Welcome to Food for Thought, providing real world inspiration for living compassionately, sustainably,

and healthfully for humankind, animal kind, and the ecosystems we all depend on.

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Today's episode is coping with the loss of a pet, morning,

healing, and honoring the animals we love. Hi everyone, this is going to be a rough episode. I wanted to

just call it a Charlie shaped hole, but I wanted to make sure the title was as inclusive as possible because I am

recording this and sharing this with you, not just for me. It is certainly part of my healing

process after losing Charlie, but it's also for you.

So the hope and the intention is that it can be,

might be part of your healing process as well when I recorded podcast episode, my goodness, now,

a decade and a half ago when Simon died.

And I shared that episode with you. I was just so touched

by how many people were moved by it and how it helped so many people. So that's what the

intention is with this episode. I suspect there'll be a lot of pausing the recording for me

and starting again. We'll see. but that's okay. I just don't

want to wait any longer to do it. So a couple quick announcements before we get on to the episode.

I'm trying something new. You know I've had different compassion in action conferences in the

past. Some of you have been here at my home.

Some of you have been here in Oakland where we held three different conferences over the

course of a few years. And I've done some online workshops as well, online conferences.

And I'm trying something new over on Substack to hold a mini course over the course of four days,

...