Last year, after my dog Mocha died, my grieving period was relatively short.  I didn’t *want* to walk around aching inside.  I was at peace with Mocha’s passing, and I honestly wanted healing.  I wanted release.

Linda Keen, a wonderful friend and amazing healer, send me some long-distance healing energy, and I woke the next day feeling restored.  I wrote about it at the time – it was amazing.  I had no idea grief could be “cured”, for lack of a better word.

I want to thank you folks for sticking with me as this blog took a bit of a sad turn after my cat Leo passed away a few weeks ago.  I knew it would be hard when he died, and it was.  I had him since I was 19.  He’s been with me through major relationships, several career paths, and moved with me across the country.  Before any of the other animals in the house, I had him.  I was a different person when I walked into the humane society, in North Bay, Ontario, and opened his cage.

He was the first animal I spoke with telepathically, long distance.

He was my first cat, ever.

Yeah, saying goodbye to Leo was very tough.  I’ve learned a lot through this period of grieving.

And I feel, in the past year, Mocha and Leo have given me great gifts, in their quiet deaths at home, in my arms.  I have learned more than I feel like reiterating here… and I want to move on to happier subjects, anyway.

In my last post, I mentioned how I’d admitted to myself I was experiencing a mild depression.  I was reluctant to admit this because in the past, for me, depression wass something that tended to linger at least until summer.  In the past, when depression stepped forward it would take months or at worst – years – to throw off.  And I’d been depression-free for so long!  Ugh, not this again!

But I am not who I was, back then.

On Friday, two of my beautiful friends came over for meditation.  Afterwards, Hernan, a healer of – here’s how I want to say it – a Healer of Unlimited Potential – I tell ya, that’s not me saying that, it’s someone else.  Anyway, Healer Hernan asked if I’d like some Reiki healing later in the evening, and I gratefully, gratefully accepted.

I loved Leo, and I still love Leo.  I grieved for him, and I did not accept healing for this grief because I wanted to honour him in grief…  Yet animals do not want us to grieve too long.  They love us too; they want us to be well.

And depression?  No, that is not a price I am wanting to pay.  So yes, Hernan, please do send me some healing goodness.

Sweetie and were snuggling and watching a movie, when I konked out right there, and woke up again at about 11pm, when I realized what had happened – the healing was done.  I went to bed to let it “set”.

Saturday, I actually forgot all about it.  I went about my day with new energy.  I wasn’t until the evening that I noticed the absence of the sucking chest-wound of grief, pain and depression.  I can write about Leo without crying now.  I can talk about him, and talk to him.

Never in my life have I experienced such a rapid and complete healing.  Reiki is magical and beautiful.  This is twice I have been healed from grief.  Oh, it’s a relief, and now I can celebrate our time together with joy, rather than in loss.

I think it helped, in both cases, that the healers and I have heart connections.  The love there is real.

You know, I think this is the force at work in “faith healings” and with healing practitioners like John of God.  http://johnofgod.com/   No doubt, the healee has as much to do with the healing as the healer – an important part of it is to *accept* the healing.  It’s interesting because in the general ideas around any sort of manifestation, the same basic process applies:  see it, ask for it, accept it, believe it.

Before I received this healing from Hernan, I had been sitting in the bath, listening to a video posted by super-famous and amazingly-skilled animal communicator, Laura Stinchfield:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX3U5r8MRYY

This video is about animals in the afterlife, and she posted it right when I needed to hear it (Feb 5^th).  There I was, sittin’ in the bath, iphone balanced on the toilet showing Laura’s video, and I was crying away all my grief for my pets on the other side.  Aside from helping me to express (by that I mean literally squeeze / wring out, to purge) a lot of my sadness, it was just really cool that Laura had come to so many of the same ideas about the death process for animals and how they experience the afterlife.

As I was watching this video, I felt a *thump* on my chest.  I felt his purr – it was my Leo, visiting me from heaven.  I knew it was him – the very first time I talked to him long distance (the pet sitter said he was sick, so I tuned into him to check on him) he thumped on my chest in exactly the same way.

I just “held” my kitty from heaven and cried some more.  (It gets better people, seriously.  It’s not all about me crying!)  Then Leo reminded me of something I had said to him when he was dying.

It was when Leo was laying inside out bedroom closet, and I was sitting beside him, asking the angels and my great aunt Ruth to help him leave his body, and asking Leo to just let go, and walk away from his body.  I felt like he was holding on, and I said,

“Leo, you can come back to me in a new cat body!  Your organs are failing, this body is done.  You can come back in a new kitten body and be young again.  It’s okay to leave this body.”

In grief, some people will just ferociously latch on to the hope that their pet will reincarnate, come back, and so alleviate their mourning.  When the people are so desperate for their animal to come back to them, it’s actually making it really hard for the animal to come back – by being so desperate for a reincarnation, they’re not really letting their animal go.

I think this is why I forgot I told Leo he could come back to me, because I didn’t want to get attached to the idea.  I wanted to let him go.  So I was really surprised when he thumped down on my chest while I was all naked and crying in the bathtub, and he said,

Maybe I can come back.

Do you want to come back?

I could come back, and that way you wouldn’t forget me.

I would always remember you and love you forever!

Maybe I could come back as an orange tabby.

I would love it if you came back.  If you want to come back, I would love that.

I think I want to come back.

I would love it!  If you want to come back, yes please!  Please come back!

And so the conversation went, for maybe ten minutes.

Here is the backstory – I’m not sure if I’ve shared this before on the blog:  last Spring, our white cat Sunshine announced that she was bringing in a white kitten, a male, to begin his training as our next white cat.  She wanted him to come soon, so she could begin to teach him what he needed to know, and he would be the reincarnation of Sweetie’s childhood white cat, Snowball.

Snowball, is Sweetie’s Leo.  She had a special bond with Snowball from the time she was a small girl, until she left home and went to university.  Snowball died shortly after Sweetie left home, and for that Sweetie carried some guilt for years, believing that if she had brought Snowball with her, he wouldn’t have died… and yet, bringing him with her wasn’t a practical option.

Snowball revealed, in an earlier reading I did with Sweetie, that he had died so that he could be with her as a spirit cat for ten years.  For this time period, Sweetie had no cats at all… that she knew of.  In fact, Snowball continued to be with her all through her twenties.

Now, he was ready to come back to her in a cat body, and Sunshine was ready to bring in a little apprentice.

Well I wasn’t on board with a kitten last year.  Even though Mocha had just passed, I said “We can’t have three cats!  Snowball will have to wait until Leo is ready to go.”

I didn’t anticipate that Leo would die at the age of 15 or 16.  For some reason, I believed he’d live into his 20s.  Timing in an art many of our animals have mastered.

So I was already open to the idea of getting one kitten – but Sweetie said, “I think we’re getting two kittens.”

My knee-jerk reaction was, “NO!  We CAN’T have three cats!”  But within a half-hour I was on board.  Was I really going to inflict a single kitten on my eight-year-old Sunshine?  No.  Kittens are much easier when there are two – they can keep each other company, keep each other entertained, and littermates often bond very closely, which is a dynamic I would love to have in our house.

Kittens it is!

I figured we’d find Snowball, Sweetie would know him, and then I’d just pick a littermate that seemed right.

It did not occur to me that Leo reincarnating would be a possibility at this point.  As far as I know, such rapid turnarounds are rare.  Most people and animals need and want years or decades between incarnations, so they can learn, heal, rest and generally catch their spiritual breath before diving back in.

Leo is coming back.  Probably as an orange tabby.

Reincarnation in animal companions is amazing and can be complex.  There are a lot of “coincidences” that need to line up for an animal to be reborn close to us, get found by us, and get to go home with us.  In this case we have a litter of kittens that needs to come in fairly close to us, and we need to hear about this litter before they get sent to the SPCA.  (The SPCA out here does spay/neuters on EIGHT WEEK OLD KITTENS and I do not want to put their tiny bodies through a procedure like that.  I will get them spayed/neutered when they are six months old, but no sooner. )

We know that Snowball is going to be a white male cat – that’s been clear since day 1.  But Leo is pretty open to the sort of cat suit he will be wearing in his next life, which makes it a bit easier for this whole thing to come together… but he really likes the idea of being an orange tabby.

We talked about gender, too.  Gender of the kitten body doesn’t matter to me at all, but I suggested to Leo that he try and get a male body again because he will need to be neutered, and I explained what that was.  I explained (mentally showed him) how a spay for a female is a lot more invasive than a neuter for males.  He took all this under advisement.

It will be very interesting if/when we and our cats manifest a litter of kittens with a white male and an orange tabby male.  It’d be a miracle, actually.

But I believe in miracles.

Every day since I talked to Leo about reincarnating, I have checked my facebook feed and found random pictures of orange tabbies and white kittens.  Inexplicably, two or three pictures, every day.  The very first photo I saw was this:

An orange tabby kitten, playing with butterflies – the symbol for transformation, reincarnation and continuing life.

Leo is coming back, my friends.  And meanwhile, I have something very special planned.  Next Entry!