Short on time? Get the gist:
- Find simple actions that can be done on a daily basis to improve the health and energy of our pets.
- Focus on the “positive” actions and benefits of love and happiness to help our pets (and ourselves!) live fuller, happier lives.
- Work with nature and the body’s natural healing processes.
Going Beyond Traditional Science – Bringing Spirituality to Veterinary Practice
Some of the actions we discuss here may seem a little unusual to some of us: Things like Love Therapy, the Happiness Protocol, and daily monitoring of BEAM (Behavior, Energy, Appetite, Mood) to name a few. If you’re wondering if there is some uniting plan that connects all these different ideas, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re taking a step back to look at the big picture, so you can see why we do what we do.
This big-picture framework we use at Holistic Actions! is called Practical, Positive Veterinary Spirituality – or PPVS for all you acronym-lovers! It’s veterinary care based on the four Cs of Caring, Compassion, Connection and Consciousness. Let’s start by defining it and seeing and why PPVS is valuable to us and our pets. The next blog will dive deeper with more details.
What does Practical mean?
The first word is Practical, meaning it’s all about finding simple actions we can do on a daily basis to improve the health and energy of our pets. With each medical idea or method, we’re looking for ways to apply it in a direct way in the day-to-day. All of the best medical concepts in the world are still extremely limited if there is no way for us as pet caretakers to put them into practice for ourselves. The Practical aspect of this framework aims to address that.
What does Positive mean?
The Positive aspect is about focus. We’re focusing on the “positive” actions and benefits of love and happiness. As we’ve explored in other posts, the science is there showing this focus on positive actions and mindsets has a huge impact on both people and animals. We’re learning to work with the body’s natural way of fixing itself rather than ignoring it. This means we’re not just all about helping our pets get over illness, but about helping them live fuller, happier lives.
What does Veterinary mean?
The Veterinary aspect means, simply enough, that our focus is mostly on animals. Our aim is to combine the more common veterinary methods with these Practical and Positive practices to benefit our pets more than traditional medicine alone can.
What does Spirituality mean?
The Spirituality aspect can best be understood as “more than physical stuff.” We’re looking at the importance of emotions and our mindset(?) rather than just actions by themselves. As caretakers of our pets, we often feel the tug to be doing things to help and care for them. But not everything is easily solved with action. When we can practice slowing down, moving from human “doings” to human “beings”, you might say, we are able to observe and understand in a deeper way things that might easily be missed in a rush to fix things.
Combining these aspects gives us Practical, Positive Veterinary Spirituality, a more holistic framework for observing and learning from symptoms, using the freely-available power of love and happiness, and finding small, simple steps to increase our pets’ health and wellbeing. This is the larger framework we use at Holistic Actions!, where we can make use of these different techniques, like Love Therapy, Inner Terrain, etc. The greatest benefit of this framework is the practice of learning to “be” more and “do” less, enriching our own health and energy as well as our pets’!