We noticed our dog start to reduce his activity and become lethargic and unwilling to take stairs, etc., right after we returned from a 12-day trip while our son stayed in our home to dog-sit. The vet has been unable to diagnose a physical malady. Could our absence, perhaps experienced as possible abandonment, have triggered past karmic trauma to undermine his health? What is most important for us to know?

You saw intuitively, and correctly, this was a karmic downturn associated with your absence. This is why you were so worried about leaving him to begin with, because you were able to see the future would bring difficulty from leaving him alone, even though in the care of your son who he adores. Even with that companionship, it is not you or your dear wife, who he treasures most greatly, for his own security and safety as well as personal responsibility. Keep in mind, it is not a selfish need to have you both in his life, it is also, in his way of thinking and level of perception, a sacred duty deeply entrenched in his heart that he must take care of you to the best of his ability. That is the essence of the guard dog impulse. It is not simply a fear-based precaution to create a tough exterior and to warn others as a pragmatic answer for the uncertainty of life. It is a much deeper bonding that gives rise to that highly efficient and predictable, uniform, vigilance that is so noteworthy a characteristic, even of quite loving and nurturing companion animals. They know deep within there is also danger in the world and their seeking to protect loved ones is a responsibility. When you are gone, he worries about you and that stirs up inner fear because there is no way to cope with the uncertainty it represents to your canine. You know his history, that in his most recent prior life he ended up leaving the physical when you and your wife were both traveling to your son's wedding and he was left with the housekeeper as a live-in dog sitter. Death is an even more extreme consequence of your absence than coming down with a physical malady that is a karmic rumbling within. But that, indeed, is the origin here of his physical symptoms. It is recapitulating a prior lifetime of abandonment and becoming debilitated and going under. You know of his past life abandonment on an island, left all alone when his human shipmates went back out to sea and he was frolicking on a high bluff enraptured by being back in nature after a long sea voyage. And when the humans were ordered back aboard that vessel, they could not wait any longer for him as a missing dog, and he perished as a result. So this is a karmic reckoning, acting through cellular memory to cause symptoms of being debilitated. But that is all that is taking place, not a serious decline in function that is from a compromise of tissue and organ function dangerous to his survival. It is enough to hamper him and make him miserable, but it will not shorten his life. As long as you are loving and supporting he will have all he needs. Given our healing effort to clear the karmic history here through our following your requests in the healing protocols, that will do the job nicely. It simply needs enough time to work through enough cellular memory to tip the balance here. Once that is reached, the symptoms will fade and your dog will be back in the pink.