Lessons From My 119 Year Old Dog

I don’t have a picture of my dog, so here is a random mini-horse i saw one time instead.

My dog passed away.

He was 119 in dog years, damn resilient little guy.

Here’s what he taught me.

Words are useless.

Well not entirely,

But the deepest level of understanding that we can learn to express is not dependent on words.

He was a deep vessel for listening.

True listening.

Not the usual, “I’m listening through the lens of my fundamental story and I’m actually just waiting until you say something that I must interject upon immediately and add my 2 cents to.”

He listened fully, without superimposing his idea of self onto others.

You could literally sit next to this dog, tell him your life story and feel so deeply seen and understood that it was uncanny.

I believe we humans can be this way too if we weren’t so attached to the ideas of ourselves.

I don’t know much about dog psychology or dog spirituality but I do know that this little resilient dog, who got mauled on 3 separate occasions by pitbulls and lived to embody, not tell, the story, dealt with his own traumas and shit that informed his everyday consciousness.

Even with his traumas, he was able to make you feel so deeply seen and loved without bias which to me speaks volumes to the level of awareness this dog just simply integrated into his life.

He didn’t have to do breathwork

He didn’t have to cold plunge

He didn’t even need to cut red meat from his diet

He simply lived his life and fully integrated what he experienced.

That is the mirror.

Can we experience life in all the ways that life lifes us and simply integrate?

Can we drop down from our minds and just enter our heart, and our body, and keep record of our experience there?

Can we experience life through our nervous system and adapt all of the ways that it unconsciously stored our traumas and now consciously integrate and release these limitations?

That’s what I felt my dog did.

He didn’t rehearse the same potential future scenario over and over again.

He didn’t let his past experiences take away from his present level peace.

He didn’t let stress overtake him unless he truly was in fight or flight because he was being attacked.

This little guy literally would be picked up by a hawk, only for the hawk to realize he was just a little too big and therefore drop him only for him to be temporarily stunned for only a few minutes then he was back on his way of basking in the sun.

Completely unfckwithable.

So the lesson is that we too can be like this.

We too can separate from our minds and be in the presence of the now.

We too can understand our nervous system and re-wire our trauma responses.

We too can set aside stress until we really need it to survive.

I certainly think it would be rad to live to 119, so I’m going to integrate more of what he taught me.

Thanks Ry!

Love you.

See you in about 90 years.