

  • What does confidence look like? What does it feel like?

  • What does predatory body language look like and feel like? Is it ever useful/good to use predatory body language?

  • Can you project what you are going to do so well with your body, that we don’t need words?

  • Exercises: Silent communication

 

• Boundaries

  • Your bubble

  • Appropriate assertiveness

  • Crescendo

  • What does it look like to enforce your boundaries with the animals?

  • Is it different, with different animals?

  • What about people? How would you show someone they were too close?

  • Who sets the boundary?

  • Practice noticing ‘tells’.

  • Practice feeling bubble

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• Integrity

 

• • What is integrity? It means doing what you know to be the right thing, in spite of it being difficult.

  • “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Maya Angelou

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• Compassion

  • What is compassion?

  • Compassion literally means “to suffer together.” Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering

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• Empathy

  • What is empathy?

  • Empathy is the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.

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• Problem Solving

  • Problem-solving starts with identifying the issue, coming up with solutions, implementing those solutions, and evaluating their effectiveness. While caring for the animals, the children are encouraged to make decisions and solve problems, and se the effects of their decisions.