If you are grieving the death of a beloved pet, you are likely to be facing one or more of the following challenges:
- The people around you don’t understand or acknowledge your grief. You’re looking for compassion and answers, and all you get is something like: “It’s just a pet”, or “you can just get a new one”.
- Grieving is too painful, so you try to ignore it by keeping busy or numbing yourself in various ways, but it doesn’t really work, because you are cutting off your feelings and capability for living fully. Since grief comes in waves, grief will overwhelm you at times, anyway.
- Grief can be is so overwhelming that you feel you are drowning and your heart is shattered. You feel like part of you is gone – from a shamanic point of view, you may be right, and that is what is called soul loss.
So, allowing yourself to grieve without getting stuck in the grieving, is not so easy. In the following I’ll talk a little about soul loss caused by grief.
Soul loss
Soul loss is when part of your soul or life essence leaves during a traumatic experience as a survival mechanism because staying in the body is simply too painful. Or, in the case of the death of a pet, especially if it was a sudden or violent death, the pet owner could suffer soul loss by unconsciously sending part of their soul out to be with the deceased pet. That will do neither the deceased pet in the afterlife nor the pet owner any good.
You need to acknowledge and be determined to work through your grief in order to to pave the way for the return of your lost soul part, so you can feel whole again. After all, if you make no changes, why would the soul part wish to return? A soul part that has left may come back on its own, but often the soul part that has left needs help to get back. And by the way – this applies to both humans and animals.
Retrieving lost parts and power
That is where shamanic journeying comes in. The shaman can, with the assistance of her/his spirit helpers, retrieve the lost soul part; and often a power animal or another guardian spirit will join you too.
A safe transition into the afterlife for the deceased pet
When your pet has died, a shamanic journey can give your deceased pet a good and safe transition into the afterlife. And that will help you too, because you will know that your deceased pet is okay. Getting healing help for yourself through a shamanic journey , will enable you to cope with the first initial shock and prevent you from suffering prolonged grief and pain.
After the journey
After the shamanic journey has been done for you and your deceased pet, you will be much better prepared to handle and continue the work on the daily emotions of grief.
You will learn to allow yourself to grieve, but you will also learn to see past the pain of the loss – you will see and remember the love you shared with your pet and be grateful for everything your pet has given you.
And you will learn to use that love and gratitude to not only improve your own life, but also to help others you meet on you path, whether it be humans or animals.
A brief summary for you
- It’s okay to grieve, but avoid feeding the grief with your mind thereby prolonging it
- Remember the love you shared with your pet
- Share that love in the world.
