Yesterday had a realisation, dogs are bringers. They bring us the things we need. Chips for example brought enough chaos that I learned enough about anxious dogs to write dog books and start dog businesses.
Posy came just after I lost the only pregnancy I ever had, she brought me the opportunity to nurture.
Eddy who I have met more recently, he's a gentle kind dog with a wide open heart, he's a bringer of love.
I was having a conversation with a friend this morning about life. He’s travelled all over the World and just come back to the UK after decades living in different places. We talked about consumerism and how he finds the nature of the West, designed for purchasing, difficult.
We agreed that buying things is a stalling mechanism.
We tend to buy things to prevent feeling our feelings.
For example, when we feel sad inside, we go and buy something nice and we get a dopamine hit, pushing the sadness away for a bit. The only thing is though, the feeling hasn’t gone, it’s just been pushed along the road a bit.
It’s just waiting in the future.
And sometimes doing this is acceptable.
Grief, for example is so hard that it can truly overwhelm us. Our systems support us in grief, by releasing it a little bit at a time. The wisdom of our bodies allows us to take our time with it. Our bodies have such great wisdom.
Our minds though, those beautiful thought machines, they don’t want us to feel anything bad at all and they can’t actually tell the difference between something that will overwhelm us and something that is going to be quite straightforward to process.
So our minds can get into the practice of chattering so much, to prevent us feeling anything.
They might go around in thought circles. They might send us to Netflix. Or they might have us splurge thousands on a course we never study. Marketing is set up entirely to capitalise on our vulnerability.
Of a more sinister nature thoughts might catastrophise, tricking our nervous system into believing that we are in danger, all the blinking time, affecting our health, physiology and shortening our lives (yes – it’s THAT serious)
And then add the urge to splurge money we don’t have.
Getting us in a right old mess.
Or they might turn their venom back on ourselves. Telling us we are not good enough, not doing enough, not enough.
So what’s the answer to this cycle of purchasing, eating, avoiding, stressing, shaming and harming ourselves?
It’s not that complicated in words, but it takes a lot of practice.
We move from our mind into our heart.
And we operate directly from there.
We remember who we are, we get brave enough to feel our feelings and we heal ourselves from a lifetime of thinking that thought is the answer.
The strangest thing is, that our dogs have been showing us this for a very long time. Dogs feel their way in the world. Their hearts are huge.
They are the most perfect example of just being.
Dogs are a gift, they are a wonderful reflection of our needs. They are mirroring us on our journey. Our dogs are light in what can be a dark world, they bring out the light in us.
But, as is the human way, we think we know better.
But we are so caught up in our minds that we can't see beyond what we think about them. What's your dog a bringer of?
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