Peace of Mind for Pet Parents Episode 013: The First Time We Knew: Encounters With the Other Side

Episode Transcript: 

Karen Wylie:
Hello, and welcome to Peace of Mind for Pet Parents. I'm Karen Wylie, here as always with my partner in crime, Gail Pope.

Today we're going to follow up a little bit on our topic from our last episode, where we explored BrightHaven's overall approach and philosophy of healing for the highest good. We were talking about the fact that that is a holistic approach.

Very often we put the letter W in front of the H in holistic to try to show we're expanding — not just to the physical or the emotional, but the social and spiritual levels or layers of us and our animals as well. And so today we thought what we would do is explore how Gail and I first became aware of this other dimension beyond our day-to-day physical — and these little glimpses that we had along the way of a spiritual dimension beyond us.

And so, Gail, I'm as usual going to throw it to you first and ask you to share when you first became aware of this other spiritual dimension that, at that point, wasn’t part of your day-to-day experience.

Gail Pope:
I guess that takes me back to... not really my childhood — there may have been some experiences there — but more in my younger than, like, eleven, twelve, thirteen age, because the one thing that I do remember from then was, I thought, just a silly thing that I completely dismissed. But I guess the mere fact I remember it after all these years...

I call it “paws on the bed.” I would wake up — I mean, we always had cats or dogs, or a cat or a dog — so I was very well used to them sleeping on my bed. And, you know, you're in that half-asleep situation, and they walk across your bed. So I remember distinctly the number of times I would wake up with paws walking across the bed... and there was no one there. But at that time, I guess I dismissed it.

Another strange occurrence again that has stuck in my mind from back then was coming down the stairs, and then glancing back up one evening — early evening — and seeing this kind of like a white mist. It wasn’t white... it was just a misty movement on the stairs. Almost, it was like the size of a smallish person, and it was moving a little bit, and I stopped and I stared — and then I panicked, and I ran into the kitchen!

I hadn’t seen it — so I think it was, you know, silly little things like that when I was very young. It was only when I was older that I started being led a little bit more, and that really came under the heading of my Spiritualist Church days.

My father — or rather, my stepfather — was a member of the Spiritualist Church locally, but I’d never been, and he’d never talked about it. In fact, I didn’t even know that he went. And on one occasion he asked if I’d like to go with him. So I did. And it was a service where people were invited to put their rings, a piece of jewelry or even a lock of hair in a box. And he’d take the box with whatever they put in — — and then he would give a reading.

It was fascinating, and it was so fascinating that I asked my dad if I could make an appointment and have a reading with him. And it was, you know, exciting and scary. But you know... I didn’t think too deeply about it — until I had the reading.

The gentleman’s name was Clive. It stuck in my memory so clearly. And he said, “Before I begin my reading, I want to reassure you of what I’m going to be sharing with you. I have a lady here who says it’s very important that she identify herself as your grandmother so that you’ll be comfortable with this.” And, you know, I’m sitting there like...EEK!

And he said, “She’s asking me to describe a piece of furniture.” And he described my grandma’s dressing table.

And the special thing about it — as a child, actually even a little bit older — I would love to sit on this beautiful stool she had and play with all these cute little drawers. It was very, very old-fashioned. It was absolutely gorgeous. And on the right-hand side, there were two drawers, and there was a secret drawer.

And he described — he described the dressing table. And then he said, “And you need to look on the right-hand side.” He said, “It’s like a drawer, but you can’t see it.”

So that really was what pulled me in.

And then there was another occurrence that links to that — that actually happened like two years ago. After my husband died, I went to see a medium with my daughter. And she welcomed me into the room, and she said, “I have to begin by explaining to you, I guess, my validity — and excuse me, I have a lady here who is at a grandma level, and she wants me to describe—” and there it was again.

She described the dress— and I’ve just gone goosey — she just described the dressing table of my grandmother’s.

And then she went on. And I could talk for hours about all the different things she told me. But the journey really takes me back to my younger days, where there were little snippets. I know you’ve had all sorts of experiences, so I’m passing this back to you now.

Karen Wylie:
You're passing the baton — or the hot potato — whichever way we want to look at it today! LOL

Yes, I think in some ways my childhood was like yours in that I had a sense of my animals that was just a knowing all the time. I knew what they thought, what they wanted. I was overall very much more in sync with animals — my cats, dogs, and horses. 

I was fortunate enough to have my own pony and horse in my own backyard. So, you know, it was 24/7 for, what, 13 years? So it wasn’t like once a week going to a boarding stable, but spending every day with my animals. But as a child, it’s not like I was thinking, Oh, I’m getting this information from my animals. It just WAS. It just was my life.

And I never thought about it as a spiritual or psychic anything. Didn’t have the language for it, didn’t have the exposure to it in my world.

So I really look at my first spiritual experience as when my father died. I was 22 and in graduate school in Nashville, Tennessee. I was raised in Connecticut — which is where my mom and dad were — and it was early August of that year. My grad school roomies and I were going to have a fun weekend in one of the state parks because we’d finished summer semester.

I was at my job, my grad assistant job, getting all my stuff done for the week because it was Friday. I was going to leave for the weekend, and you know, I was feeling great, looking forward to a wonderful weekend. And suddenly, every ounce of energy in my body was gone, and I felt myself collapsing. I barely — you know, was apparently close to a couch, so there I went.

And I’d never fainted in my life. I mean, it was just not... it’s not something that happens to me. That’s not how I process anything. And it was just really weird. And everyone was like, “Karen, you know, you cannot go out to the state parks.”

I’m 67 years old, and at 22 years old you can understand that there were no cell phones at that time. And when you’re 22, you’re not thinking about making sure everybody knows where you are, and giving a phone number for the park ranger to find you. I went home and waited for my roomies to come home to tell them, “I’m not sure if I should go because I fainted.”

And then the phone rang. And it was my sister telling me that our father had died.

I mean, just the sequence of it — that I was suddenly home there to receive the phone call. Also, this was before there were answering machines. So you actually had to be there to pick up the landline phone. It was this whole sequence of forcing me to go home — that the circumstances made me change my plan.

I said, “When did it happen? When did he die?” And she said, “Oh, it was, you know, about a half hour ago.”

And I immediately was like, “A half hour ago? Really? Are you sure?” And she goes, “Well, pretty sure. I have to ask Mom — she was with him — but, you know, just about.” And of course, that was my awareness that I had experienced something at the time of the death of my father.

At the time, you're like, God, isn’t this weird? Isn’t this something? You don’t try to put a label on it and say, This is what it is. It’s just... you know. So I shared it with my sister, and shared with my mother, and shared with my best friend Betsy.

But it was like, looking back on it, Did he let me experience his movement of spirit from his body out to another dimension? Or did he come to let me know he was passing? That he — he literally — people often talk about someone’s spirit passing through their body. Was that the cause of my collapse? Obviously, I don’t know.

But I had that experience. And then I had a whole lot of psychic experiences with one of my roomies a couple years later.

Then, really, it all just got shelved away. I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was developing a consulting business, and the logical part of my brain was much more in gear than the intuitive side.

I started raising purebred cats in the late eighties, and brought in a beautiful little girl named Annie. And when Annie was 8 months old, Annie threw a blood clot. We found out she had a very bad case of cardiomyopathy — hypertrophic cardiomyopathy — and she died five weeks later.

Despite everything that we did — which I’ll describe in another podcast episode where we can talk about cardio — I was really traumatized by her loss. Because... well, you know how I am. I work so hard to analyze everything and make sure we have everything taken care of, and I’m usually able to take care of things in my life, clients and businesses that way.

But no matter what I did for Annie, no matter what my vets tried to do with me FOR Annie, I still lost her. And my grief was... was profound. And my inability to really acknowledge that that had happened — that I hadn’t been able to control that — it hit me on all levels.

I was so physically stressed out by it. It was about 9 or 10 days after Annie died that I was just bending down to lift up Cyclone — my very first Birman — all 15 or 16 pounds of him. And I must have just bent down wrong, with all of the muscles in my back tight, tight, tight because of the grief I was carrying. And I tore every ligament in the lumbar area of my back.

I was in bed for six weeks, wore a TENS unit for six months, and unable to drive my lovely little standard Toyota for about a year because I couldn’t switch gears with my legs— it was so painful.

So it was a really big deal. And in those six weeks, I was drugged up like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve never — I was never drugged up like that before or since. I had all the muscle relaxants, I had the painkillers. It was really, really bad.

But there was something about that process that obviously slowed my logical brain down. So I wasn’t analyzing a thing — and my intuition opened up, because I found that Annie was with me.

I mean, I knew every little nuance and contour of her body, both before and after she got sick. It was her. She was with me. I felt her. I saw her. I knew it was her. And because I was so drugged out, I wasn’t judging myself either. It just became my reality for several weeks.

I would tell my husband, Tim, about it every day. And after I was able to sit up a little bit, move a little bit — six, eight weeks later — I told my friend Carol, who was my veterinarian, about it.

I said, “I saw Annie. I felt Annie. I am sure she spent part of those weeks in bed with me.” I knew Carol wouldn’t judge me. But what I was unprepared for was Carol saying, “Well, I completely believe you. You were where you were at. You were able to perceive her. This definitely happens. But this isn’t my area. I’m going to turn you over to my sister Jo. Hold on a minute.”

And she handed the phone to her sister Jo, who was a Reiki master. And so then Jo started helping me frame my experience a little differently. She started giving me my first Reiki treatments over the next couple of weeks.

And so from that point — that was 34 years ago — I have known that energy is real. And that being able to communicate with people and animals that pass over is possible.

That doesn’t mean that I’m able to do it every minute of every day — even the best mediums generally can’t do that — but it is something that, over the past 30 years, I’ve taken a lot of training on: to explore energy and spirituality.

And, now it’s pretty — I’d say it’s pretty essential to who I am. Even though right now, you know, here we’re doing podcasts and website design and my logical brain is very, very focused. But if I pause, I can also get a sense of any guidance that might be available to me.

Gail Pope:
I think I'd like to book an appointment.

Karen Wylie: Please!  I'm not that good — and you know, I’ve told you that. No, no, not going to be putting out any sign for that, because it's not consistent for me at all.

I go back and forth between my analytical work, but I think I am guided in so many more ways than I'm aware of — of what I'm able to sense. And the training — I should say the best mediumship training that I pursued — was during COVID, because, well, the world slowed down. And I got a message that I was supposed to be exploring working with the dying. And, well, that led me to: Can I receive anything from the dying? How do you do that?

And where I turned to was Spiritualist Church training in the UK. So that’s interesting — you know, where you and I both — that was our touchpoint of what gave us our first experiences of being able to receive information.

Gail Pope: Oh gosh, you just reminded me of another experience that I had back in those days. Gosh, I hadn’t thought about this for a long time. And in fact, what was interesting is, after what I’m about to tell you happened, instead of me diving deeper into the world of mediumship or spirituality, it somehow... it was like the icing on the cake. I was comfortable. It made me believe.

It was very bizarre. I still remember it very clearly. I was sitting in the living room reading a book — I can see myself now — very mid-evening, just sitting, reading. And all of a sudden, I was up in the ceiling. I was — it was where the wall meets the ceiling. It was like in the corner of the room. And my head was wedged up against the ceiling — so I was tightly held.

And I opened my eyes, and I looked, and I watched myself sitting in this chair with a book. And I remember thinking, How strange. I’m here, and I’m also there, reading a book. And at that moment, I was... back in the chair, reading my book.

The shock was huge. And yet it was... it was more of a knowing — an underlining. You know, it just made me feel really comfortable. There's a lot — a lot more here. This is — it just underscored the tippy toes that I’ve taken so far into this beautiful, great big world.

And you would have thought that I would have stepped into that world after that — to learn more and to do more — but I didn’t. I was comfortable. And that was the end of my exploration at that time.

And it really was only in the world of BrightHaven, as I was gradually introduced to Reiki and to the different facets of this world of energy — and then dealing with the numbers of animals at the end of life — and here is a topic for another conversation: all the various spiritual aspects of the dying process.

Karen Wylie:
Absolutely.

Gail Pope:
And they line up so beautifully, as well, with human experience in death and the things we see our humans experiencing. So, I guess that's another time.

Karen Wylie:
Yeah, but you know exactly what you're saying — I mean, my two key psychic experiences or spiritual experiences were both associated with death: my father's, and then a pet I loved. And, although they're different and felt different, it's still, in essence, the same thing.

But what I wanted to respond to here — with you describing being up at the ceiling, looking down at yourself — I think you’re very clairsentient. And I know I've said this to you before, that because you — just like I do — we both sense when our babies are passing over.

Yeah, you know, we can be sleeping, and you're awakened, just like I'm awakened. I talk about it, you know — there’s a disturbance in the force. The energetic field is different, you know?

So, I want to share one thing that happened to me at one of my first mediumship training evenings. Because one of the things that you do when you want to learn about psychic development or mediumship development — psychic is when you know things about your own world in this dimension that are not physical, and mediumship is when you're communicating with someone in another dimension, someone who’s passed over. So that’s the language there: psychic and mediumship.

But at one of these Sunday nights — because you try to hang out with a new group — you basically become a member of a group and meet every week with people who also want to expand their awareness. And I was in a group with people who were really — oh my God — they could sense things on all levels.

Not just being clairvoyant, in terms of being able to see something that isn’t in the physical realm, or clairaudient, where they're hearing — you and I are both claircognizant and clairsentient, in terms of we feel something and then we kind of have an understanding of what that feeling means. Some of these people were actually smelling things and tasting things — so that they would know when someone who died had worked in a New York deli, for example.

But anyway — here’s where I was going with all that story: We would have a 20-minute meditation to kind of get all of us ready to receive. And then we would come out of that meditation and be like, Okay... who wants to go first? What do you have?

I had seen one thing. And it was the weirdest thing. I suddenly saw an operating room. And it was like I was above the operating room, looking down at the table. Now — *I* was not on the table. But I was aware I was looking at an operating room. And then all of a sudden, I’m in the body of the person on the operating room table. Because I’m looking up and I’m seeing, as you would see, members of a surgical team — and they were all masked and in their gear and everything — and the bright lights up there.

And, then we came out of the meditation. But that’s — that’s the only piece I got. I had no... you know, it’s like, Oh God, all these people know so much more than I do. You know?

So they’re going around debriefing everybody — who received all this wonderful different stuff from everybody’s relatives that night. They come to me and the facilitator says, “Karen, how about you?”

And I’m like, It’s too weird.

And of course they’re all laughing, because, if you’re in a group of people becoming mediums, weird takes on a new definition. And she said, “Just go ahead.”

And so I described this operating room. And I’m like, “I have no idea. I don’t know who it might be for here in the group. I don’t know who was on the table. I’m not planning on surgery for myself or a family member. I have no idea why I saw that.”

And the facilitator said, “I can tell you why, Karen. Because yesterday, all of us in my Sydney, Australia mediumship group on Tuesday mornings received notice that one of our longtime members was going to be in surgery.” And she picked up her wrist to view her watch and she said, “And she’s under anesthesia right now.”

And she said, “You picked it up from me.” Or — there were also two or three other people there from the Tuesday group.

So, you know, for me, a lot of the messages I receive have something to do with me experiencing someone else while I’m in my body — but I’m thinking I’m in theirs. Or having that look, you know, like you were describing — where you detach from yourself and you’re looking down.

And I guess just as a final note to that story, it’s that even though I would only be having one or two of those little “ahas” every Sunday night — compared to the twenty other facts other people would be getting — it was enough for me to begin realizing that it’s not my imagination.

And it’s not... you know, how could my facilitator in Sydney, Australia — how? I didn’t know about her friend. I wasn’t part of that group to receive an email that somebody was going to be in surgery at that time. You know, it’s like — there are too many things you can rule out. It’s not a coincidence.

And that’s the aspect, I think, for truly holistic approaches, as we often talk about, that are so important for us in understanding how to approach the care of our pets, their ultimate death, trying to connect with them later.

It’s acknowledging these little snippets — these little experiences that we have along the way — that then allow us to accept that it’s real. And when we start doing that, bit by bit by bit, the more we do, the better we’re able to connect with our animals.

Gail Pope:

Yes, I think as children, we do it naturally, and we just take it for granted — we don't think about it. And as we get older, we start to live in the modern world, and it goes by the wayside. But...

I think maybe next time we're talking, we should share some of the animal experiences that we’ve had — that to me are... they're so rewarding when an animal's dying and you have a spiritual experience with them.

Oops! It’s... it's something to remember. I know I'm sitting here with thoughts going through my mind — all the little—

Karen Wylie:
Grab your pen.

Gail Pope:
It's more like my brain.

Karen Wylie: Yeah, it’s so true. And for so many of us, a death that we experience — whether it's a loved one, a human loved one, or a four-footed one — that can be our awakening. It can be our first awareness, our sensing of something beyond the physical.

And it's an incredible, incredible journey to take — both for yourself and your future, but with your pet. So we will definitely — there's just a few experiences for us to explore with our animals, right?

Gail Pope: I'm excited. Yes, absolutely. I look forward to the next time.

Karen Wylie:
Me too, me too. And we thank each of you for being with us today, and we hope that hearing about some of our experiences — over decades of time — and allowing this awareness of spirit to become more a part of our day-to-day life is at least of interest to you, and perhaps helpful in you recognizing what you're experiencing as you enjoy day to day with your animals.

We hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, and we look forward to being with you next time. Bye-bye now.

Gail Pope:
Goodbye!