originally posted on http://www.beingwithdogs.com
In her early days with her dog, Ambrose, and partly due to his apparent swagger of indifference, Jenny tells me she’d underestimated his sensitivity. In frustrating training moments, his gaze often seemed focused off in the distance, she says, “like he was some guy I was boring at a party,” and so she gradually began to raise and sharpen her tone with him. Then one day after she’d been yanked by her end of the leash toward a fleeing squirrel, Ambrose sent her a look of shocked hurt when she snapped at him. It was a “sting of shame” Jenny felt then, she says, and it motivated her to recommit to a more consistently positive approach with her new dog.
Before that arm-yanking walk, if anyone had asked, Jenny would have assured them that, yes, of course, her general way of engaging with others was positive and supportive, be they humans or animals. But even though the more “enlightened” feedback she’d learned to provide was relatively gentle, “noticing and acknowledging lack” was still a cornerstone of her approach, she says. The kicker was when she realized that she hadn’t been relating any more negatively to others than she’d been to herself. In short, Jenny came to recognize, she says, that her impatient, brusque dog-training voice was more or less the same as her internal self-talk voice. In fact, she says, the sometimes harsh “correction” she’d begun subjecting Ambrose to was a pretty mild version of how she often spoke to herself.
Jenny is careful to explain that, in her case, the most abrasive sort of negative self-talk had, over several decades of practice, mostly softened well before Ambrose came along. This is the “you idiot!” reaction to slamming your finger in the door or after having said something “stupid” during a meeting. In fact, she’d already mostly dealt with this version of her ego, the one in the guise of a verbally abusive parent. But although her self-talk had long since ceased to be chronically and virulently attacking, she says, “a thread of that haranguing voice had remained.” Hearing that voice directed at Ambrose made her more aware of what she was saying and how she was saying, both “in” and “outside” her own head, whether alone or with others.
Jenny says that some of the results of this most recent shift have been interesting. For instance, a stranger approached her at a local coffee shop last month to share that she’d seen Jenny at the park “giving your dog a very earnest pep talk.” Jenny didn’t recall that particular moment, but because Ambrose sometimes struggles to remain focused as other people or animals pass by, a “pep talk” is part of their routine: He sits, they connect through the eyes, and she calmly reminds him how capable he is, how much he’s improved, or how well he is doing. She tells Ambrose she believes in him so habitually that she had forgotten how it might appear to other people.
An odder aftereffect of her more positive training approach occurred at a grocery store when Jenny had tugged a shopping cart free from its corral, inadvertently crashing it into its neighbors. “Excuse me,” she said out loud in her gentle Ambrose-voice to the cart, to all the carts. At first, Jenny says, she laughed at herself: “Is this who I am now?” Had she become incapable of distinguishing animate beings from mere objects? But then she concluded, that, if so, “maybe that’s a good thing.” Whereas her previous default was to criticize, or even curse, her natural inclination now is to be sort of indiscriminately respectful to whatever shows up in her world.
It’s no accident that so many wisdom traditions include some protocol for acknowledging, or even blessing, mundane things and ordinary activities. Sometimes this is a means of creating a special status for the object, such as the sanctification of wine in preparation for communion. But it can also serve to recognize the always already sacredness of the ordinary, as with the Japanese tea ceremony. This ritual is, in part, a reminder that our sacred power rests in the quality of compassionate presence we bring to our relationships with (apparently) other beings and objects (whoever/whatever they may be). It’s a perspective that challenges the traditional, hierarchical Western that places god and angels above all else. Philosophy aside, though, what a friendly, generous way to co-exist with ourselves, other people, dogs, and shopping carts.
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