Your Dog as a Teacher

What if instead of seeing your companion animal as the source of your happiness and rather discovered that they are just showing you how you can find the happiness within yourself?

Your relationship with your dog is just like any other relationship. They guide us back to ourself.

Your dog is the embodiment of pure love and joy. Learn from them how to be present to what is!

You are the Hidden Gem

Getting comfortable with discomfort takes bravery and willingness.

Bravery to embark on doing something new.

Stepping into uncharted waters and being a beginner again and again.

The willingness to grow and change.

What you learn about yourself and what you’re capable for is found in the doing of the unknown.

While you may have a goal in mind to achieve like leash walking your dog or teaching your dog a new trick or you, or learning a new skill, what you take away from the experience may have much more to do with you uncovering parts of yourself that were hidden.

Stretching yourself in doing something new, exposes those parts of yourself where you can become more curious and exploratory about what’s showing up without giving up.

When those moments of stretching become too much, take a break and allow the lessons to wash over you while you begin to make sense of their meaning.

Achieving a goal like leash walking isn’t just about your dog walking with you on a leash, but rather your desire to feel more confident and connected with your companion animal and about becoming the person you want to be in that relationship.

Be the person your dog already knows is inside of you even if you haven’t met her yet.

Support is available to you when you give yourself permission to receive it!

Sitting with Discomfort

Breakthroughs in understanding oneself happen in the midst of being pushed to our limit.

During more turbulent times, opportunity exists to tap into the energy of the chaos and find out the messages the messiness is trying to tell us when we are poised to listen.

Last week, I spoke with my colleague that “I’m at my limit”, “My bandwidth is low” and “I’m running out of steam”.

My colleague turned to me and asked me if I could do “more”.

My body crumbled and I replied, “no, I can’t do those things she was asking”.

My colleague pushed and asked me if I could do other things.

In this moment, I gave up my agency, my control of standing firm in what I could handle and I told my colleague, “yes, I can do those other things”.

What transpired was that there was more tasks apart of what I “agreed” too which mirrored similarly to what I originally said no to and I became angry.

I sat with the anger and I was reminded of this quote, “anger is sadness’s body guard”.

I realized I was sad that I gave up my personal control and allowed someone else to influence my decision making.

What I did with this energy, renewed understanding and empowerment was to have a conversation with my colleague.

We spoke candidly and transparently about the situation.

I came to understand that she saw how impacted I was and how burned out I was and she recognized that she could have paused and reflected back to me what she saw.

I said, “yes” that would have opened the door even if I wasn’t clear on what I was experiencing in that moment.

I know I would have been relieved she saw my humanness.

Strengthening your inner trust, understanding your inner critic and healing parts of yourself that you didn’t realize created ingrained beliefs can lead to freedom.

If you’re struggling with getting to the other side of troubled waters, reach out for support and you can see how you can build your bridges with loving support.