I asked my wife last night if I should write about how I acquired my dog (I adopted my dog about 3 months before I met my wife). She said that would be a great idea because I'd finally be writing about something happy and positive and not bitching like I usually find myself doing at the keyboard.
Ha Ha. My wife is fucking hilarious. So, here goes.
This is the story of my dog. It's so amazingly amazing, that I feel compelled to point it out to you before you start reading.
About a year and a half before I found my current dog, I was coming down off of the loss of my previous dog who had passed on 2 years prior. She was 16 years old when she left me. A beautiful blonde, female Pekingese. Her name was Sunshine and she was my baby. I referred to her as my daughter and co-workers honestly thought I had a human daughter, but I never told them the truth. It wouldn't have mattered anyway because I treated Sunshine as if she were a real human daughter.
From time-to-time after her death, I would feel her energy body jump up on the bed and walk around until she found a comfy spot. I knew her energy. I knew what 9lbs felt like walking around on a foam mattress. I could feel the depressions from her little feet as tears rolled down my face. It was comforting, but heart-wrenching at the same time knowing that I wasn't able to hold her, but I took what I could get. What choice did I have anyway?
One morning as I was slowly coming back to this awful reality from a deep sleep, I found myself staring at the ceiling. I wasn't thinking about anything. I was in that null zone between worlds. And then I felt it. I felt something jump on the bed. I froze. This wasn't the energy of my precious 9lb Sunshine visiting me from the other side. This was something different. Large. Much larger. I estimated 40lbs or so. It walked around on the mattress and I distinctly felt the impressions around my feet. After about 20 seconds of this, I felt this energy plop down on top of my feet. I didn't know what it to think. My mind eventually came online and I had to get up and start my day.
Fast forward another few days. I was journeying and doing some deep meditation. I was hungry and tired because it was about 3am. I trudged my way into the kitchen looking for a snack before I hit the sack. There was a pack of cookies (Costco - shortbread with raspberry jam on top - delish) that caught my attention. I popped open the container and stood there barefoot on the cold tile, munching my cookie and processing everything that had happened during my journey that night. Suddenly, I felt a cold drop of water on the top of my right foot. In a split-second, I had to process all of these thoughts:
What the fuck was that? My hands are not wet. I'm not drinking anything. The cookie is dry. There isn't any water on the counter. I'm not even standing by the counter.
I looked down at my right foot and saw nothing. I leaned in closer to look because I had taken my glasses off earlier that night and I'm blind as a motherfucker without them. I used my hand to rub across the area where I had felt the drop. It was completely dry. And then I pulled my head back and clairvoyantly, I saw a white, medium-sized dog sitting there next to my right leg. She (I felt it was female) had a couple brown spots as well. She was looking at me and I realized that she was drooling and a drop had fallen on the top of my foot because she wanted a piece of my cookie. I was a little shocked, but I smiled and thought it was fucking adorable that my new dog wasn't even here yet and she was already begging from the other side!
About a week goes by and I'm sitting at my dining room table mindlessly eating a PB+J and out of nowhere, one of the most powerful psychic hits I've ever received literally hit me in the head. Imagine taking a baseball and putting a thought into and and then throwing it at someone's head. That's the energetic intensity of what came to me and it was only one word: Bailey.
Son of a bitch. She wasn't even here yet and she had already named herself. Fucking adorable. I knew she was going to be special. Very special. Not short-bus special, but psychic. Because a couple months before this string of incidents, another psychic friend had told me that I would be having a psychic dog come my way. At the time she told me this, we were both stumped as to what a psychic dog was. I knew that dogs and other animals could see/sense entities and spirits, but now I understood another facet of what a psychic dog was.
As time progressed, I would feel Bailey's presence. I would catch her out of the corner of my eye, but when I would look at her clairvoyantly, she would jerk me around and appear to look like a different dog each time. I knew she wanted me to keep guessing as to what kind of dog body she was going to take. When she finally stopped messing with me, I was able to clearly receive the information that she was going to be just like I had first perceived her: white with a couple brown spots and I knew she was going to be beefy, like a Pit Bull or American Staffordshire. I also knew she was going to be medium sized, around 40-50 lbs.
One night, I journeyed to do some deep shamanic work. I usually like to take a break during that work and do some light-hearted psychic stuff like explore some of my other incarnations or help friends with personal requests. I decided to connect with Bailey and get some more details as to when and where I could find her. Once I had a solid connection, she showed me an animal shelter that was near the house. I asked her when she would be arriving and she showed me a calendar that showed March or April of the following year. Considering it was February, it would be an entire YEAR+ before I would be able to find her. I then asked the most important question of all: How am I going to know it's you? She showed me a short movie of her sitting there in the pen and trying to shake my hand with her right paw a couple times. Wow.
She also showed me some of the other lifetimes that she and I had shared (seven in total) and reliving those lives with her during the journey made my heart hurt and feel good simultaneously. One of my gifts is being able to feel emotions through time from lives I have spent with others. Sometimes those emotions are negative in nature because let's face it, people suck. But bonds with animals are formed with pure love; a love so rare and special that it can make person-to-person love pale in comparison. After watching these shared lifetimes and processing the bond that we already had, I felt exponentially more connected to her.
So over the upcoming year, I started slowly buying all the necessary dog accoutrements to prepare for her arrival. I didn't need to weight her or measure her length, neck or chest for coats, collars, harnesses or beds because I already knew.
Fast forward to February of the following year. Without going into too much detail, by this time I have been overwhelmed from helping my girlfriend at the time who was dying from a very aggressive form of cancer. She inevitably left this planet and I was not in the mood to deal with anything, not even Bailey. But I made a promise to Bailey before I incarnated. We had agreed upon Bailey helping me through the agony of losing someone I had spent a decade with and in return, I had promised to rescue Bailey from a life of abuse. We needed each other, again.
March came all too soon and I was struggling. I forced myself to go the animal shelter. The cacophony of the dogs barking irritated me. I felt awful from grieving and being there made me feel physically ill for some reason. I looked at all the white dogs with spots that were female. None of them felt right. Not even close. I had to leave because the physical pain of being there was taking its toll on me. I was disappointed because I was afraid I might have missed her. What if someone else had adopted her? Psychically, I was fucked up with all the grief that I was dealing with so how could I be clear enough to sense when Bailey would be there? They had new dogs arrive daily and I couldn't keep driving back every day to check. I was stressed-the-fuck out.
So I forced myself to journey again so I could be as close and connected to Bailey as possible. I point blank asked her: What day do I need to arrive to get you? And she showed me a calendar of April and the number 17 was bold and it zoomed in there. Over and over, 17, 17, 17 was being flashed in my mind's eye. Ok. I hoped I had gotten the message correct.
I waited until April 17th. I nervously drove to the shelter with my mother. Looking back, here's one of the amazing parts that didn't strike me as amazing at the time because I was in such a funk from grieving. I walked straight to one of the dozen+ buildings that housed the dogs and saw a medium, white dog laying there by the chain link fenced entrance to her pen. The rest of the dogs were barking like mad, but this dog was just calmly (and sadly) laying there with her head on the ground between her paws. I looked at her and as I got closer, I squatted down. "Bailey? Is that you?" I was so goddamned nervous. I was scared too. I wanted to rescue the right dog. I wanted MY dog and I wanted to go home.
She sat up and I watched with sheer shock and amazement as she took her right paw, lifted it and attempted to shake my hand through the chain link fence. Twice.
If there was ever a word to describe the emotion of wanting to pass out, cry and scream for both heart-wrenching joy and sadness simultaneously, I would be using it right now in bold, caps and lots of exclamation marks. I was in shock. As a shaman and a psychic, never before had I foreseen an event so clearly and so far out into the future and with such pinpointed accuracy. I staggered away and tried to find the nearest volunteer to get her out of her pen. It was hard for me to maintain my composure. My mother helped me flag a girl down and the girl asked if we would like to take the dog into the park in the back of the shelter to get to know her. I wanted to scream out "That's a stupid question. What the fuck do you think?! Fuck yes! You fucking moron, can't you feel the connection I have to this dog?! Of course not, because you're fucking clueless! I'm not going to fill out adoption paperwork because she's already fucking mine and I'll punch you in the mouth if you stop me from taking her!". But I didn't say any of that thankfully. I nodded and tried not to fall over while she unlocked the pen. My mom said something about Bailey being cute, but I was still in my own little world trying to keep it together.
The three of us walked to the park with Bailey. We walked far enough away from the energy of the other dogs to think clearly. I knelt down to look at Bailey. She stepped closer to me, stood on her hind legs, wrapped her paws around my shoulders/neck and hugged me exactly like a human would embrace another human, front-to-front. She did not lick me. She did not sniff me. She just took both front legs and death-gripped me around my shoulders/neck for FIVE SOLID MINUTES. I felt my heart chakra spasm and flutter, unable to understand that it had shut down due to grief, but now was opening up involuntarily due to pure love. Like applying the brake and gas at the same time. It's a unique sensation that I hope I never have to feel again; to simultaneously feel soul-crushing heart-break from losing someone and pure, unconditional love from reuniting with your faithful, furry companion from multiple lives was fucking overwhelming to say the least.
My mother and the volunteer watched in silence. They were stunned at how this dog was so attached to me, but I knew why. I asked the volunteer to tell me a bit about Bailey. She said that Bailey had just arrived a couple days ago and she had just been released for adoption after being spayed and isolated by their in-house vet per their policy for new arrivals. The girl said that Bailey didn't like loud noises or people (definitely my dog), but that she was shy and gentle. I thought about timing. Everything on this planet is timing. Time is the cause of all stress down here, but when you get the timing right, it can be the seed that grows into the most amazing life-changing event you could ever imagine. I asked the girl what I needed to do to take her home and that was that.
I was still overwhelmed with emotions when we arrived at the house. It was so bad that I actually doubted my own intuition. I called someone very close to me who has amazing psychic skills and asked her to check to see if I had really gotten the correct dog. She confirmed that I had. Hearing the confirmation was a huge relief. The hard work was done. Now it was time to take care of my daughter.
They had named her "Sophia" at the shelter, but of course I never called her that. She had already picked her name a year ago and it made my heart smile when she responded to her name less than a day after we brought her home. She was still dealing with trauma from her prior abuse (I made the mistake of asking to be shown what had happened to her on one journey - I'm so fucking dumb) and so I had to really work with her to build her confidence again. She definitely "knew" me and our love, but there was also a part of her that still needed to get to know me in this incarnation if that makes sense. And true to the first time I had seen her drool for my cookie, to this day she continues to obediently sit at my feet while I eat and once in a while, I'll feel a drop or two of drool on my foot or see a few drops on the floor while she begs. She is ridiculously intelligent, but most of all, she is my psychic dog. Her sensitivity to energetic shifts around us when we do shamanic work still amazes me. Her awareness of spirits and entities that pass through or linger has been of utmost help to us when we lose our connection sometimes due to the turmoil that life can offer. She can discern between the friendlies and the nasties and she will play with other dogs-in-spirit, namely my wife's dog that left the planet many years ago (who, by the way, told us that he is coming back).
Bailey is the 9th dog companion that I've been blessed with during my journey down here. I've loved them all and that should go without saying. But loving a dog is NOT the same as being IN LOVE with a dog. And I can honestly say that I'm IN LOVE with Bailey. Her energy and soul is as pure as freshly-fallen snow and she single-handedly (or single-pawedly) saved me from choosing an early exit from this ball of dirt.