From milking cobras for anti-venom to helping lion cubs from Ukraine, 86-year-old Annis Parker has never followed a conventional path.
Following a career as a highly specialised nurse, she now works from the comfort of her home at Summerset Richmond Ranges retirement village, helping animals – and people - using a complementary health approach that she says involves quantum physics and analysing energy fields.
Her life has taken her around the world. As a young nurse, she worked with destitute people living on Hong Kong junk boats after a typhoon, worked in New York as a theatre nurse with heart surgery cases, and later lived high in the New Guinea highlands when her husband opened a tea plantation.
Along the way, she also volunteered milking cobras and kraits in Thailand for anti-venom production.
Returning to New Zealand, she moved into complementary health and went on to become a Healing Beyond Borders tutor – an international organisation that teaches energy-healing techniques. Although she stopped tutoring last year, she continues to work with animals overseas and locally, including horses at the nearby Richmond Riding for the Disabled.
One of her recent projects involved working remotely with lion cubs taken from Ukraine to a wildlife sanctuary in the United States, using photographs.
“Distance is a man-made concept,” she says. “The last thing you need to do on a lot of animals and birds and sea creatures is touch, because they are so sensitive.”
She had previously visited the sanctuary every six months until the Covid-19 pandemic and continues to work with its animals from afar.
Another recent job was a local horse with high levels of stress, which she says became calmer after treatment.
“Often people are carrying emotional stuff in their own lives and animals pick up on that. They’re very knowledgeable.”
Stress is the biggest problem among people she has worked with as well.
“The issue is we hold on to everything that happened yesterday without saying it’s the past, let it go. Take learning from the past - but do it fast. And learn not to pick up stuff from other people.”
She admitsthat not everybody is receptive to the idea of being healed through quantum physics.
“If people don’t want to hear and their eyes close over, I shut up!”
Her first book was Talking with Tigers, followed by Life is a Learning Curve. Though she no longer travels around the globe to solve health issues, she now “spends an awful lot of time on Zoom” with people seeking answers for their animals.
