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Chico San and Pico
Chico San was my Angora calico cat from 1982-2001. She was a sensitive, nurturing being who shared love, affection, and deep healing with the many people who came to our home for advanced animal communication courses and retreats.



Everyone fell in love with Chico. She never flinched from the emotional difficulties or confused energy people carried. Instead, she welcomed helping people through their process with devotion and compassion.

She loved to be held tightly and purred even harder when squeezed, unlike many cats who would struggle to get away if you hugged them. I would often dance with her in my arms, whirling around the room and singing.

Since leaving her body, Chico has continued to look after our family from the spiritual realm. She was very fulfilled on her soul journey and had no need to return to Earth. However, in 2011, she surprised me by telling me she would return to assist me in the form of a black kitten, whose name would be Ziggy. She guided me to the Craig’s list post that led me to him; his mother looked Siamese.

As a kitten, Ziggy, united with Chico’s presence, was a peacemaker with our three other cats. But Chico was not meant to remain embodied for long. Gradually, I could feel her soul essence lifting out, leaving gentle Ziggy to fulfill his life as a cat himself.

She had acted as a beacon, bringing Ziggy into form and helping him on his way. Our wise cat Lila, just six months older than Ziggy, naturally stepped in to guide and care for him, and Chico’s intimate role was complete.

Chico San continued to watch over our family, and I often felt her soft, warm presence around me.

Other animal friends who had passed on also made their presence strongly felt at different times. I was aware that former dogs, Belinda and Pasha, were acting as soul-family spirit guardians, helping me find my current dog, Pico, who reincarnated after dying as Pepito in August 2024. (You can read the story here.)

When I read about my student’s dream, I remembered that Chico San has been around quite a lot since Pico arrived. The songs I used to sing for her came back into my memory, and I found myself singing them to Pico.

Pico has a quality of sweetness and quiet wisdom that Chico had. I also feel a strong urge to protect the purity of Pico’s sensitivity and innocence, just as I did with Chico. Besides songs, Chico inspired many affectionate, rhyming names, and I often called her Chico Pico.

I would describe the relationship between Chico San and Pico as soul family. Their characteristics and energy intermingle harmoniously. Chico San did not feel the need to merge into Pico’s body as she had done for a time with Ziggy. Instead, she watches over Pico from the spiritual realm, alongside me.


One Body and Multiple Soul Presences
You can read more stories of “soul sharing” in my book When Animals Speak.

One striking example of this phenomenon that I have never written about before involved another human. He was a health practitioner I visited for a series of sessions.

Once, during a goodbye hug after a deep healing session together, I felt jolted by a startling sensation like a lightning strike. It felt as though our two souls had recognized each other so completely that they briefly merged. I realized we were like spiritual twins, so much so that in a recent life, we had shared the same body.

I saw how closely connected members of soul families who share similar purposes may sometimes unite as one being for a lifetime, and in other lifetimes inhabit different bodies.

It can also involve more than two souls merging into one identity. There is no single prescribed way for souls to appear in form.

You may have noticed beings, human or other animals, whom you meet and feel you have always known. Not only are you likely to have shared past lives together, but you may even have shared a life within one body.


I wrote the following passage in the early 1990s and published it in my book, When Animals Speak, Chapter 6 on Reincarnation.


There is mystery to the essence of souls: their malleability and their quantity; how we merge with each other, become individuals, adopt forms, travel from dimension to dimension, place to place; how we change and maintain identity or personality characteristics; how we return to Oneness. How does the body, with its individual genetic programming and species patterning, affect the spirit as it reincarnates, and vice versa? How much can we remember from our previous lives and apply to our new forms? How much relearning must take place in "training" or becoming familiar with our new forms?

For each life, there can be different answers. So much depends on the awareness of individuals and their decisions, conscious or otherwise, about their life paths. I ponder this mystery and understand more each time I experience one of my friends returning.…

The essence, the core, travels intact, but adds and subtracts characteristics and even soul parts to suit its evolvement or desire for experience. Spirit encompasses total malleability, infinite wizardry, and complete alchemy. We witness the grand design and are part of it, as well as being its co-creators.

What profound beauty, wisdom, power, truth, peace, and joy meet us, travelers in the worlds of creation, when we relish the depth of the mystery, the stillness and the movement, the unchanging essence and the energetic symphony of form.



You may recognize moments in your own life, perhaps with an animal companion, a beloved human, or even a place, where the sense of familiarity runs deeper than memory alone can explain. These moments may point not only to shared past lives, but to something even more intimate: shared soul presence.

Soul families travel together in many ways. Sometimes we meet as separate beings. Sometimes we briefly share form. Sometimes one soul offers its essence to support another’s journey, stepping in or stepping back as needed. There is no set pattern, only our presence, love, and purpose moving through form.

When we listen deeply, we begin to sense the quiet profundity of these connections. And in that listening, we may remember that we are never truly alone, only momentarily appearing as separate.

We are one life.


Read When Animals Speak for more on the malleability of souls and their travels from form to form, realm to realm.