If you’re reading this, there is a high likelihood that you have (or had) an animal companion that you’ve known all his or her life. You knew them when they were young. You watched them grow, mature, slow down. You’ve nursed them through health issues. You’ve watched them grow old. Together, you’ve made a lifetime’s worth of memories and can’t imagine life without them. It seems like they have always been there. How can they leave? How can that be possible?

This is the kind of animal that keeps living and living, even though they have no business still being around at their age and in their condition. And yet they keep on going. It’s clear they do not want to leave you as much as you do not want them to leave.

Eventually, like all things physical, this has to end. But let me tell you, if there is ever an animal that wants to come back to you, if there is ever a little being that wants to be reborn into a new animal body and return, it’s this animal.

In my last blog entry, I wrote about what it’s like to live with a reincarnated cat. This week I want to talk about what it takes to encourage an animal to reincarnate back to you.

I confess, I’m no expert. But, having read many accounts of this kind of phenomenon, and having some personal experience with it myself, I’ve come up with a list of things to consider doing if you want to coax your animal companion to return to you.

1. Set Intentions

This may seem rather obvious, but I did want to call it out. This involves more than simply intending to adopt to new animal. This goes a step beyond that. It’s deciding you want to adopt the next incarnation of your previous animal. 

If you have spiritual friends with whom you feel comfortable discussing this sort of thing, then tell them your intentions. If you keep a journal, write about it. One of the things I’ve done in the past is to write a list of personality traits that I might expect to see if that animal returned or what behaviors that might clue me in that the old animal has come back to me in a new body.

If your animal is still with you but growing older, you might ask them if they would come back to you in a new animal body. Explain that they’ll be young again and you can play with them the way you did when they were young. Tell them that you would welcome their return and love taking care of them again.

Whether your animal is still with you, or in spirit, they will get the message. That’s all you are hoping to have happen at this stage. 

2. Ask

For the most part, I consider myself a nuts and bolts kind of guy. I don’t want to just believe something because someone tells me it’s so. I want some personal experience to back up my beliefs. As a result, I feel a little weird putting this one out there.  But because I’ve had personal experiences with this, and because I think it’s an important part of the process, I am going to discuss it. 

There are spirit helpers “out there” who are even now guiding you along your life path (or ready to step forward to help you, upon your request). But here’s the thing: You have to ask. 

How you ask is up to you. If you pray, then include a request for your animal to reincarnate back to you. If you don’t pray, that’s okay. Just because you’re not used to doing this sort of thing or even if you don’t believe in it, that doesn’t mean that it won’t help. If you really think about it, how can it hurt?

Find some alone time—in your car, on a solitary walk, etc.—and ask for your animal to be reborn and come back to you. You can ask once or you can ask whenever you feel the need.

Additionally, if your animal has already crossed over, talk to him or her directly.  Ask them to come back in a new, young, healthy animal body.

3. Let It Happen

This is easily the most difficult part of the process. It involves trust. It involves letting go of expectations. It involves being open to adopting an animal in a way that maybe you’ve never done before.

I’ve read many accounts of animals in spirit making his or her intentions known (through animal communicators) of reincarnating back to their former humans. The human in the scenario, always excited to learn of the animals intentions to return, invariably asks the question: “How will I find you?” 

The answer from the animal is always the same: “I will find you.”

Okay, you say. Great. But what does that really mean? How?

If you, like me, are used to keeping your animals safely in the house or back yard, careful what they eat and get into, the idea that they have died and their spirits are out there somewhere, beyond your protection, is unsettling.  The idea that you have to trust your animal to reincarnate back to you on their own, without your help, can be tough to accept. But that’s what I’m saying. You have to trust.

Now, if you’re into Golden Retrievers and you always go to the same breeder to adopt one, then it seems likely your animal will know this and go back to the same breeder to be reborn. That certainly narrows it down, right? If you always get the same gender Golden Retriever, then that makes it even easier. Maybe the particular litter that is ready when you go to adopt a puppy has a limited amount of animals of that gender. That makes it even easier.

If you don’t have a situation as simple as a single breeder, it makes it a little less straightforward. What I’d say here is to stay open to adopting an animal in a way you might not expect. It could be a cat that shows up in your backyard and decides to adopt you. It could be a friend that needs to find a home for a new dog and asks you if you’re interested. This doesn’t mean you jump at adopting every new animal that comes your way, it simply means to stay open to the possibility that your former pet might show up in an unexpected way.

Know that your animal may come back as another gender or breed or even another species than it was before.  Your old horse may show up as a new dog.  Your old dog may show up as a a new little kitten.  Be open to that possibility, but don’t be distracted by it. Just don’t rule anything out because you expected to happen one way and it turns out to happen another.

Here’s the not-so-fun news. You may have to wait. You may have to be patient. It could happen in a matter of months. It could be a year or more. Again, you have to trust that when the timing is right, it will happen. When you’re missing your animal and you want him or her to come home, it can be difficult to be patient. Just trust and let the process unfold the way it is supposed to.

Set intentions. Ask. Trust and stay open for unexpected arrivals. Answers may come in dreams.  Or simply knowing that today is the right day to visit the animal shelter or go online to look at available animals.  Listen to your inner voice. 

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention (and Jamie would chime in to add if I didn’t) that the chronology might not fit your expectations. 

What do I mean? Let’s say your dog crossed over and you want her to come back. You stay open to possibilities and a new dog comes into your life. She has a very similar personality. On some level you recognize her. Heck, she even looks like your old dog. But, wait. Your dog died a year ago and this dog is two years old. This can’t be your old dog, can it?

Jamie would say that it can. Time, the way we experience it here on Earth, in our physical bodies, is not the way it is experienced for spirit. Incarnating into physical bodies isn’t like going behind a curtain, exchanging an old set of clothes for new ones, then returning looking different a little bit later. That animal that seems too old to be your former pet can very well be that former pet, even if the chronology doesn’t work the way we understand it.

Last year, my cat, Mrs. Claws, crossed over. Then, less than a month ago, I adopted a new kitten. Mrs. Claws was such an amazing soul. Do I hope this new kitten is the same cat soul returned in a new body? You bet I do. Next time, I will write about what it was like encouraging her return and picking out this new kitten, in light of everything I’ve discussed above.

In my article called “Sometimes They Come Back,” I wrote an account of my old cat Lucy being reborn as my current cat, Emily.  In my next blog entry, I am going to relate, to the best of my understanding, how you can encourage having your animal’s spirit return to you in a new animal body.  First, I wanted to talk a little about what the experience is like.

So, your beloved animal of almost two decades crosses over and it’s like losing a member of the family.  You hear this notion that your  animal can come back in a new animal body and be with you again and you find you’re all for that.  You’re ready for her return ASAP.

What you want, or rather I should say what I wanted was for my old cat to come walking through the door with a new, young, healthy body so that we could pickup where we left off.  We’d do all the same things, play the same games, snuggle in all the old places and times that we used to.   

In reality, that’s not the way it works.  First, your new animal is unlikely to resemble your old one.  He or she might not be the old gender or even be the same species.  Your old dog might show up as a stray cat that decides to adopt you.  Your former horse might in fact return as a new dog.

Let’s assume for a moment that your old dog or cat comes back as a new dog or cat; even if it’s the same breed, he or she is unlikely to look exactly like they used to.  They might want to look a little differently.  At any rate, chances are probable that they’ll be rolling in in at least a slightly new form.

Then, the new animal is unlikely to do all the same things the former animal did.  I have to wonder exactly how much they remember about their old lifetime.  If I had to guess, I’d say it varies in the same way the memory of a human’s past lives vary from person to person.  If you read “Sometimes They Come Back,” you’ll see that Emily seems to have many of the old behaviors that Lucy did.  But these weren’t discovered right away.  These were things I observed over time.

Here’s one observation I didn’t mention in the first article: My wife and I adopted Lucy shortly after we got married, just after we moved into our new house.  At the time, Lucy used to like to sit in this one spot at the top of the stairs, just outside my office door.  From this vantage, Lucy could see me working at my desk and could look down the stairs to where my wife would putter around.

As the years went by, I spent less time upstairs, doing a lot more work with my laptop in the living room.  Lucy gradually stopped sleeping in that spot. Yet now Emily sleeps in that same upstairs spot for no obvious reason.  I will discover her sleeping there at night when I go to bed (my bedroom is downstairs) and find her there in the morning.  It’s a cold, uncomfortable spot.  There’s no heater vent that might attract her to be there, and since Lucy slept there, the carpeting has changed, so it’s unlikely that any trace of Lucy’s old scent remains there. Yet still, there Emily sleeps.

It’s clear that Emily remembers something of her old lifetime.   Lucy had been a sleepy old cat when she departed and returned as a hyperactive little kitten (the same hyperactive kitten that Lucy had been all those years ago).  Yet Emily and I don’t do the same things that we did now that she’s returned, either because Emily doesn’t remember doing those things or because maybe she considers those “old cat things” and she is happy enough to run around in her new cat body.

Was I disappointed that my old cat Lucy didn’t come sauntering in the door exactly the way she had been?  I was, at least at first.  Do I think of Emily as Lucy in a new set of “clothes”?  I don’t.  That wouldn’t be fair to Lucy or to Emily.  This is a new relationship and it requires getting to know her new quirks, even if many of the old ones are still there, just the way they’ve always been.

Emily is much improved from Lucy.  Lucy was a worrier.  If something loud was going on outside, Lucy would look worried.  If Lucy would see the bottom of her food dish, she would look worried.  And while Emily definitely has those same kinds of moments, she seems much more mellow than Lucy had been.

I do miss Lucy still, but the tear in my heart that opened up when she left is no longer there.  The essence of who Lucy was is here with me now.  But Emily is Emily and I love her in a new and unique way.

Have an animal who you think has come back to you in a new animal body?  Please write to me and tell me your story.

Long ago, I came to the conclusion that we don’t really appreciate something until we realize that it’s going away.

If you think about it, it makes sense. We live busy and distracted existences. If there is someone or something in our lives, especially if we see them (or it) every day, it’s just as easy to assume it will be there tomorrow and get on about our business. Whether it’s a place, a person, or a pet, until it becomes obvious that our time left with them is finite, it is all too easy to take them for granted.

When I learned that my sixteen year old cat, Mrs. Claws, was dying, everything else in life slowed down or came to a full stop. I had just spent a very happy three-day birthday weekend with her, sitting by the fireplace with her on my lap as the rain fell, reading books and watching football. I noticed that she hadn’t been eating much, but only when I realized on Monday that she was dehydrated, did her condition suddenly seem urgent. 

Hours later, I was in an exam room when the vet broke the news. Mrs. Claws, after experiencing years of lower G.I. disease, was bleeding internally. She coincidentally had had a blood test a few weeks before, so when they compared her red blood cell count between then and now, they could see that it had dropped precipitously low. 

I was given a choice. Neither option was good. I could haver her put to sleep. Bleeding to death like this, I was told, was not a pleasant way to go. The other option was to have the vet give her a blood transfusion. The latter would make her feel better, but only for a few days—maybe a week—but not much longer. Since they didn’t know where or why she was bleeding internally, without being able to stop it, it would like trying to refill a bathtub without first plugging the drain.

Mrs. Claws was an old and loving cat. She had lived a good life. She had spent her senior years napping on my bed until it seemed that she had become a part of it. Imagine a bed that loves back!

When my wife left me after twenty-two years of marriage, Mrs. Claws had been my rock. It was she who took care of me, snuggling with me every night when it was now just the two of us on the mattress. I had just spent a lovely weekend with her. How could it be over now? The thought of going back that night to an empty bed was almost more than my mind could grasp.

A series of agonizing decisions. That’s what the end of our animal companion’s lives often comes down to. With a pet’s health, we are given life and death decisions that we wouldn’t have placed in our hands if it was a human. No one would say, “Grandma needs a blood transfusion. What should we do?”

There are rarely good answers. Make the wrong one, and it could haunt you for years.

When it came to making these kinds decisions, I learned many things from Mrs. Claws’s final illness. In the end, it all came down to this: Avoiding regret.

1. First, I called out each decision for what it was: A decision. A fork in the road. I made each one consciously. I didn’t take anything lightly. That’s pretty obvious advice when it comes to something like, “Do I put my cat to sleep or not?” but when time is running out, when days or even hours are slipping away, things like, “Should I take the day off work to hang out with her?”, “Should I cancel my weekend plans to spend a few last days together?”, “Do I sleep with my spouse or with my animal?” are decisions that can later haunt us. Some may seem trivial in the moment, but each could be something you come to regret later. Be aware of each decision, big or small.

2. Make each decision for yourself, not about what friends or family might think. Did it make sense to pay for a blood transfusion to buy one more week of Mrs. Claws’s life? The only person’s opinion that mattered was mine. At the same time, if I felt like keeping Mrs. Claws around for another week would only amount to her suffering for longer, I wouldn’t want to put her through that. Again, it wasn’t about what other people might think or even about the animal. I was about me and making the best decision with the information I had, for all concerned. (Fortunately, I didn’t have children to complicate the mix. I only had to worry about what would haunt me. This could easily extend to everyone with skin in the game. What would potentially haunt us? Does it make sense, for example, to keep the kids home from school to spend one last day with the animal if it meant giving them a chance to say goodbye? Or would those last hours only cause more grief?)

3. Imagine yourself in the future looking back on this decision having chosen Path A; now do the same, but looking back on what life would be like if you had chosen Path B. Ask yourself, with each option, which decision would you regret less and choose that option.

When it comes to avoiding regret, when it comes to preventing something that will haunt you later, look at every junction, every decision point and make the decision consciously, for yourself, with the best information you have at the time. If something goes wrong later, you can always say to yourself, “I did the best I could at the time with the information I had available. There is no reason to regret. I did my best.”

For Mrs. Claws, I had them give her the blood transfusion. I needed to spend that last week with her. I needed time to say goodbye and the vet assured me that the transfusion would make her feel a lot better. The idea of alleviating her suffering, even for a little while, caused me a tremendous amount of relief.

They gave her the blood transfusion and I took her home the next day. They changed up her meds, and I spent that week with her in the bed that she loved, enjoying every last moment that I could, taking nothing for granted. I petted her, held her, gave her Reiki, and enjoyed her presence. I always did appreciate her, but now I appreciated her every moment I could. Only then did I realize that I could have spent her entire life adoring her every moment and it still wouldn’t have been enough.

Miraculously, either because of the meds or the Reiki or both, Mrs. Claws rebounded and lived another six months. A month later, her red blood cell count was back to normal.

I knew this wasn’t the end of her illness. Her days were numbered. In the weeks and months that followed, she required an immense amount of care, but I was thrilled to do it. It was a gift to me, my way of showing her how much I loved her, of taking care of her the way she had taken care of me.

Those decisions, those forks in the road, came daily. Sometimes I choose to cancel plans and stay in with her. Sometimes I didn’t. But I made each one with my eyes open, thinking of the future: No regrets. 

This site is a love story.

Our animal companions are a part of our human families.  For many who choose not to raise kids, pets have grown to become surrogate children, souls that can be nurtured and which in turn provide companionship and unconditional love.  Yet unlike children, who will–by the grace of the natural order–outlive us, our animal companions are typically only with us a short while.

What happens to Fluffy and Fido after they leave us?  Although there are a great many beliefs about what happens to humans after we die, there are very little about animals. Many pet owners are forced to suffer quietly when their animals pass on, as it is typically less socially acceptable to mourn an animal the way one mourns family and friends.  Yet, ironically, because pets are so dependent on us, spend so much time with us, see us at our most vulnerable, we are often emotionally closer to our animals than we are to most humans.

Animals in the Light was created to answer the questions that remain after the loss of an animal companion.  Our answers come from celebrated psychic medium Jamie Butler and her more than twenty-five years experience as a spirit communicator, from personal experience, and from visitors to our site eager to share their stories.  

What is it like for our animals when they cross over? What is the afterlife like for them?  Do they visit us after they pass?

Come along with us on our journey to discover the answers to these questions and more.