Like many, one of the hardest things for me is to practice is balance. I constantly find myself doing too much or berating myself for doing too little. The doing too much, I’m sure is completely relatable. Since I love what I do, I want to keep doing it. Be it the prison program, be it working with as many dogs as humanly possible, be it presenting workshops to like minded people. However, I also work with a lot of K9 Rehab dogs. Dogs that have bitten other dogs or humans. Dogs that are anything but balanced. Dogs that require one to be completely present when being worked with.That is very energy consuming. Therefore rest and working with other energies is imperative. The doing too little is just part of my personality. I was told by my mentor that I am a perfectionist. So of course for me, lounging has to be in an exact, prescribed time. No laying around “doing nothing, for absolutely no reason” allowed. Therefore balance is something that I have to really, really practice. It does not come naturally to me.
We forget, at our own peril, that our lives are shaped and formed by cycles. Sometimes we are up, sometimes we are down. Sometimes we need to be stopped in order to come back to balance. That is what happened to me this week. I got bit pretty badly by one of the K9 Rehab dogs. This was not your “regular” bite and walk away type of thing. This dog kept coming back to bite again. I have one bite on my left hand, one on my right wrist and one on my leg. There are a myriad of reasons why this happened. I have experience working with these types of dogs and rarely take them from granted. But in the spirit of full honesty, I did take this dog for granted. He was not wearing a leash or a muzzle and we were doing a feeding exercise. Did I mention this dog is a Golden Retriever? A breed famous for doing whatever it takes to get to food? And that this dog has a pretty long rap sheet in the bite category? Nonetheless, I was unprepared, I was careless and was hurrying to get “it” done.
I am not, by any means, excusing this dog’s behavior. I am adamant that a dog not use its teeth on a human. Ever. My job is to teach them how to cope and to learn what to do when they are in a fight state. Biting will never be an acceptable answer. This dog is here to learn exactly that; to understand that humans are to be trusted and respected. My mistake was assuming that I could handle his response without the proper tools. He just did what he has been practicing for the past four years… bite when he disagrees with what the human wants him to do. We all make mistakes, learning from them is what allows us to grow. What did I learn from this incident? Several things, for starters, I was moving way too fast, doing too many things and not reading the dog properly. I was off balance. I was not present. I wasn’t prepared.
Working with dogs like this helps keep me focused. K9 Rehab dogs require a certain self awareness that we often loose when we are not in balance. If we consider ourselves at the top of the cycle, they will show you how not to take that rise so seriously. If, on the other hand, we feel like we are at the bottom, they show us what resilience looks like by their infinite ability to adapt. They are the perfect barometer to keep you in a place of equanimity and calm. That allows us to realize that we have control solely about how we react to what comes our way. Nothing more, nothing less. Every time something unexpected happens (good or bad) we humans have the ability to reset and take stock of how we are responding to it. I chose to see my mistakes and then reset and (after doing some bandaging on the wounds) continue working with him. I do not blame him for biting me, I don’t resent him for doing that. I realized that I had taken him for granted and not worked at the pace he needed. I repeated the same exercise, this time with him on a muzzle and he did surrender to the fact that the food did not belong to him. No matter how hard he fought. In the end, we were both exhausted. Making changes often will do that to you. I am still healing and he is still learning. But now, after the incident, my pace has come back to a more balanced one. My tempo has, once again, been reset. If anything, having been bit has helped me to slow down and be exactly where the dogs, and my inner self need to be. The balance has been restored.
