Puppy Mind
Sukoshi may already be a better meditator than I am.
He doesn't replay yesterday's mistakes or worry about tomorrow. When he's lying in a patch of sun, he's entirely there, in the sun. What mindfulness teachers spend years trying to get us to do, he seems to have arrived at without reading a single book.
And then it's morning.
From the moment he gets up, he's excited, and it only builds as we get closer to our walk. By the time I'm reaching for his harness, he's doing his little dance. He bounces and wiggles and very much wants to help. He even offers up his left front paw so I can slide the harness over it, which would be wonderful if he didn't usually put it in the wrong place. Then he jiggles the whole time I'm trying to clip the leash. It's one of the cutest things he does. It's also not helping.
Then there's the car. Anyone who read The Bravest Thing Sukoshi Almost Did knows the car is a different story. The energy there isn't joy, it's panic, and it starts the moment he hears my keys. But in both cases the same thing is happening underneath. Something big shows up and his attention gets swept away with it.
Many contemplative traditions separate two things we tend to lump together as meditation: awareness of the present moment, and the ability to settle attention and keep it somewhere. Sukoshi has plenty of the first. It's the second he's missing. Whether it's excitement or fear, his attention isn't drifting into the past or future the way mine does. It's just getting yanked around by whatever is loudest right now.
So yesterday I started teaching him "calm." My first approach was to say the word when he was at full tilt, hoping it would bring him down. It didn't, and in hindsight it couldn't have. He had no idea what the word meant, and I was trying to teach it at the exact moment he was least able to learn anything.
So I went looking for how this is actually done. Trainers have a name for it: settle training, sometimes called relaxation training. The idea is to teach a dog that calm stillness is rewarding in itself. You give him a place, in his case a low, flat pillow, and you wait. When he lies down, a treat lands between his paws. When he sighs, or lets his head drop, or rolls onto one hip, another one. You start with a few seconds and build slowly, ending before he gets restless, and it goes easier after a walk when he's already a little tired. The word only comes in once he's settling, so "calm" gets attached to the feeling itself instead of to being interrupted.
Which is how it works for people too. Nobody gets calm by ordering themselves to be calm in the middle of a spin. You learn what settling feels like in the quiet moments, over and over, until the feeling is familiar enough to find your way back to when things get loud.
That's my quiet hope for the car. I know better than to think a word can talk him out of his nervous system. But that night by the door, he showed me there's a version of him that can hold himself together when the reason is good enough. If he learns what calm feels like on his pillow, maybe someday he'll have a little of it to bring along.
We're on day two. He's not a monk yet. I'm getting close. But we're sitting together, and that seems like a good place to start.