In late May 2003 I was running errands and suddenly detoured to stop at a local pet store and get some dog cookies. They had long fostered cats and kittens from a local cat rescue service, but I was astonished to hear birds chirping, and asked if they were now adopting out birds.

“That’s kittens,” the clerk said, laughing.

That’s when it hit me, that “soul punch” that told me someone in my soul family had arrived. Again. Astonished, I blurted out, “Tweety?” as I turned and saw a tiny black-and-white kitten squeezed into the corner of the cat cage, glaring at me.

Tweety was my bantam chicken soul mate from my childhood. Now back in a kitten body. No doubt about it.

I had a brief chat with the kitten, acknowledging who she was, and wished her a great life, saying my house was full.

The dogs had another idea. As I walked through the door a few minutes later, Murphy and Alki confronted me, demanding to know where their cat sister was.

“You don’t have a cat sister,” I told them. Firmly.

“Yes we do, we saw her,” they insisted.

“You guys need to stay out of my head,” I scolded. Resigned to the inevitable.

And that is how, six hours later, Grace the Cat became part of the family. Things were perfect in my household until March 8, 2012, when Murphy died of cancer. Next in line was Alki dying of heart failure on November 17, 2014. What I somehow never expected was to lose Grace the Cat, but a massive stroke caused by a suspected brain tumor took her on September 21, 2106.

My perfect pack of three is gone. And I am stunned by grief.

We all know grief never ends. Grief hurts—it’s gut-wrenching, soul-testing pain. Grief matters, reminding us that if we didn’t grieve, we would never have lived the wonderful life we did with our animals. Grief is what death looks like in a multi-species family. It reminds us that we love, and love matters. Always and forever.

Still …

It’s hard to say goodbye to a beloved animal. Loving our animals as family members makes the uncertainty and heartache of loss as terrible as it is when we lose humans, and sometimes worse, if family and friends don’t understand and support the human-animal bond. Sadly, there are plenty of those people out there; in fact, many people who come to me for animal communication sessions in the process of losing their beloved animal family members also need grief support from someone who acknowledges their loss as what it is—devastating, debilitating, all but unendurable. Often that, too, for a time.

That’s where I’ve been in these last few weeks. My only comfort, outside of having had a wonderful (and sometimes exasperating) life with the only cat I’ve ever had, is that I know something about how souls come together, and leave again, and, yes, sometimes come back.

Yes, this is a huge subject, so for now, let’s just look at reincarnation and soul purpose.

Reincarnation, Soul Purpose, and Making It Work

Contrary to what some religious doctrines say, reincarnation happens. When it crosses species it isn’t inappropriate or a form of punishment, as mindsets that accept reincarnation sometimes imply. It’s simply the form the soul has taken to do its job for that lifetime—and an extremely advanced, old soul like the soul that has inhabited all my dogs, including my year-old son, Ollie, or the soul that became Grace the Cat, can do an awful lot.

Most humans are so focused on ourselves we’ve forgotten that literally everything is alive, has a soul, is equal to us—and has a job to do. For example, these days it’s fashionable, if myopic, for us to regard our animal companions as teachers and healers, as mystical gurus in animal bodies who are here to save us from ourselves (whatever that means). It’s a huge burden to put on anyone, and one animals may try to assume to please us, possibly to their detriment. We forget that families do learn and grow together (or should), which is why they’re families, but we’re all responsible only for ourselves.

But to assume animals are here to serve us is to forget they may have other jobs we may not know about or understand, jobs so huge they’re mind-boggling. A well-known animal communicator once talked about animal jobs at an event, then turned to me and smiled, saying, “Robyn’s animals have cosmic jobs.” Indeed, they do.

More on that in a bit, but first to families, who have soul purposes together while supporting individual purposes.

I learned things from all my animals and continue to. From my English cocker Maggie I learned to treat animals as souls. From my Cavalier King Charles spaniel Murphy I learned to live in a way I never considered, with my soul purpose front and center. From my Cavalier boy, Alki, I learned true love, which is helping me get along with my new Cavalier boy, Oliver (Ollie to all), his amusing, adorable, and rascally new incarnation. From Grace the Cat I have learned to laugh—and to live with an alien life-form, which helped when the real ones showed up. From me my kids learned to fully explore their lives and soul purposes with determination, humor, zest, love—and patience for their less accomplished human.

Could I live, love, and laugh before? Of course. But I learned new things from them, as they did from me, which is what should happen when souls come together again. We learned to live in a multi-species family while we whittled away at the other odd, challenging things we set out to do when we found our way back to each other. And so it continues.

How do you help others achieve their soul purpose, especially when most humans forget them when they’re born? Sometimes we just have to quit trying to explain it and fling ourselves into our lives—and theirs. By finding a way to live love, we free it to work its magic. And the magic happens.

Like with Grace.

My Magical Cat

Grace the Cat adored being a house cat (quite a difference from Tweety the chicken, who lived outside and ended up as a weasel’s lunch). Like all my animals, Grace also explored multiple dimensions, working on her own and with me at dimensional portals, which allow different dimensions to interact without blowing things up (an inadequate but necessarily simple explanation). In other times and places she would have been called a “familiar,” but whatever the term, Grace was an energy amplifier. She essentially “upped” the frequency so that I could do part of my work, which is as an ambassador to the earth, working with land and weather systems.

Grace and I did a lot of this work in our early years together. We worked with hurricanes, other weather systems, volcanoes, earthquakes … beings that most people don’t realize are alive. In fact, I’ve learned in my work that everything is alive, everything has a soul, consciousness, responsibility, free choice, and an attitude. Most humans don’t realize this, but we all have an effect on the world around us, which is why I argue against interfering with the work the planet is doing to keep itself stable, from hurricanes to earthquakes.

I’m getting back into discussing this in more detail in upcoming articles. For now, it’s enough to note that living with my animal family in the last eighteen years has deepened my fascination with souls. It’s why my work is about supporting souls, from intuitive to spiritual consulting. It’s why I know about reincarnation, and why I’m so thrilled to offer people multiple ways to tap deep into their souls with past life regression—through hypnotherapy, through intuitive insight, and through shamanic practices.

It’s why Grace went out, well, dramatically.

In our early days together I saw many previous lifetimes with Grace. Sometimes she was human and the dogs and I were cats, sometimes it was just the two of us together, working with the planet. These last years with my two soul mates—with the one soul in two dog bodies at once, and now a third dog body, and the other in a cat body—was a bit of what you’d call “upping the ante,” and not a moment too soon. Because the past lives I remember, including those shared with these remarkably advanced souls, are helping me support today’s advanced and passionate humans, who are trying to understand and live their soul purpose in a time that has forgotten much of what is not only possible, but desperately needed.

People, the world needs you. Now. Not because it needs healing, but because it needs connection. You can find your role in that by looking at your past lives, and at what you chose to do in this one.

I learned my work included working with the planet and different dimensions years before I started my current public work. I kept quiet about it for a long time, sharing it with people who quietly showed up for training. I did it when I needed to, and very little of that is public.

Until Grace had her stroke and the goddess showed up.

In more recent years, Grace and I had just played together, enjoying a quiet life. As I tended her those last five days, turning her every two hours, cuddling and feeding and cleaning her, I was glad we’d had a lifetime where we’d done some of our planetary work and a lot of goofing off. It felt good. One night as I cuddled her in bed, I whistled the little tune I called her Pied Piper song, because every time I whistled it she’d come running, even at times when she clearly didn’t want to, but couldn’t shake off the urge. (It was weirdly cute and scary at the same time.) That night, unable to walk or really move much, I whistled the tune and Grace’s face softened, she peered close at me, and reached out her left front leg to me, the only leg she could really control. It’s a picture I hope stays with me for a long time.

And then the goddess showed up.

Grace’s Choice—the Earthquake and the Hurricane

This goddess, Con Ni (yes I know her real name, but she likes this one), arrived on Tuesday, September 20, to tell me that Grace and I had one last job to do for the planet before her death, work Grace had already agreed to before Con Ni came to me. A good thing, that, because I’m not as altruistic as you’d think.

I’ll say it again, humans can and do affect planetary forces.

It happens in two ways. The first way is something we all do: if we say we “hate” rain or “hate” hurricanes or whatever, we actually send energy at what we hate and impede it in its work (it’s an energy block). That’s why I tell people to bless a hurricane on its way, or the rainstorm, or even the sunshine. It has work to do that I can explain later, but simply helps the planet maintain itself. We mess things up by interfering.

The other way humans affect planetary forces is if they have the “magic” or “intuitive ability” or whatever you call it to actually change them. Yes, change the course of a hurricane or the force of an earthquake. There aren’t many of these people out there—my guidance forces tell me about 50 planet-wide—and, yes, I’m one of them. Earth events that are affected like this are manipulated by humans. That is bad.

I refuse to do that, for reasons I will explain later, and have in old blog posts. Essentially the planet is conscious and has these things planned or, like us, has accidents, but for the most part it’s a far more complicated system than most people realize. If we change the course of a hurricane it changes the one coming along behind it, and that could be and has been catastrophic, even in our recent past. So mostly I go around and “whack” people who mess with earth events. Yes, I can be ornery, especially in the planet’s defense. (And, yes, people yell at me when I whack them and I don’t care.)

I especially interfere with those who do it on a massive scale, including at another government’s direction (we Americans are really clueless).

I will put myself on the line for that kind of work, and have, but I would never willingly put one of my kids on the line for it. Because it isn’t my choice, and I’m selfish and want them safe.

Which is why the goddess Con Ni went first to Grace. When she came to me she said the last work Grace had to do in her body was her choice, but it would drain her. It was to help me work with a manipulated earthquake directed at the Seattle area in the following two weeks, and would register somewhere between 8.0 and 9.0. This would have crippled the Pacific Northwest economy, not to mention cause widespread suffering and destruction.

Nevertheless I would never have volunteered Grace for this work; not for anything would I have asked her or allowed her to die to prevent the quake. I would have let the earthquake happen if I couldn’t find another way to work with it without endangering her. But Grace refused that option, so we tackled it together. (Yes, I’m selfish, but my work with souls makes me think that “volunteering” others to suffer or die for something, however massive an event, actually makes things worse.)

On our last night together Grace and I worked with the earthquake and dismantled it and the people behind it. For me that involved going into the quake and pulling out “red threads” that were shifting the earth while Grace amplified the energy frequency to support me. I felt pretty confident that it would not come at that magnitude, and it did not. However, since it was already set in motion, disturbed earth forces did result in smaller earthquakes, including one in Japan the next day.

We stopped the earthquake, and the next morning, September 21, Grace looked up at me and said she was done. We spent the day together, and said goodbye that evening.

Grace has been with my dad at his Way Station for Dead Things on the Other Side ever since. She was so drained from her illness and the stroke (and brain tumor) and our work that she slept in the sun for a long time, and is still hanging out on the porch at my dad’s cabin, sunning herself and watching birds.

And Ollie and I are alone together, carving out a new life in our family of two.

But that wasn’t the end of Grace’s story. Because Hurricane Matthew happened.

Hurricane Matthew and Grace the Cat

Hurricane Matthew marching through the Caribbean and up the east coast was not a natural hurricane any more than the earthquake Grace and I altered. It had the same red energy threads and the same nasty people forcing it to their will. When I went to work with it, as Grace joined me from the afterlife, I saw that the manipulation would propel it well beyond anything we’ve seen as a Category 5, and it would go far inland.

Now hurricanes are cleansing forces, meant to clear the water and land in their path. They are not evil and not killers, although things do die and become damaged in their path. Hurricanes are the planet’s weather defense system; it is because I talk with hurricanes that I know we are not facing global warming but an ice age.

Hurricane Matthew had a job to do and was being manipulated. After talking with it, Grace amplified energy and I went in and removed the red threads. About twenty minutes later the eyewall started to disintegrate. While I don’t know everything, I assume that it was reverting to what it was created to be, and not what it was forced to be. Still powerful, but not America-eating.

In death, as in life, Grace the Cat served the planet. I am proud of her. It doesn’t make losing her any easier. It simply means that like all souls, her soul chose a body to do specific things. She chose to come here and play, and to team with me to work with the planet.

Soul Purpose

Not all of us have complicated jobs like Grace the Cat, my dogs, or even me. We all have one job—to grow our souls, and to have fun doing it (if we can, I have to admit, my life hasn’t been a lot of fun lately).

The choices animals make when they choose a new soul experience, whether in spirit or in a new body, can offer growth opportunities beyond anything we can conceive. My kids in animal bodies healed past life issues while playing in their animal bodies and accepting jobs that are mind-boggling. Murphy was ambassador to the dragon kingdom—did you even know dragons were real? Because of her, dragons are back in the world again, real physical beings who guard the portals between earth dimensions. Stunning, right? And Alki, the same soul as Murphy, worked with multi-dimensional beings. The same soul, two bodies in the same household at the same time. That soul back again as my year-old dog, Ollie, with the multi-dimensionals waiting in the wings for him to grow up. (Right now he barks at them, which makes me laugh.)

And Grace the Cat, the energy amplifier who died a hero.

So, what is your soul purpose? Where does it take you, and why?

Not all of us are going to do the strange work that I do with the planet. But all of us have jobs to do that are equally important, that only we can do. Sometimes the jobs find us, sometimes we fall over them, sometimes we miss them. But we all have them.

What is yours?

© 2016 Robyn M Fritz

This week I had one of those “double-edged sword” days in my work. When I ask myself why I do what I do, and know I wouldn’t do anything else.

On an almost daily basis I place myself squarely in the face of grief and loss. No, I’m not a minister or health care provider: I’m an intuitive and spiritual consultant, and right now I’m talking about animal communication.

Early in the morning I had a phone call. The woman had barely started to talk, asking those polite things we do, “I emailed, but I decided to call, too,” when I heard it in her voice: death was knocking at her door.

 Turns out, she and her husband lived with an aged Alaskan malamute, and, while the dog had been up and down all year, it seemed like down was permanent. She asked me to talk with her dog and find out: are you ready to go, is it time, do you want help, what can I do for you?

Sometimes these calls fall into the “emergency” category, as this one did. So the appointment isn’t scheduled, it’s on top of me, with no time to prepare and a serious issue to confront. What I learned and conveyed would make a difference to these two soul mates—a woman and a dog who loved each other.

Yes, there are many intuitives who won’t take these calls, whether it’s an ill or dying animal or a lost one. The pressure is intense and can be debilitating without a lot of self-awareness, self-care, and boundaries. It’s taken me a lot of time to learn this, as both a woman in a patriarchal culture and an intuitive in a skeptical one, so I took a deep breath and did what I had to do: I asked some questions to clarify the situation, and said I’d talk with the dog and call the woman back in an hour. And then I had a quick breakfast, to get myself ready for the day, and spent some time quietly chatting with the dog, who I’ll call Clem, while energetically scanning her body to get as much information as possible.

Clem fell into the “I could go or I could stay” category. She was clearly dying: she wasn’t in any pain, but old age was slowly claiming her as her body was shutting down. She felt she could die on her own, but would like some help, and “now today” worked for her. Or she could simply “walk the mystery,” as my beloved dog, Murphy, did, as she explored the dying process with me by her side, if her person didn’t want the pressure of choosing euthanasia.

As someone who loves my animal family, I can honestly say that “now today” is something you never want to hear. I can also say that I’ve honored my family’s wishes, and, with clients, I carefully explain the options. Those who are truly living the human-animal bond seriously consider their animal’s wishes. Because love matters.

Turns out, the woman wasn’t surprised by this. She had watched her dog slowly wind down for some months, and intuitively felt the time was ready. Her dog simply confirmed it, while also giving the woman the final choice: she could help her dog out that day, or she could stick with her until she died on her own or until she started to suffer.

The woman was both saddened and relieved to hear this. Knowing her dog wasn’t suffering gave her some time. I suggested that she not make an immediate decision, but simply spend the day with her dog, even make a ritual of the dying process. Our culture today tends to ignore death, but by recognizing and honoring it, we can bring beauty, comfort, and closure to a relationship, which helps in the moment and later, when only ashes remain.

I checked in with her later that day. By then it was clear to her that her dog was more than ready, there was no more doubt that it was time, and they’d had a beautiful last day together. Because I work with my dad, who’s in the afterlife and cares for the newly transitioned (another story, another time), I could monitor the process and know when Clem died and moved on.

The next day I was deeply touched to receive an email from my client saying that she’d “felt my love” all day. Yes, love matters.

Living the Human-Animal Bond

Sometimes what animals say to us is surprising. I remember when a very ill cat told me he wanted to die: he really didn’t, as I could tell from his nuanced conversation (yes, you can pick up nuances telepathically), he really wanted to know what was wrong with him, what his person was doing about it, and what it would mean. Would he recover and be fine, or drag on and be miserable? Sadly, his person ignored the answers I offered, and, while the cat recovered, his journey to wellness would have been easier on both of them if his person had simply backed me up by explaining things. I learned from that to be careful who I worked with—because the human-animal bond as I live it, at home and at work, means that we listen to our animals, respond to them as intelligent equals, and bumble our way through life, together.

While Clem’s case ended in death, it also perfectly illustrated our lives with animals.

The human-animal bond is important to me: creating families with animals has been a major feature of my life for the last eighteen years. While I had “pets” throughout childhood, and in particular a beloved English Cocker spaniel for ten years, it wasn’t until 1998 that I consciously created a family with dogs, and, eventually, a cat (better known as our resident alien). As my relationship with my two Cavalier King Charles spaniels and the cat deepened, I “learned up” with my animal family. By that I mean I recognized that our life together was one of equals, regardless of species, that it didn’t matter that they were animals and I’m human, because the soul bond between us is there.

These days, many of us are proud to claim our animals as family members, whether we live alone with them, as I do, or other humans are involved. Living our lives with animals as family (what I call “multi-species families”) enriches us beyond anything most of us ever imagined, and, of course, adds strange complications and annoyances. I drive the car and buy the food, and my animals, well, they learn to live in a world geared towards humans, which isn’t easy for them, even for dogs like mine, which are bred to do exactly that. My life isn’t college costs or “sex and drugs” talk: it’s poop bags and leash training and finding a way to communicate when English isn’t their first language.

In this brave world of the human-animal bond, we and our animal families have learned up from ancient necessity that brought wolves to our nomadic camps to heart and soul growth in our modern comfy neighborhoods. It makes for strange and fascinating lives—and the heartache of loss as terrible as it is when we lose humans, even worse if family and friends don’t understand and support us.

But on that day, when a woman and a dog said goodbye to each other, that was a day to celebrate. Because someone loved her dog and lost her. Because she and her dog did everything right. Because I could provide some small comfort in the process.

We always hate to see them go—grief hurts. We can also always celebrate the bond—because grief means we loved and were loved.

And love matters.

Yes, it hurts sometimes, but that’s why I do what I do. Because once in a while I can be there at a crucial moment in the life of a multi-species family. Because I can help. Because I can bear witness to what really matters in our busy, mixed-up, noisy world.

Love.

© 2016 Robyn M Fritz

Animals and the Afterlife

Part 1 of 10: Honoring Murphy on her birthday

On October 9, 1998, I met my soul mate. Again. At the time I knew nothing about reincarnation, past lives, or even intuition. All I knew was that I’d driven three hours to meet the eleven-week-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel puppy I’d committed to buying the week before by phone. The puppy was bouncing up and down trying to see past her mother and grandmother. As our eyes met, I was stunned to hear her voice in my head clearly say, “Oh, it’s you” and to hear something inside me say it right back.

It took me three years to understand that this dog, who called herself Murphy Brown, was the reincarnation of a human woman who was my childhood friend (yes, human) and later my beloved English cocker spaniel Maggie. On December 25, 2001, that same soul again reincarnated as my Cavalier boy, Alki—yes, the same soul in two bodies in the same household at the same time. And on July 28, 2015, that same soul reincarnated again as another Cavalier boy—and joined me eleven weeks later as my puppy, Oliver Alki.

I know, you’re thinking, what? So, let’s back up.

Before Murphy came, I’d spent many years handicapped and ill, years in which I lost everything—my self-confidence, career, financial security—everything but my family and my quirky sense of humor. Whenever I thought about giving up, I recommitted to creating a life of meaning and purpose, as long as it was fun. In 1998 I decided that fun meant buying a $175,000 dog (okay, a condo so I could buy a dog, but still). All I wanted was a dog. Just. A. Dog. Some might say the universe had other ideas. The dog certainly did.

People debate reincarnation, multiple simultaneous lives, whether humans can be reborn as animals (or vice versa)—even whether animals can reincarnate. Others like me live with the truth: souls can do whatever they want, regardless of human dogma. Souls choose the form they need to do the job they chose before they incarnated, and if everything works out, they succeed. As we all know, though, once bodies, free will, and real life interact, it’s a free-for-all, anything-can-happen world.

Souls also move together in soul groups. These groups of souls experience multiple lifetimes and between-life times, together, however it works out, by choice or by accident. As part of a soul group, my family has been reincarnating together for centuries, freely bouncing between human, animal, and, yes, alien lives. I’ve been human many times, and also dogs, cats, even whales (I still have the hips to prove those), and my current animal family has usually been right there with me. One time, in ancient Egypt, my cat was a woman, and the dogs and I were her cats.

Is this just my weird family, or everyone’s? That depends on soul purpose—and luck.

Reincarnating together happens routinely, even when we don’t know it. From what I’ve seen in my intuitive practice, more often than not our animal companions are reincarnating with us in different animal bodies throughout our lives. Luckily for us it doesn’t seem to hinder (or annoy) them that we are seldom smart (or aware) enough to notice. I’ll illustrate with my own family, which will give you plenty of ideas about yours.

My Dogs’ Lives

The Coming of Murphy

Despite my fondness for dogs, I never thought of them as more than pets until I bought a dog who wouldn’t settle for that. It just took me a while to figure it out. Murphy quickly developed health problems that would derail my finances, my ego, and ultimately my view of life itself. As we worked through her chronic and debilitating illnesses, I noticed they looked alarmingly like mine. Puzzled and furious, I decided that neither of us would have a life of pain and disability, and went looking for answers. A few other things happened along the way.

Murphy wasted no time dismantling everything I thought I knew about the world (which turned out to be a good thing). She was six months old when I noticed that her nuanced responses to people, animals, and the world around her were far beyond what we consider to be animal intelligence. The rest of it is the earthquake’s fault. On February 28, 2001, Murphy was curling up for a nap when she leaped up barking and snarling and dragged us out of our condo—about two minutes before Seattle was rocked by a 6.8 earthquake.

That was a defining moment: I knew my entire world would change unless I ignored what had just happened—and all the other things I’d watched that dog do since we’d become a family. But what was the fun in that? Trained as an investigative reporter, and a cynical skeptic by nature, I knew what I’d just seen: there was clearly more going on in Murphy’s head than I’d ever imagined, and I couldn’t wait to learn more.

Boy, did I! To get us both healthy I studied human and veterinary medicine, both allopathic and alternative care, including nutrition, herbs, homeopathy, chiropractic, and supplements. I explored ethology, behavior, ecology, anthropology, physics, philosophy, ancient and alternative spirituality, animal communication, TTouch, acutonics, and energy healing. I experimented and knocked on doors I didn’t know existed before Murphy came and opened them for both of us. Desperate, curious, determined, I was open to possibilities, even ones that seemed dorky (and are).

I was a rational, anal-retentive, coolly intellectual atheist who’d abandoned religion in my thirties because it just didn’t make sense. I preferred key lime pie to meditation, liked yoga in principle, and avoided anything that smacked of New Age peculiarities. Sensibilities, religion, politics—I figured anything “given” was both open to challenge and needed it, and the eternal rebel in me was happy to oblige.

Although I had never felt comfortable in the world as other people described it, I didn’t understand why until Murphy rattled enough of the cages we lock ourselves into. The human-centric worldview exploded as I discovered a world I never knew existed, from a living, aware universe to reincarnation, spirit guides, and practical mysticism.

Of course there was something else involved, that thing that ties us all together, no matter our experiences: the willingness to love. The woman who in 1998 cheerfully greeted the exuberant puppy who became Murphy also harbored a closed, skeptical heart, wounded by childhood betrayal, grief, and loss, and shriveled by illness and despair. I was willing to love, or I never would have bought Murphy: I just no longer knew how.

We figured it out together. Although it took five years for us to heal, years of heartache and humor, we were perfectly content together, a family: that one of us was human and the other a dog never mattered. I couldn’t imagine one thing that would make our lives better, which means I honestly did not see Alki coming.

© 2016 Robyn M Fritz