Welcome to Mindfulness and Dogs,
The podcast for dog audience walking the path of reactivity with heart,
Courage and compassion.
I'm Biggie,
Dog trainer,
Coach and lifelong student of mindfulness.
After many years with my own reactive dog,
I discovered that real change doesn't start with training the dog,
It starts with us.
Here,
We'll explore practical,
Force-free tools,
Grounding practices and compassionate strategies to help you and your dog find more calm,
Connection and confidence on your walks together.
Because calmer walks don't start with a quick fix,
They start with you and your calm is your dog's safe place.
Hi,
A very warm welcome to this first episode of Mindfulness and Dogs.
My name is Biggie and in this introductory episode,
I will tell you a little bit about myself,
About living with my own reactive dog and how I discovered that regulating my nervous system was the missing piece.
Walking a reactive dog can feel overwhelming.
If your dog barks and lunges on walks,
You know how stressful it can be.
But what if the first step toward calmer walks had nothing to do with your dog?
In this episode,
You'll learn why calm truly starts with you and how this can shift and transform your walks.
But before we dive in,
Let's take a minute together and breathe.
Inhale deeply and again,
Inhale.
You are here,
Now,
And that's enough.
Up until his death at the age of 13 last year,
I shared my life with Charlie,
A Spanish Sighthound mix.
He came to me at the age of about 9 months,
After having been found by the roadside in Spain,
With both of his front legs broken,
At the age of about 6 weeks.
From there,
He went to a very loving foster guardian,
And after his legs had healed,
She placed him in supposedly forever homes twice.
Both families returned him after just a few days because he was too hyper,
While sure,
He was a large 9-month-old intact male with a vivacious personality.
At that time,
I already had another dog,
A 6-year-old German Shepherd girl named Nana,
And she was Charlie's bastion of calm.
She took care of him,
She told him,
And more than once put him in his place.
In 2013,
Nana,
Who had been my first dog,
Died very suddenly of an at that stage already very much advanced malignant lymphoma.
I had only a few days between the diagnosis and her death through euthanasia.
Nana's death shook our world.
I won't go too much into how it affected me.
Suffice it to say that it took me months to find back to at least a semblance of normality.
Nana had been with me not even for two years,
And as a first-time dog guardian,
I just never thought that life with a dog could end so abruptly.
While I was caught up in my own grief,
I had another dog to care for,
Charlie,
And I guess it was more a case of going through the motions of care.
My heart was elsewhere.
In hindsight,
I believe that these months had a huge influence on what was to come.
As I said before,
Charlie had always been a little bit hyper.
If he had been a human child,
He probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD.
His reactions to the smallest stimuli were out of any proportion and his attention span sometimes equaled zero,
And after Nana's death,
All that intensified even more.
Also,
He lost his house training for a while.
He grew more and more uncomfortable with being left alone at home.
He grew scared of every motor vehicle larger than a scooter.
And his behavior towards other dogs and walks intensified from avoidance to growling to lunging and barking.
Oh,
And before I forget,
As a sighthound,
His predatory behavior was unmanageable for me.
At that time,
I wasn't a dog trainer yet.
I was a simple dog guardian who felt helpless in the face of this seemingly very complicated dog.
So I read books and listened to other guardians and,
Naturally,
I went to dog training classes.
As you may have experienced yourself,
There is a lot of contradictory information about dog training out there.
The more I asked and listened,
The more confused I got.
Much of the information seemed hopelessly outdated and many of the recommended techniques made me cringe inside because they meant I had to intimidate and even hurt my dog.
So I decided to learn the craft of dog training myself and,
In 2019,
I took a one-year in-person course.
It was the start of a passion that hasn't left me to this day,
To learn more and more about these fascinating beings called dogs.
After the course had finished,
I felt empowered,
Confident,
And thought that from now on Charlie's and my life would finally change for the better.
Only,
I hadn't taken into account what Charlie wanted.
This dog had no interest in being trained and he had no intention of changing his behavior.
Even though,
By this time,
I already stood firmly in the camp of positive reinforcement,
He wouldn't eat while we were out and about,
He still hollered at every dog we met,
And every attempt at working on his separation distress failed at the magic mark of 20 minutes.
One day,
I had to leave him at home alone because there was no other way,
And he bit and dug himself through the front door of my house.
He broke two teeth which had to be surgically removed.
This was when I gave up.
I just quit.
I was exhausted,
Confused,
And helpless.
I loved my boy dearly,
But I couldn't understand as a newly qualified dog trainer why I could not help him.
During these rather dark times,
I literally stumbled across a book by John Kabat-Zinn,
One of the first representatives of mindfulness in the West.
After a while,
I took up meditation as a daily practice,
I learned about compassion and self-compassion,
And I learned to breathe and pause before reacting.
And gradually,
My life began to change.
And all the while,
I had this dog beside me who,
I swear,
Sometimes looked at me with a grin on his face as if he wanted to say,
Don't you get it yet?
Well,
I finally got it.
I don't remember exactly,
But there was a day when something lit up inside my head and I finally connected the dots.
If I could change my relationship with myself through mindfulness training,
Then it should be possible to change my relationship with my dog.
And that is what happened,
Not overnight.
But gradually,
I learned to change my perspective.
I learned to look at things from Charlie's perspective,
To consider needs and emotions as a motivator for his behavior,
And I learned to question my own expectations of him.
I gave him choices,
Asked his opinion,
And accepted his decisions.
And I started to understand how my own state of imbalanced emotions,
My nervous system dysregulation,
Directly impacted his well-being and behavior.
He didn't suddenly love all the dogs we met.
He was still pretty lungy and barky,
But it felt more and more like he was going through the motions of a very long learning history.
We made progress,
But that was measured not in how close we could pass another dog,
But in how we both felt.
One way I made sure to start walks with Charlie on the right foot was to do a baseline check.
And this is how it works.
Before you clip on the leash,
Stand still for a moment inside your house or flat.
Breathe in,
And look around your space.
Name three things you can see,
Either out loud or in your mind.
Then wiggle your toes,
And exhale slowly.
Then attach the leash,
And head out.
You have just told your body,
I am safe.
And your dog will pick up on that too.
That's it for today.
I'm curious to learn how Charlie's and my story resonated with you,
And what changed for you with the baseline check.
Talk to you again soon.
Bye for now.
