149. Facing Fear with My Dog Rusty | Lessons of Calm and Gratitude

In today’s episode, we discuss:

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🐾"Facing Fear with Rusty: Lessons in Calm and Gratitude"
In this touching video, we dive into a personal journey alongside Rusty, a loyal companion of 12 years. Through Rusty's seizures and the challenges life throws our way, we discover the power of remaining calm in the face of fear, practicing gratitude, and embracing every obstacle as an opportunity for growth.

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📚 Links mentioned in today’s episode and bonus resources:
Kathie Owen’s Links: https://www.kathieowen.com/links
Blog Post for today’s episode: https://www.kathieowen.com/blog/rusty-seizures
Joseph Rodrigues YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JosephRodrigues
Albert on Wheels on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/albertonwheels
The book Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland: https://amzn.to/3HPHOo1
The book A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle: https://amzn.to/3HMX59p

Free download and bonus content for Transurfing with Kathie: https://www.kathieowen.com/reality-transurfing

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Transcript

0:00

So as a coach, I'm often led to help people understand how to stay calm and stressful situations, how to build resilience. And that is exactly what we're gonna talk about today. So over the weekend, my bestest friend in the whole world, rusty, had seizures and he so has a history of seizures. And those things are very scary because let me tell you a little bit about Rusty. I've had him for 12 years. He's my best friend. He is my soulmate. I just love this little guy, and we've been through many, many challenges together. For example, I had a custody battle that lasted 14 years. He was part of that during the worst times of the custody battle. My house got stolen from me of all things that was so difficult. I went through that. He was there for that. And then we moved into a lovely house that I live in today that I absolutely love. I see where I had to go through these struggles to get to the other side. I filed a bankruptcy during this. A house situation where lawyers misled me. I had three different lawyers who misled me in all kinds of ways, but they also helped me overcome. That's what all of these struggles do. Struggles are just opportunities in disguise. Rusty's always been there through all of that. So Rusty is my very best friend. He goes to work with me two to three days a week. And he is had a history of seizures. And after talking to the vet, I understand what happens during his seizure and he is now what I think about 12 years old. He's a rescue dog, so I don't really know how old he's, but as he ages, he's having more and more seizures. The seizures are. Kind of considered normal. The vet told me he's probably been having him all of his life. Is just now they're getting more intense. So Friday I took him to work with me. We went to work at six in the morning. I got him up at five 30. He jumped out of bed. He's usually sleepy. And then we went to work at the gym and he got lots of exercise and activity. Yeah, he even gets exercise. He goes outside and walks and we have to walk to the building because we're on this big campus. So he got a lot of exercise and he got a lot of stimulation that day. When he gets home from work, he's usually passed out and sleeping at usually about seven o'clock.'cause I usually work 10 to six and then we get home and he goes to bed. But this day on Friday, we had company over Friday night and he stayed up till midnight. He started acting kind of strange. Uh, late in the night he was sleeping in the flower bed and on the couch he was just out. And I thought it was kind of odd, but I just figured he was tired. But at 4:00 AM on Saturday morning, he woke up and he was restless. And moving around in the bed. I thought it was time to get up. Maybe he thought it was time to get up'cause I usually get up about that time. But no, he started having a seizure. When he has a seizure, he starts to straighten out his legs and arch his back, and he cries like he's hurt. And I've been taught by the vet that what you need to do is remain calm, cover his eyes, because what's happening is his brain is overstimulated, so he needs to calm down and I need to remain calm. But let me tell you something. It looks like he is dying. It's the scariest thing is to have such a close relationship with this little guy. I mean, he actually cannot be out of the room with me. He has to know exactly where I am at all times. And just to know that I have to remain calm. And so this is where the lesson for today comes into play because it's not easy because not only did he have one seizure that day, but he had another one, and then at 6:00 AM I picked him up and put him on the floor and he couldn't stand up. So I had to hold him again and I have to cover his eyes and wrap him in a blanket and hold him tight and remain calm despite feeling like I'm about to lose the most important thing in my life, and I do it. And I figured today would be a great day to share the lessons that I've learned over the time with my house being stolen, going through a custody battle that lasted 14 years, the pandemic, having an estranged relationship with my oldest son. And despite all of those things, I kept a positive attitude, a positive outlook. I believe that when you do that. It shifts everything and it makes it a lot better. Like Eckhart Tolle says, it's just complaining. Doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it worse and letting go. And we're gonna talk about all of that today.

Kathie: 5:32

You're listening to Kathie's Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Kathie Owen.

5:36

So challenges in my belief are just opportunities in disguise and. Honestly, I believe that everything that happens to you contributes to your vision. This is taught to me by my mentor and my coach, Joseph Rodriguez. I'll have a link to his channel in the show notes and description below. What he teaches us is that we, we have a vision, we have a goal, and it's important to set that goal. It's like a definite chief aim, like taught by Napoleon Hill, and I have a definite chief aim this year in 2024. I wanna grow my coaching business. I want to level up in my public speaking level, up in my coaching business and all of those things. Are, you know, moving to new levels are going to have challenges and how we. Face those challenges is important and imperative to our success, and we, if we look at everything contributing to our success, we find that even Rusty's seizures contributed to my success. Even the custody battle contributed to my success. Even the house being stolen from me and the lawyers mistreating me. All of those things contribute to my success. But we're looking at 2024 right now, and me looking at my very most important thing in my life as almost losing him, and how do I remain calm in that, in that instance, and how does that contribute to my vision? You wanna face problems with calmness, trust, faith, non-attachment. So I wanna introduce the idea of reducing importance from Reality Transurfing when you put something up on a pedestal and you make it super important, like I make rusty. You put it on a pedestal and you invite excess potential to come in, which causes panic when you see him about to die. It causes panic when you feel like you can't handle those emotions. Like for instance, I feel, feel like I'm not gonna be able to handle the emotion of him. Dying. That's what it feels like. But emotions are just energy, emotion. What happens when you make something super important? Those emotions gain energy. They gain excess potential, which can knock you off balance, and that's not where you wanna go. And so I find that handling emotions with trust, with faith, with reducing importance, with reducing attachment makes a big difference. But how does one do that when it's something is so important, like a family member, like a child, like a dog? How does one do that? Well, that is what this episode is all about, and I'm showing you how I handle something. By reducing all of these things and what happens in the process. So I follow this little dog on Instagram. His name is Albert on Wheels, and I will have a link to him in the show notes and description below. But this little dog was born unable to use his back legs. So he had wheels that he used to help him. Walk and he's the cutest little dog. I'll have a picture of him in my blog post that goes with this article as well, but he's so cute. But all of a sudden he got sick and he just wasn't feeling well. And in like four days he passed away and my heart just went out to his owner because I could feel and sense the grief. And she wrote on her page this quote. Maybe The reason I love dogs so much is because the only time they have ever broken my heart is when they crossed the Rainbow Bridge. And I say that with tears in my eyes because I know that that's the only time, the only time that Rusty's ever gonna break my heart. As humans, we just have all kinds of relationships and humans hurt each other. It's truth. And so it's easy to make something like a dog so important because they're always there. They're always there through the time, trying times. They're always there through the great times. And the thing about Rusty is I take him to work with me. I. And I work in a gym at, I'm the corporate wellness director at OCuSOFT, and inside of this gym, he'll get to a place where he can't see me and when he can't see me, I can see him. But I start to see him panic because he has to have me in his sight. It's just the cutest thing at home. He follows me from room to room to room, and he stays right beside me, or he lays really close to where I am so he can still. Know that I am right there and I believe he senses my peace, especially when he's having a trying time and that it helps him overcome that. And he's, he's connected to me. I agree with her sentiment that crossing the rainbow bridge is. The only time that a dog will break your heart, but I also believe in the power of gratitude. I've lost another dog in 2021. I wasn't as close to her as I am to Rusty, but when I lost her, I found a sense of gratitude for the times that I did have her. I had her from 2007 to 2021, and my custody battle was all through that time. I went through all kinds of. Turmoil and tribulations, and she was always there, rusty was always there. And in fact, when she passed away, rusty grieved her loss and was looking for her everywhere. And it took us a while to overcome that. But I found gratitude in that process and that gratitude took the effect of, I was just appreciative of the times that I had with her. And same thing with Rusty. Every time he has a seizure, in my mind I go through, well, this could be it, and it could be. I don't know. He's 12 years old. That's a old dog, but he seems pretty healthy. But I don't know. But I do find gratitude in the time I had with him. I would rather have had that time and lost him than not have that at all. I. And with that shift in perspective, with that shift in attitude, it helps me look at things differently. I went through this with my, my children in the custody battle as well, because they got taken away. They would go on trips on my custody time, and I would not even know where they were. And I got to a point where I wouldn't let that. Overwhelm me and upset me. And the way I did that was I reduced importance. I found gratitude for what I did have, and I let go of attachment to how I thought things were supposed to be. And I learned that from the book, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle when you let go of attachment of how things are supposed to be, for example, how I'm supposed to be labeled as a mom, I had to let go of a lot of different labels and perspectives. And when I did that, it shifted me to another level. And that's why something like. What I'm going through right now. Every time I find I'm in some kind of what, so-called problem, that's just your perception of it, but it does contribute to your vision. So me going through this is teaching me to remain calm during stressful situations. On top of that, I'm able to teach and communicate how I did it and hopefully help you at the same time. So it, it's, it's kind of difficult for me to talk about this because it's real and raw and. A very emotional, but remember, emotions are just energy, emotion, and when you sit back and you trust the process, you relax, you reduce importance with, to me, gratitude helps that and. Stop creating excess potential around everything that you're doing and also realize that everything's contributing to your vision. If you get into a car accident that's contributing to your vision somehow, some way, and when you break it down and you look at it that way, you can find that things don't happen to you. They happen for you. So Rusty's seizures are not happening to me to make me upset or make me stressed. They're happening for me so that I can learn to remain calm, reduce importance, practice gratitude, find faith in the process, and trust that my faith is gonna get me through. Those energies in motion. It shifts everything. It shifts everything, and then it contributes to your vision and makes your vision bigger because the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. That is a quote by Joseph Campbell, and I believe in that with all of my heart. And I actually would encourage you to embrace life's challenges with resilience and a positive outlook. Not like just putting a bandaid on it, but when you reduce importance. Practice gratitude. Trust the process, find faith in there, and also reducing attachment to what things should be. It creates a different scenario, a different way of playing out, and you will find things on the other side where, wow, I see where that contributed. I see where that helped me overcome. The situation and also level up. I appreciate Rusty's companionship. I appreciate the fact that he's been in my life as long as he has, and I will treasure every moment I have with him from here on out. And when he does die, I will grieve. I, I will grieve. It will be I'm sure difficult. But I also have the faith. I have gratitude for him. I also can see the companionship that he brought me, how it helped me to level up in different ways. So I wanna encourage you to face challenges head on, know that they are contributing to your personal growth and your success. And those emotions are just energy, emotion. When you have faith, trust, reducing importance, reducing attachment, everything looks different. All right, that's my episode for today. I trust that you found it helpful, and until next time, I will see you next time. Peace out and nama day. B.