The Gift of it ALL

Holding a beloved pet through their final breath is one of the clearest, most heartbreaking mirrors life can offer. I’m recording for the first time without my little dog Jack beside me, and I share what it was like to walk him through the dying process after 17 years together, including the tender details we rarely say out loud: the pauses, the fighting, the peace, and the moment everything goes still.

As I stayed with him, I felt a spiritual download I can’t ignore. I heard the phrase “Great Creator” and a message that animals are gifts, not possessions. That idea cracked something open for me, because it points to a bigger truth about mindfulness, humility, and how quickly we forget the sacredness of everyday life. When death shows up, it strips away the performance and brings us back to what matters: love, time, presence, and gratitude that doesn’t bypass pain.

We also talk about grief as evidence of deep love, how to access love underneath the hurt, and how a pet can hold entire eras of your life like a living record of who you’ve been. If you’re moving through pet loss, anticipatory grief, or simply feeling burned out by striving, I hope this reflection helps you soften and remember the gifts that are already here.

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Transcript

Welcome Back And A Hard Morning

0:03

Hello, and welcome back to the Spiritual Shit Show. My name is Julie Nguyen, and if you've been keeping up with the podcast, I just share these awakenings, and these awarenesses, and these things that come through as I'm living my life. And I appreciate when I'm hearing other people's stories because it makes me feel so human. And I think sometimes we get lost in the trap of seeing things on social media, and we're so locked into screens that we're forgetting about human connection, and storytelling, and really being able to witness ourselves in our own soul's journey, in our own life journey.

Walking Jack To The Other Side

0:44

This is my first podcast that I'm creating without my little dog, Jack. Yesterday, I walked him through to the other side, literally holding him till his last breath, and even as I say that out loud, it feels surreal. I keep looking down for his bed, 'cause every time I record, he always sits next to me. Anytime I'm doing anything, he's always right by my side. And I've been sitting here this morning thinking about the process, thinking about this time in our lives, and thinking about how sacred it all is. letting him go after 17 years was so painful, so devastating, so heartbreaking, and really kind of I was surprised by it because so many times I'm like, "Jack! Goddammit, Jack!" 'Cause he's pissing on my floor, or I'm stepping on shit in the middle of the night, or I'm picking up his food constantly 'cause he's a messy eater. And now I'm just like, "Oh, I miss your tip-tapping feet, and I miss you scratching at the door in the morning to get let outside, and you're not here. You're not next to me." In his dying process, I've been lucky enough to be in the death process with my dad and my dog, and it was oddly similar. I was like, "Whoa, the death and dying process is the same in I guess maybe all things," 'cause it was so similar with my dad and Jack.

What The Dying Process Looks Like

2:14

You know, the stages of dying. There definitely is, stages of dying that I didn't really get to learn about until I was in it with my dad. But, there's the times when the body's in great agitation, and then it's resting, and then it's fighting for survival, so the body wants to get up and stay alive. And then there's long pauses, and then there's the moments of peace. And then the moments of peace bring about that final breath. And I think sometimes because we love someone or something so much, we want to rush the process. We want to move through it quickly because it's uncomfortable for us. There were many moments that I was like, "Should we just take him to the vet and get him, you know, put down?" But he was peaceful, And there was a whisper that was, "No, this is the process." you labor into life and you labor into death. Just be here. And Jack was peaceful. He really was peaceful. He wasn't in agony. He wasn't showing signs of distress or struggle. So that's why we chose to do it. But it really forced us to stay, or for me to stay with him, and to really stay present with death. And there is something really profoundly holy about that. again, I experienced that with my dad when I was at his deathbed, and I think his death process was about five days, and Jack was about 24 hours. And with Jack, the active dying process, really started about 3:00 in the morning, and it lasted till about 10:41 AM. And during the peaceful moments, I would sit with him and play my sound bowls, and I would sing to him, and I would hold him and just tell him how loved he was. And I don't know, it was just like a quiet, sacred stillness. It felt powerful. And at the same time, there were all these beautiful downloads that came through, and that's what I really wanna share 'cause it just was profound.

The Great Creator And Sacred Gifts

4:15

As I was singing to him, it was almost like a channel to the heavens was opened up, and I heard, "Oh, great creator. Oh, great creator." And I was like, "Whoa, what is a great creator?" 'Cause I use the word universe or God. I never say the word, "Oh, great creator." And then I heard from the great creator that these animals are gifts. They are gifts. They are not possessions. They are not little creatures or they're not random. They're gifts from the great creator, and when it is time for them to return, we are meant to lovingly and humbly return them back to the great creator with gratitude. and the message also was speaking to how sacred life is and how we as humans take and take and take, and we don't realize that these animals have souls, and they have energy, and they have great purpose, and every single animal has been created from the great creator. Nothing is by chance. Nothing is random. Nothing is just for our, our use. That life itself is a gift. And then the other part that came in that I heard was, they were saying, "You have it all wrong. life... You are also a gift from the great creator. Your life is a gift. And since you are such a gift to us, of course, we are showering you with gifts, with your animals, with your loved ones, with abundance, with all these things." And so everybody, they were showing, they're like everybody's running around like they're independent, and they are, just taking what they need for survival, and everybody's gotten on the planet so lost of who we are and where we come from, that we come from great creator source. And the great creator is also requiring us to be in a state of humility and gratitude and graciousness, and to treat all living things as sacred and holy, and we have forgotten that. So that was what was coming in while Jack was peacefully lying next to me. But it just awakened me so much 'cause I was like, "Oh my gosh," like all this time I'm like, I don't think I really took an appreciation or really has, have been able to see how holy Jack was. And it was really interesting 'cause it was different than my dad dying, 'cause I knew where my dad was going, and there is a part of me that was like, "Well, I chose my dad." I am so grateful for my dad, and I also see that I chose him, and I chose my family line so I could be and do and whatever my soul's journey is supposed to be and do and experience. But with Jack, it was like, "Oh, of course, this is a transaction." he has been gifted to me, and I get to gift him back. But in so many ways, Jack chose us too. Jack chose us and allowed us to be with him, and he stayed 17 years. So I felt also the grief that he was experiencing from losing us as well. Oh, here comes tears. I don't know. It was profound. It was really profound. But I just realized that everything is temporary, everything is sacred, everything is a gift, and everything is on loan, and I think we forget that. I think we get, again, like I said, we get so caught up in our healing or striving or becoming and stress and bullshit, timelines, identities, money, goals, stressed. Do I say that already? Stories. And I don't want us to have death be the key that reminds us that life itself is the fucking miracle, that everything in life is so beautiful and tender and fleeting. And while I was holding Jack underneath all of the crying and the grief, and there was moments that we were crying literally together, not lying, we were crying together. It was so sacred. It was so beautiful. It was so hard. It was so tender. And as I'm

Meeting Love Under The Grief

8:29

crying and saying, "I'm just not ready for you to go yet, buddy," underneath of all of that, I was being guided to, underneath the grief, can you access love? Just love. Make contact with the love underneath the pain. And wow, that was so beautiful because grief is painful, and grief is also evidence that something was deeply loved, that it was sacred, that it was a gift from the great creator.

Jack As Companion And Story Keeper

9:03

and Jack, God, was he woven into every version of my adult life. I got him when I first moved into my apartment when I was 30, and I was single, and I was living by myself. And then I brought him into my first house, and he's been with me through relationships and heartbreak, and he was with me when I was pregnant with Braxton. And it just hit me, like, when I was big and giant and experiencing pregnancy by myself, Jack would always just lay right next to me. He was my buddy. He was my companion. And then when Han finally moved in, and we had Braxton, and then we got married, yes, I understand that order. Life is life. Jack was with us. And when my dad moved in, Jack was such an energetic anchor and sweet spot in this house. And after my dad passed away, it was Jack that laid relentlessly by my side, literally crawling up on me to help soothe the ache and the grief of my dad passing. And Jack held, literally, it feels like he was the story keeper. He was my personal Akashic record. He held entire eras of me. And if you've been listening to the Spiritual Shitshow podcast, you know that this entire past year has really been about, okay, what happens after healing? What happens after the collapse? What happens after survival mode? What happens when most of the healing work is done? And somehow, even in his passing, Jack gave me another teaching, and that teaching is life is sacred. Every single thing is sacred, the animals, the people, the trees, the breath, the coffee in the morning, the sound of your kids laughing and/or fighting in the other room, the ordinary moments that we rush past because we're so busy trying to become something.

How Softly Can I Live

10:52

And this morning, I just kept on saying, while I'm missing the sounds of Jack's tip-tappy little paws on my floor and missing him following me around the house from room to room, how softly can I move through life? Not how successful can I become and how much can I accomplish and how much can I force or what misery or sorrow or pain am I gonna hold onto? What do I need to heal? And it shifted. It was, how softly can you walk through this life? How present can you actually be? How tenderly and authentically can you love? Can you actually begin to witness all of the gifts from the Great Creator? And I hate it that death has a way of clarifying everything. It strips away the bullshit. It strips away the performance. It strips away the things that you pay attention to, and it reminds you that... And this is what my husband tells me all the time, which is time is the only thing you can never get back. You can never get back time. And my husband lives so beautifully by that reminder that time is literally the only thing you cannot get back, and he creates his entire being around that. If it's not bringing him joy, he's not doing it. If it's stealing his time, he ain't doing it, because he is so anchored into the truth of time literally is the only thing you cannot get back. And I don't know if I said this already, but, one of the other downloads that came in was, "You humans have it all wrong. You think you are searching for the gift, but you are the gift. You are the gift." and if we are the gift, then of course life wants to gift us beauty. It wants to gift us love and friendships and sunsets and animals and magic and healing and joy and connection. We have been gifted. Life and the universe is constantly gifting us life to amplify our life force, to amplify our joy, to amplify the gifts, and if we are so trapped, which guilty as charged, in the suffering, in the healing And we forget how to receive life. What a gift. So I ask you this: Where in your life can you slow down enough to orient towards the gifts, to really see them?

Gratitude As Real Presence

13:28

And I think this is what gratitude actually is. It's not forcing positivity, it's not bypassing pain, and it's not pretending hard things aren't hard. But it is about becoming present, so deeply present enough to recognize, oh, my God, what a gift, what a gift, what a gift. What a gift this person is or has been. What a gift this animal, my pet, my Jackie boy is and has been. What a gift this season of my life has been. What a gift it was to witness and be with death. What a gift it is to be with breath. What a gift the ordinary little moments are that we tend to rush past or be annoyed by. There's so many times I'm walking around the house and I'm like, "Goddammit, Jack! Go lay down. Quit following me around the house." Because the little guy, as soon as I got up, he was up wanting to know where I was, and he would follow me from room to room to room. Oh, and what a gift that was. I think gratitude is slowing down enough to actually feel your life while you're living it. Doesn't that sound powerful? Slowing down enough to feel your life while you are living it. And maybe that's what Jack came here to teach me, and that's the gift that he left me with, that life is sacred, love is sacred, presence is sacred, and it's all on loan. We do not have this experience forever. So can we soften? Can we slow down? Can we look for the gifts even when it's hard, even when it's painful? Because the gifts are literally everywhere, and I want to remind you of what a gift you are.

Final Reminder And Farewell

15:32

All right. Thanks for listening. Sending you big love. Until next time.