bonding lessons #5 (aka a lesson on trusting your intuition)

Did you read my blogpost about the importance of building a support network for everything you wish to accomplish in life? If you didn’t, I encourage you to have read through it before you read further here… it’ll help put everything I share here into perspective.

When it has come to our bonding experience, one of the Facebook groups focused on bunny bonding has proved absolutely invaluable to me.

In that group are a handful of experts with a ton of experience in bonding and who generously and freely give their guidance and support as you navigate the complicated and, often, challenging bonding process.

Each and every time I have asked questions seeking practical “how to” guidance, I have been met with sensible, practical, and sage advice.

When it comes to bunny bonding it seems that things can be pretty black and white.

However, if I look back through my own personal life and my life experiences, very few of them have been black and white. There’s not much that I have experienced in my life that has been so clear-cut and certain.

Sure, when another looks into your life and may even be helping you make choices and decisions, they may see things in a more black and white fashion. But, for me, life tends to have a lot more grey than we give it credit for.

So why, if life is so grey, should bunny bonding (or indeed anything in life) be so very black and white?

I tend to find that black and white is fine in situations where emotions play no part. However, when a living being, be it a human or a bunny, is involved, emotions will naturally play a role because we are made up of emotions, it’s part of who we are, it’s part of what defines our nature.

Not too long into our bonding experience, just after the bunnies had learned to trust each other, had settled and become more calm, we were able to introduce longer sessions.

For bonding to be successful there are a few basic rules that should be followed. Firstly, ideally, each session should last 4 or more hours (in practice it’s not always possible). And secondly, after 2 consecutive sessions of 4 or more hours where there has been no negative behaviour, the bonding pen can be expanded slightly.

We started with 2 hours before quickly trying to have regular 4-hour sessions.

However, after each 4-hour session, I noticed that when the bunnies were returned to their individual areas, they each took a considerable amount of time decompressing (as I referred to it). After each session, the bunnies would disappear for some time, sleep and recover.

It never mattered how much or how little they had slept during their bonding session. Every time a longer session came to an end, and they returned to their separate areas, each of them disappeared.

And the only word I could get to describe what I was sensing from them was “decompress”. It felt like, whilst they clearly were enjoying the bonding sessions by this stage as they were spending more and more time cuddling up to each other, spending so much time together was still, in some way, stressful and placing pressure on them. So, they each had to take some time out afterwards to allow that pressured feeling to ease.

I happened to ask about this in the Facebook group, my support network. I was keen to know if it was common or if it may be something our bunnies were doing because they are deemed to be older bunnies. The advice that I received was that, as bunnies don’t have emotions like humans, this wasn’t what was happening. At the same time, I wasn’t given any guidance as to what may be happening. Their feedback was very black and white on the subject. There was no room for grey.

So initially, it felt like I was sensing something that wasn’t there. However, it kept happening, not just for a few days but over the following weeks.

In my heart I truly felt that the bunnies were decompressing. And yet the experts, though they had no answer, disagreed.

And that left me with a choice: either I listened to the experts and ignored my feelings, or I listened to my feelings and ignored the experts.

I was brought up by parents who had a great deal of respect for authority. Anyone in an uniform, be it the white coat of a doctor or the robes of a clergyman, was always right. Their guidance was taken on board without question.

I was more of a black sheep in the family. Whilst I would take on board what someone of authority advised me, I wouldn’t take it as gospel. Rather I would follow it up with my own research.

And I feel that played to my strengths.

Rather than purely listening to and heeding the expert, I chose to listen to my feelings. Feelings which were actually my intuition speaking to me.

Again, something similar happened on another occasion, where the expert again disagreed on what I felt was happening with one of our bunnies, Bobo. This time Bobo had been to visit the vet and received an injection.

I posted in the Facebook group seeking advice on whether we should carry out a bonding session that day or skip one because it might be too stressful – going to the vet was stressful and getting ready for bonding would also be stressful. In my post I happened to mention that the injection had made Bobo nauseous.

I got excellent guidance, as always about the bonding session; guidance which was black and white but was excellent because it was so black and white.

On the other hand, the expert picked up on me suggesting that Bobo had felt nauseous and advised me that, as bunnies cannot vomit (which I already knew), they would not be able to feel nauseous.

Thankfully I received this advice after I had already given Bobo some homeopathic anti-nausea medication (prescribed by the vet some time earlier for our other bunny) which quickly turned around the situation.

Again, the guidance given by the expert with regards the bunny bonding was excellent. However, their guidance about the nausea didn’t sit comfortably with me. If I wasn’t so energetically and intuitively connected to my bunnies, it may have caused me to second-guess myself.

These two experiences have taught me a very valuable lesson, a lesson I would like to share with you.

That lesson is: whilst it’s important to build a support network so you can achieve whatever goal or project you are pursuing, remember that the experts in your network have expertise in a specific area. They don’t know everything about everything. And so, when your intuition speaks up and tells you something, especially if it’s not within the expert’s immediate field of knowledge, don’t listen to the expert just because you believe they are an expert and must therefore know everything about everything, at the expense of your intuition.

The other thing I have learned through this is that the world is definitely not always black and white. It is full of grey, especially where living beings, emotions and feelings are involved.

If you live from a purely black and white perspective, your intuition which, I feel, resides more in the grey area of life, will never have a chance to fully develop because you won’t be open to listen to it.

Intuition is often described as your 6th sense, though, personally, I prefer to refer to it as our 1st sense because it’s a gift we were all born with, not some magic ability we worked to acquire as an adult. However, because most of us have dampened our intuition over time because we’ve stopped using and turning to it, often because as children we were dissuaded to do so by the adults around us, our trust in our intuition tends to be quite weak.

So, once you start to explore your intuitive abilities, once you start to follow those nudges given by your intuition, how do you strengthen your trust in it?

Well, that’s the question I posed to the angels through my oracle cards. Do you want to know how to better trust your intuition?

Viv xx