Danielle MacKinnon: Animal Lessons
According to pet ownership, statistics and America in the UK are both nations that really love their pets as is evidenced by the huge success of books and movies about dogs, horses, and animals. The characters like Lassie, flicker, a dog’s purpose. And Marley and me, it’s clear that to most of us, our pets are not just dumb animals, but could the role that they are here to play in our lives be greater even than many of us have considered? Could it be that our animals are here to help us evolve as Souls? Danielle MacKinnon is a gifted, intuitive and soul connection coach who’s appeared on national TV and in numerous radio stations around the world. A faculty member of the Omega Institute, the Lily Dale Assembly and the Kripalu Center.
She’s the founder of the Danielle MacKinnon School of Animal Communication, and she’s a popular facilitator of online and in-person seminars in animal communication, soul contracts, and intuitive senses.
An Interview with Danielle MacKinnon: Animal Lessons and Our Spiritual Connections
Interview by Sandra Sedgbeer
To listen to the full interview of Danielle MacKinnon by Sandie Sedgbeer from What Is Going OM on OMTimes Radio, click the player below.
Sandra Sedgbeer: Daniel McKinnon joins us today to share how we can develop our spiritual connection with animals and discover what they are in our lives to teach us.
Danielle, your book Animal Lessons, discovering your spiritual connections with animals, focuses on the idea that animals are in our lives to help us evolve as souls. Before we delve into the book and what it has to teach us, I would like to hear about your own journey, from a successful MBA in the corporate world in a fast track to Animal psychic, author, teacher of animal communication, and I want to know whether an animal played a role in your transition.
Danielle McKinnon: That’s a good way to ask that question. I don’t have the most, straight path to get where I am today is, I never planned on doing this, when I was, I planned on being a 
veterinarian, and I wanted to write books. So, I guess it’s kind of the same thing because I’m working with animals and people and helping animals and I’m writing books, but it didn’t look like this in my head when I was 12. Growing up, I was the sensitive one and loved animals, my safety was in animals as I had an abusive childhood. So, my sensitivity was kind of what kept me going. The animals, my dog, my parakeet, my many, many hamsters and caterpillars and, and all of the other animals that I had in my life, they were really my lifeline. That wasn’t quite normal, everybody else had their dog, and they love their dog, but they didn’t have the same feelings about their dogs that I had. And I always thought that I could know what they were saying, know what they were thinking.
It was kind of a tough childhood because nobody really understood, including myself, that my sensitivities were allowing me to connect with energy, with animals that all of this part of me existed. So I spent a lot of the time growing up trying to be like everybody else, trying to not be sensitive, beating myself up for being sensitive as well. It wasn’t until I got into college that I was more on my own and three to start exploring things. And in college, I started exploring meditation. I had terrible panic attacks, anxiety, and depression. I know now that it’s because I was so sensitive, and I didn’t know how to handle this. As part of the question where you asked if an animal, played a role and yes, animals played roles the whole time through.
We’d been living in California, we moved back to New England. We were both going to Grad school. I was getting my MBA, and my husband is a scientist so he was getting his masters and our dog got very sick, very sick and nobody could figure it out. We didn’t know why she suddenly got sick. She was very young. She was like an eight-month-old puppy, and she ended up being in the thing at the veterinarian for several days in a row. We had a $4,000 bill. We didn’t have the money to pay for that. I was freaking out. I saw a friend, and she said, well, you know there’s a pet psychic that lives in town. Why don’t you go see him? So, I immediately said, all right, I’m going to see that guy. I took my dog out of the vet, and I grabbed my science-based husband, and we went to visit this guy at the event that he was doing.
He looked at me, and he looked at my husband, and he went back to her, and Bella was pretty mellow. Normally, she’s not mellow the right of way. I was going, hmm, something is different here. And after a moment he came back, and he said, okay; the reason that she’s sick is that she ate corn cob and she ate the corn cob because she was anxious. Since you and your husband have been fighting about your mother, and he was mostly right. It was my mother in law. He would’ve had no idea about any of that. That sentence that he spoke right there changed my life. My dog, Bella saying to him this exact stuff, and he being able to pass this on to me made me go, why am I in the corporate world?
This is what I want in my life. This is how I want to help people. And that kind of set me off on this, this path of working with animals.
Sandra Sedgbeer: So, you founded your own school of animal communication, which offers courses, classes, and training in soul level communication. What distinguishes soul level communication from say you know, someone else’s method of communicating with animals?
Danielle McKinnon: I think it’s a good question. Um, the best way for me to explain that it is for me to explain how I developed soul level animal communication because I never planned on doing it. So, when you think of animal communication, what do you, what I used to think of is, you connect psychically with the animal, and you find out what the problem is. Why are you barking so much? I’m barking because I don’t like Harry. Then I as the animal communicator, I say, dog, stop barking at Harry that doesn’t work, and it’s causing a problem in the family, problem solved. I told him what to do, and it was over. Is that kind of what you think of? I think it’s what most people think of that we’ve solved these problems with animals.
Sandra Sedgbeer: It is what most people think of, but it’s not what I think of because I happen to have a friend who is very psychic and has given me a lot of evidence of why my dog was in my life. But I haven’t found that to be incredible, common.
Danielle MacKinnon: When I had that session with my dog Bella when she was sick, I was like, this is great. I’m going to start a business, I’m going to fix all these animals that are having problems in their lives, with their humans. And I thought I would just connect psychically and tell them all what to do. I didn’t know at that time either what animals were really offering to us. But I wasn’t having the success at making the animal do what the human wants and don’t really understand why. And then finally I started asking the animal, why are you doing this versus telling them to stop doing it or telling them to change their behavior, which is a very human-centric way to be.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Danielle MacKinnon
