I stood in front of my dad in my grandparent’s kitchen shaking with excitement in anticipation of sharing my profound news. I often stopped him there by the dishwasher to capture his full attention when I had news he needed to know because there was only room for one person to move between the dishwasher and the counter and he had no choice but to listen.
“I know what I want to be when I grow up!” I confidently declared at 7 years old.
“Oh yeah?” I had his attention.
“Yeah! I want to work with animals. I love them so much.”
I saw his face scrunch up in hesitation. “What will you do?”
I wasn’t prepared for this question. I mean, I just told him, I would work with animals. My eyes floated up and darted back and forth searching for what he meant and a different answer to his question. Got it!
“I’ll be a vet!”
“That sounds great.” The hesitation returned as I’m sure he was thinking of the sensitive nature of his middle child. “Are you sure you can do all of the things you would need to do as a vet? You know you’d have to give them shots and perform surgeries on them.”
“Oh.” Maybe being a vet wasn’t the best job for me. “Yeah, I guess I hadn’t thought about that.”
I spent the next week thinking about all the things I’d have to do as a vet and knew that even though the surgeries would help save the animals, I would not be capable of performing them. I’d have to come up with another way to work with animals. At 7 years old, I didn’t know what else I could do. I resigned myself to having to find another job and maybe I could just fill my house with all the animals I wanted to love on so much.
I locked this impossible dream of working with animals away deep in the recesses of my heart because it felt too painful to believe it wasn’t going to happen for me. But, the box I locked it in must have been a soft or porous container because every once in a while I’d feel the murmur of the dream begging for release.
As I got older, in those moments of feeling the murmur, I daydreamed about possibilities other than being a vet. I could be a researcher – no that would require too much time in paperwork and not enough time with the animals. I could be a zoologist – nah, still looking at too much studying and not enough face time. I could rescue animals – closer, but still didn’t quite feel like the right fit.
In the meantime, life continued happening. Before I knew it, I was married with two kids and a sweet little part time pet sitting gig. The murmur giggled.
The pet sitting gig grew until I was working full time with elderly and special needs pets. The murmur felt more like ecstatic jumping beans begging for release from their confined space. I was in heaven – until the pandemic hit, people stopped traveling, and I was headed for a divorce.
A pivot was required. The pet sitting in its current form would not sustain me post divorce even after the travel bans lifted. I remembered taking an energy healing course through Healing Touch for Animals a few years prior to help support my anxious chihuahua. I leaned in to this potential new path and dared to unlock the box that caged my impossible dream.
Two years later and that path led me to not only become a Healing Touch for Animals® Certified Practitioner, but also an Animal Energy® practitioner and animal communicator. With every horse, pig, snake, spider, dog, cat, lizard, etc I worked with, the light of my soul burned brighter and brighter.
Then the time came when the animals said, “That’s enough. You’ve worked with us long enough, we want to work with you.”
Huh?
“There is an abundance of people who are focused on healing us, rescuing us, advocating for us. You are listening to us. We want to help you help humans return to their roots and remember who they are. To remember that we are all connected. To remember the dream they came here with because that will heal the planet.”
And so, here I am. Working with animals in a way I never could have anticipated was possible as a child, but somehow knew was inevitable in my heart. I was born for this. Just as you were born for your impossible dream.
