Katie Heldman

Things are getting kinda heavy out there; let’s look at something light.  This is a re-posting of of a very fun reading.

Drive carefully out there, and send good thoughts toward Colorado.  I’m smelling wildfire as I sit at my kitchen table.

And now, back to our Schnauzer:

Speaking of the gifts our pets bring us, there’s a popular genre out there but it’s very specific.   It’s called “Animals as Healers” and the mascot is a dog with a halo, gazing into the setting sun.  Precious for sure, but it so misrepresents the hard work our pets do every day, to help us grow.

I did some free readings at a party last year.  A woman came in with a picture of a giant schnauzer, Sid.  You could see she thought he was the greatest but he exasperated her and she wondered what he was up to.

Sid was maybe 3 or 4.  She didn’t give me any other information but I could see a kind of open, curious dog whose mind was unencumbered by reason.  In other words he was inspired daily, to pull off some stuff that didn’t make sense.  I saw there were messes to clean up and things to put back in their place and I saw the joy Sid derived from his accomplishments.  I looked at him.  There was crap in his beard and at his feet I saw a pile of .  .  .  huh.  What was that?

“Is he kind of crazy?” I asked her.  “Not naughty, but more .  .  .  creative?”  I drew the last word out and braced to be wrong.  She started to laugh.

“He’s totally creative,” she told me.  “He makes these big messes but it’s not exactly a mess for the sake of a mess.  He’s doing something but I can’t figure out what.”

I looked at him some more.  He was smiling.   He showed me you could do all sorts of cool things if you just gave yourself permission and went for it.  I told her this.

Then it began to get clearer.  He looked over his shoulder at her, like, c’mon along! “Okay,” I said, “it also looks like he’s teaching you to drop your inhibitions and try some stuff.  It looks messy, but it’s really experimental.”

I paused for a moment and watched Sid tear something up.  ”What’s he’s doing,” I said, “some of it’s kinda .  .  .  ill-advised.”  We both cracked up.  “But he’s like a child with a great imagination!  Eventually he’ll calm down and give you a break,” I said.  “But I really think he’s in your life to show you how to come out of your shell and be more creative!”

She suddenly got still, in that way that says you just figured something out.  Then she got weepy.

I love those moments when you hit it out of the park.  Everybody gets it, and a client’s relationship with her dog transforms.

The planets are asking us to be the best and highest versions of our selves that we can be.  I’m noticing our pets are stepping up their work to help us change.  How are they doing this?

They’re showing us where our boundaries ought to be, by behaving in ways that are unacceptable.  Let us enjoy some random peeing, pooping, spraying and chewing while we discuss Sophie, a completely charming and lovable little dog who uses the entire house as a toilet while the client trots around behind her, cleaning up.

Sophie’s person cooks, cleans, shops, is the primary bread winner and she babysits her live-in son’s child while he’s out looking for women.  She begged me to fix the dog but I told her, this is about your whole life–everyone treats you like crap, even the dog!    

Pets are mirroring our emotional state by developing illnesses that point to a particular emotion.  I had a client lose two pets in a row to liver cancer.  I asked her if someone in the family had a problem with anger (yes).  Anger is linked to the liver in Chinese medicine.   Or the client who had a broken heart–her cat died of a heart attack.  Then there was the client who couldn’t relax and let his horse be a horse.  He was obsessed with the idea that something was Wrong and so the horse complied.  I had to tell him the horse was completely fine and in fact, remarkably well-adjusted.

Does this mean we make our pets sick?  No.  It’s way more complicated than that.  Put away the worry beads.  I’ll write about this another time.

Some are mentoring us by being notably higher, more courageous, graceful and balanced than we are.

One funny dog was helping her too-serious person to lighten up.

These are some common ways pets are showing us where we need to change.  But how do the planets fit into this?

This space is too limited to provide a full discussion of what the planets are up to but the themes can be summed up neatly.  I will say up front, I am not an astrologer but a longtime follower of this tradition and I will give credit where credit is due.

Let’s start this party with Pluto!

Once considered a full-grown planet, Pluto’s demotion to dwarf status doesn’t seem to have slowed it down.   From Neptune Trine Moon:

Pluto has been in Capricorn for almost four years now. If you follow astrology, you hear about it all the time.         Structures being transformed, Governments, Business and Financial Markets, the World. That is a big part of the picture, but what about you the individual, your world?  Pluto is breaking down a lot of things and you have likely been affected.

They say that Pluto strips away the things in life that are unnecessary, the weak structures in your life.

From About.com:

Pluto’s trials serve to shatter structures that have become prisons to growth, even though we cling to the familiar as it crumbles.

Essentially, Pluto wants us to be authentic or “real”, with firm foundations under every area of our lives.  Again, it’s not optional; change is coming whether we like it or not.  Many people are losing jobs, homes, relationships, wealth and so on, as Pluto seeks to correct what’s rickety in our lives.

Recently an animal lover showed me some photos of her pets.  Two cats and a dog; she had pictures of the trio in a beautifully bound little book that a friend made for her.

All three pets had come from shelters.  The woman remarked that one of the cats had gone through multiple homes.  Why would it be, she said, that the cat was relinquished so many times when she was so sweet?

I didn’t even think, it just popped out:  “she was probably making her way to you.”

People have Ideas about psychics and I’ll admit it, I’m one of them.  It might seem as if one is just a couple of filmy scarves and a comment about your aura away from a career but this much I do know:  If you insist on running off to be a clairvoyant there are some rules to follow.  And like anything else, you need to put in your time.  Maybe there are infants who pop out of the womb solidly grounded and knowing automatically what to do but for the rest of us there’s training.

I can’t recommend training enough.

1) Just Say No! to Empathy.  Empathy comes very easily to me so I have to consciously turn it off.

Feeling other people’s feelings is an express train to Crazy.   The lines blur until you don’t know where you leave off and the other person begins.  Worse yet, you’re feeling their emotions by taking them into your body.  If you aren’t properly trained, it stays there and accumulates.  Before long you’re sluggish and sick.

How many years of my life was I depressed/unhappy/(fill in the blank) but it wasn’t even me?

2) Don’t read someone unless you’re invited.

You start out and have some success, then, if you’re like me you start thinking you can heal the world.   You see everyone’s foibles and dysfunctions and you know how to fix them, don’t you?  They don’t even have to know!    Everyone needs psychic intervention!   If they knew, they’d all want it!

Well, no they don’t and no, they wouldn’t.

I didn’t learn that one until I befriended clairvoyants who like to tinker anonymously.  The day came when they wanted me to dabble with a person I didn’t know on behalf of a second stranger who wanted to buy a house in a town I’d never been so my clairvoyant friend could be happy. My internal red flag turned into a club and took a swing at my head and I knew I was out of bounds.

A trusted friend told me, unless your help is requested, the only person you have permission to influence is yourself.  When you tinker it creates karma that must be repaid.

I think of it as psychic breaking and entering.

3) You need to clear and ground yourself before you read so you can separate your target from everything else.   Other peoples’ energy is everywhere.  My cat likes to sit on my lap when I read, so I have to remove her energy from my reading space.  The private study rooms at the library are nice and quiet, but what about all the people in the main room, feeling their feelings?

We live on open space and I could read on the bench by the stream but there’s no way around it; it’s essential to set up your space to avoid taking in wandering energies–even if they’re your own.  I clear myself for a variety of things that vary from day to day.  My own sources of self-doubt, distraction and confusion, as well as energies spilling over from other sources.

4) Once the reading is finished, you have to remove the client from your field and pull your energies away from your client.

These rules are very simple but using them it takes years of practice to produce work that is founded on clarity, integrity and mastery.

Science, you might want to take a break; go have a coffee or something.  You’re not going to like this.  Run along!

All right, now that we’re alone:  let’s start at the beginning.  As a kid I knew things about people.  But they were poorly defined in the way that kids’ thoughts tend to be:  I can’t be alone with him.  She’s saying that but it’s not true. The usual stuff.  I didn’t verbalize these things and there was no thought process.  I just looked at people and I knew.

I was certain.

In the absence of role models and feeling very unsafe with this phenomenon I put it on the back burner and went about my life for 30-some years.  But in the way of repressed things, it made its way to the surface and I “discovered” clairvoyance as a way to cope with sensitivities that had taken over my life.

It was the old story:  if you ignore what you need most, it will destroy you.  If you embrace it, it’s your greatest gift.

Years passed and I found myself reading people’s pets.  At first, the only way to know if the information was accurate was to trust.  Trust, trust, trust.  I rolled my eyes every time I put a reading in the mail.  The clients were satisfied but I doubted myself.

I couldn’t seem to access that childhood certainty.  Now there was more at stake.

One day I got some information that had an unusual spin on it.  I like surprises when I work–they tell me I’m not making things up–but this time it was it was plain wacky and I stalled out.  I asked the pet if he was sure, I put up the usual gauges for % accuracy, I begged St. Francis to tell me if I was on to something or perhaps nuts.  He laughed.

In the end, all signs pointed to ‘go’ but I still had to trust and that was the problem.

Suddenly an online Solitaire game appeared in my head.  I heard, move the card.

Why not?  I took the top card off the stock pile.  It was a red 7.  The disembodied voice said, put it on the black 4.  Obediently, I took my cursor and dragged the 7 to the 4.   Well, everyone who’s played cards online knows what happens–there’s a moment when the computer either grabs the card from your control and puts it where you want it, or rejects it and it flies back to its original position.

It’s a sudden ‘snap’ I feel viscerally.

Of course the computer snatched the 7 and slammed it back down on the stockpile, aghast at my incompetence.

The cool thing about clairvoyance is you get the gist of the thing right away.  I now knew, I could move the “card” (the pet’s story) into “position” (the place of truth for that pet) and the card would either be accepted, or rejected.

At first, I followed this protocol whenever I felt unsure.  But soon I realized that “true” felt one way and “false” felt different.  I didn’t need the card game anymore.  I also quickly learned to sense shades of gray, like close, but you’re missing a detail.

This is how I know.  Next question?

I read a fair amount of animals who exhibit oddball or irritating behaviors that no one can decipher.   Sometimes the pet gives great, clear information but doesn’t respond to the healing–nothing changes.

It didn’t take too many of those before I realized I could accurately predict which pets would respond and which wouldn’t.  It got so I knew about 5 minutes into the initial phone call. Oh no, I’d say to myself.  Another one.

At the same time, it didn’t make sense for me to be attracting a lot of clients I couldn’t help.  Why was I attracting all this work, if I wasn’t effective at what I did?

It made me uneasy.  Still, I’d asked so many times:  What am I supposed to be doing with my life?  Every time I asked, the phone would ring and there it was, another ailing chihuahua.  A moribund Siamese.  That time with the horse.

For this reason I knew I was on track.  What was going on?

One day I thought to ask my teacher, the lovely and talented David.  Oh, he said casually, when the pet doesn’t change it’s usually the person who needs the help.

That was it!   I began to warn clients:  if we do a reading and a healing and nothing changes, you need to know this might be more about you than your cat.

People were receptive to this news.

Then I wondered, should I shift my focus to people instead of pets?  It made me a little sad; I got into animal healing because they’re more open and honest than we are.

In the end, with David’s help I realized there are many paths to healing and for some people, that path is through their pet.

her stunt double

Well, the new cat yowled all the way home.  I found this more encouraging than the silent staring.  Better to complain than to remain catatonic, no pun intended.

Once in our house, she fled underneath the upstairs bed.   We tiptoed about the place, thinking we’d spend several days in ultra-quiet, low-stress mode.   We shushed each other.  We said correct-y things like don’t you’ll scare the cat.

You know, we just weren’t expecting much from this situation.  Which is why we said, wha? when after an hour or so she emerged from her bunker and had herself a look around.

Now we could see she was skinny and mostly black with butterscotch highlights.  We saw dainty white gloves on her front paws and thigh-high white go-go boots in the rear.  “Look!” my daughter said, “she’s pretty!”

Her name is Gem.  I don’t think she means to be, but she’s funny.  She chirps, she quacks; sometimes she opens her mouth and nothing comes out but ‘k’.    She grooms me, which is really just a couple of licks at my hair then this whole thing where she cleans her tongue ‘nungnungnung’ and it all seem kind of arduous.

She has a voracious appetite.  In her former life she ate cheap dry food but we feed her Merrick wet (California Roll!  Grammy’s Pot Pie!  The irresistible Cowboy Cookout!) so every meal is a party.  When she first moved in I fed her on demand but we had to put a stop to that.  As a result, Gem treats me like a waitress.  First she yells, then she puts her paw on my knee and if I ignore all that, she bites me.  Gently, but still.

She follows me most everywhere.

Her favorite toys are ribbons and the laser.  Her athletic, bouncy gait reminds me a of a German shepherd, or a racehorse.   If you run at her saying I’m gonna get you! she darts away, then circles back for more.  She had dogs in her first home.  Maybe she thinks she’s a dog.

She’s patient with children and seems to enjoy our friend’s 2-year-old.  I believe she has a crush on my 80-year-old mother-in-law.

She’s extremely, fastidiously, OCD-ishly, borderline troubling, clean.  Like, “stop, you’re taking off fur.”  She arrived at the pound that way and it persists.

I’ll be interested to see what this cat is all about.