Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Heather Norton. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Heather , appreciate you joining us today. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

I started out my professional life in traditional careers. I went to graduate school for high energy theoretical physics, and worked in the field for a few years before going to law school. I practiced law for more than 15 years before embarking on my current path.

My current work is centered around connecting people to the natural world. I do that through animal communication, plant spirit healing, and teaching plant and animal communication. When I started my current work, I initially felt uncomfortable telling people about it. I’ve come to realize that having a more traditional job acts as a shield in some ways. A lot of people don’t like lawyers, but they are a known quantity. They are an accepted part of society. Introducing myself as a lawyer provided me with a shield made of legitimacy as well as anonymity. I didn’t have to give much away about myself if I said, “I’m a lawyer.” People would usually nod and the conversation would move on.

By contrast, if I tell people that I’m an animal communicator or that I work with plant spirits in my healing practice, my shield of anonymity is taken away. With that introduction, people immediately know a great deal about me. They know that I take being an animal person to another level. They know that I’m spiritual, that I value nature, and they know that I’m taking a non-traditional path. Revealing all that about myself just by answering the question, “what do you do for a living?” felt rather confronting for a time.

My discomfort was heightened by the fact that the work I do isn’t for everyone. I don’t need or want it to be for everyone, but I have received negative reactions from people I knew through my prior careers. I’ve been made aware that some people think that what I do isn’t real or that it isn’t important. With all those thoughts and fears swirling around in my head, I sometimes found it difficult to stand up straight and tell people about my new business with pride.

However, the more I engaged with the work, the more my fears melted away. I love helping people form a deeper relationship with their animal companions. I love working with plant spirits and seeing other people be transformed by the sentience of nature. I learn so much from the work I do, and I get to help people in the process. When I’m filled up and lit up by the work I do, I forget all about holding on to fear.

Heather , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My work is centered around connecting people to the natural world. I am an animal communicator. I also have a healing practice that incorporates work with plant spirits. I teach plant and animal communication as well and I have a fledging podcast. In my animal communication practice, I help people form a deeper relationship to their animals, work through behavioral challenges and provide end of life support. I also communicate with animals in the afterlife and help people shift their grief by
gaining an understanding of their animal’s perspective.

I use a variety of modalities in my healing practice, with a focus on working with plant spirits. At its core, healing work helps us come into balance with ourselves and our environs. It helps us shed trauma, whether it is trauma from this lifetime or ancestral trauma. It also helps us release limiting patterns, limiting self-beliefs, and energy that we’ve accumulated that doesn’t belong to us. We can then stand in our own sovereignty and experience profound and beautiful shifts in the way we perceive ourselves and in our life path.

I’m always amazed at the way the exact right plant spirit will show up at the right time for clients. I have a close relationship with some plants, but there are far more plants on this planet than I could ever hope to know. I’ve had plants show up in client sessions that I’ve never heard of before, but when I research them, I find that they do in fact exist and they inevitably hold just the right medicine for the situation at hand. They continue to amaze me and I love sharing plant medicine with others.

The work I do now is certainly much different than my previous careers of lawyer and scientist. I loved exploring the universe through science. I also quite enjoyed law school and learning more about how and why we’ve created the human constructs that govern our lives. But as a practicing lawyer, I often felt isolated. And stressed and exhausted. The cases that paid the bills did not ignite my passion. Instead, they simply wore me down. The cases that I truly cared about often broke my heart. I’ll never forget seeing incredibly deserving asylum clients being brutalized in court. But I stayed with it, trying to find ways to practice that worked for me and trying to make those student loan payments.

Eventually it all came crashing down in a classic tower card moment. If you know tarot, the tower card shows a tall strong castle tower being struck by lightning and set on fire. In the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the king’s crown is tumbling off the tower and the king and queen are being unceremoniously ejected from the tower. In other words, the status quo is being blown up. My tower card moment turned into tower card years. By the end of it, I was struggling with severe depression.

My animals quite literally saved me during that time. I also renewed and deepened my spiritual practices and slowly, brick by brick, I began to build a new and very different kind of space to inhabit. I became a reiki master, studied different forms of energy healing and different shamanic traditions as well as dreamwork. I was still practicing law at the time, but I had made some changes and had established my own practice rather than working at the large law firm.

Sampson, my dog at the time, absolutely insisted on being outside as much as possible. He was incredibly stubborn and wasn’t above staging a sit-in in the park when I was trying to rush home to get on a conference call. Eventually I followed his lead and began packing my laptop into a backpack and working from a redwood grove or the cliffs overlooking the ocean.

In those settings, I was able to reconnect to the sentience of nature. Listening to my dog and to the wisdom of the plants truly brought me home to myself. I realized that when I was working at the large law firms, I had been very disconnected from the natural world. My life at that time could almost have taken place anywhere. It could have been on any distant planet or even on a sound stage. The fact that it was taking place on earth didn’t seem to matter much. That disconnect played a big part in the depression I struggled with.

Listening to my Sampson dog changed everything. Sampson reminded me just what a gift it is to be living on the earth. He took me to wild, untamed places where the voices of the plants were strong. With his help, I remembered how to hear the voices of the plants and animals. It truly felt like remembering myself.

I ended up further deepening my relationship with plants by going to herbalism school and learning about the ways in which plants not only heal our bodies, but their consciousness also heals our mental and emotional bodies and evolves us on our soul journeys. I also studied with amazing animal communicators and honed my animal communication skills. And here I am now. Every day I feel awed at the wisdom, perception and love of our animal companions. I feel continually amazed by the intelligence of nature. The curtain on the sound stage I once inhabited has been pulled back to reveal a magical, wise, loving, sentient earth that, amazingly, was here all along.

In my view, forming a deeper relationship to the animals and plants we share the earth with is transformative on both an individual and collective level. We seem to be going through a tower card moment as a collective. I think that one of the best things we can do for ourselves and for each other is to welcome in the earth wisdom that is all around us. Let ourselves be transformed by it. Let that wisdom bring us home to ourselves and help us build stronger and more sustainable structures to inhabit

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal in all my work is to help people deepen their connection to the plants and animals we share the earth with.

I’ve come to realize that humans are fairly uniquely individuated on this planet. We think of ourselves as quite separate from one another and from the earth. There’s a great quote by the author Francis Hodgson Burnett. She said, “How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it.” I’ve come to know that she is so right. Plants and animals are in conversation with themselves and with one another. They have so much joy and wisdom to share and they are just waiting for us to remember how to join in the conversation.

For me, life is a much richer, more magical experience when I do listen to the earth and to the animals. Having even a quick communion with an “ordinary” houseplant can be so calming and restorative. Likewise learning more about animals is such an eye opening experience.

Both plants and animals have shown me that consciousness can evolve in more ways than one. Our human consciousness has evolved in an external way. Meaning, we have developed external tools and technology that now defines our society. But a lot of plants and animals have been on this planet for a lot longer than us. I’ve come to know that many of them have an extremely evolved consciousness, but we tend to overlook it because their evolutionary process doesn’t look the same as ours does.

We can truly evolve our own consciousness by listening to and learning from other beings we share the earth with. Doing so truly feels both evolutionary and revolutionary to me. There is a lot of fear and uncertainty on the planet at the moment. Remembering how to listen to the earth, remembering how to join in the conversation, is one of the best ways I know to break through that fear and to build a better future for ourselves and our planet.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I get to experience wondrous things everyday in my work. I talk to plants and animals, hold space for clients, teach, and write. I also create natural perfumes and paint. I have backyard beehives and create salves from my garden and beeswax. When I’m engaged in any of those activities, I’m in a state of connection – to my clients, to the animals, to the plants and to my artwork. In that space of connection I feel that I’m not merely living on the earth, but I’m living with the earth. That feeling fills me with vitality and I learn something new every day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dancingbeealchemy.com
• Instagram: dancing_bee_alchemy
• Other: TikTok: @dancingbeealchemy
  Podcast: The Dancing Bee Podcast