In Episode 10, I mentioned that friends and relatives can be soul mates, not just romantic partners. I even said that businesses could be soul mates. What I did not explore is whether our pets can be our soul mates. So I am doing it in this episode, this week.
But first, I wanted to explore what traditional religions say about animals and what I found did not sit well with me. The Bible says that animals are “things” to be controlled by men. And it wasn’t so long ago that these same men thought that women did not have souls, nor did children. It’s also the same men who promoted slavery and considered that people of colour did not have souls. We need to decolonise our minds from the centuries of brain washing by white supremacy.
When I looked into Hinduism and Buddhism, I wasn’t that impressed either. They both consider animals as inferior to men. It’s slightly better than Christianity because they are considered to have souls, but the supremacy remains. Full disclosure here, I am not a pet person, but I love animals and get upset when they are not treated properly. And I certainly question the narrative that they are inferior to us. In fact, they do much less damage to the environment than we did, when left to their own devices. And I could be wrong, but there is much less cruelty in their world. We as a species are much more prone to darkness and evil. And yet the Buddhists consider the animal kingdom as part of the “evil” realms.
I know the texts that these religions are based on are thousands of years old. Well then it’s time that these religions base their morals on revised texts. Why would “God” have stopped talking to us thousands of years ago?
In this episode I talk about my lived experience and some pretty extraordinary cat stories. This was all possible thanks to a Facebook friend of mine called Sarah-Jane LeBlanc, who is a pet whisperer and who teaches animal communication. You might want to buy her book called Pet Whisperer, my life as an animal healer. I won her home study pet whispering course in a Facebook competition. I am not a pet person, so I actually told her to gift it to someone else but she refused. She said that if I won it, I was meant to do it. And she was right. I did the course and managed to help one of my dearest friends who lives in Dubai (I am in the UK) who had just brought home a rescue cat, who wouldn’t come out of her basket and eat. I can’t say that what I did had a direct link with what happened next, but the timing was certainly interesting.
The reason I agreed to do the course is that when I first met my ex, who was a cat person, his cat, Tom, behaved really strangely towards me. For one, whenever we were on the phone together (at the start we lived in different parts of the UK), he would sit on top of the sofa and listen to my voice through my ex’s phone. And he did this every single time. When I trained as a reiki master six years later, my reiki master told me that he was a soul mate in a past life. At the time, I found her claim bizarre, but now that I know more about the spirit world and spirituality in general, I am more inclined to think “Who is to say this is not possible?”
Animal communication is not that different to mediumship and what I learnt in Sarah-Jane’s course helped a lot with my mediumship skills. I actually talk about it in my first memoir, My Father Who Art in Heaven, which is available for sale in my online shop. The old concept that we are punished if we reincarnate as animals is obsolete at best, offensive at worst. In fact, I believe animals can teach us humans a lot about spirituality. In the UK there are several famous mediums who specialise in animal communication. But I want to finish these shownotes with a reflection from a vet interviewed by the Guardian. Dr Chen says she has seen enough evidence to convince her that the idea of pet communication should not be dismissed outright. I like her thinking. She also says that when she trained as a vet, acupuncture was considered voodoo, and it has now become relatively mainstream. So let’s all keep an open mind.
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