The Elephant Whisperer an interview with Jann Weiss by Tasha K. Taylor In South Africa, they call Jann Weiss "The Elephant Whisperer." She has experienced documented success in communicating telepathically with elephants that have been traumatized and are displaying violent behavior. She has worked with elephants who were about to be put down for their uncontrolled and dangerous actions, and has spent time "talking" to them telepathically, through a process she describes as transmitting the essence or feeling of the communication, explaining to them the reasons for the actions humans have taken with them. She is compiling an impressive list of successful encounters in interspecies communication with elephants in South African game reserves that have directly affected the behavior of the animals in a positive way. There is a South African production company presently trying to raise funds to produce a documentary on her work. Jann is no stranger to the Pacific Northwest; she has been coming to this region since 1984, conducting human potential workshops. She is very intuitive, and has had experiences all her life in seeing and knowing things about people and events. She refers to herself a transformational therapist. Her first book, Teaching the Monkey to Fly: A Step-by-Step Guide to Self-Empowerment, was published last year, and provides a very practical approach to self-healing. She is the director of the nonprofit organization, The Living in Truth Institute, based here in the Puget Sound region and dedicated to individual and global shifts in consciousness, and has trained facilitators to teach these techniques to individuals all over the world. In 1987, she had an opportunity to swim with dolphins, and it was a life-changing experience. She found that she was tuning into the dolphins' thoughts telepathically. Since that time, she has been involved in researching the benefits of interspecies communication. Through the power of telephonic communication, I was able to chat with Jann in South Africa from my home in Lynnwood. Tasha: Your work seems to be very diversified, from transformational processes to orphaned elephants. I'd like to focus first, however, on your work with humans. You have developed a series of personal healing techniques to assist individuals in overcoming trauma and life issues. What exactly are they, and how do they work? Jann: The Weiss Transformation Processes (or WTPs) are specific techniques designed to show people how to replace their negative belief systems with their positive higher truth. The work is based on the understanding that the negativity that occurs in our lives is fear-based, "survival" genetic programming. They are also based on the belief that our higher truth is not only more powerful than our negative programming, but also practical and humanly livable. The WTPs are a systematic, step-by-step approach to changing the body's programming. Tasha: What are the benefits of doing this? Jann: Changing the body's negative programming allows us to create lives free from fear and self-doubt. It allows us the freedom to create relationships, work, and play that reflect who and what we are in essence. Imagine relationships based on the mutual appreciation for the divinity and preciousness of each other instead of the mutual codependent need of each other. Imagine engaging in a work that fulfills you and is hard to tell from your play. What would our lives be like if this were true? What would life on our planet be like? Tasha: And you think this is possible? Jann: I'm watching it happen every day in this work. Tasha: How did you develop these Processes? Jann: The first of the Processes happened in 1989, while I was trying to recover from the loss of a child. As I tried to heal the grief, frustration, and anger, my spiritual guides began suggesting that I show Christ how I felt. To be very honest with you, I was so angry that I didn't feel much like doing anything spiritual, never mind talk to Christ. They persisted, however, and finally, I did as they suggested. I was showing Christ every dammed thing I was feeling. After a couple of hours, I realized that I was going deeper in the emotion and releasing it in a way that I'd never experienced before. I was also receiving insights into the "why" of the experience. It helped me heal not only the loss of that child, but began a deeper level of healing my childhood abuse as well. The Time Process, The DNA Process, and The Reality Shifting Process happened in group sessions between 1994 and 1997. The other two, The Filter and Integration Processes, are much newer, and were the result of working with individuals in private sessions. Tasha: Is there a particular WTP healing experience that stands our in your mind? Jann: One of the very first experiences I had was with an 18-year-old in Brighton, England. He came to me because he'd been on heroin for four years, and he knew that if he didn't quit, it was going to kill him. I asked him to focus on his need for the drug and allow Christ to feel the need with him. We worked for about twenty minutes, talked a bit, and then he left. I heard two months later that he never did the drug again and was working at a rehab center helping others clean up. Tasha: Do you always work with Christ? Jann: I do, personally, in addition to my soul. When working with other people, however, we'll use whatever source of higher perspective they feel comfortable with, whatever they trust — Buddha, God, angel — as long as it's a source of nonjudgmental non-primate perspective. Tasha: What is the most important information you've learned from dolphins and from elephants? Jann: Most of what I've learned from finned friends, if applied to daily human living, I think would make a big difference in our quality of life here on Earth. For instance, dolphins aren't capable of hate. It's a concept that they just don't understand. Self-judgment is another concept that doesn't make sense to dolphins. I think human relationships might be very different if this were also true for us. Another aspect of dolphin perspective that I find interesting is their inability to judge each other. They will judge the behavior of another dolphin, but they will not judge the other dolphin. When we discipline our children, we tend to define the child as "bad" when they engage in bad behavior. This is actually very detrimental for a young developing human psyche. For dolphins, there is a big difference between the value of the behavior and the value of the individual engaging in the behavior. I believe that our children would benefit from this approach to discipline. It's a little more difficult to discuss what I've learned from elephants beyond how they are with each other. Their lives are very complex. I'm just blown away by the fact that they're willing to talk to me at all, in view of how destructive humans have been in their lives, and there are some who would just as soon hurt us as look at us. It's my hope that we can heal at least some of that over the next few years. I'm also hoping that enough humans will be open to the idea of interspecies communication so that we can minimize some of the killing that stills goes on. Tasha: What do you see as the spiritual issues we are facing as a planet in the next twenty years? Jann: I think the most obvious problem is how to get six billion territorial Homo sapiens to get along on one planet? We're going to have to develop some level of collective oneness if we're going to survive. I know it goes against our genetic survival programs, but that's probably why there's such a focus on changing our DNA right now. If we don't reduce the "me and mine" programming and replace it with a new global sense of "we," then, quite simply, we'll be spending the better part of the next twenty years working to eliminate each other. Road rage, rape, and the increase in crime in the streets are just a few examples of humans not coping with the pressure of too many in a space that's getting smaller all the time. Population reduction is certainly one answer, and perhaps the increase in disease is an expression of this. I believe we have it in us to create a reality where we can live in collective oneness without compromising our unique individuality. Tasha: Do you think this is possible? Jann: Every time I take a peek into our future, I see us doing just that. When I ask Spirit how we created this in our future, I get the same answer: "Learn to think, see, and act as though you are Soul." Hence my work is replacing the body's perspective with that of Soul. If you'd like to know more about Jann's work, you can contact her via e-mail at < helpufly@global.co.za>. To find out her schedule for her March 2000 workshops, please call Tasha Taylor at (425) 776-2894, or visit <http://home.earthlink.net/~mdgarner/>, then look for the link to her schedule.