Anticipatory and Post Transition Pet Grief and How to Navigate It

In this transformative episode of Let's Talk to Animals podcast, animal communicator Shannon Cutts dives deep into a rarely highlighted part of our grief journey as pet parents - anticipatory grief.

As you listen you will learn:

• What anticipatory grief is and how to spot it in your life
• How undiagnosed anticipatory grief can damage your bond with your pet
• Why anticipatory grief happens and what to do about it
• How anticipatory grief fits into the greater grief process we all go through as pet parents, guardians and carers
• Practical tips to use right now to help yourself through the ache of pet grief at any stage
• How animal communication itself can help you begin to heal from anticipatory or post-transition pet death and grief

Related podcast episodes mentioned in this episode:

• Last Wishes: the most important conversation you will ever have with your pet
• 8 different soul agreements you share with your pet
• How I became a professional animal communicator
• A tale of pet reincarnation how Pearl became Petal

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Free pet grief guide
• Free pet reincarnation guide
• Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery student program

Are you animal communication curious? Have I got something special for you! My new Animal Communication Adventure to Mastery student learning program just launched! This program is designed to be a gentle, yet thorough, serious, yet lighthearted path to interspecies fluency that pairs beautifully with my ongoing live Animal Communication Adventure Practice Circle for developing student practitioners. Visit animallovelanguages.com and click on programs to join us.

Chapters

• 0:04 Welcome And Mission
• 1:09 Naming The Big Trigger: Pet Grief
• 2:25 Anticipatory Grief Unmasked
• 7:15 A Cape Cod Story And Soul Bonds
• 13:10 Biology Of Anticipatory Grief
• 18:08 Acknowledging Grief And Safety Rituals
• 27:05 Body Optional: Love And Ongoing Connection
• 32:14 The Grief Firestorm Explained
• 40:45 Resetting The Nervous System
• 47:26 Routines, Psychometry, And Honoring Rituals
• 54:59 Walking, Water, Laughter, And Memory

Transcript

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. Hi, Shannon here, and welcome back to another fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals, the podcast that all species can enjoy together. And today on the podcast, I am tackling head-on the topic, a topic that I refer to here, there, and everywhere, especially throughout the last couple seasons here on Let's Talk to Animals. And it's the biggest trigger that sends pet parents to me for animal communication sessions and to learn animal communication. And that is pet grief. Pet grief is the journey that we embark on before we even say yes to a new animal family member. It is the part that we do our best to ignore throughout all of the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the glorious moments and the difficult ones in our daily life with our pet. And the part that surprises us with its intensity and confusion when the day finally comes that our animal either lets us know that they're ready to transition or simply transitions. And that is why I want to spend a whole episode. In truth, it deserves many episodes, and I'm sure that we will be coming back to this topic, but I want to devote this entire episode to walking you through what the animals have taught me thus far about navigating our grief journey when they feel the need to transition out of their physical body. Now, for most podcast episodes, I've at least got a working outline of notes that I try to do my best to follow to make sure that I hit all the highlights. But I want you to know that I'm coming to you today completely unscripted because my intention is to speak to you from my heart while tuning in with the souls of all the animals I've spoken with who have walked through this journey with you, their beloved humans, their beloved pet parents or guardians or carers. And I want to see what the animals want to share through me today for you. Now, the timing of this episode, I'm not really sure why I decided I needed to do it today. I literally was just like, I woke up and I knew I needed to do it and I went to the mic and here I am. So I'm trusting that whenever you listen to this episode, that it will find you in just the right moment when you need the support and insight the most. Right now, when we here in the West are heading into kind of our traditional holiday running of the gauntlet, where we go through a particular series of holidays that mostly hail from the Christian tradition, or at least have been appropriated by the Christian tradition. And it can be a time of just simple emotional intensity as well as amplified grief. Because so often, if you have lost a pet already and you're walking through the grief process right now as you're listening, then you have those amplified memories of being with them during the last big holiday blast. And if you haven't shepherded your pet through their final transition, but you know that it is imminent, it is fast approaching, then there can be this feeling of increased urgency to make memories, to make meaning, to mitigate anticipatory grief for holidays to come when one of you will be in a body and one of you may be in the spirit space. And of course, we can always talk about pet reincarnation. I've done other episodes on that, and we can certainly revisit that topic again through the lens of pet grief. If that's something that you would like to hear more about, you can post a comment and you can let me know and we can return to this conversation. But the first thing that I want you to know, and that your pets want you to know, is how intensely, intensely brave you are. This is the part that gets completely whitewashed, completely overlooked when we do that amazing thing that we do as animal lovers, as pet guardians and pet parents, we point and we say, I want that one. We sign the paper and we say, I'm adopting this one. And we already know for the majority of cases, we already know in advance that they're going to be departing their physical body before we depart ours. And if we're honest, between two hard choices, we go first or they go first, we want them to go first to make sure that we'll be there for them. But we also can't imagine life without them. And we're already staring this in the face before we even make the final decision to add an animal to our interspecies family. We've already signed up for eventual and anticipatory grief. And this was something that I have spent most of my life blissfully unaware of, or maybe dangerously unaware of, until I started my intuitive and then animal communication journey. And my soul bird Pearl began pointing it out to me. And he did it in such a creative way. I'm a lifelong reader, my adult life, I've been a professional writer for many, many years. I have a couple of books out. So writing stories has always been a very powerful teaching tool for me in my own life. And my petal, who's my Pearl reincarnated, just came over to join me for this part. If you're watching the video version, that was that little flap, flap, flap you've heard. When Pearl was 15, my beloved parents invited me to take a three-week vacation with them to their rental house in Cape Cod. And at that point, I was a seriously overworked nonprofit founder and director. And I was working all these odd jobs and I was just exhausted. And somehow, uncharacteristically, I said yes. My soul knew that I needed a break and a chance to reevaluate my priorities in my life. And so I actually said yes to taking three weeks away from all of my various jobs and from Pearl to travel to Cape Cod, not an easy trip to this very remote town, to this rental house that they had. And I discovered a lot during that three-week refuge and respite from my regularly scheduled crazy daily life. But for our purposes here, for today's purposes, I discovered, rediscovered that my heart had stayed behind with Pearl and that the one thing that I simply couldn't bear in my life is to be separated from him for even a day. In fact, I would convince my folks to drive me to the SPCA in Cape Cod so I could visit with the cockatiels there that were being rehomed. And I actually got a chance to volunteer with several different parrot species and help with socialization and just healing and calming for them. But it was as healing and calming for me as it was for them because I was missing Pearl so much. And so I started writing down all of these stories of our life together. And it brought to my attention the degree of anticipatory grief that I was feeling. Now keep in mind, Pearl went on to live another nine years. He had been with me since he was a five-week-old chick. At that point in time, he was turning 15 and he would go on to live another nine years. So he passed when he was 24. And I was already in the throes of deep anticipatory grief. And when we have these deep soul bonds with our animals, very quickly we reorient our reality to life with them, to the point where we can no longer remember what life was like without them. And in truth, most of us would rather not. And we can no longer pull forward those memories and the capacity to imagine surviving when we are not together. So anticipatory grief can start several years before our pet actually ends up needing to transition out of their physical body. It can start before we even bring our animals home. I've had pet parent clients whose anticipatory grief was so strong throughout their life with their pet, all the way up and through the time of their pet's actual physical transition, that it has stopped them from ever being able to say yes to a new animal, even a possible reincarnation of their beloved soul animal, because they don't ever want to go through that experience of grief again. So we have to recognize how powerful this is. And I want to tie this back to everything that I've been learning about our neurochemistry, our biology, how we're wired and why we're wired this way. Because these deep emotional experiences, this bank of emotions associated with this grief experience, can build up over years worth of time, sometimes decades worth of time. And what that means is they then get coded into our limbic brain, into our fight, flight, freeze, our sympathetic nervous system operating system as danger, danger, danger, run away, go as fast as you can. This is gonna wipe you out. Never, ever, ever let yourself get near this again. And they get coded in high resolution, high definition intensity, and they get stuck there. And it's a part of our risk management system that will kick in and say, never again, not for me. And I have come to live by the credo of what we don't acknowledge within ourselves, whether we like it or not, it rules every experience that we have in our life and every choice that we make in our life. And the degree of intensity of this anticipatory grief that we can feel, and certainly the degree of anticipatory grief that I felt, I wrote an entire book of stories about my Pearl that I then published and shared out into the world. I wrote a blog called Love and Feathers and the book Love and Feathers followed that, and then Love and Feathers Cookbook followed that, and that's a whole other story for a whole other episode. But I was all the while not just enjoying my time with Pearl and appreciating all that he was teaching me, but I was trying to manage undiagnosed anticipatory grief and a worldview that did not include me surviving Pearl's passing out of his physical body. And in fact, I used to say to him all the time, and especially when we were going to the vet, where you go, I go. And it used to scare the crap out of my family and my friends. It didn't scare me because I couldn't imagine my life without him. And I speak to many pet parents one-on-one who come to me and confide that you feel that way too. You simply cannot, you can't be without this particular animal, even if you are someone who has loved animals all your life. When we have these deep soul bonds, and I encourage you to go back and listen to the episode I did on eight of the different soul agreements that we can have with our pets. You can start identifying the flavor or the nature of your soul bond that you have with your beloved animals. That'll be something that you can do as like your homework today, if you will. But when we have these kind of deep soul bonds, heartbreak syndrome is a real threat. I've had pet parents tell me that they've gone to the emergency room after their pet passed because they were afraid they would do themselves a harm, or they were simply afraid that their heart was going to stop because their grief was so strong. And that is a real condition. Look it up heartbreak syndrome. And it actually happens not in just human animals, but it happens in some wild animal species, most notably a pack of wild dogs in Africa. I watched a documentary on it recently, and I can't remember the species name of these wild dogs, but they were rehabilitating individuals who had gotten hurt in the wild, and they would bring them in, they would rehabilitate their bodies, but they would die anyway. And when the autopsies were done, it was discovered that they were dying of a broken heart. They were dying of heartbreak syndrome. So it's basically a syndrome that mimics a heart attack. And you don't find out until you go in afterwards and you do an autopsy that there was no actual cardiac arrest that took place. It's actually just a flood of adrenaline and cortisol that the heart can't cope with that shuts it down and shuts it off. So I really want you to take this anticipatory grief seriously. It's the main reason that I recorded the episode a couple weeks ago about last wishes, the most important conversation you will ever have with your pet, because we have to recognize the depth of the bonds that we have with our beloved animals. And for many of us, those bonds transcend and overshadow in intensity and devotion and unconditional love, any bonds that we might even have with other human animals. And when you lose or you perceive that you lose a bond of that intensity, all kinds of crazy things can happen, not just in your mind and in your heart, but in your physical body. So we have to take it seriously. Anticipatory grief is a killer. And the reason it's a killer is because for many of us, it has been building and building and building over time, over days, weeks, months, sometimes years of our animals are in a palliative care situation. And we're always in this low grade state of fight or flight or freeze, the sympathetic nervous system where we're always waiting for the traumatic event to take place, and we don't ever know when or where or how it's going to happen. That is an extremely toxic space for the physical body to dwell in. And it means we're not just living in our regularly scheduled sympathetic nervous system state that our 24-7 artificial first world lives induce, but we are also living in a low-grade toxic state of unknown future bad things are gonna happen, anticipatory grief, it's coming, but I don't know when or how or why. And layering on top of that, I don't know how I'm gonna cope and I don't know if I'm going to do what my pet wants and needs me to do. In other words, I don't trust myself to navigate this successfully, and I don't even trust myself to survive it. So basically, I don't trust myself to even be able to be there for my pet because I'm so emotionally compromised within myself about how I'm going to survive their passing. Now, this kind of conversation, I believe, needs to happen with each pet parent, at least each pet parent that I interact with in the world and the communities that I move within, because it doesn't happen anywhere else. And it is absolutely essential not to whitewash or water down these bonds because they just happen to be with non-human animals versus with human animals. We're hesitant enough to really honestly talk about the fallout of grief, anticipatory or otherwise, with the human beings that we love and we lose or they transition out of their bodies. You'll almost never find an open and honest conversation about what it feels like and how to prepare for and how to shepherd ourselves as well as our animals through the process of them needing to pass out of their physical bodies. And so that's why I feel so strongly that this topic, this experience that we go through as animal guardians and pet parents, we need to talk about it because we need to take it very, very seriously. It can be life-ending, not just for our pets, but for us as pet parents as well. And so the next thing I want to say about that is where we get into trouble with anticipatory grief is not that it's there. We can't help having it. That's the way that our fight-flight-free system is wired. It's always scanning our surroundings, looking for possible threats. Once upon a time, when we were out in the greater food chain of life, tasked with feeding ourselves and not becoming somebody else's dinner, that system worked perfectly and it hopefully kept us alive. It kept our ancestors alive or we wouldn't be here. Where it doesn't work so well is when we're trying to manage and mitigate first world threats. Like someday at some point in time, I don't know how or when or why, my pet's body is going to give out and they're going to transition and leave me here in my body all alone. Our fight-flight-freeze survival system doesn't know the difference between a saber-toothed tiger stalking us in real time out in the woods, and someday I'm going to lose my beloved animal's body and be all alone. Our primitive wiring does not know the difference. And what's more important, it doesn't care. And the reason it doesn't care is because both of those events are a potential threat. And its job isn't to micromanage the degree of threat. Its job is to keep us alive, which means it treats all threats as equally serious. So we need to mitigate, manage, and triage, if you will, our own threat detection system. And we cannot manage what we will not acknowledge. And this is the key. This is why so many of the sessions that I do that revolve around talking with an animal about last wishes or reconnecting pet parents with their animal after they've transitioned has to do with easing the grief, which begins with acknowledging it. It. If there isn't a place, a space, a set of listening ears, an empathic heart with which to acknowledge that the grief is there and that it feels real, whether it hasn't happened yet or it's already happened, and how it affects us and what we need to create space to enjoy our life as it is right now, even though the grief is there, we know it's there. But if we don't have those tools in place to do that, our entire life with our pet boils down to I'm just waiting for you to die. So I'm going to be miserable and alone. And that's no way to live. And that's not what our animals want for us. And if we're being honest, it's not what we want for ourselves. So where I want to start you off, especially if you're listening to this episode and you're staring down that tunnel of my pets in their quote unquote golden years, or my pets in the hospice or the palliative care stage of life, or my pets hovering on the cusp of transitioning. Or maybe you're listening to this and you are contemplating saying yes to a new animal companion, but you just can't make a decision because your grief from a beloved animal's passing is getting in the way, and you don't want to sign up for that again. This is what I want you to do. First of all, I want you to sit down with yourself very gently, very calmly. Take a deep breath in and a long sigh out. And I want you to do that two more times. Just take a deep breath in, a long extended exhale out, a deep breath in, an extended exhale out. And I want you to acknowledge the anticipatory grief in the room, in your heart. I want you to just point to it if you need to by name, actually point it out and say, you are anticipatory grief. I know you. I recognize you. I know that you're here. And then I want you to take another set of those same deep parasympathetic breaths. So we're sending our nervous system a message of rest, digest, reconnect, it is safe. And as you're breathing, deep in breath in, long out breath. I want you to notice where you feel the anticipatory grief in your body. For me, I feel it in my chest. I have always felt it in my chest. Maybe you feel it in your gut. Maybe it comes in the form of a headache. Maybe you notice it's actually in your low back, or maybe you start feeling wobbly. If you're standing up, you feel like you need to sit down. Maybe the temperature changes in your body. That's something else. If I'm in the presence of strong emotions, I'll notice that my temperature goes up. My physical body temperature. If it's strong enough, I'll start sweating. So notice for yourself as you're taking these deep inhales and these long extended exhales. Notice where do you feel it in your body and place your hands on that area. If you're watching the video version of this podcast, you'll notice I'm actually placing my hands over my heart as I'm doing this. I'm taking these deep in breaths, long out breaths, and I am acknowledging, I'm actually patting on the area very softly. When we tap or pat on an area, it can reset our sense of inner equilibrium, bringing our attention in a very safe and comforting way to that area. And I want you to actually say out loud or inwardly to yourself, even though I feel this grief, I am safe. Even in the presence of this grief, I am safe. Even though I feel this grief, I am safe. You may need to do this daily. You may need to do this multiple times a day, depending on where you are in your grief journey. If you're in anticipatory grief, if you're listening to this after you've lost an animal, and we're gonna move into that here in just a moment. But if you're listening and you're in a stage where you're struggling through anticipatory grief, like I did for all those years without having any idea what it was that was wrong with me, I actually thought that there was something wrong with me, something even more wrong than all the other stuff, something that made me even weirder and more woo-woo and more unlike everyone else around me, because I loved my pet, my pearl, so much that I was already anticipating not surviving life without him years before he would ever be ready to transition out of his physical body. I had no idea that anybody else in this world could ever feel that way or had ever felt that way, so much so that I was actually judging myself on top of these feelings. And I don't want you to do that because this is real. You're having these feelings for a reason. And of course, with our pets being our partner's empathic friends and teachers, by their own admission, part of your pet's role in your life is to teach you that you can feel strong and even unpleasant things. And it doesn't mean you're unsafe. You are okay. So starting with acknowledging wherever you are in the grief process, I feel this. It's okay to feel this grief. I am safe. I've actually created a little ritual for myself. Anytime I start feeling this kind of strong emotion, I use it for other things besides grief, but it definitely works really, really well for grief. I'll pay attention to my body and notice where I'm feeling the intense emotion in my body, and I'll place my attention there and I'll place my hands there. And then I will say a phrase to myself I am safe and supported, guided and protected in this world. And then I'll make a little sound. I use a click. So I don't even know if you can hear that, but I basically make like a little clicking sound with my tongue, and then I visualize an animal. And the animal I chose to visualize is a sea turtle because of their longevity and their peaceful temperament. But you can create your own ritual. I learned this from one of my neurological programming mentors. And so you can create a statement for yourself that you say and then make a sound. Whatever the sound, you could snap your fingers, you could clap your hands, you could tap your foot, but make a physical sound that grounds you back in your physical body. And then you can visualize either your favorite place in the world. Like if I was visualizing a place, it might be that rental house in Cape Cod. You could visualize an animal. I chose the sea turtle for the reasons I mentioned. You could visualize a flower or a crystal. So you're basically working with yourself at a biological, neurochemical level. So you've got the physical component of actually tapping or placing your hands on your chest. You have the mental component of speaking words of safety. You have the emotion that arises after you hear those words, and then you have the physical sound that brings you back into your body and all of those things working together. It's similar to tapping, if you're familiar, but it's a much shorter cycle that you can do in one second whenever you feel the need. So sometimes I do it multiple times a day if I need to. So you can use a system like that and just get in the habit of acknowledging when that anticipatory grief comes up and when you start worrying, when you start feeling that sense of preparatory separation, because when you can acknowledge it, you can end that preparatory separation before it gets any wider. Because what we're actually doing is we are distancing ourselves from our beloved animal while they're still with us, if it's anticipatory, or we're distancing ourselves from the continuing, ongoing, and ever-present energetic connection that remains heart to heart with our animals, if we are stealing ourselves against grief from a passing that's already happened and we don't want to feel it. And that's the furthest thing from anything that could possibly nurture and help us and support us through this. We need to cultivate increased closeness, not enforced distance. So acknowledging yourself for the power of the bond that you have with your pet and the depth of love that you feel and praising yourself, giving yourself acknowledgement for the capacity of your heart to love that on the highest vibration levels will never be anything that anyone should ever have to be ashamed of. You will never have to be ashamed of or hide from or hide yourself from the depth of your capacity to love another being, another soul. You want to honor that, you want to acknowledge that, you want to cultivate that. We just need to cultivate the depth of your love for your pet and their love for you in a way that feels safe and not like you're anticipating or stealing yourself against a threat, something that might kill you. No, this is going to make you even stronger and braver. It's that old adodge about what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But we don't recognize that by surviving it, we get stronger and we get braver, and we have the opportunity and the capacity to love even deeper, to love even more intensely, and to be safe in that container and to expand the capacity of our hearts more and more and more until when the moment does come that our animal transitions out of their physical body, we understand at a biochemical level, as well as at a soul and a spirit level, that if the love is still there, the relationship is still there, body optional. And increasingly, this is what I share with my pet parent clients when I'm working in these one-on-one sessions, these last wishes sessions is if the love is still there, the relationship is still there, body optional. Lock this in. And if you need to use that for your centering phrase, along with a sound of your own choosing and an image of your own choosing, then do it because that is what the animals increasingly are emphasizing in the sessions that I do is our body was never necessary for us to love one another. It was just an extra added treat to have our cute furry or feathery or shelled or skinned or scaly bodies with you. That was just icing on the cake. The cake has always ever been and always will be and is now. So that's the first thing. And if you are in a position where you are struggling through this on your own, I want you to know that you don't have to. You'll find a link in the show notes to my free download, my pet parent grief support guide, and a download to my free pet reincarnation guide. There are so many ways to continue the connection that you have with your beloved pet, even when they are in the body optional state or in the light body state, if you will. So this is where we need to find our flow again, continue the journey, recognize the journey is continuing. It is always endeavoring to continue. We are the ones that are trying to stop it prematurely because our left brain mind and our sympathetic nervous system does not understand the nature of dark night of the soul level threat. It only understands saber-tooth tiger. And what you are going through is a soul awakening to a new reality of how energy flows and creates and sustains what matters most, which is love. So if you are listening right now, my question to you is do you still feel love for your pet? And if your answer is yes, then my response is then the relationship remains body optional. Now I want to move into part B of taking a look at the pet parent grief cycle. And that is what I call the grief firestorm. If you've been listening for a while, you've heard me talk about it before, but I want to break it down for you here because it's a whole different facet of how we human animals and non-human animals who've lost loves, how we biochemically as well, soulfully move through grief. Of course, when I was growing up and when I was taking my psychology 101 classes in college, we were taught the classic five-stage model of grief, the denial, the anger, the bargaining, the sadness and depression, and then the acceptance. And at that time in my life, I was like, oh, good, it has five stages. I'll document them and I'll know when I've entered depression that I'm getting close. Well, I soon discovered it didn't work that way. And it doesn't work that way for any of us. Sure, all of those elements can and typically are there, but linear they are not. Our left brain mind just craves structure during such uncertain times, and that model gives it some. So that's probably a part of why it has been so enduringly popular over the years. But when we're taking a look at exactly what happens biochemically when we go through a visible separation, and by that I mean your pet's body has broken down beyond repair and shuts down. And your pet's energy, the soul or spirit, whatever word you prefer, has to depart because that body is no longer a safe, habitable space to dwell within. We have a reaction. It plays out differently depending on our personality, our temperament, our socialization, what Don Miguel Ruiz, the Toltec Shaman, calls our domestication, our cultural standards, what's expected of us and what we have observed and witnessed in others around us as they've grieved, as well as a deeply internal process of what's really going on, all of that is playing out in those first moments, as well as a fight, flight, or freeze response, which involves flooding your physical body with probably many hormones because emotions have hormonal neurotransmitter foundations. But the two principal ones to be aware of are adrenaline and cortisol. Yes, the very same that can cause incidences of heartbreak syndrome. And your body is flooded with these hormones and it doesn't feel good. So, regardless of how you may be acting or reacting or what's going on around you on the inside, underneath your skin, your body is flooded with threat response chemicals and lots of them. And because there is no end, if we were out in the forest and there was a saber-toothed tiger, those hormones would be very useful to prepare us to fight flight or freeze. And we would either get away or we wouldn't, and it would end probably in the next 20 minutes. But grief doesn't have an ending. So the signal that your fight, flight, or freeze system, your sympathetic nervous system is looking for that the threat has passed never comes. And what happens, and the reason that I call this the grief firestorm is because your body is prepared for the threat for days. It's preparing for hours, days, weeks, sometimes months, continuing to churn out those higher levels of adrenaline and cortisol because it never gets the signal that the threat has passed. And often, by the time you come to me for a session to reconnect with your pet in spirit, you may have been marinating in adrenaline and cortisol for some time. And it could feel pretty lousy. And I've actually seen this be one of the key reasons why pet parents don't schedule animal communication sessions, because they feel like they're not ready yet. But the reason they don't feel ready is because they still feel like they're trapped in the presence of a grave threat. Because that adrenaline and that cortisol keep pumping out and they build up to toxic levels. Something else that most of us do when we're grieving is we tend to isolate or hibernate. We shut down. Well, that means we're not moving our bodies as much. A lot of us we lose our appetite or we seek comfort food. We're not drinking enough water, we're not taking in the right balance of nutrients. Our whole digestive system, our gut brain, our enteric nervous system is thrown into disarray. And this goes on and on. And so, what could actually send the signal to your sympathetic nervous system that the threat has passed is this reconnecting conversation. And yet the reason that you're not seeking the conversation, the pet communication session, is because you're in the presence of a perceived threat and you don't feel ready. Of course, you're not going to feel ready to stop and have a conversation when your entire wiring is looking around you, going, where's the threat? Am I in danger? Am I going to die? So the very thing that could send the signal that it's okay, the danger's past, you're reconnected now, you're safe, is the very thing that you avoid because you don't understand what's happening in your biochemical organism. And where was this training when we were in biology class? I don't know. Or psychology class for that matter. We got the five stages of grief. We didn't get how does the sympathetic nervous system keep us alive? What does it do when it goes haywire in the presence of these first world threats? See out in the greater food chain of life, wild beings, regardless of species, cannot afford to hang on to their grief because it makes us inattentive and it puts us in real harm's way. We actually are going to end up being on the sharp end of a saber-toothed tiger because we're not paying attention. We're wandering around in a grief firestorm. So that's why you'll often see wild animals that have just avoided getting eaten. If they manage to escape their attacker, they will literally stop for a moment, they'll breathe, sometimes heavily, you'll see them breathing, and then they will shake their physical body and they'll shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it. And sometimes they'll either have a little nap or they'll just get up and they'll walk away or they'll fly away. We as human animals, we've never been taught to do that. So we don't know how to restore safety within ourselves, within our own lives. We don't even know what our body is doing and why it feels so awful, so potentially lethal. So if you are in the great firestorm and you're listening right now, understand there are things that you can do right now. In fact, I want you to pause this podcast or this video and go get yourself a big jug of pure water. And I want you to start drinking it. Your lymphatic system needs water to help neutralize and move all those toxic hormones out of your body. The lymphatic system also needs you to move your body. It needs water as the carrier agent to transport the toxins, to neutralize them, to Water them down and get them out of your body. And it needs you to move in order to actually pump them out. So if you're listening to this, put your headphones in and finish listening while you go for a walk. I like to recommend walking because it's a repetitive activity that is pretty safe, especially when you're in the altered state of the grief firestorm. Bring your water with you. I want you to take a walk around the block and then take another one. And I want you to do this every few hours. And if you can, what I recommend is that you keep to your same schedule that you followed when your pet was with you in body. Recognize they're still with you in energy. They're still with you in the love. If the love is there, you know your pet is close. You know they are still there, but your nervous system doesn't know that. And it will never know that for all the reasons we just talked about. So as best as you can, try to keep to your same daily schedule. If you always took your pet for a walk at a certain time, or you fed them at a certain time, or you let them out at a certain time, you had a certain daily routine that you followed. Continue that routine because it is another way to send your overreacting sympathetic nervous system the message: you're safe. The threat is passed. If the threat hadn't passed, you wouldn't be back to business as usual. You wouldn't be following your regular daily routine. One of my pet parent clients, she told me that one of the things that she started doing is she actually takes her dog's leash and she slings it over her shoulder. And when she goes out in the woods for their morning hike, she brings the leash. And I recommend that. It keeps their energy close. This is called psychometry. It is the practice of drawing the energy of our loves close through a sacred object, something that holds their energy. You'll see mediums use this a lot. And it's a way to feel that outer connection, to bring that outer connection into context with the inner connection that you still feel. We humans, when we're grieving, we need things to do. We need tangible kinetic activities. So keeping to the daily schedule. Something else I like to recommend that my pet parent clients do, and we talk about this a lot in our last wishes sessions, is how do you want to be remembered and honored? And often that will involve something to do, shopping for crystals, going to the plant store, crafting something. I have one pet parent client whose dog in spirit wanted her to go back to jewelry making. And her first assignment was to make a beautiful little bracelet using a little section of his collar. So give yourself something to do. Or if you need some inspiration, schedule a session with me and we'll ask your pet, what should I do? What would you like me to do to honor you? And typically, this is why I say that the grief firestorm period, this period of detoxification, of shutting off this extended ongoing nervous system response, can last for at least three to four weeks, often longer, because it depends on the amount of time that your nervous system has been waiting for the all clear. I mean, it depends on all kinds of things, including how emotional you are. Some of us, we're not wired to be the one that's going to burst into tears all the time, but that doesn't mean we don't feel things deeply. It can just be a little more difficult to actually get the emotion out, to acknowledge, yes, I'm feeling. Oh, this is what I'm feeling. Oh, this is what I need to release that stuck energy and motion, emotion. There's all kinds of different ways to grieve. There's all kinds of reasons why we might move through it at different paces. But the most important one is that your sympathetic nervous system is waiting for the all-clear. So these are some of the ways that you can start transmitting the message. Hey, turn off the cortisol pump. The threat's gone. And then you need to go through the detox process. You've got to get all that excess toxin out of your body. So that's the lots and lots of water that's moving your body in gentle, repetitive ways so that your lymphatic system has a pump. It doesn't have a pump, otherwise, it's gonna just sit there. So you need to get your lymphatic system up off the couch and out and moving. The sunshine will fill you with endorphins and help you start making vitamin D again and help you lift your mood naturally. And I want you to talk with your pet. I used to take a big old jug of water and some dark sunglasses, and I would walk a three-mile loop when Pearl passed. And I would just walk that loop and I would cry when I needed to cry. I would drink my water and I would talk to Pearl and I would talk to him like I had taken truth serum. If that day sucked, if I couldn't see how I was going to make it through to evening without him, I would tell him. And then inevitably, after several moments of that, my mind would go off and I'd start remembering memories of our life together. And then my emotions would take care of themselves as I was walking. And again, this is why I recommend walking and not skateboarding or biking or rollerblading, because walking is repetitive and you're grounded. And in fact, if you could wear some grounding shoes while you do this and go walk on natural surfaces, gravel or soil, even better. You can lie on the grass and look up at the sky afterwards and offer a prayer or set an intention to call to mind your favorite memory of your time together and hold on to the feeling of that memory for as long as you can. This is another way to start shutting off that sympathetic nervous system response is to call into your awareness another stored memory of your life with your pet that had a very positive, uplifting emotion associated with it. Gratitude, love, joy, and hold on to that emotion for as long as you can. And that too will send the message to your sympathetic nervous system. Hey, if she's feeling joyful, happy, grateful, well, the threat must have passed. I can shut myself off now. And then what I want you to do after that is I want you to go and find something funny. Find something funny to watch, go watch some funny TikTok videos or a funny movie that you love, or read a funny book, or watch a comedy special, or call a friend who always makes you laugh. And give your nervous system some balance. When you start laughing, your nervous system cannot help but take note that the threat has passed. And for those of you who are listening who might feel like, well, I feel like I'm being disloyal to my pet or feel like I'm being disloyal to myself and how I feel if I let myself laugh. Then just understand that your pet wants nothing more in their life than to see you heal and thrive. Go back to what the pets told me when I asked them, why do we call you pet? What does the word pet mean? And they said, Well, that's easy. We're your partner's empathic friends and teachers. And sure, we will learn how to grieve under their tutelage. Everything I'm sharing with you today, I learned from them, from talking with your pets day in and day out, from talking with my own pets, from having to walk myself through my own grief process, worried if I was going to make it. And when we're talking about beings who are at such a high vibration level of a bodhisattva, of the original wise teacher, of the source of unconditional love itself, they do not desire suffering. They are not coming into our lives to introduce more suffering, but rather to teach us to find balance even in the midst of suffering, to find our balance, our inner equilibrium, to balance sadness and joy. All of the extremes and the opposites in this world. Those of you who are already working with me one-on-one and are in the process of going through animal communication adventure to master, you know how important the pairs of opposites are in learning this interspecies language and becoming fluent for yourself. This is the original life skill. It's how once upon a time we kept ourselves alive and took opportunities as they came up to thrive. It is woven into the core, the essence, the foundation of who we are as embodied, energetic, soulful beings. And our pets want us to heal and thrive. And they want us to understand how strong we are, and that there's never a finite amount of love. It's the most abundant and the least utilized resource in this universe. And so anything they can do, including sharing funny memories of themselves to get us through this difficult and terrifying part of our journey, our ongoing, our continuing journey with them, they will do. So if the only way you can allow yourself to laugh or grieve and still feel like you are respecting the depth of the feelings, your feelings right now, is to just watch funny videos of your pet. I say just in air quotes, to watch funny videos of your pets, to look at funny pictures of them in their costumes or interacting with each other. And that is what you can do to make yourself smile and laugh and find some balance in your neurochemical composition, then by all means. So none of this is to take away from the respect that deep grief needs, requires, and deserves, but it's also to reintroduce balance to help shut off this rogue sympathetic nervous system response and help you chart a course forward. And this is often the point in time where the question about pet reincarnation starts to enter the picture because you're just starting to get a little breathing room for yourself. You've gone through the worst of it, and your brain is starting to get curious again. And that might be the time when your pet and spirit manipulates the algorithm a little bit, and suddenly you find yourself at 2 a.m. reading a post by a communicator who specializes in pet reincarnation, and you're like, what the heck? I didn't even know this was a thing. And I hear that all the time. So just know if you can give your pet even the slightest window of opportunity to share with you the next steps in your journey and your continued soul journey together, they will do it. And the last thing that I want to share with you in today's episode is a reminder that you are not alone. You do not have to go through this process alone. Whether it's with myself or one of my colleagues in the field, there are some wonderful support groups out there today. I actually have a blog post at animallovelanguages.com that I'll link up for you below that has some wonderful resources, including online support communities that you can join for free and get support, but recognize that while it can feel like you are alone, and that is another function of our sympathetic nervous system. You're all alone here. You got to take care of yourself. If you survive, it's up to you. We are wired to crave connection and community. We are a social species. I am one of the most introverted members of that species, but I too even am social and we need support. So I've talked about several resources today where you can find support. And when you're ready, I could not strongly encourage you enough to schedule a session because it is one of the most profoundly healing parts of my grief journey, my personal grief journey. Remember, I was on the other side of that conversation for years before the animals told me that I was supposed to be doing this work professionally. And when that happened, no one was more surprised than I was. And that is a topic I deal with on a completely different episode of Let's Talk to Animals on how I became a professional animal communicator. So you can seek that out. That was at the beginning of season five last year. But for many, many, many years, I hired animal communicators for just such times as these, as well as for many other reasons. So just know that I would be remiss as your podcast hostess and featured presenter today if I did not share the secret weapon in my grief support toolkit, which is animal communication. And what I want you to know there is if you want to schedule with me, you can find a link in the show notes below to join my weekly love letters community. It's a free weekly newsletter that I send out and it includes all kinds of fun things, including new podcast episodes, new free high-value interviews that I do, articles I write, upcoming opportunities for free animal communication sessions with my senior students, and a$25 coupon for your first pet session with me. So wanting to do whatever I can do to make this as simple a decision process for you. Just know that your pet is waiting to talk with you, to answer your questions, to reassure you, and most importantly, to reconnect with you, heart to heart and soul to soul. So may today's episode be a supportive one for you, an encouraging one to you, and most importantly, a reconnecting one for you between yourself and your beloved pet in whatever stage of the grief journey from anticipatory to post-transition that you may find yourself in today. And remember, you are not alone. You have support, and it is here for you when you are ready for it. So thank you so much for giving me a little bit of your precious time, energy, and attention today. Know that I'm sending you and your interspecies family all my love. And I can't wait to welcome you back to a fresh new episode of Let's Talk to Animals very soon. Okay, all my love and bye for now. 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'd 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 animallovelanguages.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.