"As Above, So Below"-- why your life matters more than you think

and what that has to do with the cat that lived

My red-haired Chi Gong Grand Master, and self-proclaimed-witch-with-Irish-ancestry, would often say these words:

“As above, so below.”

I thought they were from the Bible and I never could quite comprehend what they meant.

If heaven was the same as the earth, what about all the terrible things I saw happening here? What about THAT? It bothered me.

“As above, so below,” just made no sense.

In my mind, I added the words: “on Earth as it is in Heaven” and it still didn’t help.

I wanted Heaven to be better than what I saw happening here on Earth.

Sure, there are beautiful moments. Divine experiences.

And there is also the opposite, as Fear, Greed, Jealousy, and Loneliness are also quite prevalent. I am sure you feel this in some way.

It wasn’t until this week, years later, that I finally got some understanding and it all relates to my parent’s cat.

It also has to do with why you matter so much and what a profound effect I believe you are having on the world, even if you do not yet know it.

I want to tell you about that.

You may not want to read it.

There can be resistance to hearing that we have value or that we actually matter.

It may be hard to look into someone’s eyes while they tell you that you did something they appreciate and really allow yourself to feel valued and seen.

You know what I mean.

I know you do.

That moment when you quickly brush off the love or the sense of “I-see-your-value” with a quick: “Oh, it was no big deal.” Or: “Oh, that was easy, don’t worry about it,” (and they are not worried, they are just telling you that you matter to them).

Then there is the big parry move (if you were fighting them with an energetic sword) where you deflect the love energy and come back quickly with a compliment directed at them: “It is nothing compared to what you have done for me.” “I appreciate you so much and am so grateful for that thing you did for me forty years ago.”

You know.

I know you do.

So, this article may be hard to read.

Maybe just read to see what happened to my parent’s cat as this is the general underlying theme of something I wish to speak to.

You can leave it at that.

All this is about a cat.

It isn’t about you.

That’s fine.

Let’s talk about the cat.

First: a brief history.

In 2012, I went through a very horrendous divorce. That was the year my family and I mostly stopped speaking. My mother made a new friend who was the same age as me, named Donna. She and my father also got two cats. Soon after, one disappeared, which was blamed on the local coyotes. The other became their first house cat (as they decided it needed protection from the local predators).

I think they were ready for a true friend to support them as the energy of our mutual family field was stormy at best.

They continued to have my ex-husband over to visit along with his current girlfriend, one of which became his new wife.

Over the years, I have grown my capacity to hold more and to see more from a zoomed out viewpoint that has allowed me to value the people in my family and their gifts to me.

So now, here I am at my parent’s house and I am grateful to be with them.

They still have the cat. Her name is Meiko.

Meiko likes to drape herself across the back of my mom’s recliner in the living room while mom sits and talks out loud about her thoughts on life and the books she is reading.

Meiko’s tail will twitch periodically and Mom will reach half-consciously to touch her fur as she muses out loud about various things.

Once in a while, Meiko strolls over to my dad’s recliner, where she likes to lie on the seat and not the top.

The two recliners are exactly the same. They are the same ancient age, the same color. Everything. They used to belong to my grandparents. They are well-loved and tattered and suit my parent’s aging frames nicely.

When my dad comes over and sees Meiko there, he squishes her to the side and they share the seat.

Dad also pets her a bit, almost unconsciously.

It was Sunday morning, and my parents were leaving for their weekly meeting in Temecula. My parents found their way to a group of people that study various alternative ways in which we might exist with less outward control. They are friends with Chas Holloway, who has a blog here. They don’t vote. That gives you an idea of them.

Every Sunday, they take wooden folding chairs and sit outside in a park with a few friends who have similar views and talk with them.

It is a highlight of the week for my parents as otherwise; they stick close to home. They have never seemed to enjoy leaving this adobe house they built by hand. Mom gardens. Dad, at 88, is refinishing the wooden garage doors he built. You can’t buy creosote anymore he tells me. It makes wood last forever and now the government has banned it. This action causes my dad’s hackles to go up. He is likely to go out and buy some of it while he still can.

He and I have different views on herbicides and other things. Anyway…

Just before they left, and I was preparing for my weekly Zoom call with my friend, Sandra, Mom pointed out that Meiko did not seem “quite right.”

And sure enough, Meiko was next to their bed, on the carpet that also originally came from my grandparent’s house, panting. She wasn’t just panting. She really looked like she was struggling to breathe. Her abdomen was straining and her eyes bulged a little. Her tail was down.

Mom was worried and speculated that it might be a fur ball stuck somewhere in her digestive tract.

The whole family is averse to traditional medicine and doesn’t like to sit in doctor’s offices. Mom was not in a hurry to rush Meiko to the vet.

And by now, Meiko was old.

I asked Mom what she wanted me to do if I saw things get worse and she told me to do nothing. Mom preferred to wait and see what happened, and Mom was really worried. The concern on her face was palpable.

Dad spends most of his time working outside or in his office. Mom spends a lot of time reading in bed during the day when she is not outside gardening, gently stroking Meiko the Cat.

My parents love the cat, and they are also pragmatic. If Meiko was going to pass, they preferred it happened at home if possible. So off they went, and we all pretended it was a fur ball.

I got on my call with my friend. I told myself not to check on the cat. It would be hard for me not to rush her to the vet, even though generally, when it comes to doctors, I feel the same way as my parents. I don’t like not knowing what to do.

Let’s leave Meiko now for a minute and talk about what happened on this call.

I know it sounds harsh and narcissistic, but just stick with me here.

Sandra and I have been in multiple courses together and over the years, she holds the place of being my longest and now only, weekly practice partner, where we explore personal and collective energy fields together.

That may sound a little vacuous and abstract.

Basically, what some people go to a therapist to explore, Sandra and I do together with a lot of curiosity. We find energetic places in ourselves or our family fields that might be stuck or unconscious and see if we can shift them through awareness and love.

Our last couple of calls had felt a little flat and difficult.

I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly. I knew the key was always to find what was not being seen between us and express it. It always is.

But this time I was at a loss. I was feeling like I was doing most of the sharing and talking, and Sandra was offering her insight and gifts. But not much was coming from her side, personally.

From the outside, it would appear I was talking too much and Sandra was not being included enough. That there was not enough space for her to express herself.

Now, the nuts and bolts of what was in the energy field waiting for us to discover and work through together seems to matter less than what all this has to do with Meiko the Cat.

I mentioned Meiko to Sandra when she asked how things were going and waited for me to update her on all the stories I had since our last call.

Now, since I travel, moved to El Salvador, and basically view life in a way that involves a lot of interest, I always have stories to share.

I mentioned Meiko with an unspoken hope Sandra, who is also an animal communicator and dowser, might say something about what she sensed was going on.

But Sandra didn’t, and I moved onto more stories.

Which was rather tedious since, for the last couple weeks, it felt like the calls were always about me and something was just missing somehow. Even though it seems nice to have all the attention, it wasn’t.

As Sandra and I talked, we spoke about this.

Sandra remembered that as a child, her mother never made space for her to speak and feel received. As she shared this with me, she said she had the sensation of not being able to breathe.

That is when Sandra-on-my-screen turned into Meiko the Cat.

She didn’t know she was doing this, and Sandra exactly mimicked the cat in the other room. She panted in exactly the same way. Her eyes had the same look in them of struggle and pain.

This struck me deeply.

We realized that two things were going on in our calls. One was that a young part of Sandra did not want to share anything (which was simply a pattern that had arisen between us). The other was that Sandra was tiring of me doing all the talking.

Now, as you can see, this left me in a Catch-22 situation. No matter what I did, I could not win. I would not get “it” right. Sandra didn’t want to share or talk, so I did. But Sandra wasn’t happy I was doing all the talking.

This, I believe, related to some of my childhood situations, as at one point, I felt like there was a very young Terra sitting in front of Sandra. At the same time, there was a wise, adult part of Terra there as well.

Wise, adult Terra felt the young Terra and had a huge amount of compassion for her in the energy field she was in. It was familiar, and young Terra used to be all on her own in it.

Wise, adult Terra loved young Terra in that moment, so much. An immense wave of love surrounded that young child that really felt quite unseen and didn’t know what to do in a situation that seemed hopeless.

Sandra and I continued to hold these places and name things that were arising, as only long term-practice partners and friends who have built a lot of trust over time can do together.

At one point, I asked her to slow down, and I looked in her eyes (yes, just like I was alluding to above when I was addressing why you might not want to continue reading this). And I told her the truth. “Sandra, I am really interested in what you have to say. I want to hear what is going on with you and in your life. I want to know how you are. You are my friend and I care.”

Sandra, (who in that moment I think was “young” Sandra) asked me to pause for a moment so she could take that in.

She said it was hard.

I know it was.

I have been on the receiving end of moments like that and I have had to really practice allowing myself to receive love and care like that.

Eventually, we finished our call. I was relieved, as I knew, if we hadn’t been able to untangle the threads that were arising, we would have both eventually called it quits. Years of practice mattered a lot, and we were stuck. But God, or angels, or guides, or ancestors, or our souls…helped us to find the courage to express what felt scary for us to say and we both found our way through it. Holding hands, metaphorically.

I planned to go check on the cat after our call and I planned to do something rare.

I was going to dust off my Chi Gong energy work and see if I could heal that cat. I was going to ask permission of Meiko, as Beverly had taught us all that asking permission before doing any energetic work on another being was key. And I wasn’t sure how that would go, as I don’t know how to actually hear a cat’s thoughts. But I was going to go in there and fix that cat if it was the last thing I did.

I planned to do this before my parents got home, as I liked to keep my energy work under wraps and didn’t and don’t go around considering myself a Jesus kind of healer. Actually, the thought of that and the crowds that came wanting healing from him has always slightly terrified me.

The problem was that as I emerged from my room; I realized my parents had just arrived home.

Mom was walking down the hall and suggested we go check on Meiko.

So, I mustered up my courage to do my energy thing in front of my mother and started talking to angles silently in my head and asking for their help. I felt my “crew” arrive as we walked down the hall together and both looked for Meiko the Cat.

She was not where we left her.

I wondered if she was already dead.

Mom found her in their walk-in closet.

She looked fine.

She was purring.

She did a cat stretch that was like a relaxed, utterly extravagant and fluid version of a downward dog yoga pose and offered her head to my mother to pet.

Her tail was erect.

Mom had told me that when she wasn’t feeling well, her tail would sag.

It had definitely been in a sag when they left.

Her breathing was fine.

It was like nothing had happened at all.

Despite the cat allergy I used to have, I petted her head.

I think my cat allergy has recently left.

Meiko purred.

And I wondered about Sandra, who had just had an experience that was exactly like what I saw happening in Meiko the Cat and how something had shifted in our call. How there had been some love and care received that had been missing in the past.

And how that somehow, in my mind, completely affected Meiko the Cat.

Now, that may seem unrelated to you.

Like I said, you can just see this as a quirky story about a cat.

Or not.

Maybe energy matters more than you or I imagine, and brief moments of love and care affect the surrounding energy field in subtle but profound ways.

Maybe, as you work through the edgy pieces of your life, you are changing the world.

Maybe cats on the other side of the world can breathe again.

“As above, so below” seems to mean, to me now, that energy affects our physical reality.

That love and healing “above” causes the world “below” to change in profound ways.

That you, in your life, with whatever little moments you work through, are not only liquifying yourself and becoming your own version of a butterfly, over and over again.

You, yes you, are healing cats.

Or other things.

Energy matters.

You matter.

Things that seem small, or not important, matter.

Your life is not about outward popularity or likes or fame or money.

Your life is about this and you are living it.

You matter.

As above, so below.

Just remember that you are doing more than you know and the world is responding to you more than you might think.

Here’s to another week of becoming butterflies.

And cats.

Meiko the Cat, today