20/12/2025
The healing medicine of animals 🐾
This time of year always feels a little up and down for me, and I know I’m not alone in that.
There’s the rush to wrap things up before the holiday break, the quiet pressure to finish strong, the lack of sunlight here in the Midwest, the sense that everything is happening all at once… and somehow also slowing down.
Add in the loved ones and cherished animals who aren’t here on earth with us anymore, and the holidays can stir up feelings that are complicated and tender.
When things feel like this, one of my greatest sources of comfort is my cat, Juniper.
Animals are healers. They’re exquisitely attuned to their humans — emotionally, energetically, intuitively. They feel what we feel. They know what’s moving through our hearts and our bodies.
Science reflects what many of us already know in our bones: being with animals lowers stress hormones, increases oxytocin, slows the heart, and helps the nervous system shift out of fight-or-flight and into rest and repair.
The love of an animal is unconditional.
And you also get what you give to that relationship.
Animals aren’t cookie-cutter beings. Some are higher maintenance than others. But at their core, they are simply themselves. No performance, no pretense about who they are.
Juniper always knows when I’m having a rough day… or week. I can feel that she knows, and still, I tell her anyway. When my energy is low. When I’m sad. When I need alone time.
Juniper will curl up right over my heart and turn on her healing purrs, steady and warm.
She doesn’t try to fix me.
She doesn’t ask me to be different.
She never makes me feel like a burden.
She’s just there.
And she gives back so freely because she is loved and cared for, every single day.
That kind of presence is medicine.
Tell me in the comments, how does your animal give back to you?
