When You Can’t Forgive Yourself: A Pet Parent’s Guide to Breaking Free from Guilt, Self-Unforgiveness and Chronic Grief

In this episode, we tackle one of the toughest and tenderest topics in our lives with our pets: pet parent guilt, shame and self-unforgiveness. Whether you are carrying regret over losing your temper, a decision you wish you had made differently, an unexpected outcome with a pet care professional or an end-of-life experience that didn’t unfold the way you hoped, these feelings can keep you stuck in an emotional feedback loop that makes it difficult to reconnect with yourself and with your pet. Together, we explore what your pets have taught me again and again about intention, personal power and forgiveness, PLUS I share some of the practices I personally use to work through self-guilt and self-unforgiveness, regulate the nervous system and ease unresolving grief. 

As you listen, you will learn…. 

• The deeper soul lesson hiding beneath pet situations that cause you to get stuck in guilt, self-unforgiveness, self-blame and unresolving grief. 

• A new perspective for the “grief part” of your life with your pet that can transform your relationship with your own grief AND with your pet in spirit 

• Steps to take when self-judgment, self-criticism, self-unforgiveness or unresolving grief creates disconnection between you and your pet 

• How to navigate the aftermath when your pet’s death process doesn’t match up with your dreams or goals for the type of passing you wanted to give them

• Self-care practices that really work to help you rebound when a decision you make on your pet’s behalf doesn’t turn out the way you hoped it would 

• Exactly why your pet’s life with you was never going to be “perfect” (no matter how much you try) and why they are actually okay with that!

• What matters most to your pet when they are healing from trauma, dysregulation, mishandling or other all-too-common pet experiences

• True pet stories from my case files highlighting real messages from pets to their people about healing after traumatic shared experiences and working through grief

• 4 research-backed practices you can do right now to calm your nervous system, ease self-criticism and feel more connected to your heart and to your pet’s heart

• And much more….. 

NOTE: Please remember that this episode is designed to offer additional support, ideas and practices you can explore as you work through pet parent guilt, grief and self-unforgiveness. It is not intended to replace professional grief support, guidance or care when you need it. 

Other podcast episodes mentioned in this episode: 

• The Hero’s Journey, Pet Edition: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2105365/episodes/19241267 

• Pet Soul Agreements: Do Your Pets Have Soul Contracts With Each Other?: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2105365/episodes/17796225 

• Pet Reiki Miracle Stories and How Reiki Can Help Your Pet Heal and Thrive https://www.buzzsprout.com/2105365/episodes/19564154

• What Animals Say About Enduring Trauma and Abuse from Humans https://letstalktoanimals.buzzsprout.com/2105365/episodes/16634240-what-animals-say-about-enduring-trauma-and-abuse-from-humans

• How EFT Tapping Can Help Your Pet Heal and Thrive https://letstalktoanimals.buzzsprout.com/2105365/episodes/19489159-how-eft-tapping-can-help-your-pet-heal-and-thrive 

Additional resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ho’oponopono Prayer book Zero Limits: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Limits-Secret-Hawaiian-System-ebook/dp/B008L044DA?ref_=ast_author_mpb

Transcript

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Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast all species can enjoy together. My name is Shannon Cutz. I am an animal sensitive and intuitive, a Reiki master practitioner, and an animal communication teacher with Animal Love Languages.com. And for our purposes here today, I am also your friendly neighborhood hostess and guide through the wild, wise, and wonderful world of interspecies communication. Call me crazy, but I truly believe that animal communication has the power to save, heal, and restore our planet for all species to enjoy and share. When we learn to communicate with one another, we begin to realize we are so much more alike than different. We care about each other. We become friends. On this podcast, we talk about what the animals have to say and share, and why our pets truly are our partners, empathic friends, and teachers. I am so glad you have joined us here for this fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. So let's dive in. Welcome back to Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast all species can enjoy together. I'm your friendly neighborhood hostess, animal intuitive, Reiki Master Practitioner, and animal communication teacher, Shannon Katz with Animal Love Languages.com. And today we are tackling what is perhaps the toughest, tenderest topic that we could ever touch upon in a podcast that talks about our bonds with our pets. And that is pet parent guilt, pet parent self-unforgiveness, pet parent grief that doesn't resolve because of pet parent guilt, shame, unforgiveness of self, which is really a part of our soul awakening as embodied humans. And it is a huge aspect

Naming Guilt Shame And Stuck Grief

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of why our pets, our partners and pathic friends and teachers, choose us in the first place. It's one of the hugest motivators for why this very, very special subset of animals who are alive on this planet choose to come here, choose incarnations where they will be keeping a close, sustained company with our species, with human animals. And it is a huge part of their soul mission to help us take that long, painful journey from our head to our heart and back into our soul-level connection with ourselves, with each other, and with all life. And anytime these strong emotions and experiences like guilt, like shame, like self-unforgiveness, when these experiences present themselves in our lives, it is always an invitation for us to awaken to a deeper level of understanding, of connection, and of awareness of what's really going on here. So experiences of pet parent guilt, experiences of shame, experiences of self-unforgiveness, experience of grief that does not resolve. And by resolve, I don't mean disappear. I mean evolve to a perspective where gratitude for the time that we have had together takes the lead. And regret over maybe what we feel like we could have or should have done differently, and that missing you feeling of I just want you back. And it wasn't enough. And this deep level of disconnection that we feel, it fades into the background a little bit more, where we can start to say to ourselves, you know what? I always knew that this day was coming. I knew that most likely, given our species differences, your body would pass away before minded. And I always knew that we would have to endure this temporary physical separation. And yet I wouldn't change a moment. I wouldn't change my decision to invite you into my life, to say yes to you, to keep company with you, even knowing that all this grief was coming. So when we get stuck in these patterns of self-guilt, self-shame, self-unforgiveness, a lot of the time it's because we have failed to resolve our own decision to say yes, even knowing that this separation was coming. And so it can feel like a way to hang on to our pet's energy, to our pet's present. And it is a way to hang. It is a way to kind of delay the full acceptance of what has just happened here, but it's not the highest and best way to stay connected with our pet. And it's not the most evolved understanding of what's really going on here and why our pets, our partners, empathic friends, and teachers have entered our life in the first place, which is really to prompt us to ask these big, almost unanswerable questions about who am I? Why am I here? What's really going on here? And what is this really all about? And when we have these feelings of guilt, of shame, of self-unforgiveness, these are the questions that are underneath all of that. These are the questions that we are asking, that our soul is inviting us to explore. And this profound sense of self-disconnection that arises when we get stuck in a place of beating ourselves up for why did I do this and not that? Or I could have and should have done better for the pet that I love so much. Or what did I miss? Or why did it happen this way when my vision was so different? And we see this a lot when on the shallow end of the spectrum, maybe when we lose our temper with our pet, they bark or vocalize or do something just at the wrong moment when our nervous system is already frayed, or we're exhausted, or life has just handed us a whole lot of stuff we weren't expecting. And we snap these small cuts that take their toll over time and add up. When it's like we wake up every morning with a fresh resolve, today I'm going to be a beacon of calm and light and acceptance and tolerance. And then we find ourselves breaking and snapping again and again and again. And please know as I share this with you, that I am right there with you. It happens to all of us. Being an animal intuitive does not exempt me. In fact, it invites me to go more deeply into these questions and into these experiences and into a way to work through them where we don't end up inadvertently causing even deeper disconnection with the pets we love so much. So please know that I am learning and growing right along with you as we have this conversation. And then we go all the way to the deep end where, and I've also experienced this where with my soul bird pearl, for instance, maybe we create in our mind's eye and our heart's intention a transition experience for them, for instance. We know that they're nearing their end of life or they're in a period of life where we're supporting them in a palliative care or hospice setting. And we have this very specific way that we have decided we want and need to show up for them and a very specific type of death experience that we would like to give them. And then things happen differently. And rather than finding an acceptance with that, or even giving our pets their personal power back to choose their own death experience, whether it matches our desire for them or not, we hold on to that. We hold on to it, we blame ourselves, we shame ourselves, we get angry at ourselves, we beat ourselves up. And again, this can feel like a way to stay in relationship with our pets, even if they're not currently inhabiting a physical body. And it is a way to stay in relationship with them, but we're not really in relationship with them at this point. We're in relationship with ourselves, and it's not a very healthy relationship. And so actually, what's happening is we are living kind of parallel lives with our pets. We're still connected with their energy, but we're not actually engaging with them and allowing them to teach us and guide us and explore with us why things happened the way that they did. We are stuck in an aggressive combative relationship with ourselves, where our bond with our pet is just a side piece, if you will, or it's an add-on, but it's not the main event. And so in this podcast episode, I want to give you some tools and some techniques that I personally have used with great success. I have offered many of these techniques to you when you work with me one-on-one. And certainly they are available to my animal communication students. And I also work with these techniques quite a bit in my pet Reiki and energy balancing sessions. Most of all, these are avenues that pets have gifted to me over the years as I've had ongoing conversations, one conversation after another, seeking new tools, seeking new techniques, seeking new methods, where we can start to unstick ourselves. We can start to power down this extreme sympathetic nervous system response that we're having, where we're stuck in this fight, flight, freeze response that doesn't seem to have a shutoff, where we're getting more depleted and more tired over time and feeling even less able to dig ourselves out of the emotional hole that we're living in. This can sometimes create situations where we get stuck in the deepest, darkest aspects of grief for not just weeks or months, but years and even decades. I've seen it, I've experienced it, where we walk around for decades feeling so wounded by an experience that we've had with our pets, where we had a vision for it going differently than it did, where we actually start to shut ourselves off, not just from welcoming a new animal into our lives or our reincarnated pet into our lives, but also shutting ourselves off from relationships with other humans, and most importantly, shutting ourselves off from our relationship with ourselves. So this can be quite pervasive. It's an emotional level of agoraphobia, not wanting to go out, not wanting to leave our own skin, not wanting to leave the safety of our self unforgiveness and our guilt and our decision

How Guilt Keeps You Attached

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that we are awful, horrible humans who do not deserve to be happy, who do not deserve love, who do not deserve connection, and who have nothing to give. And what the pets have shared with me again and again is nothing could be further from the truth. So that's where we start off today's episode. So I recognize that this podcast episode may not speak to every listener in my community and just know that if that is you, that is absolutely okay for you to pop off. It will be here for you should you ever find the need for it. And for those of you who are struggling with any degree of self-guilt, self-unforgiveness, self-same, this deep unresolving grief where you just can't seem to let the feedback loop of how it all went down go. Just know that I am recording this episode just for you and weaving throughout the techniques that have worked well for me to get unstuck when I've had these kinds of self-negating, self-critical, self-loathing experiences where I've watched myself lose my temper with my pets. I have watched myself give up on myself. I have watched myself judge and blame and shame myself and expect perfection out of myself, even when I had never experienced a situation with a pet before. I never experienced a particular health issue, never experienced a particular accident, never experienced a particular missing animal situation, and still having that expectation of myself that I'm going to somehow just download a way to navigate it perfectly, and that if I don't navigate it perfectly, that means I am a bad human. And I start to question whether my pets love me, whether I am worthy of love, whether I'm worthy of these beautiful animals in my life. And so that's where I'm coming from. Many of you are living with pets who have experienced trauma, pets who have experienced their own emotional heartache. And so these issues can get triggered in that way as well, because we humans have experienced things in life where other humans have let us down. And we know how painful that is. We know how awful that feels. And so we can empathize with our pets who have gone through trauma to a point where we become kind of militant almost. Like, I am going to make everything okay for you. I'm going to make sure that nobody ever hurts you again. I'm going to make sure that you don't ever experience these kinds of things ever again. And yet when we go through periods in our life with our pets where we don't know what to do, or maybe we feel like we make a misstep. Maybe we feel like we didn't choose the right trainer, or the veterinarian let us down, or we allow our pet to play with another animal and an injury occurs. And we think to ourselves, I should have known that. And so that can be something that really starts this self-guilt and self-unfruit cycle where we then start to hold ourselves away from the continuation of our journey with our pet. We then start to put protective barriers around our pets. We decide who they are based on how things have gone. And we actually start refusing to let them have new experiences and learn and grow and reset their nervous system. So this can have a very deep ripple effect. It can turn into a very deep, very vicious circle that eventually can place us in a self-isolating way of life where, and I have experienced this too, where we just make a decision. I don't like people, trust people. I don't even trust myself. I'm just going to live here with my pets. I only trust animals. I'm not even going to go out of my house. And once grief hits me, I'm done for because I have absolutely no coping skills for how to get through the grief experience, how to feel deeply and continue to self-nurture, self-support, self-encourage, even when I do quote unquote mess up, even when I don't understand, even when I don't know what to do. So there's a difference between caving in when those experiences happen and rising up. And this is what I call the Heroes Journey, the podcast that I recorded about the Hero's Journey Pet Edition, which I'll link up for you in the show notes here, will give you some further insights on how your pets view their own personal power and agency and their own ability to continue learning and growing after extreme emotional trauma or setbacks or experiences that would level your ordinary garden variety human and how they see it as this soul awakening journey to embrace rather than to push away. And how they really are in our lives in part to teach us how to do the same. So where we start today is to just take a look in your life with your pets to date. It might be with the pet that you're living with now. It might be with a previous pet whom you are still connected with through the love that you feel for them, even though they're in the spirit space, and taking a look at where you still feel what I might call an emotional depth charge or pain around an aspect of your life together, the life that you share together, where you look at something that you have experienced together. Taking a simple example, it might be selecting a veterinarian for your pet and having an experience where you felt like your pet was traumatized or mishandled or misdiagnosed. I've had several of these cases in my one-to-one pet parent sessions recently, where we've been talking with an animal about an experience where maybe they got some veterinary care that really didn't serve them or just didn't meet their pet parents' expectations for what was wanted and what was needed. And then this tendency that we have to blame ourselves or to get angry at the veterinary professional and to dive into this cycle of strong, unpleasant emotions and not knowing how to break through that. And then getting into this even deeper cycle of feeling like I need to ask forgiveness from my pet and I don't know how to do that. And I don't believe that my pet will be able to forgive me. And the reason that we often carry that belief is because we can't forgive ourselves. And if we can't forgive ourselves, it actually doesn't matter if your pet has already forgiven you a thousand times over because you can't take it in. Because it

Pearl’s Story And Letting Them Choose

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really at that point, it isn't about your pet at all. It's about your relationship with you and how you treat yourself when things don't go the way you anticipated, expected, or planned for them to go. And that's really where we need to start is to take a look at an aspect of your life with your pet where you are having this feedback loop, this emotional feedback loop where maybe you find your mind replaying a certain event. For me, with my Pearl bird, who passed after 24 years of life together, and passed in exactly the same way that my previous cockatiel, Jacob, had passed, and passed in the exact precise way that I had promised Pearl. I would never let him pass in because it was so awful with Jacob. And then it happened again, and it felt like this cosmic slap in the face and this deep self-inadequacy and self-guilt that led to months of just stuck, held, traumatized emotions that I couldn't seem to work through, and really was holding me away from having a continued connection with Pearl and with his reincarnation, Miss Pettal. And one day I actually decided to ask Pearl. You knew how I wanted your death experience to go. You knew that for 24 years I promised you that I would be there for you and I wouldn't let you die alone the way Jacob died. I promised you, why did it happen the way that it did? And when I finally asked Pearl, he said, Well, that's easy. I wanted my death to be peaceful, and you were a basket case. So I chose to die alone so I could have peace as I was passing out of my body. So sometimes when we ask the question, it becomes very clear. At that point, I could say to Pearl, who was now in spirit, I could say to him, You make a valid point. I was a mess. I howled so loud that I scared our dog. And he ran outside and started howling. And he never howls. He's a dachshund. Dachshunds don't howl. He was howling too. And it made so much sense. And it reminded me that at no point in time did my intention for Pearl's death experience, at no time did that ever have more power in Pearl's life than his own desire to pass in peace and his own awareness that that was not likely to happen given my emotionality around his passing. So that's what I call giving our pets their personal power back. And the Hero's Journey Pet Edition podcast episode has a lot more about that if you want to tune into that. And again, I'll link that in the show notes for you. But we have to take a look at where our intentions begin. Where do we start with anything? Let's go back to the veterinarian example for a moment. Maybe, like several of the pet parent clients I've worked with recently, maybe you've had an experience where you've done your due diligence. You have spent the time, you've spent the money, you have had the conversations, you've done the research, you have selected a professional to care for your pet. Maybe that was a veterinarian, maybe that was a trainer, maybe that was a behaviorist, maybe it was even a communicator or an energy worker, maybe it was a body worker, a holistic practitioner. And your intention was to give your pet the gift of quality of life, of the very best. And yet, when you actually made the decision, hired that individual, it didn't go that way. Maybe you chose a new friend for your pet. This is something else that has come up recently in my one-to-one pet sessions, where we've brought a new animal into the house, and your intention has been for the highest and best good to give your existing pet companionship when you're not home, a new friend, someone else to enhance. Their enjoyment of life. And instead of getting along, they seem to be at odds with each other. Maybe it's even turned dicey or dangerous. And there can be this self-guilt, there can be this self-recrimination, there can be this self-judgment. There can be this denial of self-trust. This can there can be this self-unforgiveness where it's like, oh, now look at what you've done. So we have to start looking at how we talk to ourselves when our intention doesn't produce the outcome we're expecting. And this is so key in breaking this emotional feedback loop of self-disconnection and self-unforgiveness. And this is what the pets have taught me. They have taught me again and again and again in conversation to go back to our intention. I lost count of the number of times in pet sessions where a pet has said to me, Ask my mom, ask my dad, what was your intention for me when you took that action? Was it to harm me? Was it to add distress to my life? Was it to put me in harm's way or in danger? Was it to get rid of me, to kick me to the curb in favor of a newer model? And time and time and time again, I hear you answer, no, no, and no. My intention was for the highest and best. My intention was to give you a gift. My intention was to enhance your life with me. And what we fail to understand about our pets' perceptions of their lives with us is they don't care about the outcome. They care about the energy. They care about our intention. That's the only place they look. And we alone, out of all the animal species alive on this planet, we are the only species that defaults to thinking versus feeling, to left brain living versus right brain living, to head-based living

Intention Over Outcome With Pets

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versus heart-based living. So that's what I was talking about earlier, where a huge aspect of our soul agreements with our pets. And if you have questions about what I mean about a soul agreement, I'll also link up the episode that I did on the eight common types of soul agreements. So you can listen to that and identify what soul agreement you have with your pet. But a huge aspect and a motivation for making these soul agreements to share time here in earth school together is so that they can teach us, it's not about what we're thinking, it's about how we're feeling. It's not about the outcome, it's about the intention. It's not about the head, it's about the heart. So taking a look back, maybe you have had a less than satisfactory experience with a care provider. Maybe that's a veterinarian, maybe that's a trainer, maybe that's a behaviorist or communicator, et cetera, et cetera. But you need to go further back than that to look at what was your intention when you hired that pet trainer. I had a pet parent client recently who lost their dog due to heat exhaustion after she hired a mobile groomer to come to the house. And it turned out that there was a problem with the air conditioning in the mobile grooming truck. And her dog ended up passing away of heat stroke and heat exhaustion. We had a pet session about it. And when I asked her dog how he had experienced that whole scenario and how he was feeling about his bond with mom, he said, all I cared about was your intention. And your intention was good to help thin my coat for summer, to help me look and feel my best, to give me a spa day. And it didn't go the way either one of us planned. But that doesn't matter because I know that you weren't trying to hurt me. And I know that if you could have traded places with me, you would have. I had another pet parent client recently where we were talking with her senior dog who mysteriously escaped their backyard and ran right out in front of a speeding car, was hit and killed instantly. And she came wanting to reconnect with him, having a tremendous amount of guilt and self-recrimination. And her dog shared, All I care about is your intention. I know that there was no intention to let me out. There was no intention to put me in harm's way. I got out on my own. And that was a whole other conversation because he was ready to go. And he didn't want to go the long, slow, painful route through his death process. He wanted a quick, painless death. So he made a decision. And we, as pet parents, we love our animals so much and we feel our responsibility to them so deeply. And we are so heightened in our awareness of how they are living in our human-centric world. They are living according to our rules and in a very artificial environment that they would never find if they were out in the wild. And so we feel our responsibility so keenly that we personalize everything that they do to the point where we view our pets as extensions of ourselves and we view every action they take as our fault if it doesn't go well, and our agency if it does. And nothing could be further from the truth. So in this case, my senior dog client was saying to his, I know that you had no intention of letting me out, and I know that you don't understand how on earth I managed to get out. And what I want you to know is that I did it because it was my time to go. And after I shared that with her, she shared that her dad had seen her dog escaping from the yard and had described it like watching a dog who was on a mission. He was very deliberate in his actions. And so that's where we can see that energy of self-agency. And we can start to let some of this guilt, some of this self-recrimination, some of this self-unforgiveness go because we can realize I can love my pet to distraction and back as close to unconditional as any embodied human can ever get. And that still doesn't give me the right or the ability to overtake their life and live it for them. It doesn't take their personal power away. It doesn't take their personal choice away. Every moment that our pets share with us is another moment that they are actively choosing their own fate. They are actively choosing to stay in relationship with it. They are actually actively choosing to trust us in all of our imperfections because they don't care if it doesn't all go right. All they care about is our intention. This is where we have to start. First, identifying an area where you feel some of that emotional depth charge or that guilt or blame or shame or self-unforgiveness, and you're stuck in that feedback loop. And then you have to rewind whatever it is that's playing out in your mind and in your heart. Often it's even causing pain in your body, disruption in your sleep, whatever it is. And you rewind it all the way back to the beginning, back to the point where it, whatever it was and however it went was still just what I call a gleam in the eye. You were just forming your intention for bringing that new friend, for hiring that professional, for curating a particular type of end-of-life palliative care or transition experience or whatever, fill in the blanks, whatever it may be. A harmonious household, peaceful animal while you're traveling, being the perfect Zen monk, even when your animal is pushing all of your buttons after a particularly exhausting or trying day. Whatever it is, you go back to your intention and you ask yourself, what was my intention? Where was the mark that I was aiming to hit? What was it? And if you don't find any intent to cause your animal any distress, to cause your pet any harm, then understand that in that moment, you can let the self-unforgiveness go because that is where the pets bring me in every single one of these types of conversations. I had a pet parent client a couple of years ago whose dog transitioned to spirit, and he was utterly distraught, very successful, very charismatic, very social young man who came to me wanting to connect with his dog in spirit. And as we the conversation, I could tell that he was holding something very close to his heart, something that he did not even want to verbalize because it was causing him such a depth charge and so much emotional chaos. And finally he found the courage to say to me, I feel so guilty because I was out with my friends sometimes. And even though I knew I needed to come home and give my dog a wop and let her out, I would choose not to come home right away. And I felt so guilty about it. And I feel like I didn't do right by her and I didn't do as well as I could have. And this was really one of those conversations that started my own deep dive into this particular topic that we're talking through today. Because when I asked his dog in spirit for wisdom and for her perspective, she said, Tell my dad that this is why I loved him. This is why I chose him. Because he is the kind of human that once he knows better, he does better. And she said, I acknowledge that things didn't go perfectly between us. But I have seen him go through this again and again and again that once he gets it, once he develops his empathy and is able to go deeper into that, he makes changes. And she said she found that highly motivating. Again, we're talking about a pet here, a partner, a friend, and teacher, somebody who is willing to, in some way, put themselves in

Real Cases And Pet Agency

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harm's way for the opportunity to help us grow and evolve as embodied souls, an avatar, an empath, a bodhisattva. And I did another episode, I think it was about six months ago, where I answered Elner's question about how to animals feel having endured trauma or neglect or abuse at the hands of our species. And I took some time and had a conversation with the animals about that question and then brought their insights into that podcast episode. So I will also link that up for you here in the show notes so you can take a listen to that and add your own insights and understandings. But this dog was saying, and so many of the animals I've talked with when we've had these kinds of conversations have said if you were perfect, if you had a pristine, unconditionally loving heart, and you could feel the sadness and the self-distrust and the grief in another soul so strongly, and you knew that you could do something to help, even if it meant perhaps putting yourself in harm's way to do so, wouldn't you do it? That is the definition of a bodhisattva. That is the definition of an avatar, of an awakened empath, is somebody who so loves the soul in all that it is their privilege, truly, their honor and their joy to do something to ease suffering in others, to show up, to shed a little light in a dark place. And so that is what this dog was sharing. She was saying, I knew going in that there was a possibility that I might temporarily need to put myself in harm's way, but my motivation for doing it was so strong because I knew that my dad had the potential to learn and grow and evolve because of it. And I wanted to be of service. Have you ever just done a favor for somebody? Maybe even just something super small, like carrying somebody's groceries or holding the door open or smiling at somebody when it's clear they're having a tough day and need a little extra encouragement. And have you ever noticed how you feel better yourself afterwards? So that's the energy with which this dog and so many other pets that I've talked with have shared how they perceive these kinds of learning opportunities in their lives with us, where they have the opportunity to teach us what works better and feels better. And we get the lesson. And our teacher, our partner, empathic friend, and teacher, our pet is so proud and they feel so fulfilled and they feel like their life has so much meaning and purpose. So species does not matter here. If you ever taught anybody anything and it's made their life better as a result, you already understand the motivation. And yet, in our species, what gets in the way of this is we get stuck in how the outcome doesn't match our intention and we focus there. Instead of focusing on our intention, instead of focusing on our vision, instead of focusing on only the aspects of our pet's life that we actually have any control over, we focus on the whole thing. We take ownership of the whole thing. We actually try to steal our pets' personal power and their agency and their purpose for being in our lives, which is to help us grow and evolve and start to sort out all of this behind the scenes mess so we know where to focus in the future, not if, but when life doesn't meet our expectation, whether it's our life with our pets, whether it's our life in our work, whether it's in our life with our human relationships, whether it's our life with our self-relationship, whether it's in life with our health or our finances or our friendships or the service work that we're doing in the world. It's all the same. You turn that tapestry over and you look at the back end, and it's all the same. It's the same relationship. It's the same battle of ego versus heart, of mind versus soul, of what is my side of the street and what is your side of the street. This is why when I teach animal communication, I teach from the Toltec Five Agreements framework. This is Don Miguel Ruez and Toltec Shamanism, where we look at the five agreements. Be impeccable with your word, don't make assumptions, don't take anything personally, always do your best and be skeptical, but learn to listen. Reminding ourselves we don't have all of the information when we step into a new situation by design as well as by necessity, especially when we're in relationship with another embodied soul, in this case our pet, and we're not fully in charge of anything. We're only in charge of our side of the street or our part of the experience. What our pet chooses to do with it may not be what we expect or even think they should do with it. So often we come out of these experiences where maybe our pet hasn't had the best veterin care. I went through this with my red-footed tortoise Malty, and I've been raked over the coals more often than you can count on social media when people get a look at her shell and they announce to everyone who is watching and reading that she has metabolic bone disease, that she is being poorly treated, et cetera, et cetera, not knowing any of the backstory. And I have been through the ringer with this, choosing the wrong veterinary and choosing them again and again and again and again and again until they almost killed my tortoise. And having to look at Malty every day with her misshapen shell and asking her forgiveness every single day. She is 12 now, and I've had her since she was eight weeks old, and I have asked her forgiveness every single day for the last nine years. And every single day she says the same thing to me. Mom, your intention was good. Mom, you didn't know. You know now. Now she's as healed as a tortoise can be with metabolic bone disease. And she's actually thriving in all the ways that matter most. Yes, there's lifelong management. Yes, there is a constant self-reflective process that I have to revisit at deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper levels. Yes, there is my awareness that when Malty ran away for six days when she was two, she was probably aware of what was coming at age three and trying to decide if she really wanted to show up for that or not. And she chose to come back to me. So I have to let that part of our experience go and give her her power back and recognize how deeply she cracked open my heart and how much I have learned and how it has changed everything about my relationship with her, the work that I do with other pet parents. She is an avatar, an empath, and a bodhisattva in my life. And she's told me over and over again, Mom, I forgive you because your intention was good. And I chose to continue to show up for this life with you, even though maybe in my shell and my paws, you might have not had the courage to do the same. I have the courage, and I'm okay, and I'm living a wonderful life, and I'm an ambassador tortoise, and I'm touching hearts all over the world. After that experience, this website for pets called the Dodo got a hold of a couple of videos of Malty and my family, and it went viral, went to almost 9 million views, and she became an ambassador tortoise. And I had people writing to me saying, I didn't even like turtles and tortoises before I found your videos. I just thought they were rocks with legs, but I've fallen in love. And now when I see turtles, even though I'm scared, I will stop and help them across the road. There was other information that I was not privy to that was informing how this entire situation has played out. And so I share all of that with you to let you know that first and foremost, if you are dealing with a situation where you have been feeling persistent self-guilt or blame or shame or self-unforgiveness or this just perpetual grief and sadness, emotional feedback loop that plays on repeat. I want you to know that you're not alone and that these kinds of experiences are teaching experiences for us. And they're not just teaching us about how somebody else can love us unconditionally, in this case, our pets. They're teaching us about our power to unconditionally love and support ourselves through these kinds of experiences by taking a step back, by having a conversation, by recognizing that our pets have reasons of their own for why they sign up to have these kinds of shared experiences with us and to honor them for some of the seeming sacrifices that they make because of who they are, being awakened souls, being bodhisattvas, being empaths in our lives, and to recognize that as long as we hold on to these emotional feedback loops of self-alienation, really, and self-unforgiveness, we actually aren't in relationship with our pets at all. We're only in a combative relationship with ourselves, where we are basically treating our pets like they are helpless victims at our mercy, under our thumb, and they have no agency. And again and again and again, the pets have told me we never gave up our personal power or our life path to you. That was not the bargain that we made. We are giving our unconditional love to you, and we are giving our support to you and our encouragement to you to learn and grow, but we never gave our personal power to you. So you can't own all of it. You can't take all of it on. It's not yours. So starting to let some of that go and give our pets back their part of

Rewind To Your True Intention

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their life with us. So that's really the process for starting to untangle these extremely tangled tapestry threads of some of these feelings of self-guilt, self-blame, shame, self-unforgiveness, this deep schism that we feel in our soul for some of the experiences that our pets choose to have and choose to share with us in the flow of the life that we share together and even the transition that we are there to witness that they go through. However, having said all of this, this podcast episode is not a substitute or replacement for grief support, for professional guidance and care if you need it. Instead, it actually is designed to be a supplement and a source of some ideas for how you can work with yourself, because this is really at this level when we're holding on to self-unforgiveness or self-blame or self-same or self-guilt or self-denial or self-hate, self-anger, any of these emotions. It's about the relationship that we have with ourselves, within ourselves. And so, really, this podcast episode is designed to be a source of support for you and in terms of giving you a framework to work through. First of all, identifying where the depth charge is, where the stuck point is within you when it comes to your bond with your pet, rewinding all the way back to what was your intention before that whole experience was even a gleam in your eye. What was your intention? What life were you bound and determined to give to your pet? And what does that intention say about who you are as a pet parent, as a human, as an embodied soul, and anchoring into that and then recognizing, just acknowledging that. Can start to loosen some of the emotional shackles, the handcuffs that you have on yourself, but you still have a nervous system that's stuck in fight or flight or freeze. You still have this nervous system response. And if you've been in it for a while, I've had pet parents I've worked with that have been struggling through these cycles for weeks, for months, sometimes for years, and occasionally even for decades. And so the longer you've been stuck in this feedback loop of self-unrest and self-unforgiveness, the more accustomed your nervous system has gotten to running that program. And the more deeply it has likely embedded itself into your way of being in the world, your way of seeing the world, your perception of what is possible for you or what is deserved. And the more support you may need to start to reset and rewire and regulate your nervous system. And so what I'm about to talk

Tools To Break The Loop

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you through in this next second part of our conversation together are tools that I have personally used and vetted over days, weeks, months, and in some cases years that have helped me to do just that. And these are tools I often use in my pet parent sessions as well. When we're talking with your animals and we come up against one of these feedback loops, and we have to start working through them together. So these are tools that I am best friends with, if you will, that I personally trust and use regularly and sometimes daily for myself and for you when I'm working with you and your animals. The first one is something I call tapping. Now, I just did a podcast episode all about tapping and what tapping can do and how tapping can help. So I will link that episode up in the show notes here for you. So you can go and you can visit that episode. I'm not going to spend a lot of time unpacking tapping here because that episode takes a deep dive and it also includes my free four-part

Tapping For Rewriting The Memory

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guide for how to start working with tapping for you and for your animal. But what I will say about tapping is tapping employs a mental, an emotional, and a kinesthetic or somatic element. Tapping gives you the opportunity to work with remembered emotion in a way that opens up that memory file again and reprograms it. So how you experience the strong emotions, how you experience the cognitive dissonance of the memory shit. It's very powerful and it is very, very well documented. So I will link that episode up in the show notes so you can visit that and learn more about tapping. The second one, and I have not yet done a podcast episode on this, and I have every intention of doing one in the future, is the Hooponopono self-forgiveness prayer. So the Ho'oponopono prayer is an ancient Hawaiian prayer. It's a four-part prayer, and it focuses on your relationship to the divine or to all that is, or to the benevolent life force energy, or however you like to mentalize that or emotionally connect with that, that which we all share in common, the breath, the animating life force, and on your relationship with you. And it focuses on recognizing that your intention and your outcome may not be in harmony and returning to that intention and recognizing fallibility, errors in judgment, outcomes we didn't expect, they are common to everyone. So

Ho’oponopono Self Forgiveness Prayer

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the reason that is so powerful is because sometimes in our grief, in our self-unforgiveness, we find that we have a lot of anger or judgment directed towards somebody else. In my case with Malty, I went all the way down the road of even taking a look at whether I could bring the veterinarian that I had hired for two years who'd almost killed her, to small claims court, whether I could actually file a lawsuit against them and take them to task for what I deemed their complete lack of care that my tortoise needed. And ultimately chose not to pursue that route. I had conversations with other veterinarians that I deeply respect and really took a look at all of that. And where I ended up is realizing that that veterinarian was doing the best that they knew how to do, just like I was doing the best that I knew how to do. And we don't know what we don't know. And I feel like even though I didn't know the hoopono pono prayer at that time, it actually was there operating in my subconscious all along, giving me this perspective that when we know better is when we do better and before. So the ho'opono pono prayer is very simple. It starts with going back to that feedback loop or that memory or whatever that experience is that you feel very negatively emotionally charged around, bringing that to your mind and simply saying to yourself or to the divine or the benevolent life force or however you like to experience that. I'm sorry, and feeling that fully, feeling the emotion of your regret, of your intention to do better than the way that it turned out, to whatever it is, and just simply saying I'm sorry and feeling it fully. Step two is to say to yourself or to all that is, please forgive me. So you're not saying it to the other person, you're saying it to yourself or to the divine or to all that is. So I am sorry, please forgive me. Feeling for any break in the mental and emotional chaos, any recognition that if you could have engineered it to come out differently, if you could have done things differently, if you could have done better, you would have. And then saying, please forgive me. Feeling for that connection to your intention, and then saying thank you, and then saying, I love you. It's a very simple, very profound prayer. You need to stay very emotionally present during it. If you're doing it out of anger towards someone else, like for instance, the veterinarian I was talking about that misdiagnosed and mistreated my tortoise multi, you're looking for that within you that you share in common with them. So again, we're not asking the other person for forgiveness, we're asking ourselves for forgiveness by recognizing that whatever wrong was done to us, there is an aspect within us that is also learning and growing. And none of us are infallible. None of us are gonna do life or make decisions or engineer outcomes perfectly. So this is us stepping back into the shared human experience from a place of empathy and forgiveness. This is the same place of empathy and a forgiveness that our pets step into in their lives with us. The number of missteps we are likely to make throughout our shared lives together, given that we're caring for a different species, a species we've never been, a species that we're often getting to know for the very first time. Errors in judgment, oopses, outcomes that we didn't anticipate or expect, they just come with the territory. So rationing down our expectations and recognizing it's not about doing it perfectly, it's about loving one another. And it's about ultimately loving self because when we disconnect from self, we also disconnect our nervous system from our pet's nervous system, and we literally cannot sink back and forth to share love. So it's like our pet all of a sudden is living in this lonely, isolating world where they do not have access to us because we no longer have access to ourselves. We've cut off access to our own hearts and we've cut it off not just for ourselves, but for our pets as well. And in my experience, the ho'opono pono prayer is one of the fastest ways to reconnect our own connection to our hearts and open up that pathway to let our pets back into our lives. Because isn't it true that so often when we're blaming ourselves for something that we feel we have done wrong in reference to our pets, we shut down and we cut off their access to us because we can't forgive ourselves. So we can't let anyone else love us, we can't let love back in. And so all of a sudden, our pets find themselves in this very lonely place where they're cut off from the only being in their life who matters most to them, the being that they're actually in our life for us. So it's a very simple prayer. I am sorry, please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. And there are some wonderful books and videos that you can reference. I will link up the book that I love that I have used as my own personal reference so you can read more about the deep work that you can do with the Haopono Pono prayer. Way more than I could ever possibly cover in a short podcast episode. And you can read about it and you can work through the exercises in the book and experience the transformation that this prayer can offer. So this next set of resources actually comes from two mentors of mine. The first is Kamal Rabbi Kant, who wrote the book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It, and Don Jose Ruiz, who's Don Miguel Ruiz's son, who wrote a wonderful book called My Good Friend The Rattlesnake.

Mirror Practices For Self Love

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And both of these books focus on the path of self-love. So self-acceptance and beyond self-acceptance, deeper than self-acceptance, self-love. And every single morning I do a practice where I look in the mirror and at least for one minute, I look in my own eyes and say, I love myself. I love myself. I love myself. I love myself. And I look in my eyes. I do my best to block out any distractions. So you might even want to turn the lights out in the room that you're in and just focus on your eyes and say it until a tiny little part of yourself starts to feel it. So that practice comes from Kamal Ravi Kant's book. The other practice comes from Don Jose Luiz's book, where he guides you to place one hand, and if you're watching the video version of this podcast, you can actually see me do it, to place one hand underneath your chin, along your cheek, and to stare into your eyes in the mirror and say, I love you, or to simply feel it. But it's even more powerful to say it out loud, to say, I love you. I love you, I love you for at least one minute. Now, why do both of these practices? Because one focuses on your day-to-day relationship with what we might call the ego or the small self or your mind-to-heart connection. You're saying, I love myself. So this is an empowering statement of personal choice. You are stepping back into your own hero's journey and continuing to walk the path and making a decision to do so out loud with your conscious minds. Awareness. The second is a heart-to-soul process to say, I love you. This is coming from your higher self, from your soul, from your connection to all that is speaking directly to your heart and your nervous system. Doing these two practices together, which is why I do both every single morning, can address both your conscious and daily awareness of how valuable you are to you and how committed you are to you, and to continuing to walk beside yourself, to walk with yourself, to walk within yourself, to support, guide, and encourage you. Because after all, you are the only one that you've got 24-7 for the remainder of your days. You will be in company with yourself way back in the day when I was struggling with anorexia and melemia for 20 years. At some point in that journey, I had the aha moment that I was going to spend the rest of my life with myself. And that was not optional. I was not getting out of that relationship. And I realized in that moment, if I was gonna have to spend, and it really was a have to at that point in my life, if I was gonna have to spend 24-7 the rest of my life with myself, I really wanted to be somebody fun to hang out with. I wanted to be somebody I trusted, I wanted to be somebody encouraging. I wanted to be somebody who was my own best friend. I wanted to be somebody who, if I walked into a room full of strangers, I knew I was in the best possible company. I wanted that. I wasn't there. I'm still not there and I'm still working on it, but I'm a lot closer than I was. And so doing these two practices together can really support you at a deeper level, especially when you pair them with the hoopono pono prayer and with tapping to reset your nervous system, break through these feedback loops, and start to install a new perception and perspective on your life that feels better and works better than everything you've tried up until now. And the fourth tool that I want to give you is something I give every single pet parent client of mine and every single animal communication student, and

Parasympathetic Breathing Reset

SPEAKER_00 58:05

that is parasympathetic breathing. So when we're working with a nervous system that has been hijacked by self-blame, self-guilt, self-shame, self-unforgiveness, it can be really hard to find the shut-off switch, the reset button if we don't use the breath. Because our breath is the fundamental signal and trigger that our nervous system looks to for how to respond to our life. So when we're in self-guilt, self-shame, self-blame, self-unforgiveness, we tend to breathe very shallowly. We breathe from our upper chest only, we breathe in short, sharp breaths, we hold our breath, we withhold breath from ourselves. There's a part of us that doesn't want to live, and we are actively withholding breath from ourselves. And we need to shift that in order for any of these other tools to really take root. I probably should have started with parasympathetic breath, but considering that I'm recording this episode very intuitively for you, I'm just gonna trust that this is the way that it's unfolding. Parasympathetic breath is very simple. You start with exhaling all the air out of your lungs. You take a nice deep, refreshing breath in, really focusing on inviting your whole body to move to the point where everything is expanding so that your lungs can intake 100 oxygen capacity. You pause for a moment and then you extend your exhalation and really extend it past the length of your inhale. That is key. And you'll need to do it a few times. I like to start with three times and then you do it three more times and do it three more times if you need to sit down if you start to feel lightheaded. Why does this work? It works because never ever in the history of history of history has any being, any embodied soul, ever stopped to extend their exhalation when they are running away from a saber-toothed tiger. It has never happened, it is not happening now, and it will never happen. That is not how our nervous systems work. So when you are extending your exhalation, especially when you're doing these deep breathing patterns, your nervous system can't help but get the message that you're safe. It's okay, it can stand down. So extending your exhalation is the fastest way to give yourself a little bit of breathing room to use the rest of these tools.

Talk With Your Pet And Reiki

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Now, I would be remiss in an episode for a podcast, it's all about animal communication to not mention the incredibly transformative power of talking directly with your pet about what happened, whatever it was, and asking them, how did you experience this? How did you show up for this? How was this a part of our relationship? Not an obstacle to it, not a disconnection from it, but an included part of our learning and growing together. What wisdom do you have to share with me about this? What am I missing that you can help me to learn? And having these conversations gifts you with information, insight, and perspective that you literally cannot access in any other way. And as a side component to that, I am a Reiki master. So I have worked with Reiki and animal communication side by side since day one. I recognize that the majority of animal communicators and energy workers keep the two separate. I do not, I never have because they came into my life as partners. And that is my unique path. I'm not saying it's right or wrong or that anyone else should view it that way. It's just how it works in my practice. And Reiki is a powerful detoxifier, unifier, reconnector. So working with energy, working with the Reiki. Reiki is not quite as well documented scientifically as tapping for lowering cortisol levels and resetting the nervous system response, but it does have documentation. And in the episode that I just recorded on Pet Reiki Miracles, I'll link that up for you in the show notes here. And you can take a listen to some of the amazing experiences that I have had working with Reiki with pets. And just know that those experiences are equally available for us when we're working with our own energy. In fact, I've had amazing experiences of working with Reiki with humans as well, most notably my dad. And I tell that story in that episode. So you'll want to listen to that as well. But pairing animal communication and Reiki, what I call tandem Reiki, Reiki for you, Reiki for your pets, because you're caught in this together. You're experiencing this together, whether your pet is here or in spirit. So we break together, we heal together, we grow and evolve together. So adding these tools in can really help to support you both as you're weathering these storms in your own soul growth and evolution that your pet is kind of instigating in a way. Because if we don't care about somebody else, we don't commit to somebody else, we stay very safe and we stay

Courage Closing And Ways To Connect]

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very small. So that feels like the right place to close out today's episode is actually to recognize you for how brave you are. There are many humans in this world who will never commit to a pet. And there are all kinds of reasons for that. Everything from I just don't like animals to it hurts too much when I lose them, to everything in between. And they simply will not open their hearts to a pet ever or again. And that's not you, because you would not be here listening to this episode if you were not all in. Nobody tackles this level of work without being all in to keep your heart open. You just may need a little extra support. You may need a little extra help. You may need extra tools to keep walking this path. And I want to normalize that for you because we all do. We all do. I use these tools, some of them, every single day. So if you are here listening to this episode, you are brave, you are strong, you are resilient, and somewhere in your soul blueprint, you have already moved through this whole experience that you're going through right now with flying colors. You have learned the lesson. Opportunity has knocked, you have opened the door, and you have walked through it. So just because it feels a little bit messy right now, or even a lot uncomfortable, or even totally hopeless, you wouldn't be here and you wouldn't still be here. If an aspect of you somewhere in your timeline hadn't already overcome this, learned the lesson, opened your heart at a deeper level, released all of the constraint and the constriction surrounding your soul, and stepped into a space of being completely and utterly reachable to unconditional love, to soul growth and expansion, and to continued connection. So please know that it has been my honor and my joy and my deep gratitude to share this episode with you today. Thank you so much for being brave enough to walk with me through this conversation. And I welcome your questions and your requests. If there are other questions that you have about working through self-guilt, self-blame, self-unforgiveness, grief. I'm open, always eager to hear your needs and your questions. They really help me shape these episodes to meet you where you are, to have a shared connection and an open and ominous conversation, to share what the pets have taught me thus far. And your questions often prompt me to ask the animals new questions and continue learning and continue sharing as we continue this conversation. So thank you again for being a part of the Let's Talk to Animals podcast community. Know that I am so glad and grateful that you're here. If you have found value in this episode today, please take time to leave a review, to share an insight or a comment. I adore hearing from you to support the show. If you didn't know that you can actually become a podcast supporter, you can. And if you know somebody who is struggling through the kinds of experiences that we talked through today and could use some encouragement, please do feel welcome to share this episode with them as well. And I will be back in two weeks with a fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. And I can't wait to meet you here. I have so enjoyed sharing this episode with you. If you're new to the Let's Talk to Animals community and you've enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a review on your favorite streaming service or drop a comment wherever you'd like to listen. I love to hear from you, and your feedback truly helps me shape future episodes based on your interests and needs. If you're not already in my weekly love letters community, head over to Animal Love Languages.com to opt in. Your welcome email will include $25 off your first pet session with me, and you'll be the first to know when a new podcast episode drops. If you're interested in learning more about the work I do communicating with animals, offering pet Reiki, and teaching animal communication, please visit me at animal lovelanguages.com. Click on Schedule for Pet Sessions and Programs for all the information about my new animal communication adventure to mastery student program and the live animal communication practice circle I run for student practitioners. And I look forward to welcoming you back here very soon for a fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals. Okay, all my love. Bye for now.