A Tale of Pet Reincarnation: How Pearl Became Petal

This month is very special to my little flock. It is a month of death, rebirth and miracles. So it felt fitting to share our very personal story of pet reincarnation with you this month.

I take you all the way back to my eight year old self, when I met the being who would reincarnate back to me not once, not twice, but three times. Earlier this season I shared about the passing of my soulbird of 24 years, Pearl. Now it is time to share the story of his return in a brand new body as Petal.

This episode is part one of two - in our next episode, I will walk you through five of the most frequently asked questions about pet reincarnation that I get as a working professional animal communicator.

And if you are longing for your pet in spirit to return to you through pet reincarnation, you will definitely want to listen to this episode to get a feel for the personal impact it can have on us, the human animals.

Our memoir of life together: https://www.animallovelanguages.com/book

The video I mentioned (the TLDR version): https://youtu.be/GNeEV8ylXXs

To schedule your pet reincarnation session: https://animallovelanguages.as.me/schedule.php

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome to let's Talk to Animals. My name is Shannon Kutz. I'm an animal sensitive and intuitive, a Reiki master practitioner for pets and their people and an animal communication teacher here at AnimalLoveLanguagescom. If you're listening to the audio version and you just heard that precious little chirp that was my co-host, my feathery sidekick, petal Kutz, and today is a very special podcast and vlogcast. If you're watching the video version, it's a very special episode for me, for us, for my inner species family. This is our birthday podcast and it's also the story the long overdue, possibly long-awaited story of how Pearl, my soul bird of 24 years, became Petal.

Speaker 1: 1:06

This is a story that's near and dear to my heart, that I've never tried to just sit down and really talk out and share in any way, shape or form. I've definitely written about it, so I don't know how this is going to go, and so bear with me if I fumble a little bit. It's a very emotional story for me and it's also a story that I'm constantly working with and learning from. All great love stories are like this, isn't this true? Someone comes into our life. Maybe they have fur, maybe they have feathers, they might have a shell, maybe they look just like us. They're another human animal, another homo sapien, and they just take our breath away, they steal our heart, they make us say, oh crap. They transform our lives, whether we were expecting it or not, whether we particularly think, we ordered it or not, whether we even wanted it or not. Love has a way of overcoming all sorts of obstacles in our path, including the ones we don't know are there. And that's really where I want to start sharing the story of my soul, bird Pearl.

Speaker 1: 2:18

Now, for those of you who are listening and you have read our memoir, love and Feathers, what a Palm-sized Parrot has taught me about life, love and healthy self-esteem. You are already aware that I have been in love with feathers, with parrots, with birds, since I was old enough to realize I had preferences, and so I would have to say that probably started showing up around the age of two or three. That's about the timeframe when we learn that most magical of all words, no, and that's when we start to really learn that we have preferences about everything, including who we spend our time with. And for me, I loved birds before I knew the word for bird. I just was smitten, captivated, besotted, and when I was seven, I started begging my parents for a parrot. I wanted a companion Avian, I wanted a bird and when I was eight, perky arrived.

Speaker 1: 3:24

Perky was my first ever avian companion. He was a green and yellow parakeet and he and I quickly became best friends. I taught him hundreds of words, we read together. We shared everything together. When I had a birthday, perky had a birthday these and all of our family photos. I'm carrying his big yellow cage around with me. He's at all of my sleepovers. If my friends came over, perky joined whatever we were doing. But frankly, I was mostly an introverted kid and I was perfectly happy just to play with Perky.

Speaker 1: 4:01

Once Perky entered my life, I was set and we were best friends. And in fact there's a book when I was in I don't know, probably second grade and it's one of those little flip books where you write down who you're gonna be when you grow up and ask questions like what are you gonna be famous for? And I wrote that I was gonna be famous for having the most birds and to date I have had one bird at a time. Occasionally, here and there along the way I would have two or three Perky's at a time, but for the most part I've had one avian soulmate, one avian life mate, one avian life companion at a time, and we have had very, very close bonds. But it took me until my fifth decade of life to realize that this avian companion that I have spent my whole life with at this point, starting at age eight I'm turning 53 this month that this avian companion that I first met when I was eight is one and the same.

Speaker 1: 5:07

Perky became Jacob, my first cockatiel, and I'll share a little bit about that. Jacob became Pearl, my soul bird of 24 years and the greatest architect of transformation that I have met in my life to date. And now Pearl has become Petal. Yes, I am talking about Pet reincarnation, and in addition to the many profound personal lessons that I have learned along the way, many of which I talk about in our memoir 11 Feathers, I have also learned that I have the ability to hear Petal, pearl, jacob, perky and all animals speak to me and I have the ability to reply. So let's take a little rewind, shall we?

Speaker 1: 5:59

Pearl entered my life in a very chaotic time. I had just lost my beloved first cockatiel, jacob. Jacob came to me as a little baby. He was about six weeks old. We bonded instantly. He was just love with wings, just pure heart covered in feathers. And what I didn't know when I adopted Jacob from our local bird store was that he had a congenital kidney defect and he shouldn't have made it past chickhood.

Speaker 1: 6:36

And so, starting about age one and a half, jacob started to get really, really sick and he would become thargic, he would have abnormal droppings, he would change his eating habits and I took him to the vet again and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again and again, spending hundreds of dollars, crying, trying everything I knew of at the time which was far less than I know of today, given what veterinary medicine has blossomed into. And Jacob just got sicker. He would go through periods where he would kind of rally and then he would get sicker again, and the whole last year of his life was one emergency after another, until finally, one night, we were at home and he was really starting to fail and I just wasn't willing to see it. My heart just wasn't brave enough and I put him down on the floor of his cage and I said you need to get some rest, I need to get some rest.

Speaker 1: 7:37

Woke up the next morning and he had passed away and I was hysterical. I lost myself in that moment and didn't really want myself back, to be honest, and had to go into work later that day. I shared with my boss that I was late because my beloved parrot died. She didn't really seem to get it, what it was that was making me so upset, and did my best to carry on with life and business as usual, but my heart had closed.

Speaker 1: 8:10

You know what that's like if you've lost someone, and you especially if you just really weren't expecting it, whether it was expected or not, if you weren't in a place where you could see it and feel it and then walk with it through what you know is to come, which is the grief and the loss, and then the resurrection and the rebirth. And when we're stuck in the grief and the loss and the fear of that, we can't see the resurrection and the rebirth, and so we just believe that the grief and the loss will last forever. And it's not impossible for that to happen. It does happen. For me it lasted about six months. And then my parents, whom I was living with at the time, kind of in a real transition point in my life, it was really pretty adrift, to be honest and they just couldn't handle it. I could handle being sad all the time, but I guess they couldn't.

Speaker 1: 9:05

So one day my mom and dad went to our local PetSmart and I was at work, as usual my office wasn't too terribly far away and so they called me and they said you've got to get over to PetSmart at lunchtime. And I said absolutely not happening. And my mother being my mom, if you've read Love and Feathers, you know she's very persistent and she would not take no for an answer. And eventually I realized it would be easier to just say yes. And so I said yes and I headed over at lunch and there was this huge open air aviary, the kind that you never see anymore. I don't even think PetSmart has cockatiels anymore.

Speaker 1: 9:46

And I walked in and I saw these big yellow and gray birds and they looked so healthy and they looked just like my Jacob and I almost turned around and walked out and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a little movement. And I looked closer, in spite of myself, and saw this little miserable gray clump of feathers covered in baby bird formula. The older birds were walking all over him. It was like they didn't even see him. Nobody knew he was there, and without even taking the time to go up into my head and reason it out. And isn't this how all the best stories seem to start we start stories with. Once upon a time, I think it would be even better to just start stories saying in spite of myself I because that's exactly what happened, in spite of myself I turned my arms, reached out and he hopped on and he scampered up my arm and he hid under my hair for 45 minutes and we just walked around the pet store that way. I whispered to him you are love with wings, aren't you? You're my pearl of great price. And he was for the next 24 years Now for the first 11, we thought he was a girl bird and that's a whole other story. You'll wanna check out the more if you wanna learn more about that.

Speaker 1: 11:08

We don't have time enough on this podcast for all the wonderful stories of my life with Pearl and all of the amazing things he taught me. But he transformed my life in certain key ways that, frankly, you wouldn't be listening to me right now if he hadn't been in my life, because I discovered animal communication through Pearl. Pearl started getting kind of a mystery illness when he was about 11, he started to have these off and on bleeding episodes where he would just bleed a little bit when he pooped. Of course, veterinary medicine was evolving it's still evolving to this day and as new options became available, we would try them different blood tests, different things we could do. I wasn't getting anywhere, and every time he would start bleeding again I would panic. I'd take all the red stuff out of his area. I'd take out anything red that was a toy, any kind of red bird seed, anything that he had access to, thinking he was maybe swallowing something. Then I started taking away anything that was hard or rough, anything he could chew on, just trying my best to troubleshoot what was happening.

Speaker 1: 12:22

One thing led to another and I started reading books. More books were becoming available about birds and about animals and about medicine and about intuition and about animal communication, and the first book I read and I talk about this a lot is actually Dr Temple Grandin's Life in Pictures and she talks about her autism and how being autistic helped her in the work that she does she still does today, providing much more humane conditions for commercial livestock animals during their lifespan, helping to work with the commercial livestock management, the large factory farms and designing accommodations for them. She does amazing, amazing work, probably equally famous for being a high, high, high functioning, autistic and for being this incredible humanitarian for animals. Even though she never called her work animal communication, there was something about it that resonated with me and I knew I had to learn more, so I started reading more of her books. One of her other books was called Animals Make Us Human.

Speaker 1: 13:33

Another book was called Animals in Translation, and through that I found another author who turned out to be an animal communicator, named Marta Williams, and Marta's books brought me to animal communication for real, and I hired Marta to help me with Pearl, and Marta directed me to a homeopathic practitioner who created a remedy that helped ease Pearl's bleeding for a while, but this would turn out to be a lifelong issue, and one of the many lessons that Mr Pearl taught me was that Pearl and I had similar issues with our health, and so when I would work on my health, pearl's health would get better. You are so cute. If you're watching a video version, you're hearing my songstress. Yeah, my songstress is serenading us. She knows we're talking about her, and Pearl also inaugurated me into the world of being an author I now have three books and it was my desire to capture his wisdom, his stories.

Speaker 1: 14:55

I started a blog called Love and Feathers because I wanted to share his wonderful impact on my life with others. I wanted to share the consciousness of our companion animals. I wanted to share that with the world and so I started the blog and then that became the book Love and Feathers. And then it just blossomed from there and I could spend all day just telling you about my Pearl, but in a very, almost really identical fashion to Jacob.

Speaker 1: 15:26

One night I went to bed and I could tell he had just turned 24, and I could tell he was slowing down. I mean, I looked in the mirror, I looked at the two of us and I saw our age, how much we had aged together. I mean, we've grown in wisdom, yes. We've learned to love better, as Thierry Brock says. Yes, but we also age physically. So I could see it and in hindsight I was seeing more than I was willing to see, if that makes any sense. And even though all the signs were there and by this time I was a practicing professional animal intuitive and a Reiki master even though all the signs were there, they were so subtle in my eyes and my heart were so blinded by my love and my absolute conviction that I couldn't live without Pearl, that he was my everything. I was not ready when I woke up that next morning and found him almost in the exact same spot on the floor of his cage where I had found Jacob so many, many years ago.

Speaker 1: 16:30

All of the preparation that I had done writing the book, learning to speak with animals, learning energy healing, becoming, I hoped, a better human, a more evolved human, a human who was more resilient, who could move through grief and stress, all of that work, it didn't mean a thing. I howled, just like I had so many, many, many years ago and my world stopped and I lost myself and once again, I was living with my mom. My precious, precious dad had passed and my mom had had a bad fall and then a hip replacement. So, of course, many of you who've been following the podcast, you know that I live with her and she is grandma and she's the star of our social media, along with along with my feathered and shelled inferred crew. So, yet again, here I am, living with mom, and she could see how devastated I was and I couldn't even speak. I called her. She was a church. I couldn't even speak. I she answered the phone and all I said was pearl. And she asked me what had happened and I said pearl. And she said is it too late? And I said pearl, and she said I'm coming right home. And I said pearl, and that's how it was. Ah, yes, that's how it was. She got home and she put her mom hat on and she sat down at the computer and she said well, we're just going to find another one right away. And I needed something to do because I didn't want to be there. I wanted to go where pearl went.

Speaker 1: 18:07

All of a sudden, in the middle of the maelstrom of grief, somehow he broke through and I could hear his voice, clear as a bell, the same inner voice that I've come to know so well, and he said I'm rushing right back. He said I will be a ladybird this time. My name will be petal. And then he downloaded a picture of a bright, yellow bird. Now, this bird that he downloaded to me didn't look like my petal. Yes, this bird was yellow, but this was what we would call a Lutino a bright, pale, yellow, all yellow bird. When I got that downloaded.

Speaker 1: 18:48

It's not like it swept on my grief away. I was a miserable wreck for several days, but it calmed something in me that simply had disconnected. Because that's what grief does to us. It's a reaction that's so overwhelming on so many levels that, at the physical level, what it does is it throws us into our sympathetic nervous system. Our fight, fight, freeze tend to be friend and we go into kind of a physical lockdown when it shuts our higher functioning processes off. In the interests of survival. Do I need to run? Do I need to hide? Do I need to fight? What do I need to do? And so, with that reconnection inside, when I heard Pearl's voice inside and I felt his presence, it turned enough of my higher functions back on that I was able to kind of shift back into. All right then, what are we looking for? How will I find you? Meanwhile, as I'm going through all this and listening to Pearl's mom's on the computer and she's scrolling and she's looking for baby cockatiels, he passed away just a handful of days after our shared birthday, december 19th. That was another really cool thing. Is that based on how old he was when I met him that day at PetSmart and when he had hatched. It's a very, very good likelihood that we shared the same or very close birthday, so we always celebrated our birthdays on December 19th.

Speaker 1: 20:22

And here we are, the middle of winter, really, it's the middle of January, january 8th, and there are no cocktail babies to be had anywhere. Cockatiels don't breed in the middle of winter. They wait until the sunlight hours are getting longer Again. In the temperatures you're getting warmer and set, the food sources are starting to spring back to life and that's when they start thinking about making an egg. And so we're calling, we're calling, we're calling and we're hearing we won't have any babies till March. We won't have any babies till March. Cockatiels won't start laying eggs until February or March, because it's quite warm here in the south, here in Texas, where we live.

Speaker 1: 21:01

All of a sudden, as mom was scrolling, I saw two words Robin's nest. Now, I love Robbins. And I saw the words Robin's nest and I said wait, go back, what's that? Click on that. Mom clicked on it. I found the number and I just called. My fingers started punching numbers and I just dialed. I got Robin. I said do you have any, any cocktail babies? And she said not until March. I was like, oh crap. And then she took a breath and she said but I do just happen to have two cocktail egg. And here I am, I'm listening to her, I'm listening, my ears are perking up.

Speaker 1: 21:43

And she said during the freeze that we just had and we had just gone through a huge kind of an epic row freeze that nobody here in Texas was expecting. During the freeze a few weeks ago I had to pull all my outdoor aviary birds inside and I found two cocktail eggs. I totally wasn't expecting it. It's completely out of season and I had to move them inside so fast that I didn't even get a chance to notice whose nest they were in, and so I don't know who the parents are. So I've got these eggs in an incubator. I can't promise anything. I don't know if they're going to make it, but why don't you get in touch with me in a couple of weeks and I'll give you an update? If not, try back in March.

Speaker 1: 22:28

I just knew one of these eggs was pearl, coming back to me. I knew it, I just knew it, and I think it probably took. I don't even remember. It was a couple of days and I contacted her and I said I just wanted to check, just check. And I shared my story of losing pearl and how he'd been with me for 24 years, and I didn't say anything about reincarnation, I just said I really need a bird in my life. And she texted me a video of her handling the eggs and both were alive.

Speaker 1: 23:00

Now, to make a very long, wonderful story slightly shorter for the sake of your time, only one of the eggs made it, and this egg she popped under the bum of her most experienced laying pair and sent me a picture of the little baby right after hatching. That turned out to be Miss Petal here, and would you believe that the mama bird was the exact, the spitting image of the bright, solid, yellow bird that pearl had downloaded to me. He was showing me who his foster mom was going to be, who the circuit mom was going to be. From this point forward, I was all in and Robin Blesser Hart kept me updated, probably staved off me texting her every single hour, but she kept me updated with wonderful pictures of this enormous baby growing up and that you got all the nourishment, you got all the mommy and you got all the daddy and you got it all.

Speaker 1: 24:04

And on February 27th my little baby came home with me and this whole experience of Petal coming back and Pearl masterminding the whole thing the way that only he could, has been such a leap of faith for me and as I've shared bits and pieces of our story, including a wonderful little video that I will link to in the show notes if you'd like to take a look. Consider that the too long didn't read or did listen version of how Pearl became Petal. There had been so many signs and wonders and little hints along the way, like a picture that a vlog fan of ours painted that showed Mr Pearl surrounded by pink feathers. And if you're watching the video version, there's a painting that I've had and loved for many years of birds on a wire behind me, and several days after Pearl passed because it took me a while to notice it A shadowy outline of him appeared on the wire next to all the other nesting birds and even the receptacle where I keep all of Pearl's melted feathers. It's a pink parrot. There are so many signs and every so often he'll send me another one. He'll send me a sign in the strangest way that this enormous lady birds is him, and so the next blog episode that I have on our schedule is going to go into more about what pet reincarnation is, what it isn't, what to expect frequently asked questions because and I'll just leave you with this little spoiler alert pet reincarnation is not pet cloning.

Speaker 1: 25:58

There's a lot that goes into opening our hearts, opening our minds, opening our lives to the reincarnation of a beloved soul, pet, and it's a process. Pearl is still teaching me every single day what it means to keep company with the reincarnation of someone that you love so much in a certain form, and it's an adjustment. It's really making me a better animal communicator. It's making me a better animal communication teacher and mentor. It's definitely, definitely making me a better pet parent and more appreciative of the heart connection.

Speaker 1: 26:39

That does not change. That feels exactly the same, perhaps even more if you fancy the idea of really spending a lifetime falling in love deeper and deeper and deeper, with the same being over and over and over again. And pet reincarnation definitely is for you. But it also requires a lot of brave, a lot of courage, and so we'll talk about that more in our next episode, but for now, as imperfectly as I have shared it and as many things as I'm even thinking of now that I left out, that I wanted to share with you, and so much more to our story, so much more to the miraculousness of how Pearl pulled the whole thing off.

Speaker 1: 27:23

May this be enough for now, and if you are missing a soul pet whom you deeply love and you feel like you need help or mentoring or support or just somebody to help you reconnect at the heart level, please do reach out. I am here, I've been through it. I understand at the heart and soul, as well as the mind level, how it impacts us in so many ways that go beyond words and certainly go beyond anything that our fellow human animals could possibly understand or connect with, especially if they've never been through it themselves. So it would be my honor and joy to help you reconnect with a soul, pet and spirit, to help you welcome a beloved soul pet and spirit back in a new body to share more of life's adventures with you. You can reach me at animallovelanguagescom. Back slash connect. Okay, this is Animal, my Love. I'll talk to you again soon. I'll see you next time.