Coping with Pet Grief While Living with Your Reincarnated Pet

Pet reincarnation is a wondrous experience. But it can also bring up a lot inside us! 

This is especially true if you go into the experience having certain assumptions or expectations about what it should be like to live with your reincarnated soul pet.

And it's hard not to have expectations or assumptions since, if you are like most pet parents, this is probably going to be your first time consciously welcoming your pet back in a new body!

Recently a pet parent client of mine asked me if I ever still feel grief about my soul bird Pearl, who passed away a year ago and then returned to me 8 weeks later through pet reincarnation as my current bird, Petal.

✨Listen to How Pearl Became Petal: https://letstalktoanimals.buzzsprout.com/2105365/14130275

I answered, "Yes, absolutely!" So that is what this episode of Let's Talk to Animals podcast is all about. What is it really like living with a reincarnated pet? What if grief comes up (spoiler alert: it will!). 

I share six tips to navigate your first days and weeks of life with your newly reincarnated soul pet. 

Key topics include:

- How you can start at the acceptance stage of grief and work backwards
- What it feels like when your reincarnated pet gives you signs
- The magical power of gratitude for embracing your old pet in a new body
- The one key thing you need to say to yourself if you are grieving
- The power of honesty in bonding with your reincarnated pet 
- Why it is so hard to be patient with the pet reincarnation process

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome to let's Talk to Animals. My name is Shannon Cutts. I'm an animal sensitive and intuitive or Reiki master practitioner and an animal communication teacher for pets and their people. If you heard a little hop and you're listening to the audio version, that was my feathered sidekick, petal Cutts. Yep, loud and proud, she loves to co-host with me. She has very strong opinions about the topic we're tackling here, which is de-wooing and demystifying all things intuition and animal communication. What is it? Who can do it, how does it work, how do you know you're doing it, how to troubleshoot when it doesn't feel like it's flowing, and what can we use it for.

Speaker 1: 0:53

Thus far in season five, we've really been going back to basics, talking about intuition, your inner teacher. What is it? How does it work? How can you begin to tune in, and I've been speaking about how, for me, 2024 really feels like a tipping point year. We've spent the last couple of years kind of up close and personal with ourselves in ways that haven't always felt comfortable. We certainly weren't expecting it. Probably many of us have spent the last year or year or few in kind of a perpetual low-grade state of the sympathetic nervous system response that fight flight frees tend to be friend reactions that we have when everything feels like it's up in the air and unknown and possibly dangerous and definitely scary. So we started out season five really talking in a two-parter about intuition, how to begin to activate yours and take it for a test drive, just see what it can do. I'm not saying throw out the left brain and with its logic, loving and over analyzing and rational focus on life. I'm just saying let's seek some balance. Let's maybe add in a little bit more of the expansive, the creative, the right brain, the feel it before you know it response. That is so much a part of the work that I do and the courses that I teach, the animal communication courses and programs that I teach and I share with others, and I definitely would love to share more about that with you. If you're interested in learning animal communication, we would be delighted to welcome you.

Speaker 1: 2:30

But for today I want to piggyback on our topic from last last. Well, the last, I want to say last week, but this is the last two weeks. We're doing these episodes every two weeks because it's just me and Petal here in the little podcast sphere and frankly, petal's really more the creative lead and I do all the grunt work. So if they're coming, if the episodes are coming out every week, that's twice as much grunt work for me. So two weeks feels much more manageable. I do hope you're enjoying season five best far and I hope you do listen back to the four previous seasons that we've done as well and lots of amazing interviews and wonderful and animal loving individuals that are there waiting for you to meet them. But for last, the last two weeks episode, we took a deeper dive into the grief response.

Speaker 1: 3:26

What happens when an animal love crosses over, what happens in our bodies at every level physiologically, emotionally, mentally, at the soul level, with our relationship and spiritually, if you will, and kind of how to speed up that initial grief storm that we look at and we see it coming. Sometimes we don't see it coming but we could just there's little, this little heads up that happens in our sympathetic nervous system that goes oh no, I see that tornado, I see that tsunami, I see that hurricane, I see that earthquake. No, thank you, I don't want any part of that. And that's the part of us in the first stage, stage of grief. And the classical model where they talk about denial and denial is that shutting down against that battening the hatches, that closing of the locking of the storm doors and saying I don't want that. That is not for me, that is unsafe. I don't want to experience that. Come here, my love. You want to introduce yourself to those watching the video version. If you haven't met Miss Paddle yet, this is our musical accompaniment for today's podcast. They're very animal friendly here.

Speaker 1: 4:38

But we have this initial grief storm. That happens and we have to get through it somehow and we have control over a big part of how rapidly we move through. That it doesn't mean there aren't still going to be grief waves, grief ripples. It's the difference between the hurricane as it moves over the ocean and all the way down to the ocean floor and even below Everything gets displaced and kind of the aftershocks where we're looking more at something will trigger a memory or we'll just be having an off day. We'll have a dream that really affects us emotionally and we'll need to move our body. We'll need to move it out of our body. But the big storm has passed and we're reorienting. We're getting to know ourselves as the new being we are now who's gone through that grief storm. We're hopefully anchoring back into the part of us that is very brave for having weathered that storm very strong, for having chosen to face it, to walk through it and to still seek for the highest and best good.

Speaker 1: 6:00

And, if you're interested in animal communication or you're studying animal communication, to seek for a reconnection, which is really kind of where we focused in the last episode. After we get through that initial storm of grief, that can feel like we've disconnected from our animal love. It can feel like they're no longer a part of our life because their body is missing, and this is something I went through. By the way, if you haven't listened to that episode it was the last episode before this one Go back and listen to that as well, because I share a lot more about my personal story with my soul, bird Pearl, who passed a year ago last month and it was unexpected.

Speaker 1: 6:39

He was 24. I had cared for him and loved him and we had been joined at the beak for 24 years, from the time he was a five-week-old chick that I rescued from a pet smart and it was just my world, just, and I was a professional animal communicator at the time and I have three other animals in my family and yet it just ripped my life apart and kind of shut it down for a couple months and because I have learned animal communication, because I've become adept, I was really able to take a look at the grief process and how it unfolds and how I could help myself and use and apply what I'd learned to kind of shorten the life cycle of that initial grief hurricane. I'm here in the south, in Texas, so I call it a hurricane because we're very familiar with those down here, but you can call it a tsunami or a northeaster or whatever natural disaster rocks your particular corner of the world, and so I really talked a lot more about that and also referenced a couple of episodes in late season four You'll want to go back and listen to those as well where I talked about how Pearl reincarnated to me as Miss Petal who is even as I speak, repelling up her enormous cage, her cassa, here in the great indoors, and she's a very active, just turned one year old baby bird. She's a cockatiel, just like Pearl and her coloration is Pearl and there are so many signs and wonders and I share quite a bit of those in those couple of episodes in late season four where I really talked more about how I knew that Pearl was coming back to me, how I followed the clues and the signs that he shared with me the process, what it was like to seek Pearl in his new body as Miss Petal really just snapshots of our first days together. Pearl coming back to me as Petal was wonderful and it has been wonderful and it's also been challenging at times and sad, and still there have been those grief ripples and those waves.

Speaker 1: 9:08

And so last week I was talking with a client of mine who is going through that process right now and she's seeking to reconnect with her soul pet and she is really struggling with the grief and yet visioning forward, wanting to have that reconnection, wanting to welcome her soul pet back in a new body. And she asked me a question that was like a depth charge, right to the core of my being. She said what is it like living with your soul pet reincarnated? Do you still struggle with the grief? And I thought this is something that needs to be talked about and isn't being talked about. I just spent the last year of my life, of our life, together, experiencing in real time what it's like living with your soul pet in a reincarnated life, in a reincarnated body, and I can answer that question. So I wanted to make this podcast episode for you in case you're interested in calling a soul pet who's passed into spirit, back in a new body, so you can have more adventures together. In case perhaps that is already unfolded for you, maybe you've worked with me, maybe you've worked with another communicator to call your animal and spirit back into a new physical form and you welcome them back into your family in this new body, in this new incarnation, and yet the grief is still there.

Speaker 1: 10:52

Or you just have troublesome feelings or emotions that you don't know what to do with, or you have assumptions or expectations that are troublesome for you because you don't know how it should be, and those are very much left brain mind constructs. Where the left brain mind really and we talk a lot more about this in my animal communication program when I teach my students we talk a lot about the left brain mind's job description, about its role and about where it lives in our world, and what I can share right here right now is that for our purposes here, the left brain lives in the past or the future. It's never here right now, and so when your left brain kicks in with those assumptions or those expectations, then it's either looking back to the past for an example from your time with your soul pet in their previous body and their previous incarnation, looking for a time when the behavior or the emotion or whatever it is that you're experiencing with your reincarnated pet, it's looking for a time when that happened in the past and it's trying to pull it forward to say it's okay, don't worry, you don't have to feel uncomfortable, you don't have to wonder if this is really your reincarnated pet, you don't have to worry that you're doing something wrong. It's not finding it. And there's a reason for that because, while your animal has reincarnated to you and their essence, their energy, their energetic signature is tangibly known and familiar to you. There's a lot about them that's going to be new. Why is that? And we talk about that more in one of the reincarnation episodes at the end of season four, but again, for our purposes here, what I can share is that no spirit, no soul, no being of any species chooses to reincarnate into a new body here in the 3D human centric earth plane that we live in together. If they don't have more to learn and that can mean they have more to experience it means they have lessons they need to learn. It might mean they have a mission that they really want or need to follow. It might mean they have something special to give. It might mean they have something special they need to receive. It could be all of the above or something else, but there is an agenda, there is something that serves, that being to return, to reenter a physical body to put up with the limitations, with the speciesism on our planet, with all of their privations of being a companion animal, as well as the joys. They have their own reasons for coming back, and that means they're not going to be identical to the animal that you knew in their last incarnation, in their last physical body. There are going to be hallmarks that may carry forward, but there's also going to be a lot that's different In some ways, miss Petal here coming in my love.

Speaker 1: 14:07

Miss Petal is the spitting image of Pearl, but I find that in her energetic signature and in the way that sometimes she just looks at me when I'm having one of those moments of are you just too woo-woo for words that you really think that this is your tiny little gray and white soul bird Pearl, who just would sit on your shoulder, and she's such a live wire she's in. She's the largest cocktail I've ever seen. She is wildly colorful. Where Pearl was very much duo tone white and gray. She is flighted. He was not flighted because of a wing injury. All kinds of things are so radically different that it would be so easy for me to just descend into doubt and then into grief. So the reason that I don't, the reason that I can catch myself, is because I understand that the nature of reincarnating is to have new life lessons, is to have new experiences, is to challenge ourselves, to learn and grow what my late best friend Marcy used to say to grow in wisdom and learn to love better. I think that's a Tara Brock quote. She just loved it. She said it all the time and I think to myself.

Speaker 1: 15:31

Petal has definitely challenged herself as Pearl, coming back as Petal, there's, it's there's whole new vista, there's a whole new set of opportunities. There's been a personality shift. She's flighted. Now it, our relationship dynamic is different. Plus, she's a baby bird. Pearl was 24, which is quite grandly old for a cockatiel. So there's so much that's different.

Speaker 1: 16:02

And, and I'll be honest, when, when I first welcomed Petal home, I was still just skating on faith, pearl had told me certain things. He had told me that he would be coming back as a lady bird, his name would be Petal. He showed me a picture, an image of a pale, all yellow cockatiel who turned out to be his foster mother, her foster mother. So there were all kinds of signs. Their birthdays are very, very much, almost identical. Just there are so many. There are so many signs and wonders that I talk about in those other episodes. But yet Petal is very different.

Speaker 1: 16:46

And I remember once I was day two, petal had just come home. She wasn't hand tamed, she was kind of skittish, just scared of kind of everything, which is totally normal for a little tiny baby who has just been rehomed, and it's just very different for her. And she was just it. We were just a hot mess. The two of us together were just a hot mess.

Speaker 1: 17:12

And I remember walking outside and walking over to where we buried Pearl, by this little plant in our backyard, and I walked out and I sat down and I just cried and I said I know she's you and I'm so grateful that you've come back to me, but I miss you as you, I miss you as you and I kind of just was like I just had to accept that this was how I was feeling. And I walked back inside and Petal was just. She was just really shy, she was scared. She would kind of flinch. You know if I would handle her and it was hard to get her to eat at first because she was scared and she just was in kind of in a little bit of a rehoming shock and she would wake up really early in the morning and Pet Pearl would just sleep late and I'm not asleep. I've never been a morning person, I'm more of a night owl. So she'd wake me up and I'd be come out, I'd be bleary eyed and be like, oh my God, did she need for five minutes and fall asleep. And I remember my mom just looking at me and saying she's going to be such a great bird and she just got it. She just understood.

Speaker 1: 18:28

She's been through with her soul dog, jp Morgan, and the dog that we have now, flash Gordon, who is not the reincarnation, far from it. I just remember those early days, and there are still times. Petal is just, she's so active, she's rambunctious, she's flighted, she's just and she's a, she's a baby. So she's got a ton of energy, don't you, my love. I mean, she's cute as all get out, and yet there are moments where I'll come across pictures.

Speaker 1: 19:01

It's bittersweet, it's sweet. My heart is open. It's so important when we're going through the grief process to grab hold of everything that can keep our hearts our hearts open and brave and I'll talk more about that in just a minute because I'm gonna walk you through some of the tips and the guidance that I have that I've taken a look back at the last year of our life together, me and Petal, as she's growing up. She's now just a little over one year old and so we've gone through some incredible growing up experiences. I shepherded her through her first molt and saved every single feather. It's been wonderful.

Speaker 1: 19:49

But what is it like living with your reincarnated pet? If I could sum it up in a word, I would say it's bittersweet, been a huge experience for me to go through this from the perspective of a pet parent and animal guardian who was deeply in love with one being. And then they pass into spirit and their body is no more. And then they come back and there's this deeply familiar feeling and yet there's so much that's new and that's going to trigger the sympathetic nervous system to say warning, warning, warning. Something's not right here and there's nothing wrong, it's just different. And so that's where we need to start. And I also want to just pause for a moment and say, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I want to call my soul pet back to me in a new body, but I'm worried about, or I'm concerned about, the possibility that I might feel regret or grief or guilt, or it's not going to be the same. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Even though it's been hard, I have felt very grateful for all of the experiences that I've had, including watching the different aspects of grief as they shift and transform and feeling myself being shifted and transformed and encouraged by them. If you're interested in having this experience, I would love to work with you. You can reach out to me at animallovelanguagescom. There's a little schedule button and we can talk. We can talk with your pet and spirit and we can welcome them back.

Speaker 1: 21:43

The first thing I want to share with you is hearkening back to what I talked about earlier with the five stages, the classical five stages of grief, which are denial, sadness, bargaining, anger and acceptance, and all of those are. They're not linear, even though they sound like they're linear at least they're not linear for me. But all of those stages of grief have a protective function. They allow us to take that initial grief storm at a pace that doesn't feel life-threatening to us. So maybe for a little while we're hung up in bargaining, or we're hung up in denial, or we're hung up in sadness or we're hung up in anger.

Speaker 1: 22:29

The acceptance piece really comes for me first by being able to acknowledge the grief storm and go oh goodness, it's coming. I don't want that, I don't want to go through it. Okay, here we go and I just start walking through it and I just allow myself to accept whatever feelings are coming up and accept right up front that this is going to be the same, yet different. That is by design. It is for the highest and best good of the animal that we love so much. We wouldn't want them to be hindered by having to come back in the same exact body, in the same exact personality, in the same exact circumstances, because then they wouldn't be able to continue their journey, they wouldn't be able to do more learning and growing, and we don't want that for them.

Speaker 1: 23:23

When we love someone, when you and I love someone, of any species, we want the highest and best for them. And so just understanding and accepting up front that when you call your soul pet back to you in a new body, you are necessarily calling change, even sometimes shocking change, into your life because that is for the highest and best good of the one you love so much. Now you may not find that some of the changes are as shocking as the ones that I've been through with tiny little petite flightless pearl and enormous energetic flighted petal, and there's so much outside contrast that it's easy to overlook the inside similarity and the feel of the energetic signature, and we can talk more about that in a future episode. But just the sensation that I know you, you and I, we've been here before, we have met before, we're best friends, that inner, that subtle inner sensation that I have, it anchors me because so much about the exterior of this bird that I love so much is so very different. So having that acceptance upfront and understanding why it's because that is what serves this animal that you love so much, it's what serves their best and highest good to come back in this different body Of course Mr Pearl would wanna come back as a flighted bird.

Speaker 1: 24:56

He'd never got the chance to experience flight, he was nest bullied and either one of his parents or his siblings bit off the left wing tip when he was a baby, when he was less than five weeks old, and he was never able to fly. So of course, that would be like his number one thing he'd wanna come back as a flighted cockatiel, and once he attained reproductive age he was constantly looking for lady birds. So it makes perfect sense to me, mentally as well as emotionally, that he would wanna come back as the one thing he spent most of his adult life searching for which was a lady bird. He came back as petal and he would come back as a beautiful lady bird. And he came back. Here's the funniest part. I didn't know this when Ms Petal came home with me. But I didn't know he was. I didn't know she was a girl. I had to take it on faith and I didn't know what coloration she would be. But she turned out to be a pearl coloration. That's the color mutation that she inherited from whoever her parents were, and we don't know who her parents were, but she's a pearl. But she's this big, brilliantly, wildly colored bird where his pearl looked like he was wearing a little tuxedo. You wanna meet pearl?

Speaker 1: 26:08

You can read our memoir of life together Love and Feathers. What a palm-sized parrot has taught me about life, love and healthy self-esteem. Pearl helped me heal from a very serious 20-year battle with eating disorder, with anxiety and depression. He helped me re-engineer my career several times. He helped me weather a really difficult relationship that ended right before he passed away. And it's just. We have so many stories. But of course it would serve Mr Pearl to come back and have access to all of these new experiences, almost direct opposite to what he experienced in his 24 years with me.

Speaker 1: 26:48

So I'm so glad in my heart I'm not only accepting, but I've come to become so grateful for these differences, because I'm like, oh my God, you are having such oh you know, like a rip or a good dime in your flighted body. Like sometimes she'll just, she'll see me coming and she'll just if you're watching the video version like she'll just raise her wings and she'll just hold them out and just like, look at these, look, look at my wings. And it's so amazing. And I just celebrate with her. Did I have all of this awareness at first when she came home with me Heck. No, but I do now and I'd love to hopefully maybe save you a little bit of the angst and the discomfort I felt by sharing that with you.

Speaker 1: 27:35

So you just know upfront, your animal will be different. We're not cloning here. Cloning is a whole separate issue. It's done for a whole separate set of reasons and I don't delve into cloning, at least I'm not going to talk about it in this particular episode. Maybe we'll talk about it later.

Speaker 1: 27:53

So let me know if you're interested, but for now I just I want to encourage you to kind of get to that acceptance stage of the five stages of grief, even as you go through the grieving process for the one you loved whose incarnation has ended. That's really what happens when the body falls away. The incarnation has ended, that, that set of lessons has ended, they have completed them and now it's time to either stay in spirit and serve from that side and be a part of that community, or it's time to come back and re-up for a new set of lessons. And so if you can get to that acceptance part first, it's going to lessen the shock value of welcoming your reincarnated animal back and experiencing them as their new incarnation, with their new set of lessons with the new tools that they've been given. Now, even tempering that, my second kind of tip for you, which just again comes from my own experiences over the last year with Petal Pearl, as I call her look for the little signs. And a PS to that ask for the little signs.

Speaker 1: 29:03

What has happened for me is that learning animal communication has not taken away my sympathetic nervous system, which is with its natural inbuilt tendency to question and doubt. That in a past life kept me from ending up as a plated and served, as I like to say, for the Sabertooth Tiger family. There are going to be moments when I just I look at her and I'm like there's no way you could possibly be, mr Pearl, and usually it'll be right at those moments when she'll turn and she'll give me a look. This is not a bird that sits, she just did it. This is not a bird that sits still for too terribly long. So when she does it, it's really obvious, or she'll, just she'll meet my eyes and I feel it. I can feel it right here and if you're watching the video version, no-transcript thumping right on my thymus gland, right that breast bone, right in the center of my chest and I can feel it. It's like a click. It's like that feeling you have when your key turns in the lock and you know it's the right key and you know that the door has just unlocked and now you can push it open. It's that feeling, and there are other. You know, there are all kinds of little subtle variations of that, but that's just one example. I'll have that moment of doubt and I'll allow it. That's natural, it's inbuilt, it's actually protective. There's nothing wrong with feeling doubt. There can be something wrong with getting stuck in it. There's nothing wrong with questioning.

Speaker 1: 30:37

I love what Don Miguel Ruiz says. There's, in his lesser known fit, the agreement he says be skeptical but learn to listen. And I think it's really interesting because one of his other four, the four main agreements, is don't make assumptions. So it's like he's constantly telling us feel, don't just think, feel. These have different functions in our life. I have really come to experience with pedal pearl.

Speaker 1: 31:03

One of the reasons that we may feel called to invite a sole pet back in a reincarnated body and to go through the some of the head, the intuitive heavy lifting that comes along with that experience, is because we have a sole lesson. We've added that to our basket or our toolkit of lessons that we want to learn in this lifetime. I want to develop my intuition, I want to trust my intuition. I want to understand what my intuition is, where it lives, within me, my inner teacher, and there is nothing that can skyrocket your intuitive development more than going through a pet reincarnation experience. You have to go within. I've had to go within the clients I've helped who have called their their sole pets back into their lives. They've had to go within.

Speaker 1: 31:56

We've had to have those conversations about what do you need? Not to completely squash the doubt forever or eradicate the questioning, but what do you need? To take that next step forward in faith, if you will Down here, I'm not referring to religious faith. I'm referring to sensory faith, trust or a little inner instinct that overrides this empathetic nervous system and says no, no, no, this is okay, you can take another step forward. That's not a saber tooth tiger. That's your best friend up there. That's your sole pet hiding in a new body, playing a fun game of hide and seek with you. You can take that next step forward. So that's what we're talking about here your intuitive development, and your sole pet has a contract with you to help you in this area, and so this is another piece of the puzzle. This is another reason why your sole pet isn't going to come back in the same exact form. It isn't going to look exactly the same. It isn't going to act exactly the same. They may have one or two habits or mannerisms or a certain look in their eye or certain way that they approach you.

Speaker 1: 33:09

Where one of my clients had her sole dog, who, reincarnated to her, would just come and put his paw on her knee in a very particular way, and even though so much about her reincarnated dogs in his new body and his new personality were very different, this particular thing was a dead giveaway, just something that very unusual that out of all the other dogs she's ever had, this was her dog in spirit, who reincarnated to her, was the only one who did this, and she would get that little key in the lock feeling in her gut and she would say I know who this is. And so we have to know, at a level that our left brain mind will never be able to access, because it doesn't live. We started this episode by talking about where does the left brain mind live? What is this job description. It lives in the past and in the future because that's where the sympathetic nervous system functions to keep us alive. It takes data from the past and ports it over to the future, hopefully keeping us alive in the present moment. So all of its functionality happens in the past and the future. Right now, in the present, is where your inner teacher is active. That's the parasympathetic nervous system. That's your right brain, and I'm not talking about from a biological standpoint. We're talking about intuitive anatomy here. So this is different. Don't go to the biology textbook and look it up and go. She was wrong. This is a different set of wires that we're talking about. So just understand that.

Speaker 1: 34:37

The acceptance piece, if you can bring that forward and say, okay, beyond this grief that's about to unfold here, I'm just gonna. I'm gonna have to grieve, I'm gonna have to get the cortisol out of my body, I'm gonna have to cry, I'm gonna have to go through any guilt or shame or regrets and all the stuff that just has to come out in the form of just this grief storm. Understand that I really want to spend more time with this being that I love so much, and pet reincarnation is a way for me to do that. It's a way for us to have a whole new series of adventures together. It's a way for us to continue learning and growing from someone we trust so much and have invested so much time and energy into the relationship with. So I'm gonna accept that it's gonna look different, because that is what's in the highest and best good of this animal I love so much, and it's also in my own highest and best good. I'm gonna accept that and I'm gonna train myself to watch for small signs and to ask for small signs. There have been days when Petal has been acting up because she's a baby bird. She's a little baby bird and she's just got baby bird energy and she's just. If I had a tenth of her energy, there's no telling what I could do. I could power the world. So sometimes I ask her for signs, are you sure? And she'll give me the look and I know. And we go on, we go on and so just. And this builds my intuitions, builds my trust with her, builds my trust with Pearl, it reawakens gratitude in my heart and it reminds me that I am brave. And that is the next tip that I wanna share with you Self-care has become such a cliche, such a kind of a buzz phrase in our modern self-facing world, post-pandemic self-facing world.

Speaker 1: 36:31

We've had all this time up close and personal with ourselves, that most of us didn't order and didn't necessarily want, and it has changed us and it has made us more aware that self-care feels good. But it hasn't yet necessarily filtered down to the fact that self-care is essential. And what does self-care really mean? It means befriending ourselves. It means encouraging ourselves. It means giving to ourselves in the ways in which we give to those we love the most, who are not us.

Speaker 1: 37:03

I would never go to Miss Petal and say oh, you're such a coward, you're so lame, you are such a doubter, you're so I am ashamed of you. Why would I ever say that to myself, especially when I'm in a fragile place and I'm still grieving somebody I love? I would go to her and I would say you're so brave, you're so strong, I admire you. You're such a light in this world, you're such a teacher. You're paving the way. You're taking the path less traveled. You're seeking within for your own answers rather than listening to others' opinions of what they do or don't believe is possible or true.

Speaker 1: 37:51

So self-care is treating ourselves the way we treat the ones we love the most with deliberate ness to say to yourself I am brave for going through this. I am brave for welcoming this experience into my life. I am brave for showing up for myself even when life feels really hard or really sad, or really tender or fragile. I am brave for keeping my heart open and staying open to and welcoming of love in my life in all of its many forms. I am brave because I don't know how this is going to turn out and I'm going anyway and having that sense of adventure. It's like that old story about the athlete who's anxious at the starting line and how the athlete that wins the race isn't necessarily going to be the one who's the fastest. The athlete who wins the race is going to be the one that reframes that anxiety as adrenaline and excitement as rocket fuel that's going to push them over the starting line and across that finish line ahead of everyone else. You can be the fastest runner in the world, but if you're overcome with anxiety, you're not going to be able to make it out of the gate, so to speak. So we reframe these feelings as weak or cowardly or whatever we're saying to ourselves, or regretful, and saying I'm brave, I'm open, I'm an adventurer, an explorer and chartered territories. I don't know when I'm going anyway, and your sympathetic nervous system may have a couple of problems with this, but if you can keep working with it, you're going to start to build an inner trust bank that tells you we've done this before, we can do it again. We're doing it right now and you can start to really trust yourself.

Speaker 1: 39:55

The next tip that I want to share with you is really one that I see pet parents shy away from quite a bit, and this, in my opinion, is a missed opportunity. I don't want to call it a misstep per se, but definitely a missed opportunity to build trust with your reincarnated pet, because our animals know exactly what we're thinking and feeling anyway. They are experts reading our nonverbal. Not only do they know many, they know or the associated meanings of so many of our verbal human words and whatever language you happen to speak, but they also are experts at reading our nonverbal and our sensory body language and our energy, our pheromones, the chemical makeup of our auras. They know what's going on with us, often before we do, and so attempting to hide anything from your pet, attempting to be dishonest, attempting to say, oh no, I'm not missing you in your other body, in your other form. That's going to degrade the trust that they have in us and it's going to degrade the trust that we have in ourselves, because we know we're not being truthful. When I say to petal I miss. I miss you as pearl. I'm just acknowledging what she already knows, what she already senses, and to solidify our relationship. What I can say is, to be honest, I'm really missing you as Pearl and I'm also so glad that you're back with me as Petal.

Speaker 1: 41:27

Honesty has its own transformative effect on our own life, on our energy, on our energetic signature and on the lives being lived all around us, like that quote that talks about I think it was Mary Ann Williams who talks about when we shine our light, we free others to shine their light brighter as well, and so I'm shining this light of honesty, saying this is what's up with me right now, saying this is where I'm at right now. Be with me. We don't have to be alone in these experiences. Our reincarnated Pet understands, they already know, and so we don't have to tiptoe around them. We don't have to try to hide what's going on with us from them. We can just simply be honest and say this is what's coming up for me today, and then we can allow our bodies to move through it, because we're not in a hiding act, we're not trying to keep something from our pet and, in essence, also from ourselves. We're just acknowledging it and that makes it so much faster for us to let it go. Because it's just, it's a wave, it's moving through our life and who knows what wonders it may bring in its wake. But if we don't let the wave pass through, we don't let that moment of just going.

Speaker 1: 42:52

Oh, I miss it when my 24 year old soul bird would just nap on my shoulder all day. I miss petaled bites, my skin and my hair and just she's just up, down and all over me. Of course I miss that. Of course I do, and yet I acknowledge she's a baby bird, it's different. But that doesn't invalidate the fact that I miss that and that for a moment I grieve that. But it's just, it's a wave, it's just one moment, it's one little experience that I have in my life. I can acknowledge it and then I can release it and come back too and this is my next tip Anchor back into the gratitude of right now. It's like that was an amazing time and I'm so glad I had 24 years or eight years or five years or whatever you had with your beautiful soul pet, who's now in spirit I am. I wouldn't trade a second of that time, not even one second. You couldn't pay me a million dollars for one second of the time I spent with my pearl. I would never give that up.

Speaker 1: 43:57

I always knew here's the part that really proves that you're brave, because the moment you welcome your animal into your life unless you have a legacy animal like my turtle and my tortoise, and it is kind of really a big question who's going to outlive who. But for most, for most of us, when we welcome an animal into our lives, we already know what's going to unfold. We know the grief storm is up there ahead. So we're super brave, you are super brave, you've always been brave. You said yes anyway, knowing what lies ahead. You said yes anyway, so you can just anchor back into the gratitude for the incredible gift of the time that you had and listen, of course, to the last episode too for more tips on how to re anchor back into a continued relationship with your pet and spirit right now.

Speaker 1: 44:57

That's why I wrote Levin Feathers, our pet pearls, in my memoir together, because I didn't ever want to forget a single story, a single lesson that he taught me, and now I never will. So I encourage you to do that. If you're a writer, write, if you like to podcast for yourself or leave notes for yourself and never know to another app. Do that. But capture those memories, talk about them, think about them, remember them. They become more real to you and they evoke so much gratitude. Who might you be today if you hadn't allowed yourself to have those experiences with your pet and spirit?

Speaker 1: 45:36

And I also want to, as a kind of a PS to that say, even as you are keeping company with your reincarnated pet in my case with Miss Petal I still have an ongoing relationship with Mr Pearl in spirit and this is the really intriguing part about pet reincarnation and pets and spirit versus embodied pets who return to us the essence, the energetic signature of Pearl and who Pearl was and his personality and that set of lessons that he came here to learn. That remains. I have not taken down any of my pictures of Pearl. I still have a picture of Pearl right behind this particular laptop as I stare at myself talking to you on the screen. I still have a relationship with him and he still has a relationship with me and I often talk with him and I talk with him and I ask for help with Miss Petal. They say can you please shift the energy a little bit here? Can you please help me understand a little bit more deeply what you're experiencing as her and what she's going through right now and what lessons she's trying to learn?

Speaker 1: 46:48

That we have all these different facets to our lives we do live in a sliding doors reality. Our reality in this particular moment, in this particular body, at this particular instant in time, is just a sliver of all that we are. I stay open. The fact that if I feel a relationship, if I feel a connection with someone it doesn't matter if their body, if their physical organism is alive and functioning or deactivated that relationship, that bond remains. If you welcome your reincarnated soul pet back into your life in a new body, that doesn't cut off the relationship you had with them as them. It enhances it. Now you have two beautiful relationships. You have two different aspects of this being whom you love with every ounce of your heart and soul. You get to experience them in two different, or maybe in many different ways.

Speaker 1: 47:50

In Petal's case, she was first my soul bird Perky, who came into my life when I was eight. She was then my soul bird Jacob, who had an untimely death at age three. She was Mr Pearl, who was with me for 24 years, and now she's Ms Petal. I've had four opportunities in this incarnation alone to experience this great lifelong love of mine. I still interact with all of those energetic signatures as well. Keep your heart open to all the new possibilities that open up when you say yes to pet reincarnation.

Speaker 1: 48:35

Finally, my last tidbit for you is to be patient. Be patient with yourself. I remember walking in after just going out to Pearl's grave site and crying and just saying I miss you. There have been many, many days when I have done that and it's been a way that has moved through me and I have gone outside. I've grounded on the earth, walked out to his grave site, had a little chat, walked back inside and kissed Petal on her soft feathery belly and felt grateful for her presence in my life. Be patient with this process.

Speaker 1: 49:14

Vibrations can feel so slow and so sluggish on this 3D earth plane. The higher our vibration becomes and the stronger that high vibration becomes, the more we feel the denseness and the sluggishness and the slow pace of life in these physical forms as the vibration shifts and lightens and expands on this plane of existence. Those of us who are sensitive to frequency, who are sensitive to vibration, are going to feel this more and more strongly. It's like, oh, it's just taking so long and it really manifests as impatience and then for some of us it expresses as frustration or self-frustration and self-unkindness and self-uncare, which is not a word, but you get what I'm talking about. So we have to anchor back to being patient.

Speaker 1: 50:20

This is a process, this is part of the bank of lessons that we signed up for in this incarnation, where we have the opportunity to learn this lesson, to be patient through an experience that so few human beings ever get to have, which is I can have relationships with the same love bond in different incarnations. That's one of many magical gifts that our pets give to us is that their bodies become non-functional and get decommissioned. They pass into spirit, they can come back in a new body and be with us again, and they can open us up at such a deep level to truths about what it means to be alive, what it means to love and be loved, what it means to be in a relationship, that they're mind-blowing, because our minds literally cannot conceive of them. Only in our hearts can we feel what's really happening, what's really unfolding and what's really possible. And so I hope these tips, these life lessons from a family of reincarnated pets, I hope that these are helpful and useful to you. I hope that they make sense. It's not always so terribly easy to put my own experiences into concise, clear words, but I hope that this lands If you have questions.

Speaker 1: 51:50

You have more questions about pet reincarnation, how it works, what it's like, how to start the process. I would love to talk with you further. I'd love to work with you. I'd love to connect with your pet and spirit and we can start that conversation. You can reach out to me at AnimalLoveLanguagescom. Just hit the little schedule button at the top right corner of the website. You can reach me and we can get something on the book, so to speak, if you're interested in learning animal communication.

Speaker 1: 52:19

Several of my students in this latest course that I just concluded specifically joined because I offer a very personalized approach to animal communication, where you bring your own pet or pets with you to the class and we talk a lot more about why that is. But your pet becomes your primary guide, your primary teacher, and several of my students in this last class that I just wrapped up specifically brought their pets and spirit that they really wanted to foster a deeper, more tangible connection with them and that was super cool. That added a very neat dynamic to our small group sessions and our live practice sessions. So if you're interested in that, please do reach out to me. You can find me at Shannon, at AnimalLoveLanguagescom or over on Instagram I am love and feathers and shelves or drop a comment in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 53:09

If you've enjoyed today's episode, please do take the time to leave a review. It really helps our little podcast. Just know you have my heart and I am so appreciative and grateful of your time, your love for your pet and your open heart, your open, brave heart. Okay, all my love back in two weeks. Bye for now.