Life After Traumatic Pet Death How to Recover and Regroup

Traumatic pet death is much more common than most pet parents realize. 

The truth is, the grief of pet death - even under the most idyllic and ideal circumstances - is still under-appreciated in most parts of the world. 

And so resources for support and coping can feel few and far between. 

And for suffering pet parents who feel lost and alone, it can feel hard to express the depth of the loss - even to close partners and friends.

The loss can feel even harder to bear when your pet dies in a way that leaves lingering questions, guilt, shame, self-blame and feelings that it should have happened differently.

This causes many pet parents to stay stuck in a grief cycle where the traumatic experiences of their pet's death never get expressed or resolved.

In this episode of Let's Talk to Animals, we focus in on life after traumatic pet death, how to recover and regroup and the role animal communication can play to help you find closure and healing.

Specifically, you will learn:

• The definition of traumatic pet death - how to know this is what you are experiencing. 
• The two levels of how we as pet parents interact with our pet's inevitable death and our understanding of why it happened the way it did.
• The opportunities available to you as a pet parent for finding grief support, greater understanding and reconnection with your pet in spirit
• The role animal communication can play in bringing you the answers you seek and the closure you need to move forward in your life.

✨Find pet grief support resources now ✨

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hi Shannon here with AnimalLoveLanguagescom. I'm an animal sensitive and intuitive, aka an animal communicator, animal communication teacher and, most importantly, your friendly neighborhood hostess for the let's Talk to Animals podcast. And today I want to touch on and dive deeper into a topic that really has been coming up a lot lately in the one-to-one work that I do helping pet parents communicate with their pets and spirit. It feels like my weekly client requests often come in waves and so some weeks it might be problem pet behavior, sometimes it might be integrating new animals into the family. Some weeks it's really focused on pet death, grief and the possibility for reincarnation, and it does feel like there's been a cycle of that recently and one of my clients that I talked with just a few days ago was just really struggling with a lot of guilt, feeling like her pet had passed in a very traumatic way and really getting stuck in the sense that she should have been able to see it coming, do something differently, prevent it from happening, make choices that could have changed her beloved pet's trajectory and timeline, and really just was seeking animal communication to fill in the gaps. Very wise decision, very inspired, very intuitive choice to seek out animal communication to see if there was any other way to experience the events as they unfolded, see if there was any way, she could possibly let herself off the hook and discharge some of the deep sense of guilt and anger towards herself and just a lack of understanding about why did it have to be this way? So that's what I want to cover with you today.

Speaker 1: 2:37

Just like any new eager student of animal communication, when I first dove into this field and I don't know if you can relate to this, but if you're anything like me, when you dive into something new, especially something that your heart really wants to, you probably dive in with both feet, with both hands, with your whole body. You learn to swim as you go because you're just so excited. You can't wait any longer. It feels like I've lived this long without being able to communicate with the animals and now that I realize it's possible and I realize it's possible for me I don't want to wait another minute. I want to learn everything right now. I want to be an expert. Yesterday, and it all does feel really shiny and new and very wonderful, light filled, full of joy.

Speaker 1: 3:24

For me personally, I was coming off of a decade long stint as a professional copywriter and before that I ran, founded and ran a nonprofit that focused on helping provide mentors for people who were struggling to recover from eating disorders. So I came from a really very serious background and prior career history, and so when I dove into animal communication it was like, oh, beautiful, light, love, joy, happiness, talking to people about their pets, and it did take long for me to realize that this could be really serious work too, because our pets are our heart, our pets are our soul, our pets awaken aspects of us that really sometimes it often it feels like no other connection with any other being, certainly not with our own species has ever even really touched that level. And so we feel our connection with our animals so deeply. They also reconnected with us, with the natural world, and remind us that we're more like than different. We do belong, we can have a great impact, a really positive impact on the world around us, really be a voice for animals. And so it does feel it can start to feel really heavy like, oh, I've been given this great blessing. I now have invested my time, my energy, learned how to feel at this deep level, learned how to connect at this deep level, really opened my heart, really been brave and felt the love that I feel for my pet completely, and suddenly they're gone, and when they leave their body in a traumatic way and by traumatic I mean a way that was very sudden or very unexpected, or in a way that we perceive as being very painful in some way to the animal, in a way that perhaps we look at it and we say I could have, should have, what have I? It was my job to I shouldn't have.

Speaker 1: 5:37

There's just a lot of labels and a lot of judgment. A lot of pet parents come to me and want sessions with their animals, want to reconnect and communicate with their animals, because they worry, and you might be able to relate to this. You might have, might really be stuck in worry. I should have done more to extend my animals life in their body, or I shouldn't have waited so long. What if I caused my pet pain that I didn't need to have caused them if they were going to pass out of their body anyway? And so that's what I'm talking about when I say trauma. What I mean is there is not a peace about how your pet passed out of their physical body. There is instead a lot of second guessing or a lot of uncertainty or a feeling of guilt, or a feeling of anger towards yourself, or a feeling of anger towards other family members who were involved in those final moments of decision making, or just a lingering feeling of I missed something or I should have or I shouldn't have. That is all. Those are the hallmarks of trauma, when the death itself, the death process, the details of the death they feel unresolved. It feels like it should have been different or you simply wanted it to be different.

Speaker 1: 7:05

I have one pet parent client that I'm thinking of right now that she just had a really specific vision in her heart, in her mind, of how she felt her animals should make their final transition, how it should happen, where it should happen, when it should happen, who should be there. It didn't happen that way. She was really not even unwilling, so much she just couldn't wrap her mind around the way that it actually happened. It just felt so much more traumatic to her than how she had envisioned it going. There was a lot of lingering trauma around that, especially when we feel like we've missed our opportunity to say what we need to say, to feel what we were intending or expecting to feel, to create a death process for our animal, a transition process that fully reflects how we feel about them, how special they are, how much they mean to us. We want to give them everything, and that includes in their final transition. If we can't keep them with us forever, we at least want to create the most wonderful, peaceful, pain-free, healing, serene, calm, deeply, unconditionally loving transition for them, as we possibly can. So often, death has other plans. Our animals have other plans.

Speaker 1: 8:39

What I want to talk with you about in this podcast episode is how to move through this, how to not get stuck, because I have spoken with some pet parent clients who have remained stuck in this space for years. I had one pet parent client who had spent three decades struggling with the way that her soul pet passed and how she wasn't as present as she wanted to be and she wasn't as aware as she wanted to be. It takes the time. It takes for each of us. Those of you who've been following the let's Talk to Animals podcast for a little while and you've been following along with my personal journey, you know that just a little over a year ago, I lost my soul bird of 24 years, who I'd raised from a five-week-old chick. We'd spent 24 continuous years together and I lost him in a very sudden, very unexpected, very traumatic way. A lot of these podcast episodes have been born out of everything that my pearl is still teaching me, how I've been able to share what I've learned with my pet parent clients, with you here on the podcast, and so much wisdom that has only been able to come to me through him in his spirit state.

Speaker 1: 10:05

And so I just I want you to know, if you're listening to this right now, if you're struggling with pet death, with your pets transition, whether you're looking forward and seeing that that's something that is going to unfold in the near future, whether you're trying, as I did for 24 years, prepare for the eventuality of it and you're already pre-forecasting that you're going to feel traumatized when it finally does happen, if you are in the thick of it it's just happened or it's happening right now and you're just really struggling with the whole process. I just want you to know that I have been there with you. I know that I will be there again, because when it happens, there is no preparation that we can really do other than to do the things that I'm gonna talk you through in this podcast episode, and so it may be something that you want to bookmark. If you have someone in your life a friend, a colleague, a boss, an employee, a neighbor, a relative, a family member who's really struggling, this maybe an episode that you wanna share with them, because they may really have find some peace in what I'm about to share with you. And the very first thing that I wanna share with you is that there are two levels through which we receive, go through, journey through, process, understand, feel and move through and finally release the actual event of pet death.

Speaker 1: 11:53

And when I say pet death, what I mean is the moment when your pet leaves their physical body. So we have the physical body, the 3D physical body, just like you and I have bodies. This is the body that lets me talk to you on this podcast. It gives me vocal cords, it gives me hands to make gestures probably too many gestures with and eyes to connect with you, and a mouth to smile with and ears to pop in my little earbuds. So I've got this body and it serves me really well. It gives me a lot of functionality, but it's gonna wear out eventually, just like I recently got a new laptop and I had to update all my software. Fortunately, we can't just go out and get a new body without having to return to the spirit side and reincarnate, which.

Speaker 1: 12:41

I've recorded a couple of podcast episodes about pet reincarnation and if you're interested in learning more about that, we'd like to invite your pet to reincarnate Back to in a new body, see if that's something that your pet is interested in and learn how to identify them. Definitely, reach out to me on animalloveling, which is dot com, and we can talk about scheduling a session and connecting in with your pet. But for this podcast episode, what I really wanna anchor us back to is that your pet's body is just like your body. It gives their soul self. Their soul, just like your soul, is the individual expression of you that is linked back to the collective energy of all. So you, as a life form, come into a physical body so that you can get all these bells and whistles, so that you can live here on this earth plane, so that you can interact with others who are also embodied and others of all species. But there's this soul level aspect to you too and that's linked back to the spirit of all, and so there's a lot more to the story than just your pet's body wore out and was no longer functional and so they had to leave. And that can happen in a variety of ways. It can happen in a more of a lingering way, where there's more of a slow devolution, where the body just gradually kind of loses function, like making copies on an old school copy machine, and the more copies you make of the original, the blurrier they tend to be. That's one way. Another way is quickly.

Speaker 1: 14:30

I've had pet parents come to me wanting to talk with their pet in spirit after their pet has died through car accidents or ingesting a foreign substance. Or I don't want to trigger you, but those are just some examples of a more sudden way. Or just a health issue that was hidden from sight, didn't give any warning signs and just suddenly happened. And those are some examples of more sudden. What I have learned is that my work as an animal communicator trauma doesn't occur because it was more of a long term or slower, gradual decline in health and then a passage out of the body. Or if it was sudden, the trauma happens because we're not at peace with how it unfolded. We're not in sync with our inner intuition telling us that this is the path that our animal is on, we're not okay with what is happening. Often it means we don't understand what is happening and we don't understand that our pet has a say in it all.

Speaker 1: 15:48

We really, on the 3D level, just like your soul, which is a manifestation of the spirit, energy of all, has a body, because the body gives us a lot of functions that we tend to take for granted but that are really useful, like me, being able to talk to you. But the body also has a shelf life. It's only gonna last for so long and the body comes with a mind attached, and for us humans the mind can be particularly problematic because it convinces us that we're in charge of everything and that we get the final say over everything, and that includes our pets wellbeing, our pets lifespan, our pets method of dying, transitioning out of their body. It tries to convince us that we should know everything that there is to know about our pets, that we should be on top of all that, that we should pre-plan all that and that if anything goes not according to our minds plan or our minds assessment of how it thinks that our pet should transition, then we have done something wrong.

Speaker 1: 16:53

We're not a good pet parent. We didn't really love them as much as we feel like we love them or we say that we love them. We're a bad person, we have a lot of guilt, we have a lot of shame. We owe our pets an apology. We feel like we need their forgiveness because we weren't the all seeing, all knowing, all powerful Oz when it came to helping our pets transition. And that is what I call a very 3D focus.

Speaker 1: 17:23

Our mind is in charge, our intuition is turned off, we are not tuned in, we are not listening, we're not even admitting that we have such a thing as intuition, that we have such a thing as a sole contract with our pet. We're not even entertaining the thought that our pet has free will just like we do, that our pet has full agency, and by agency I mean control over their destiny, over how their lives play out and when their death process occurs. We view them kind of in a way like the law of use our pets as our property or our possessions, and that's a whole other topic. But we're kind of taking on a little bit more responsibility and importance in our pet's life than what we're actually entitled to. And again, when I say that, please know that from my heart. I've gone through all of this with my box turtle, bruce, who ran away and still at large. I tune in with him intuitively, but I was never able to reconnect with him and bring him home with my precious pearl, who passed away, with so many other animals that have passed in my five decades of life to date. So please don't hear this as something judgmental. It's something where I'm simply saying I get it, I've been through it and that's what helps me to identify how this sort of death process with our pets can play out.

Speaker 1: 18:55

When it comes to our minds on the 3D level, I've been through the thick of it, just like you potentially have. You may have, Especially if you're listening to this episode, this may be something that feels very, very fresh and very painful for you and so, but this is the 3D level where, like I'm in charge, I'm responsible for my pet. I should have known. I am in charge of doing everything to make sure that they never suffer a moment in their life, that they never have any experiences that are outside of my control, and if something does happen and I didn't see it coming or I didn't take care of it before it got bad or got painful or whatever it is, then it's my fault. That's the 3D. That's when we're letting our mind pilot the ship of our life and our mind is trying to say and I'm not just going to take charge of your life, I'm going to take charge of your pet's life and your kid's life and your partner's life and everybody else's life. And that is just over stretching our bounds, it's just over reaching our authority. It's not actually reflective of what's going on at the deeper level. And that's what?

Speaker 1: 20:05

If you've spent any time consuming social media or reading blog posts or watching video lessons about the transition our planet's going through right now? The typical term for that is the 5D, and what that means is we're finally getting back in touch with our what my teacher, sonia Chouquette, calls the sixth sense, or our vibes, or our aha moments. It is what tells us when somebody's staring at us even though our back is turned, or when we think of somebody that we care about and then suddenly our phone rings and it's them, or when we just get a good vibe or a bad vibe, or we're just kind of in the what Sonia Chouquette calls the yellow light vibes, which is I need more information. I don't know we're getting back in touch with that and that's a whole really interesting topic that we delve into in my animal communication adventure courses. So if you're interested in actually learning animal communication, then we I talk you through the intuitive anatomy and how it works and how you start to learn what is going on when I feel these sensations or I know something and I don't know why, or how I know it and I can't know it. Like that's all part of this 5D transition that our planet is in, when we're waking up to a new sense of all that we truly are.

Speaker 1: 21:33

When I lead my students through animal communication practice circles, one of the first things that we do is we feel beyond the boundaries of our physical body into all the rest of us, because all of who we are, our soul level, energy doesn't fit in our physical bodies and that's the part of us that can connect with those around us, that can feel when someone staring at us from behind our backs, because we are bigger and we have so many more sensory perceptors out there than just our outward facing physical eyes and nose and mouth and ears and skin, and our feeling center and our gut brain, our gut knowings. And so the 5D aspect is a much more respectful, much more open, much humbler, much more engaged and humble sense of okay, everybody is in charge of their own lives. I'm in charge of mine as best as I can live it, but I'm not trying to take any authority or responsibility away from others out of a misplaced sense of love for them or care for them or feeling of responsibility for them. I recognize that each embodied being I keep company with, I share my home space with, I share my family with, I share my daily life with. They are in charge of their own lives. And if we're together, that means that there's something called a soul agreement or a soul contract in place. That it's not an accident that out of all of the beings, all of the embodied beings, millions upon millions upon billions of beings occupying bodies here on planet Earth, it is not an accident that the two of us are together. I mean the amount of randomness, of chance it would take to bring me and my petal bird together, out of all of the parrots alive on this planet right now in bodies, all of the humans that are alive on this planet right now in bodies, the fact that the two of us are together, that we found one another. That did not happen by random chance. There is an agreement in place, and so we have to understand that at the 5D level, we're wrapping in soul agreements, or contracts, if you will, that we've made with our animal loves, with our pets, with our pet companions, and those agreements were made before we entered our bodies. That's how we recognize one another.

Speaker 1: 24:22

When we are in our bodies, there's something in us that it's that same, something that feels someone staring at us when our back is stern. It says I know you, we're meant to be together. It's what gives us the courage to say yes, especially when we know that our animal will most likely transition out of their body first and we are going to have to go through the storm that is to come. We know, before we even welcome them into our family, that one day, not so terribly long from now, we're going to be crying because their body is no longer with us. We're going to be missing them and possibly we're going to be traumatized by the way in which they left, especially if it does not meet our mind's assessment of how it should have gone down. And so that's what we're talking about here is starting to raise your awareness of this deeper level where your pet signed up for a particular time period in their body. They always had the right at first refusal. They weren't game to go through what they went through if they wanted a different amount of time or a different body.

Speaker 1: 25:42

Of course, we all come here with opportunities and we come here with challenges and we come here to grow in wisdom and learn to love better, as my late best friend, marcy, used to love to say and that's a terrible quote that she would share with me regularly, especially when I was kind of caught in this period of why is it happening this way or what did I do wrong, and she would say we're here to learn to grow in wisdom and learn to love better. And that means learning lessons and it means going through stuff, and part of that is remembering that everybody is here for the same reason, it's not just us. So it means that your animal, your beloved pet, comes into their body because they've sketched out a timeline that includes opportunities. They want to take advantage of challenges, they want to experience themselves working through opportunities to grow in wisdom and learn to love better, opportunities to evolve as an embodied soul and we as human animals, especially those of us who are a little further along, a little longer in the tooth, so to speak like myself, a little further along in years than have been raised and educated in an environment that puts human beings, homo sapiens, at the very top of the food chain, at the very top of the importance list. We somehow have allowed ourselves to get brainwashed to think that we're the only beings who are conscious, we're the only beings who are aware, we're the only beings that have free will, we're the only beings that can sense things like it's not my time yet or it's my time or opportunity knocks. I'm going to jump out of my body now because that's what best serves me and everyone that I have soul agreements with. So it's very easy for us to get into that mind space of going. I didn't want it to happen that way. I didn't intend for it to happen that way. I didn't plan for it to happen that way. Therefore, there's something wrong about how it happened and it's my fault.

Speaker 1: 28:03

Reconnecting with this 5D perspective, it's humbling. We are rejoining the greater whole in a position of equality, not dominance. We're not smarter than wiser than farther seeing than more resourceful than stronger than or have more importance than any other embodied soul energy. As a species your dog, my parrot, your cat, my tortoise we are all equally valuable. We all have equal agency, equal control over our own lives and, most importantly, over the time of our own birth into a body, over the time of our own death, transition out of a body over whom we spend our embodied time with, here on planet Earth.

Speaker 1: 29:01

Our animal companions, our pets, get to choose who do they want to hang out with. They choose us. That means it's got to mean there's something pretty special about me, about you, that your beloved pet shows you. That's a vote of trust, a vote of confidence. But it's not an invitation to overstep our bounds and assume control of their lives, of their destinies. It's also not a license to make an assumption that if we do make a misstep somewhere along the way, maybe we have a bad day and yell at our pet when and later think what was I doing? It's not their fault that I, my boss, yelled at me and I just kind of took it home with me. We also don't assume that our pets are going to behave like we so often do and not forgive us and not see past that 3D momentary meltdown to the truth of who we are and why they chose to be with us.

Speaker 1: 30:03

Those rocky bumps in the road come with the territory when we sign up to be in a relationship with each other. What that means is, if your pet wanted to opt out of all that the messiness of your life and you taking imperfect action, with heartfelt, unconsciously loving intention what we call perfect intention but you're taking imperfect action. If they'd wanted to opt out of that, they would have opted out of their relationship before they ever incarnated into a body. So you have to understand that your pet signed up for all of you before they ever incarnated, before they were even born. They signed up for all of you.

Speaker 1: 30:45

This is a big reason why we keep company with pet companions, especially at this stage of our planet's evolution and growth, when it kind of feels like the shit is hitting the fan all around us, all around the world. Everywhere we look, things are crumbling down. But when we look inside, we see that the flowers are blooming, they're growing taller and stronger. We see that we're opening our hearts, we're opening up. The contrast is so severe that it makes it easier for us to choose. What kind of energy do I want to bring into my day? Who do I want to be in my world? What kind of impact do I want to make? It becomes much easier to make those choices and to live from our hearts once we're aware of what's going on, and so that's kind of where we need to anchor back, to Like if you're in the thick of grieving or second guessing or blaming yourself and your pet has, is headed towards or is going through or has just gone through, or even it's been a while.

Speaker 1: 31:53

It's been days, weeks, months, years, possibly decades since your pet experienced what your mind has turned has labeled a traumatic death. That's left you kind of holding the bag full of unresolved questions and self doubt and self blame and self judgment and guilt and shame and closed heart, because when we feel that way, we don't want to open up to anyone else, we don't allow ourselves to give of ourselves because we think we're dangerous, we think we could hurt somebody else, and so you living with a closed heart is not serving any anyone. It's not serving you. It's not serving anyone else. It's not helping to uplift the energy of this planet. Your pet is in your life to help you learn how to keep your heart open. Sometimes that is part of the soul agreement that you have. It's part of why your pet shows a death that on the surface, appears and feels more traumatic to you. But there are many, many reasons and that's what we get into.

Speaker 1: 33:00

When you have an animal communication session with me for your pet, we start to really delve into your animals perspective, why they made the choices that they did. We give them back control over their own lives. We give them back the right to make their own decisions, and that includes the most important decisions about when to arrive, when to inhabit their bodies and when they're going to leave their bodies. We give them back the right to exist, even when their bodies no longer do. We give them back the right to remain in relationship with us, to continue teaching us, to continue guiding us, to continue loving us, to continue supporting us, to continue mirroring us, to continue helping us to evolve, to continue evolving themselves, even when their body no longer exists. We give them back the right to be other than simply their body, no matter how cute and furry or feathery or lovely or wonderful or cuddly that body happened to be. They lure us in with their cute, cuddly, furry, feathery, shelled bodies. They lure us in with their beautiful heart-melting eyes and their smiles and their sweet spirits, but their body isn't that. That is who they are.

Speaker 1: 34:27

So when we start to delve deeper, especially when the death is traumatic again, that contrast is so great that it almost shoves us into a position of having to do this kind of self-inquiry, of having to dig deeper, because life is not supportable when we feel this bad, life is not liveable. When you wake up every day and all you can do is cry or blame yourself or rage or distrust yourself or distrust everyone else around you or feel like you're cut off from your heart. That's not, that's not life, that's just. That's not living, that's just existing. So you're. We give our pets back the right to be independent of us and to call the shots in their own lives and to have their own reasons for why they choose the transitions that they choose, and there are many, many, many, many reasons.

Speaker 1: 35:24

So if this is something that is unresolved for you, in my experience and I have been working with animal communicators and as well as working as an animal communicator and I really should say serving, because that's what it feels like to me, but I have been hiring animal communicators and gainfully employed as an animal communicator for decades now. I mean that the the amount of combined experience that I have on both sides of that communication fence being the one who's waited, waiting with baited breath to hear what my animals have to say and share, and being the one who is the channel through which you can do the same, I can share that there is nothing else that can replace animal communication to help heal that broken heart, that broken self-trust, that broken bond with your pet, that disrupted connection with your pet, that lack of understanding, that inner turmoil and trauma. Like you've turned on yourself and all the different aspects of you mental, physical, emotional, soul level, spiritual are fighting with one another. There's an internal civil war going on and forget connecting with your pet because you won't allow them to reconnect with you, because you no longer think that you're safe for them to connect with you, no longer believe yourself when you say I love you so much, my beloved animal and spirit. And so you're not only depriving yourself of that connection you're, you're depriving your, your pet and spirit of staying connected with you too. So now they're suffering too, and it's all unnecessary suffering. We just don't understand, and so that's the role that animal communication plays.

Speaker 1: 37:19

It helps you receive your pets perspective, their explanation, which they're almost dying to give you there, because they can't reconnect with you if you won't let them share their side of the story, if you won't let them explain why did I do it this way, why did I choose it this way? I? It's not like like they didn't know that you didn't want them to die. It's not like they weren't aware that you had their perfect transition all planned out in your head and heart and still they chose to do it in a different way. It's not like they weren't aware that you had a long, happy, healthy, pain-free life planned out for them and a peaceful transition. They had their reasons, and in my experience, being on both sides of that fence for decades now, in my experience there is no substitute for hearing your pet's side of the story and receiving their wisdom. Why did their transition? Why was that the highest and best choice, the most loving option for everyone, for them, for you, for your combined impact on this planet as well as on the soul side and the spirit realms? Why did they do it this way when you wanted it to go so differently? And so that's really where the work that I now do, that I have been the beneficiary of for so many, many, many moons. Now that's where there's nothing else that substitutes for it nothing else I've found anyway. Now you might be wondering when should I schedule my conversation? Or maybe I should learn animal communication so I can facilitate my own conversation with my animal, and I'm always a fan of that. It took me decades to say yes, and I wish I hadn't waited so long, so I'm always a fan of that. But I will share that.

Speaker 1: 39:35

In my experience, it's best not to do it from a trauma or crisis place in your life. It's better to invite someone else, like myself, to help you connect with your pet. When you're trying to resolve a trauma that is immediate or simply feels immediate and it's become a barrier or an obstacle or even a stumbling block in your path forward, that's not the right time to drop everything and start learning the building blocks and learning about your intuitive anatomy. There will be a time for that, absolutely, and that may even be part of why your animal passed in a more traumatic feeling or seeming away is because that's part of the call. This is something all human animals can do. You, too, can hear the animal speak, starting with your own, starting with the animals in your family, your chosen soul family, and that may be the ultimate, the eventual evolution down the road.

Speaker 1: 40:39

As my pet, my petal, is a reincarnation of my bird, pearl, who was by my side every step of the way as I first hired animal communicators and then learned how to communicate with animals myself. But, believe you me, I invited my colleagues to support me when Pearl passed and before petal came, it was too much for me to handle on my own. I will share this. There's a place for inviting someone into the conversation who does this on a day-to-day basis, for a living, not just for your animal to be able to be heard without your mind yelling over there their story and saying, oh but if only I had done that, if only I had done this. There's some kind of magic when it comes through an objective and by objective I mean someone with an open, unconditionally loving and accepting heart. You simply the messenger. It allows your heart to hear and start to open up again, and also it gives you some really good, powerful experiences of why animal communication is so invaluable, especially if you've never had an experience of it before, because it's not a mental thing, it's a heart thing, it's a felt thing. It's a felt experience, it's something, it's a gut experience. It really kind of bypasses your mind and so you start to experience a connection with your pet that your mind can't access, that's never been designed to access it. You have this deeper connection, this very intelligent connection with your pet at a heart and a soul, a deep gut heart, soul level, and animal communication helps wake you up to that and then you can evolve your connection with your animal on this spirit. In this I say the spirit side, but it's really more like in the spiritual frequency or in the spiritual dimension, or like tuning dials on an old school radio or adjusting the brightness of your screen and you're brightening up your screen so you can see it better, so you can feel it better, so you can reconnect more immediately. And so I that's where I always say some of those feelings you just need to feel them.

Speaker 1: 43:07

Grief has its own process and the original five stages of grief. The model that was developed really evolved from a research perspective, from observing and interviewing and experiencing all the different feelings that can come and go, as a heart is grieving a loss, whether that's a death or that's some other kind of loss or transition in life, and that, the denial that can happen. No, it's not really happening. No, not to me. Oh wait, I want to stay in the dream where this never happened. The anger that just why did this happen? And it shouldn't have happened and I could have prevented it from happening, and all of that and the bargaining, if only. What if I do this? What if I pray every day? What if I volunteer somewhere? What if I am just a better human from now on?

Speaker 1: 43:58

The depression, that just kind of numbing out, where you're like I just can't take it anymore. I just don't want to feel, I don't want to deal, so I'm just going to erase myself, I'm just going to pretend I don't exist. And then, finally, that acceptance of kind of like okay, this happened, I'm not dead yet. So let me find a pathway through this, let me look for some light and all of those stages that can be really messy. Your body has to go through it, your mind has to go through it, your heart has to go through it, and so it can be important. Often I'm asked is there a waiting period before I can connect with my animal who's passed into the spirit dimension or is now vibrating on the spirit frequency? And my answer is no, as long as you have gone through enough of the unloading of that initial grief storm so that you're available to have the conversation.

Speaker 1: 44:57

For our animals it's a very quick adjustment and the main reason is because they're not going to some place unfamiliar, they're going to a place they know well. This is like their vacation home. They often give me that image and that remembrance of times when I've gone to a beloved vacation home. It's like no, we're going here to, first of all, our art of rest and recharge I mean, being an embodied soul can be fun and exciting.

Speaker 1: 45:24

It can also be exhausting and sometimes painful, and so we go there to recharge. It's like our vacation, we look forward to it, you look forward to going on vacation. And so they're like this is a happy event for us in the sense that this is a gentle kind. It's like a warm bath with epsom salts for their soul, for their energy, and for them it's also it's a win-win, because they don't have to be disconnected from you, but you've disconnected and you've shut down from them because you're going through your grief storm or you're stuck in the trauma of it all, and so we're opening you back up, and so you need to have gone through enough of that where we can have a productive conversation and you can receive your animal's truth as their truth and not just be constantly fighting with it in your mind. And if that means you have to take some time out to cry, to yell into a pillow or something else, to take a kickboxing class, to just sleep for a while, whatever it is, to go, take a walk, whatever you need to do, and then arrive for the conversation and the reconnection with your pet in their spirit dimension, where you're able to hear their truth, you're able to receive the information they have for you, the encouragement, the guidance, the instructions to find them in their new body, if that's something that's of interest and something that your pet also wants. So that's where I'm going to leave you today is to allow yourself to keep moving through.

Speaker 1: 47:07

Yes, the trauma happens. Even the most peaceful and idyllic of transition processes, of death processes, can leave trauma, because there's the grief, there's the messy anger, denial, bargaining, sadness, depression, acceptance and that weird funhouse mirror sort of experience that we have as we're meeting ourselves without our pet's body as a companion right by our side, and so that kind of has to unfold. But what I want to leave you with, and what I really pray and hope that you'll hear me, is that there's so much light. Just beyond that, there's a reason. There's absolutely a reason.

Speaker 1: 47:53

I have not yet spoken with a pet in spirit who didn't have their own very wise and very unconditionally loving reason for why it unfolded the way that it did with their personal transition. And I have not yet talked with a pet who wasn't completely aware of why it made sense, logically as well as intuitively, mentally as well as emotionally and from a soul agreement perspective, for things to happen the way that they happen with their death process. And so that's the blessing that animal communication can offer to you. If you would like to schedule a session, head over to animallovelinguagescom, click on the green schedule button that's right up at the top right hand corner of the website and then I'll get you to my scheduler and we can get something on the calendar and start embracing the light that is not at the end of the tunnel but at the beginning of your continued journey with your pet on the soul dimension in their spirit form. There's so much more to your story together and I just don't want you to let the trauma of losing your pet's body put a period on the end of a story that has so much more in store for you both. So hopefully this podcast has been of service to you, has been a balm to your soul.

Speaker 1: 49:24

If you have questions, if you'd like me to talk about other aspects of the pet transition process, the grief process, the healing process and the reconnection process, whether as a spirit guide or in a reincarnated body, let me know it always helps me so much when you share this podcast wherever you are listening. If you download it, that really helps kind of boost our visibility and the ratings. Leaving a review is a huge gift and a blessing to me and also gives me a lot of direction for planning future episodes. So please know you have my heart. Thank you for spending a little bit of your valuable and precious listening time with me and let me know how I can be of service to you and the beloved pets, both here in the physical and on the spirit side. Okay, fresh new episode coming your way in two weeks and for now I send you all my love. Okay, bye for now and I'll talk with you again very soon.