Dancing Hearts Blog

Are you feeling disconnected from your dog? Are you struggling to remain present and in the moment with them?

When we talk about living a partnership lifestyle, one of the things this means is intentionally creating a heart-to-heart connection with your dog.

It means learning to be present and having an awareness of ourselves and our thoughts and feelings. By learning more about ourselves, we can learn how to become brilliant partners for ourselves, our dogs, and everyone else in our lives.

In this post, I’m sharing my recommended method of coming back to this feeling of presence and contentment with your dog. Read on to discover how you can use this wonderful, grounding exercise in your brilliant partnership.

 

Focusing on what we have

In our pursuit of learning to become a brilliant partner, one thing that often comes up is frustration with what we want yet don’t have. We all have an idea of the perfect dog partnership in our minds, but if reality doesn’t look that way, it can be frustrating.

Sometimes the very thing that we want can actually create tension and resistance because we’re pushing so hard for that. That struggle, the pushing and striving for what we want, literally separates us from the thing we want. It can make us close off and shut down from the flow of connection and communication. This can apply to many things in our lives, but especially our relationship with our dogs.

It may sound strange to think of it in this way, but bear with me!

When we think about creating a great partnership with our dogs, many of us spend time thinking of all the things we want to change. But that overthinking can get in the way of real change.

What we want to do instead is focus on our current wellbeing, our current connection, our current state of love. Feel that gratitude and delight about how things are great right now.

Many of us struggle to be present in the moment, but this is key to developing a great and loving partnership with our dogs.

 

 

Start with that feeling of gratitude

If you want to strengthen the feeling of connection, I’d recommend taking a moment to just feel gratitude, to begin with. Allow that feeling to flow through your body, notice how it makes you feel. That feeling of love, gratitude, and connection, try to just notice that.

Why is it important? When we feel that within ourselves, it removes our need to find it outside of ourselves.

Let’s explain that in the context of our dogs. Say your dog does something that doesn’t leave you feeling warm and loving. Maybe they bark a lot or get over-excited when they’re on a walk. When our dog is doing that, it doesn’t feel great. We get caught up in this feeling that because the dog is behaving this way, we can’t feel good.

We’ve all been there before. I’m sure you’ve been frustrated with how your dog is behaving and thought, “if only you did this instead, we’d all feel a lot happier.”

But that looking for that satisfaction outside of ourselves is the problem. So that no matter how well behaved (or not) our dog is, we are attaching our feeling of gratitude, love, and connection to something outside of ourselves.

 

“You can have that feeling of gratitude and abundant love and connection in any moment that you want ­­– when we give up our need to find that feeling outside of ourselves.”

 

Feel the connection in a field of flowers

I want to invite you to join me in a little exercise to explore this feeling and experience it in a different way.

Take a nice deep breath, close your eyes if you can or want to. Now take a moment to feel that love, connection, and gratitude. Allow that feeling of love and connection to flow through you. How does that feel? Maybe you can’t describe it in words, that’s okay! Just get used to feeling that way.

Imagine that you are standing in a field of beautiful flowers all around you. Imagine trying to make the beauty of the flowers come to you. You would have to force it, and that feels rather absurd. The flowers don’t need to come to you. They don’t need to be anything other than what they are. They’re ready, and all you need to do is open your eyes, and see them, and connect with them. The same goes for your dog.

This exercise is like opening your inner eyes and heart to the inherent connection and love that always surrounds you and your dog. It’s always there, no matter what, just like that field of flowers. So, whenever you need to, you can imagine yourself in that field of flowers.

Another thing you can try is to imagine trying to picture in vivid detail every single flower in that field before you could take in its complete beauty. The very act of trying to do that would bring your mind elsewhere and distract you. It would take you out of the moment.

Don’t let your mind become preoccupied with getting everything right, doing the right thing, saying the right thing. When you do that, you lose sight of the enjoyment and feeling of connection, and that’s exactly what happens with many dog moms I see out there. It’s as if we forget. A simple shift in perspective has led your sense of connection to become skewed. When that happens, remember that feeling of love and connection and come back to it.

 

“That field of flowers is like a metaphor for how I’m always in love with my dog. I’m always connected heart-to-heart with my dog. Even when we’re having a communication breakdown, we are still always standing in our field of flowers together.”

 

What creates our life experiences?

The total sum of our thoughts and feelings is what creates our life experience.

Every time you smile at your dog, every time you love them and express gratitude for them, that is adding to your sum total. That’s what it looks like to create a life experience that’s beautiful and rich with love and connection.

Your connection with your dog is constant and sacred, and it’s always there for you. All you need to do is open your inner eyes and feel that feeling again. Jump back into that field of flowers and hold that feeling in your heart and your body.

The greater the sum total of your life’s experiences, the happier you’ll be and the better your partnership with your dogs and everyone in your life will be.

I hope you enjoyed this post and exercise. It’s something I’ve shared at my BPA live experience, and the feedback from that was fantastic.

That field of flowers is like a metaphor for how I’m always in love with my dog. I’m always connected heart to heart with them. Even when I’m distracted or my dog is, or we’re having a communication breakdown, we are still always standing in our field of flowers together. All I need to do is shift my awareness and see that with my inner eye, and I hope that you find that helpful.

 

If you’d like to work with me and learn how to create a partnership lifestyle for you and your dog, you can request an invitation to join us in the Brilliant Partners Academy when the doors open for the next enrollment!

You can listen to everything I talked about in this blog post over on my podcast – Enlightened By Dogs. It’s episode 159, which you can listen to here.