Tom Pfeifer's Blog
August 31, 2017
Imagine you have an unusual gift you have turned into a career. But when you tell people at networking mixers, their initial reaction is a quizzical smirk.
Welcome to the life of Maribeth Decker, intuitive
animal communicator. Maribeth owns and operates
SacredGrove.com, “where people and pets heal and
connect.” She connects “telepathically with animals
to allow people to have a two-way conversation
with them.” This allows animal and human to solve
issues between them, such as anxiety or aggression
issues. But Maribeth is not a pet trainer or
behaviorist. She simply allows humans and animals
to communicate.
That includes communicating with pets that have
passed, a subject she tackles in her book, Peace in
Passing: Comfort for Loving Humans during Animal
Transitions. The book tells the stories of people and
pets Maribeth has connected in life and death and the peace it has brought them. (Full disclosure: I had a hand in persuading Maribeth to write the book and I was her editor.)
On her website, Maribeth says she didn’t come out of the womb and immediately begin to talk to the animals. But she has had an ethereal connection since a very young age.
“What happened to me was that as a young teenager, probably 12 or 13, I had what I consider a major spiritual experience,” she told me in a phone interview. “I was going to Catholic education classes, CCD, and was wondering if there was a God. So I asked if there was a God and, lo and behold, I had an experience that said, ‘Yes, absolutely yes.’ What astonished me was I received a response in such a clear way that I knew I wasn’t making it up. I had the experience of understanding that God—and I mean that in the non-generic way—The Creator—infuses everything around us, and because It infuses everything around us, we don’t notice it. What The Creator did was give me a sense of what it would be like if It wasn’t infusing our whole life. And it felt like somebody had sucked the air out of the planet for a little bit, and I thought, ‘Oh, oh, I get it.’ And then the air came back.
“What I learned is we live in a world where we are surrounded by a loving
and intelligent Creator. That question was answered very clearly.”
Maribeth did not share her experience then. Catholic classes taught her
about saints and others who had had such spiritual awakenings but she
did not feel—and still doesn’t feel—she was on a level of saints and
didn’t want to be accused of claiming to be.
She had a second spiritual awakening in her early twenties by gaining
sobriety through the 12-step program. “I did have another experience
of incredible love and forgiveness, which was just like a waterfall
cleansing me. … That was another affirmation that I was still loved and
that I still had a spiritual connection available to me. And it became a
part of me and how I saw the world in a more positive vein.”
Still, it would be decades before that spirituality revealed itself in the gift of animal communications. First came marriage and the bearing and raising of two children while engrossed in a career in the U.S. Navy. “On the life to-do list, connecting in a big way with unseen forces was not there at the top,” Maribeth said. Raising the children, making a living, and making a marriage work were much higher priorities.
It wasn’t until Maribeth became a Reiki Master in 2007–2008 that she came to realize her animals—alive and dead—were attempting to communicate with her. And thus began her journey into another side of spirituality she didn’t realize existed.
(Next week: Animals Reveal to Maribeth Her Gift of Virtual Mind-Melding.)
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Tom Pfeifer is the managing partner and chief strategist for Consistent Voice Communications and author of Write It, Speak It: Writing a Speech They’ll APPLAUD! Reach him at Tom@YourConsistentVoice.com.