Dogs Are My Meditation
Years ago I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. You couldn't speak for 10 days, and we sat and meditated for hours every day. The experience was exactly like it sounds — miserable. It was a good experience, sort of, but also a brutal one. I learned a lot about myself, primarily that I absolutely hate sitting still.
Movement has always been my true meditation, whether through competitive sports or more expressive ones like surfing and climbing. Finding the flow has always been an ecstatic experience for me, and it's a state my pups are in perpetually - especially as we walk.
No past, no future — just the joy of the moment. From waking in the morning to finally falling asleep at the end of the day, they move through the ever-present now with complete joy. I try to find that same flow for brief moments while I walk them each day.
In the words of Alan Watts:
"A dog does not calculate. It does not compare. It does not stand back to see if love will be returned in equal measure. Its presence is not strategic — it is simply present. And this leaves us with an unsettling thought: if such a way of being exists so close to us, walking at our side, resting at our feet, sharing our ordinary days — then perhaps the deeper question is not why we keep them, but why we were given them at all."
I think we were given dogs to teach us how to live — in the moment, in the perpetual now, and to simply love without expectation.
— R
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