The Journey back to Wholeness of an Extraordinary Akita

Dear Subscribers,

It is very close to the one-year anniversary of adopting my Akita companion. It was love at first sight when I saw her picture on petfinder.com, but I had not been looking for a new house-mate. I was simply trying to describe my missing dog in a manner that made her identifiable. I always called Tundra the "Red Wolf" but I figured that would not help someone to know what she looks like. Well, it would actually, but they would not enter it as a search stream.

The long and short of it is that destiny has its ways . . . which reason knoweth not. Okay, it's late at night, and sometimes I get punchy.

The instant love was called Sakura on petfinder.com and she was described as aloof. When I contacted the rescue group, they actually tried to discourage me because they didn't really consider her particularly adoptable. I had to convince them that I really do know the breed and so on and so forth. After they finally agreed to let me have her, she had an epileptic seizure which they then told me was the second known seizure, the first being on the operating table when the spayed her at the kill shelter. Gosh, who wouldn't have a seizure! They were quite certain I would not accept her once disclosing these facts.

She had another seizure shortly after I brought her home. It was after dinner and she seemed to be sleeping. This was, however, not my biggest concern. She was afraid of just about everything and she looked at the ceiling all the time and twisted her head in a strange manner. Practically none of her body behavior was perfectly normal; she was afraid of hands near her face, was non-responsive to the voice, barely responsive to tummy rubs, terrified of doorways, shadows, cardboard boxes, poles, tubes, tailgates, men, and garden paraphernalia like tools and wheelbarrows. Poor girl!

Ironically, she was not at all disturbed by firecrackers, gunshots, doorbells, and all the things that normally drive critters nuts. It took me a while to realize that she was actually more autistic than epileptic. She always smelled everything, never looked. I could take her on walks or to pet food stores but she smelled the floor, not the things on the shelves or the people. She seemed to be on information overload through one operative sense. I wondered if she was visually impaired or hearing impaired and therefore reliant on smell, but I also know from my work with people that trauma stimulates the adrenals and they, in turn, affect the sensitivity to odor. I figured she was pretty unhappy inside.

She was always hungry, always, always hungry. She ate fast and ate absolutely as much as I gave her.

Flower Essence Kathrin recommended an animal communicator. I was a bit slow on the uptake but, as you know, addiction followed. So, the real reason for the anniversary email is to say that this last year has been about coming to understand just how detailed and complete the thought patterns are with animals. Honestly, I had no idea. Well, I had been slightly prepared but truthfully, I am ashamed of how little I really understood.

So, let's go way back because life is a huge connect the dots game. On one of my ventures out of body, I joined my soul group, one or two thousand individuals, only two humans. That was intriguing and I was terribly curious. A dolphin picked up on this and said, "Well, being a human is not all it's cracked up to be." That was an interesting remark but it was also my sole preparation for what was to crescendo during the last twelve months.

Morrnah Simeona, the Kahuna

There was one other tiny, tiny dot. Morrnah and I had discussed involution and evolution and parallel states of awareness that occurred at the same level but the difference between involutionary consciousness and evolutionary consciousness was the descent into the realm of the objective mind. In short, one could have a similar awareness without the mental constructs to express what is known. The context for this was Lemurian spirituality and why it seemed so remote to me that I doubted I had any first hand contact with it. Morrnah would do that head wobble thing and I knew it meant something like, "Poor Ingrid, she doesn't get it." I tried very, very hard to see what she saw but it just wasn't on my screen.

Morrnah used to say and do things that others would find curious. Once she asked me who the gladiator was. I must have had a completely blank look on my face because our concrete minds really do need associations to help us get from one dot to the next. In her world, I suspected there were no dots, just huge comprehension. So, I did the thing most of us would have done. "Morrnah, can you give me just a little clue why you asked the question?" It was a reference to a new person in the life of a friend of mine so I explained that I had not met him so couldn't comment. She said, "Doesn't she know who she is?" My response was, "None of know who we are. We keep waiting for you to tell us."

Okay, so I had a tiny, tiny parachute but no manual for what was to unfold this last year.

Memory

Savika's memory for details was not just compelling, but very detailed. She was totally aware of her seizures and said that she was often terribly hungry and frightened that she was so hungry. The issue of doorways was totally heartbreaking. Punishments nearly always took place at the doorways and she was afraid of being ambushed and beaten. She has lots of injuries, not minor but serious. The other animals complained, via the communicator, that her stories made them sad and they didn't like her in the house because she was so depressed. Tundra said she felt sorry for her and didn't want her to be hungry again so it would be all right for her to stay even though she found her stories of her past really tedious, especially when Savika awakened her during the night to tell more sad tales. The catalogue of scents was over the top boring to Tundra.

Well, all these accounts are not really necessary, but I took her food issues very seriously and made sure she not only had two meals a day but lots of treats and snacks. One day, she left some food in her dish and I knew we had graduated. The sessions with the animal communicator were rather like very good psychotherapy. I could listen to her issues and assure her that everything here would be very different. She would never be beaten or starved. I could also validate her pain and suffering in a way that she knew I understood and cared. I suppose I had a hidden agenda. I was waiting for her to say she liked it here or perhaps even that she was happy. I had no idea what an enormously unrealistic wish that was.

Visitor

One day, a friend came over and Savika actually went to the door to greet her, looked at her, and then walked to the front window to look in the driveway. We laughed. She wanted to know where the children were and wondered if they were waiting in the car. She actually likes children, especially very small humans. This was another milestone because she used her eyes! I could hardly suppress my tears.

Various people had input on her behavior but I figured she had a neurological problem. I knew she hates nuts. It was the only food she would not touch in any form, and I know a few of you are saying, "Smart dog!" She had been on antibiotics and I was giving her Kolorex for the fishy smell I detected as well as a few other unpleasant indications that the mold in antibiotics was viable. It took quite a few months to get rid of the smell and once that mission was accomplished, she stopped looking backwards and concentrated a little better on what was in front of her. She also took a fancy to cashew butter.

I became a zealot about her food and we really, really cleaned up her diet. We had very detailed discussions with the animal communicator about likes and dislikes. Savika is actually exceptionally polite about food. She is curious about the smells in the kitchen and the taste. She told the communicator that it would be very nice if she could sample just a bit of what I eat because she could then associate the taste and smell. I immediately asked what she liked best and she gave extremely accurate feedback, including something that was yellow in color and mostly liquid and burned her mouth but the pain went away later so she wouldn't mind trying that again. We determined that it was coconut curry and I have to say, I was astonished that it burned her that much. It was definitely not in the three chilies range.

She said that she didn't at all mind kibbles but if I wanted to cook for her she thought this might be rather nice. In short, we worked very hard on likes and dislikes and eventually we nailed it. She never had another seizure and all the gawking at the ceiling has stopped. Earlier this month, I took her to the farmer's market, sort of a birthday celebration for me, and she was a total traffic stopper. Dozens of little people had their hands all over her, squealing, "Look, mommy, this huge dog is letting me touch her. Her fur is like a bear. See how deep I can get my fingers." She was a rock. She was totally stormed by children and a few grown ups and she was completely steady, not one bit nervous, but she slept like a log when we got home. I was so proud of her.

Awareness

Like many abused creatures, Savika is hugely intelligent. Some absolutely extraordinary critters have shared their incarnations with me, but this one is way smart. I believe she is also very content now. She feels safe but she still has nightmares sometimes, less often than before. I have matured a lot as a healer because she gave me the chance to put into practice much that I have learned over the years, including how bringing issues to the surface can be the first important step in rewriting scripts so that the patterns shift.

Now that Savika feels secure, she has expressed an interest in more stimulation. She would like to go places where she can have new experiences. The incredible factor is that when we are both conscious of the desire, we share the adventures more deeply. It's actually quite amazing.

Patterns

However, I am also aware that even if the reality has shifted, the memories are still there and to the extent that they are there, the potential for reinfecting a pattern and regressing is also there.

If you are wondering what your animal friends know and understand, you better take a really deep breath because you are going to be astounded. The last time we had our therapy session, Savika said that she was a little disappointed that we weren't going out at night together to watch the stars. She then gave me a whole big account on why star watching was important to me and how when she first came here, she expected we'd be doing this together. Gosh, I wish she had email!

A long time ago, I wrote a book called Shadows on the Soul, still unpublished. It is about memories and how they are archived and accessed. It actually works a lot like your hard drive. Imagine that absolutely every experience you ever had was stored somewhere or other on your hard drive. To find the memory, you have organize your folders, but memories of experience all use an emotional cataloging system. The files therefore have names like "hungry", "frightened", "doorways are dangerous places", and so on and so forth. The system is so idiosyncratic that it only makes sense to the individual whose memories are filed there. For everyone else, the contents are irrational.

So what happens is that just as you open a file from your hard drive, there are actions that open memory vaults. Doorways trigger the avalanche of associations created by the incidents that occurred in the doorways so having a different opinion about them requires having a different experience at the doorway. Savika and I are trying to fill up the memory banks with new doorway experiences. For instance, we go in and out together and I turn on the lights so there are no shadows at all and nothing that moves or jumps when she has to do this very difficult thing of going in and out. She still gets stuck sometimes, but in the beginning, she used to get stuck for hours. I tried putting food on the floor over the threshold. We worked hard but it was terrifying to her.

Stairways were also a huge problem but only because she thought they were slippery. She didn't have much confidence in her body so we practiced balance and sure-footedness by my standing beside her and sometimes even touching her feet to remind her where to put her weight. If this sounds like it was very time consuming, it wasn't really because there were longer and longer normal times between the let's try to master this now times.

The biggest event of all was when Tundra died. Savika was very upset but clearly she could see Tundra so she had to organize a distinction between the physical body and the spirit body. Tundra spent a lot of time in her dream state practicing moving between the two. She explained this in considerable detail to the animal communicator, but Savika wasn't quite prepared. She was a bit confused at first and said, "She's not coming back, is she?" Well, evidently, she knew Tundra had a spirit body but in the past she had been able to depend on her returning. Now, she wasn't sure and this was upsetting. She realized, however, that this was a big loss for me and she felt sorry for me. She really filled up with compassion and this was a completely new feeling for her. She had been hurting so much for so long that she insisted she had no idea what love is and then suddenly, one day, she was attentive and affectionate and supportive. She even went up the stairs to sleep near me, right against the bed. She told the animal communicator that she didn't want me to be sad and when she had that feeling, everything inside of her just changed and she started to feel like herself. Before, she said, she wasn't really herself, but now she feels very good inside and wants to grow more into her complete self.

Friends, this has been an amazing year.

Many blessings,

Ingrid