A quick note from Michael:

Nina Lockwood is a Supercoach Academy graduate and member of my Emerging Voices mastermind. She initially wrote a piece on spiritual lessons she had learned from her recently departed and much beloved cat. She wrote this one in response to a prompt where I asked her to write it from the point of view of the cat himself…

First of all, when I was in a physical body I had the best home any cat could have wanted: I could roam free, climb trees, chase butterflies, feel the sunshine on my fur ,and snuggle down on soft beds inside the house when the snowstorms raged. But best of all, I was adored by my humans. And I adored them.

I remember hearing Nina laugh about how John Edward, the American medium who talks with the dead, used to sell his services to people who wanted to make “a really, really long distance call”.

But for those of us who are no longer in the physical bodies we once occupied, there’s no such thing as long distance. We’ve never gone anywhere. The love that connected us is still as strong as it ever was and it always will be. Contrary to what most humans believe, that love never dies, it just changes the form in which it’s expressed.

Humans attach a lot of importance to being in a body: how it looks, feels, what to do to protect it, keep it healthy, prevent it from getting old, and fearing the day when it will die. And they have the same response to other things they care about: they want to hold on to them as long as possible and they fear change and loss. 

After I left my body, which had simply worn out after many years of a well lived life, Nina used to say  – a lot – that she missed “the purr and the fur” of me. And of course, grief is a natural response in the physical world. But she often made it worse by the stories she told herself about why it shouldn’t have happened and what it meant that it had.

She had fallen into the mistaken thinking most humans have, which is that when the bodies they love are gone, whether human or animal, the love is gone too. But that’s the farthest thing from the truth. They just forget where or how to see it. Instead of love being contained in the form of a single body, that love is now free to be everywhere, in everything, all at once. When water evaporates, humans know that the water hasn’t disappeared but has simply changed form. They don’t mourn for it. They see it as a natural occurrence. But they seem to forget this natural change in form when it comes to love being in a body.

We can’t really know something unless we have something to compare it to. We know joy because we know sadness. We know kindness because we have known cruelty. I’m not sure that you can really evaluate an experience without having something to compare it to. To try to live by only accepting one aspect of life and only feeling the so-called “good “feelings is to only live half a life. It is to live only on the surface, without much depth and without the full capacity for kindness and love that come with living a full-spectrum shared experience with the rest of the beings on the planet.

We animals know, in a way that most humans do not, that beyond the basic physical instincts for safety and survival and comfort, the body is a vehicle through which the energy of life flows, in just the same way as the wind flows through the trees. That energy is made of love.  Some wiser human beings know this, but most do not.  

Animals have no trouble slipping out of the body because we don’t find anything wrong or bad about the idea of it. Of course we love our human companions, but we also know that the love we shared is always there, and we find little ways to keep in touch – through dreams, through memories, and sometimes even making guest appearances so they can actually see us out of the corner of their eye. 

When humans are able to set aside their thinking of what should and shouldn’t be, they’re able to notice so many subtle expressions of the love they shared with the one who is no longer in physical form. 

It does take a little bit of practice to see this, but I think my humans are starting to catch on to it…

About Nina

Nina Lockwood is a transformative coach, speaker, facilitator and trainer with over 30 years of expertise in psychology and personal development and 20 years in the fields of health and wellness. Drawing from an interdisciplinary background, Nina works with individuals and organizations (leaders, dreamers and visionaries) to achieve improved performance, problem solving, productivity and minimize the effects of stress and pressure. Using an insight-based, presence-centered approach, Nina points to the innate resources we all possess but may have lost sight of. www.ninalockwood.com