Welcome to the Soul Touched by Dogs Podcast, the show for dog lovers who
see dogs not as toys or tools, but wise souls worth our respect and care.
I'm an Herrmann, and I'm your host.
I talk to poor some humans, people who do great work for dogs and their people.
So come and join us for today's conversation.
Anke: welcome Jeff.
I'm super excited to have you
Jeff: here.
Thank you Anke.
I really, really appreciate being here and I'm also super excited to
play with you, get to play with you.
Awesome.
Anke: Awesome.
So before we start playing, uh, why don't you give us like the two minute overview?
Where are you based?
You know,
Jeff: what's your business?
What do you do?
I am a U.
S.
based Connecticut, about an hour outside New York City,
uh, based veterinarian and I...
Don't do private practice.
I do an online or what we're...
Based in as an online community, um, trying to transfer information
about molecular biology, individuality, and happiness in pets.
So, instead of focusing on individual diseases, symptoms, and diagnoses, we
focus on quality of life and happiness and, uh, the community that, that we're
going to talk a bit about based on which is a marker for quality of life.
Love
Anke: it.
So, I would imagine, so you're a veterinarian, so you went to med
school, you know, you did your degree.
What sparked the focus on
Jeff: the work you're doing now?
Great question.
Um, I got my degree first in molecular biology.
Penn Veterinary Medicine, and what sparked what I'm doing now is me.
Because I have a chronic degenerative brain disease and found that...
By focusing on the symptoms, as we do in medicine, I wasn't doing as well as
focusing on things like getting out in nature, and feeling our joy, being happy,
you know, like, uh, there's a gentleman named Norman Cousins, that wrote a book
called Anatomy of an Illness, which is all about how he had this incurable, painful
illness, that he basically left away.
And it's now being shown in research and science that laughter and happiness and
awe and gratitude are all things that make us better physiologically, but our
heads and our cognitive dissonance and our uncertainty about the future and the past
and get in the way, but not with them.
So it's a joy to be doing this for years now.
Super successfully with animals because there are very few animals
that get in the way as much as we can get in the way of the animals.
That's
Anke: all.
I just love that.
I mean, that whole sort of a more
Jeff: holistic approach, you know, I think
Anke: it's kind of, it feels the only thing that really makes sense.
Right, to just get away from the kind of little band aid and just kind of really.
So how would you recognize, measure, like, happy and like, so
how would I know whether my dog's
Jeff: happy?
Awesome.
Thank you for that question.
B.
E.
A.
M.
is an acronym for behavior, energy, appetite, and mood.
And each one of those factors combined to give a B.
E.
A.
M.
score.
B.
E.
A.
M.
score above 8 or above is the hot dog or a cat.
Or person, because I know people that are now using this for themselves,
um, means that they're in balance internally, and aligned, and connected,
and happy, and having a good life.
Stubby behavior.
What does your dog or cat do when you come to the door?
Does they want to be with you?
Do they want to be off by themselves?
Would they rather not engage?
So that can lower or increase the beam, the Behavior, part of that score,
energy, do they get up all the time, do they go to the door, do they want
to go on their walks, do they tire quickly on their walks, do they like
five ball throws, or will they go?
Sorry, my own dog, uh, thinks we're going out to play ball right now.
Archie, Archie, Archie.
But he's a great example of focusing on that approach because he's had a
bunch named diseases that if we just monitor the diseases but focus on being
the disease symptoms tend to go away.
You know the easiest part of being to measure is the appetite
because you can measure how long you don't have the anxious to eat.
We ate whatever you offered, they finished their bowl, so we
quantitate as much as we can.
But at the same time, we measure and quantitate internal things like kidney
values, or liver values, or other tests, because the body manifests
its balance both externally, by being, and internally, by eating.
By measured symptom.
Anke: Hmm, that makes, that makes so much sense.
So, I remember when my dog Leo, like he crossed the bridge like two years ago,
when he was like 10 years old, like quite a few years ago now, he all of
a sudden like couldn't get up, right?
And I felt that I took him to the vet and they go, well,
we've never seen this before.
We have no idea what we're doing here.
And what occurred to me was Reiki.
I don't know.
I had no idea what I did is I bought a book on animal Reiki, you know?
And I mean, you know, it wasn't that I didn't know how to feel
the, you know, I'd done yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, all that stuff.
So I kind of knew what it felt like.
And I thought, well, okay, what's different about And so
anyway, I got this book and then I just kind of did what I like.
Well, I'm happy to report that this dog recovered despite vet's prognosis.
And he lived another almost seven years happily.
So yeah, there is so much.
There's so much there that isn't.
Conventional
Jeff: knowledge.
Is that?
Yeah, and you brought up a really, really, really important point.
There's individuality, there's happiness, there's nature therapy, but Reiki and
the energy, the body works by energy.
When you're alive, you have energy.
You're not alive, you don't.
The car, the gas tank is empty if you don't have the energy, so what
Reiki does is harness that universal energy that we know is all around
us, thanks to Einstein, you know, talking about the E equals MC squared.
And all the studies since then, um, Harnessing that energy is a way to address
symptoms that can otherwise be addressed.
And that energy is also the most sustainable and beautiful and
easy to re employ energy, because that energy is also seen in love.
Love is energy, and we often talk about love as the most sustainable
form of energy, and our unconditional love with our animals is gonna
heal them, and it does heal them, like, like your dog's story.
Anke: So...
You were talking about Holistic Actions, and obviously the link's
gonna be below here, wherever, you know, if you're listening, it's in
the show notes, if you're on the, on the blog page, it's right here.
Um, how can people get
Jeff: involved in that?
Well, the easiest way is go to holisticactions.
com and sign up for the free one on one course.
That gives you the basis for...
You know, the method that we just spoke about.
If you want even more, then you can sign up as a community
member to help their sponsorship.
Digital resources, we have weekly webinars, uh, there's a 24 7 Q& A forum,
so if you have any questions you can ask on the forum, and myself and the other
Vets and other community members will chime in, and I apologize for my voice,
but My brain and my respiratory muscles don't, they're not connected real well.
So, what's one thing
Anke: you would want to leave people with, if there was one thing
you wish people understood, what
Jeff: would that be?
One thing is that there is...
Always another.
There's more that you can do that there is no one right answer
to get outside to see nature.
The beauty of nature, which basically is all that our pets need to heal, is
to get out and sniff and engage and, you know, be happy, happy, happy, happy.
Love that.
Anke: Love that.
There's nothing more to add.
Thank you so much.
And I can't wait to have you back, to be honest.
I think there's so much more we need to talk about, so I really
look forward to having you back.
Jeff: Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks so much for listening.
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Email me at Anke.
That's A N k E at Soul touched by dogs.com.