It’s been a year since my cat Furball passed away. I had him for 20 years. He witnessed my transformation from stressed out tech worker to “here I am now!” Lol, it’s too hard to describe what I do now. I recently had a vivid dream with Furball in it. Somehow he had returned to life after being gone. He was getting into the middle of everything, like he always did. This time, he was crawling under the laundry, and then he poked his head out to head butt me.
A year after his passing, I finally made the commitment to clear out the last of his cat food still in the pantry. I found a local animal shelter that would appreciate his special diet food. And as I’m typing this, I feel big fat tears rolling down my cheek.
Interestingly, I also received an important message from the Universe when I woke up from the dream. It was on the power to transform grief into joy.
Here’s some special Dragon Spirit wisdom on turning grief into joy:
“When you feel sadness about the loss of a loved on, think of the joy they brought to your life. The grief will be ‘overshadowed’ by the joy. While you may carry sadness in your heart, use it to activate joy, and the sadness will no longer weigh you down.
How do you do this?
Whenever you feel sad because of their passing, recall a joyous memory. You will then replace the sad feeling with heart-bursting joy.
It is not a coincidence that the heart and lungs are in the same area of your body. [Note from Holly: In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Lungs are associated with the emotion of grief, and the Heart is associated with the emotion of joy.] The heart has the ability to counter the sadness with joy, but you must choose for this to happen. You do this by choosing what you dwell upon. Fous on the joyful memories.
Right now, I’m thinking of how Furball loved to play. I had this dangly polar fleece fabric on a stick and he would latch onto it and not let go. That got me thinking of another toy he had, which we named the “muskrat.” It looked like a big rodent on a string. Furball would grab that and bunny kick it, with his ears back, and the most hilarious expression.
Another time, when my son was a baby, we had a Diaper Genie. It’s a bin for stuffing used diapers. There’s a plastic bag inside and a fairly airtight seal on the lid to keep the odors in. However, when you took off the lid, the odors would be released. To empty the bin, we would squeeze down the old diapers so that there was enough plastic bag at the top to tie it off.
One day, Furball who is always so curious, came by and stuck his head in the Diaper Genie bag just as I pressed down to compress the diapers. This sent a week’s worth of concentrated poo smell directly whooshed into his face.
You should have seen the horrified expression on his face. He looked like a cartoon cat with his eyes all bugged out, and he ran away as fast as he could. Poor thing, but I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m smiling and laughing right now thinking about it.
See. This is how you turn grief into joy.