A Story of Unconventional Healing

[00:00:00] Hey, dear ones, we are now two part three of a four part series where I’m sharing inspirational stories. The inspiration behind this series is that tomorrow’s my birthday, and I’m really looking at ways to just pour into myself this year. And when I thought about what I wanted to record. For the next batch of podcasts due, I thought, it would really be fun to share inspirational stories.

[00:00:34] So in today’s episode, I reveal the third inspirational story of our series, which has its origins in Malaga, Spain. I’ll end on an invitation that will have you identifying all the unconventional ways that you may have received healing over the years. Hint, that’s what this story is about without even realizing it.

[00:01:00] So please stay with me until the end. Hello there. We’re creating a global community of soul guided leaders, coaches, healers, and entrepreneurs called the Soul Guide Circle and the Soul Guide Circle. We’re inviting in our spiritual gifts to get our clients even more results and transformations so you can create massive referral buzz.

[00:01:57] Finally, link to join our close Facebook group@allisonscam.com or in the show notes today. We’re talking about my dog, Astrid. Now look, I get it. Everybody loves to talk about their own kids and talk about their own dogs and say how our kids and our dogs are more special than yours and anyone else’s.

[00:02:22] Today’s story is gonna be different because I’m here to say that my dog Astrid is more special than all the other dogs. No, I’m just kidding. But I kind of am not just kidding. ’cause there is kind of a flavor of that. So before you roll your eyes and say, yeah, yeah. Allison, I hear you. I have a special dog too.

[00:02:45] I wanna say, I know that you have a special dog or pet or animal or thing in your life too, but this is more a story about this special animal. That is really inspirational, so please stay with me. So I have a dog named Astrid and she’s a Spanish greyhound. For those of you catching this on YouTube, I am actually wearing my Greyhound t-shirt.

[00:03:14] I’m showing it on the camera right now. Greyhounds are such beautiful animals. I’m a big Greyhound fan. Here’s a few things about Greyhounds you may not have already known. One. They are one of, and many believe to be the most abused dog breed in the world. Many places racing greyhounds is illegal, but many places it is not.

[00:03:40] And if you ever hear dog racers say they use humane practices of their dogs, please question that ’cause it’s often not true. Spain has a special. Way that they race greyhounds, and it’s not on a track. It’s through a field and it’s called coursing, and it’s actually much, much more dangerous. The Spanish greyhound racers have lobbied the government so that greyhounds, Spanish Greyhounds called gal GOs are considered property. They are the same as a pair of shoes, so you can treat them legally, any which way you could legally treat a pair of shoes. So the dogs have basically no rights.

[00:04:36] The practice in Spain is to over breed the dogs on purpose because finding the winning race dog is like finding a diamond in the rough. So they say, so they over breed on purpose, and then they use really, really horrible, awful techniques to determine quickly. Which dogs will indeed hunt. You know that expression, that dog will hunt, which dogs will indeed be the ones that they will keep to train to race through these fields.

[00:05:16] I’m not gonna go into it because this is an inspirational story, but just trust me when I say the tactics they use to cull, if you will, the dogs, to find out which ones will be. The winners in which ones won’t is very abusive and horrible, and I’m using the word cull because the dogs that don’t get picked, which is a overwhelming majority of them, because remember they’ve been over bred, so they’ve got lots of dogs.

[00:05:49] They only fit, pick a few to actually race, and those that aren’t chosen at very, very best just get. Released into the wilderness so they get abandoned. But sometimes what happens to these dogs who don’t get chosen is much, much worse than that. If you wanna learn more about it, all you have to do is Google Spanish, Greyhound, and most of the links that will pop up are actually about the abuse of greyhounds, especially Spanish Greyhounds.

[00:06:23] Some of the videos and stories are really, really hard to watch and read, but I’m sharing this because I do wanna bring awareness to the fact that this practice is going on, and if we don’t talk about it, people won’t know about it. So I will say Astrid was your stereotypical pandemic dog. So it was , the middle of the pandemic when we were, 

[00:06:50] longing for human to human contact, and we thought, okay, we’re quarantined inside of our house. We’ve been talking about getting a dog. At that time, our daughter, Freya was four. Both of my, my husband and I grew up with dogs. I grew up on a farm. We always had a dog. My husband, Pete, grew up in a real dog family, so they always had two to even three dogs.

[00:07:15] And so dogs were a huge part of his childhood and mine too. And we really wanted Freya to have that experience. And neither Pete nor I had a dog as an adult up until now because we traveled all the time. But we thought, okay, here we are settled in the Netherlands. It’s a pandemic. Let’s get a dog. 

[00:07:35] So once we got into the Yes energy about getting a dog, it all got very synchronistic and my husband’s first wife’s aunt, who we’re all very, we’re very close to her and her family. She owns one of the most reputable grey Spanish, Greyhound dog rescue shelters in Spain, in Malaga. And so we contacted her and said, Hey, do you.

[00:08:04] Have a greyhound for us. I didn’t know anything about greyhounds. I didn’t know anything about rescue dogs and rescue dogs who have been abused are a special, you know, they just require special considerations. They, they need. Special care, which I’m gonna be talking about in just a sec. And at the time, Freya was four years old, so that was also a consideration.

[00:08:33] We, what we really needed was like a dog that was really good with kids, but with these rescue dogs, you weren’t always exactly sure what you are gonna get. But we knew this woman, her name is Farrah, the head of this rescue shelter, which I’m gonna talk about more in just a sec. And we knew that she would give us, I just knew intuitively that she was gonna give us a special dog.

[00:08:58] So we agreed we were gonna get Astrid at the time. She was 18 months old. Astrid in a couple weeks is gonna turn six. Aw. So this was , four and a half years ago. And so, because it was a pandemic, they ended up driving a bunch of dogs up from Spain to the Netherlands where a group of people were adopting these dogs.

[00:09:24] And because it was the pandemic, like we, you know, usually there’s a big party and there’s a big like handover process, but because of the pandemic we literally had to like drive our car up. Pick the dog up and drive away. And my husband and I were like, we’re not like, we both grew up with dogs, but like our parents took care of the dogs.

[00:09:45] Like we just really felt like we had no idea what we were doing. So we get this dog and she was really scared. We, we were trying to get her to jump up into the back of our. , SUV and she was too scared to, so what we had her do instead is we picked her up and we put her in the backseat with me, and she sat down next to me and she just sort of cuddled up to me on the drive home.

[00:10:12] And I knew from that moment I’m like, oh, she’s cuddling with me. For those of you who know the breed, the Greyhound, they’re not the cuddliest breed in the world. They’re quite an aloof breed actually. But she really was, it was kind of a rare moment, which I realize now that Asford was cuddling with me.

[00:10:31] I think she was really happy she had found her home. So we get her home. And you know, I remember the first nights were a little like, wow, what are we gonna do with this dog? She had never lived inside. We had to house trainers. That was like the next thing. And then the next thing after that, that came right away was Freya.

[00:10:53] Freya was a little bit or a lot, a bit jealous. At all the attention that Pete and I were giving to Astrid, our new dog, you know, dog training, helping her to get acclimatized. It was an unusually, we got her in March and it was an unusually cold march in the Netherlands, and this poor dog who had just come from like super warm, beautiful weather was freezing.

[00:11:20] Greyhounds don’t have much of a coat, so she had no fur. So we were just trying to do everything to make this dog feel comfortable. But Freya was not having it. So she would tug on the dog’s ears. She would tug on his tail. She would, just give Astrid unwanted attention. And here’s the thing about Astrid.

[00:11:42] She will let you know when she doesn’t want it. She’s the best communicator I’ve ever known. If she likes it, she’ll tell you. If she doesn’t like it, you’ll know. And she tells you with a growl, the girl likes to growl. So when we first got her and a, , frail was messing with her, she would growl. And because we didn’t know this dog and we didn’t know what she was capable of doing, we didn’t know if Astrid was gonna bite Frey’s face off.

[00:12:13] So we had to monitor the dog and the 4-year-old at all times. Now you might think, oh, well there’s two parents that shouldn’t be that hard. Let me tell you, it was hard if I had to go to the bathroom, I had to call Pete and say, Pete, come here. Be on dog and Child Watch while I go to the bathroom. We literally had to monitor them at all times, and when Freya wouldn’t listen to us, we’d be like, Freya, Freya don’t.

[00:12:47] Pester the dog, but she’d do it anyway. And I wasn’t sure how the dog was gonna react. I would get very nervous and very scared that the dog would bite her or do, , do something terrible. And it got to the point where Pete and I were just emotionally fried. We were so exhausted from monitoring.

[00:13:12] This dog and this essentially a little older than a toddler and trying to keep them away from each other and trying to make sure that Astrid didn’t do something. We literally got to the point of being emotionally fried. And that’s when Pete said to me, I don’t know if this is gonna work out. We might have to send Astrid back, but at that point.

[00:13:40] I was already to attach to her and I just thought, I cannot send this dog back. I love her too much. So we just didn’t know what to do around this time. Also, we realized we had to get her up. , proper dog jacket ’cause she was just freezing all the time. The poor thing. So I ordered her this super cute plaid, soft warm, greyhound jacket that just gently, went right over the top of the dog , and then you fasten it over the, , underneath the belly with just a Velcro.

[00:14:20] Very easy. So we get the dog jacket, we put her on her. She loves it. It’s warm, it’s soft, it’s cozy. We go outside. We have a beautiful walk. She’s so happy. And then this was the nighttime walk. It was like 10 30 at night. It was like we were still sort of potty training her, so we were going out a lot. We get back in, she’s all happy.

[00:14:45] She’s all loving her new jacket. She looks so cute. And then I go to take the jacket off and I un velcro the belt and it makes that Velcro sound, and I really do not have the words to describe what happens next. This doc let out a howl. An absolute howl that was so long and just there was just so much agony and pain in this howl.

[00:15:35] I have never heard a living being make such a noise that was infused with so much agony. And I didn’t even touch her. It was literally the sound had triggered a memory that set her into a place of pain. I have literally never experienced, and I have been a coach. I mean, I have coached people through.

[00:16:10] Very traumatic times in their lives and I’ve, I, with my experience, have never experienced anything like this, so we quickly got the coat off of her as fast as we could. She went to the corner of the room and stood there shaking, just shaking. And she was in the living room. So Pete and I went to the couch.

[00:16:40] We gave her distance, and we just sat there. We just sat there in silence. As she stood there and shook, she was on the other side of the kitchen table. So I think she felt kind of safe. ’cause at that point in time she hadn’t developed full trust with Pete or I. And I had the intuition that we need to just sit there in silence.

[00:17:06] So we didn’t turn the TV on. We didn’t really talk. We were, we were both in shock to this day. I don’t know what the neighbors would’ve thought because they, it was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. So they definitely would’ve heard it. And we just sat there for, I don’t know how long. A period of time passed, and then little by little she started walking towards us and little by little she sat down, , a couple feet from us and we still didn’t touch her.

[00:17:35] We just sat there and I could see. As, as she was standing there shaking, I could see the trauma being released from her little body because remember, animals store trauma just the way humans do, and we have to experience that trauma that’s trapped inside of us in order to release it. And that’s exactly what she was doing.

[00:18:01] But it was a release, like nothing I’ve ever, ever seen or been witnessed to. And then the physical shaking was also the trauma leaving her body.

[00:18:12] So finally she got into her dog bed, she got curled up, and she fell asleep. Pete and I went to bed and as we pillow talked that night, Pete said to me, this dog clearly has trauma. This dog clearly has triggers that we don’t know about, and we don’t know anything could trigger her. I mean, the sound of that Velcro probably reminded her of a shock collar from when she was being trained by these.

[00:18:44] Greyhound air quotes farmers, they’re called farmers in Spain, and when she was being trained to see whether or not she could be a winning race dog, which she failed the test and which is how we got her, you know, they used shock colors. They used all sorts of really nasty methods. So that sound triggered some memory in her of some awful experience.

[00:19:09] She also has some really bad scars on her body. So we don’t know what happened. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone being cruel. ’cause again, if you know greyhounds, you know how incredibly sensitive they are. They’re known to be one of the most sensitive breeds. If I say to Astrid like Astrid. If I say that to her, she just cowers of, , you know, she has such a strong reaction to any, any sort of raise of the voice.

[00:19:43] You have to be so gentle with these little, these creatures. They’re actually not so little, but these creatures are so sensitive. I just, I can’t imagine being cruel to any animal. And then take an. Hyperly sensitive animal and beating it. I just, I, I, I don’t really have the words for that. I’m just, I’m lost in my comprehension of how somebody could do that.

[00:20:09] I mean, okay. Yeah, I do understand how it happens and you know, people who do that, people who abuse have a lot of wounds inside of ’em, lots of wounds inside, and so. Being the abuser is the manifestation of trapped trauma inside the body. So there is a piece of me with empathy, but right now I’m thinking about Astrid.

[00:20:35] And so I’m very protective of her and I’m very protective of all greyhounds and basically all animals who are suffering and all people who are suffering. 

[00:20:45] So getting back to the pillow talk with Pete, he said to me, we don’t know what our triggers are. We are not equipped for this. We have Freya who’s , pulling her tail, pulling her ears, acting like a bully to the dog because she’s jealous. I think we have to give the dog back. And again, my heart just sank and I, I was just like, I don’t know if I can, but I knew a piece of me knew that Pete was right, like maybe we just need to find her a different home.

[00:21:17] We’re not the right family. I, so the very next morning I wake up, I go down to greet Astrid, and I just felt it. With every cell of my body that when she greeted me, she was a different doc. She was nuzzling me, cuddling me. I just knew that something had healed in her, and all of a sudden she trusted me.

[00:21:52] She developed trust in me, and from that moment on until today. She has been an entirely different dog. She has been a dog. You would never know she was a rescue. She shows no signs of abuse. Now she trusts Pete and I completely we’re still working on her and Freya and their relationship. That’s a work in progress.

[00:22:20] But when it comes to Pete and me, there’s absolute unwavering trust. 

[00:22:26] I feel so deeply that Astrid came to us for a divine reason and we healed each other. During those weeks where I was just on emotional edge, I was releasing all sorts of pen up trauma about something will happen to my daughter. You know, I was healing past lifetime stuff, ancestral stuff. When I was on emotional edge, I was actually also releasing.

[00:22:53] A lot of blocks and trauma blocks. And then when she had the, the Night of the Great Howell, she released an absolutely massive trauma block. And it was miraculous to me that after that night, how it was like a flip of a switch and all of a sudden she was this healthy, happy, well adjusted dog. With complete trust, and it made me realize like how we all come together for a reason, how we all help each other heal.

[00:23:34] When I was thinking about getting a dog, I never dreamed I would be getting a dog that would help me heal past lifetime wounds and I would do the same. And now I have this extraordinary creature. Astrid is just an absolutely extraordinary dog with so high consciousness. I speak to Astrid’s higher self all the time.

[00:23:58] She’s like truly a human. Just wearing a dog suit, the consciousness behind her eyes will absolutely just blow you away. I mean, I hear it from people all the time. She’s so smart. , she’s just extraordinary. I, I struggle with the fact that I know that dogs don’t live so long, and so sometimes I get overwhelmed by.

[00:24:22] You know what will happen when Astrid is no longer with us, but I try to do the pre grieving. I try not to stuff it down, and I try instead to do the pre grieving, so I’ll be ready for when that day comes, which I’m manifesting is not for a very, very, very long time. But , such a source of joy for me and my times with Astrid walking on the beach watching her sprint.

[00:24:48] She really is an endless source of joy. My invitation for you this week is to reflect back on your own experiences of when you might have been healed from a person or an animal or a situation that you just didn’t expect. Maybe there’s a little bit of healing that’s. Left to be done, but see if you can recognize that unconventional healing for what it is as the gift it is.

[00:25:20] And.

[00:25:21] Send a little gratitude for that unconventional healing that it was able to occur. And in this moment, I’m sending gratitude to Astrid, to this Greyhound rescue shelter. And to be honest, I’m sending gratitude to the Greyhound farmer who bred Astrid. Although I do want Overbreeding to stop.

[00:25:41] , certainly I can send a little gratitude for . The people who created the circumstances so that Astrid was born. But certainly I wanna work to stop this overbreeding and to make sure that all greyhounds of all the different various breeds of greyhounds just have a happy, loving home to live in and a happy, loving life to experience.

[00:26:06] So on that note. I am gonna leave a link in the show notes to the rescue shelter that saved Astrid’s life and then connected Astrid to us to take Astrid from a truly traumatic experience. , to a, just a, a, a home of unconditional love. And the rescue shelter that made that possible is called Gals e Familia, and they’re based in Malaga, Spain.

[00:26:34] And if you’d like to give them a donation, that would mean so much to me. , this is part of my birthday episode package, so you can. Consider this yet another birthday gift for me and just a wonderful thing to do for the Astrids of the world. And we’re gonna leave a link in the show notes for you to leave a donation if you feel so called, and I would be so, so grateful if you did.

[00:27:04] All right. That’s a wrap for this week, and as always. I’ll be back in your earbuds next week for our fourth and final episode of this four part series where I am sharing inspirational stories. And as always, until next time, may your soul guide the way.

[00:27:25] Hi, dear ones. Listen here. The Soul Blueprint certification program is a roadmap to becoming a more powerful coach, healer, writer, artist, or entrepreneur, and then earning more money. It’s the only certification program that reveals how to activate your five unique spiritual gifts. So you can create massive soul aligned success in life and business.

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00:00 Introduction

01:39 Joining the Soul Guide Circle

02:05 Meet Astrid: The Special Greyhound

03:25 The Dark Reality of Greyhound Racing

06:39 Adopting Astrid During the Pandemic

09:51 Astrid’s Trauma and Healing Journey

21:20 Building Trust and Healing Together

24:53 Reflecting on Unconventional Healing

26:13 Supporting Greyhound Rescue Efforts

27:10 Conclusion