✔ Organize holiday grocery list
✔ Wrap presents
✔ Vacuum house
✔ Decorate Christmas tree
✔ Clean up cat pee on the couch.

Wait, what?

Cleaning up messes outside the litter box are never on the to do list.

When our pets are stressed, they are going to act out in some way or another to let us know things aren’t in balance anymore.

Ready or not, the holidays are upon us, and while it can feel overwhelming for us, have you ever thought about how this season affects our pets too?

Is your pet ready for the holidays?

As we dive into the holiday rush—planning meals, preparing for gatherings, buying gifts—our pets quietly share in all of it. They live in the midst of our energy, absorbing every bit of our excitement, stress, and busyness. Unlike us, though, they don’t have the chance to take a break or escape the hustle and bustle.

You can’t go too slow.

But my to do list! But my tasks! But my job, and the chores, and the cooking, and the cleaning, and and and….

Yes, yes, I know that the to do list exists, and All. The. Things™ must be done. But in their own time.

B has been with me now for a year and a half, and we are still working on the ground, because her body has been that horrifically out of balance. She has spent her entire life unbalanced, and feeling insecure because of it.

Her solution when pressed about it was to rush into whatever it was that seemed like the right answer, and get through it is quickly as possible in order to get back to being left alone again.

She desperately wanted to please, but as much as desiring to please as just get away from whatever it was she was being asked to do. (If you know of the defensive strategies, this is classic Fawn behavior).

There’s one more part to this energy discussion that I didn’t talk about in the four part series (that starts here if you’d like to go back and read it). That piece is the nervous system and the role it plays in all of this.

The longer I’ve studied all of this (mostly by trial and error, with a number of mentors (human and animal alike) adding pieces of the puzzle along the way), the more I realize that the root of not being able to mange our energy is because our nervous systems haven’t grown into that capacity.

Has your pet ever had a behavioral response that seemed out of the blue?

My cat was recently peeing outside the litter box, and none of the usual checks and remedies resolved the issue. This is when I reach for my team of support, and got help from a dear friend to connect with him since he was not interested in explaining to me what was going on (I was literally getting the cold shoulder!).

It turns out, after 10 years, he has decided he doesn’t really like his name. I have no idea why this has shifted for him, but our pets can changed their minds just as easily as we can, and who is to say that anyone needs to have the same name for their entire life, anyway.

I was disappointed, to say the least, but recognized that he was simply sharing how he felt, and he didn’t feel his name adequately represented him. So off we go on the search for a new name that he feels better about (still looking, but that’s another story).

This is not an uncommon situation - frequently behavior disruptions are simply our pets letting us know they don’t like something about their environment, life, connection, or what they are called.

The snarling and growling from my dogs was becoming overwhelming. At first, I’d hear it just after I closed the door to go outside. And then it started happening when I was in another room; suddenly, there would be teeth snapping and ferocious noise. Each time I broke them up, I wondered if I’d be able to manage the next time, or if it would spiral out of control. Their fights made me feel so much sadness, and on really bad days, despair.

Around the same time, routine moments with my horse were also getting more and more challenging. One fall day, leading him into the barn, dry leaves rippled across the driveway just outside the barnyard. He spooked, spun, and jerked me around, finally stopping with his head twenty feet in the air, eyes wide in terror, blowing at the beast that was surely over there somewhere.

When I look back on all the moments in my life when my energy was unmanaged and at its worst, it was showing up in my pet relationships - not in a good way! My dogs were fighting with each other, my horse was running away, and I was left in a crying puddle in the middle of it all.

One tool I underestimated for balancing my internal energy is movement. I wish I had known how big of an impact it has sooner, which is why I’m sharing all this information with you!

Have you ever met someone and just knew they were upset? That’s picking up on energy! Or maybe someone walks into a room and suddenly, the whole atmosphere shifts. That’s the power of energy in action!

But here’s the thing: if we’re not aware of the energy we’re putting out, it can lead to some unexpected challenges—especially with our pets.

Science shows that our atoms are mostly made up of empty space, and yet we are very real physical beings. Energy is the foundation of the universe, and everything has its own frequency. Physical objects will have a lower and slower frequency than objects that are alive, or objects with less mass.  

Everything has its own energetic signature that has an impact on everything else around it - including rocks, trees, mountains, tables, chairs, bugs, rivers, and even the weather. We are always receiving that information, and responding to it. 

As living breathing beings, we can change our energy and the frequency of our signature. Events in our day, experiences with other people, good news or bad news, our environment, and our own thoughts can cause our energy to change and shift as we go about our life. From moment to moment, our energy is broadcasting the changes that we are feeling internally.

“Why won’t my pet cuddle with me?”

It’s not an uncommon question that I get. “My pet likes to sit on so-and-so’s lap, but not mine. I want them to cuddle with me, too.”

Underneath the words, I feel the pang of jealousy that their furry companion is choosing another member of the household over them.

“But I feed them/care for them/walk them/do all the things, and they won’t cuddle with me!”

When we become intimately familiar with another being, we often assume we have permission to do things that we would (hopefully) otherwise not do with a stranger.
That assumption may be right, or wrong.

Our pets live in a world where the only option they have for communication with us is body signals and a limited array of sounds (that some employ more liberally than others). They live with beings who are constantly making noises, and whose energy is often not nearly as regulated as we’d like to think.

And they live in a world where they have virtually no control or autonomy over their spaces, their meals, or their companions.

When you stop and think about it, life as a pet may not be nearly as rosy as we like to believe it is.

Cats are particular creatures. If you’ve owned one (or they’ve owned you), you are fully aware of this.

What I’ve noticed is that despite this, many cat guardians don’t put as much thought into the litter box as they could.

Cats like to be clean, they often tell me so when I am connecting with one for the first time. It’s not uncommon for them to tell me that they like their appearance and take pride in it. A cat that doesn’t groom is actually a warning sign that something is off with their health.

So why do we not put as much thought into the cleanliness of our cat’s bathroom as they do in their own self care?

If you’re anything like me, at any given time, there’s so many things rolling around in your brain that you can’t make head nor tails of any of it. Forget the train of thought getting derailed… I’ve got 15 dogs, and half of them are just running around with the zoomies, one is sniffing and rolling in something unknown, another is barking at something in a tree, two are chasing their own tails, and three others are zonked out taking a nap (and I’m sure I missed some!).

There’s never silence in my brain, even when I’m meditating there’s still things always flowing through. Some days it’s a calm lazy river, and other days it’s class 5 rapids. It never stops.

So how do we know when what we are “hearing” is our own thoughts/ego vs information from our pet or another being?

#SorryNotSorry there’s no other way around it. It’s going to hurt.

We end up in pain in two ways in our life: through the things that we do that are not helpful, and through things that are helpful.

Hear me out for a little story time…

Summer is upon us and the season of vacations is here! Ahh, fresh beach breezes! Cool mountain air! All the adventures await!

But wait! What about your furbaby? Are they coming, too?

As much as I'd love to travel with my pets, sometimes it's not practical. I don't know about you, but I think my cats would appreciate being stuck in the car for 8 hours even less than I do.

Here's a list of tips and ideas to think about when you know you're going to be traveling the routine is going to change.

On last week’s episode of Riding in the Weeds, Tash and I dig into the fact that reps is the key to success with anything. Inspired by a podcast she shared with me, I realized it’s no different with our pets.

I’m guilty of this one and the painful learning curve that comes with it. My dogs were never all that well behaved. They were my very first pets, and I made a lot of mistakes with them.

Almost everyone wants to know if they need to be near their pet when we do a session. Do I need to be next to them? Should I have them settled? Do they need to be in their crate/my lap/somewhere special?

One of the most overlooked thought processes is that doing anything that you haven’t done before requires the process of building the muscle to do that thing. What often missed is the fact that this includes mental and non-physical activities as much as it includes physical activities.

When we think about being present, and having a stronger awareness on a moment to moment basis, we somehow think that we can simply decide to do it and then do it all the time. Ta-da!

If I decided that I wanted to go on a riding expedition and suddenly started riding for 7 or 8 hours a day, everyone would tell me how foolish of an idea that is. My one hour rides a few days a week are not enough to build up the muscles for being able to stay in the saddle for a full day, let alone several days in a row.

Somehow that does not get translated to non-physical activities.

I don’t think I’m abnormal when I say I have a limited amount of time to work the horses. In recent years, I’ve actually had more time and flexibility than I had in the past, and I’ve attempted to capitalize on that as much as I can (especially with an aging horse- that means even more to me now than it did years ago).

But my schedule, just like the average person’s, is quite full. And sometimes things don’t go as planned. Today I worked B (yay!) in the rain (BOO). NOT exactly my idea of a fun time, and I’m sure it wasn’t hers, either.

But, this was the time block I had available, and so we worked. I could have easily skipped it, but she’s had her time skipped more often than not, and I didn’t want to do that to her again. Tnd the work is really benefiting her, but she won’t get the benefits unless we work. So work we did.

Stop panicking when it gets difficult.

I see this all too often with my clients, and I’ll freely admit that I’m not immune to it either.

I guess we can blame our culture for the instant gratification trend, that seems to spill over into every area of our life - we think that things should just magically be better when we try.

That’s not how the universe works… Caterpillars turn to GOO before they become a butterfly (but retain awareness of their experiences as caterpillars somehow… 😬)

Going from seed to plant requires being in the DARK, and busting out of the hard shell of the seed.

Things are hard before they become easy.