Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel.

When you awaken spiritually, in fact, you can use thought much more effectively than before, but you realize there is a depth to your Being, a vibrantly alive stillness that is much vaster than thought. It is consciousness itself, of which the thinking mind is only a tiny aspect.

I had been anxious and depressed for years and suddenly I was deeply at peace.

You get there by realizing you are already there.

Being is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature. But don't seek to grasp it with your mind. Don't try to understand it. You can know it only when the mind is still. When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.

And whenever you feel that essence in another, you also feel it in yourself.

The animals certainly like to be close to humans, especially as humans go through the shift in consciousness.