Present Moment Magic Mindfulness for You and Your Animals #120

What if the way to connect more deeply with your horse or dog wasn’t by doing more—but simply by noticing more?

In this episode of Easier Movement, Happier Life, Mary Debono explores how mindfulness, the simple act of noticing your present experience, can radically transform your life and the lives of your animals.

You’ll learn how slowing down—even just for a moment—can awaken you to new possibilities. Discover how mindful movement, shared awareness, and practices like Connected Breathing and Rhythm Circles can regulate your nervous system, deepen your animal connection, and bring more joy into everyday life.

This episode is an invitation to savor your life instead of rushing through it—and to create a profound, felt sense of connection with your dog or horse that words can’t always reach.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Mindfulness = Noticing: Being aware of your moment-to-moment sensory experience is the foundation of meaningful connection.
  
  
• Break Habit Loops: Mindfulness helps shift unconscious physical and emotional patterns in you and your animal.
  
  
• Shared Awareness: Practices like Connected Breathing and Rhythm Circles create co-regulation and intuitive understanding between you and your animal.
  
  
• Mindfulness Is Movement Too: You don’t have to sit still to be mindful—movement can deepen awareness and presence.
  
  
• Savor Life: Mindful moments help you feel time differently—life becomes richer and more meaningful.

Resources:

Grab your FREE videos on Connected Breathing and Rhythm Circles to help your dog. 🐕 https://www.marydebono.com/lovedog 💥

Get your free videos on Connected Breathing and Rhythm Circles with your horse. 🐎https://tinyurl.com/equine-videos

Get Mary’s bestselling, award-winning book, “Grow Young with Your Dog,” for a super low price at: https://tinyurl.com/growyoungwithyourdog. Demonstration videos are included at no extra cost.

Want to sit in a more balanced, secure way? Click here for all the details on our Feldenkrais series:
Effortless, Balanced Sitting: A FeldenkraisⓇ Movement Series   

All information is for general educational purposes ONLY and does not constitute medical or veterinary advice or professional training advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider if you, your horse, or your dog are unwell or injured.  Always use extreme caution when interacting with horses and dogs.

Email [email protected]

TRANSCRIPT:

If the way to deepen your connection with your horse or dog wasn't through doing more, but simply noticing more. In this episode, we're going to explore how mindfulness can help you move better, feel better, and discover brand new possibilities for both you and your animal. Hello, I'm Mary debono, and this is the Easier Movement, Happier life podcast. It's for you, your horses, and dogs. I'm so glad you're here.

Yeah. Today I want to talk about how something that's seemingly simple and quiet is really quite powerful and can do a lot to change the quality of your life experience. It can help you shift not only how you move, but how you live and how you interact with others. And that includes your horses and your dogs. And what I'm talking about is mindfulness. Now, mindfulness can sound kind of abstract.

It's like, what is mindfulness really? But it's actually very tangible. It means being aware of your present moment, experience. It's like what you're sensing, what you're feeling, what you're noticing right now. And with that awareness, it can change everything. It's really pretty cool. You know, most of us and this. You know, I'm including myself here, right? We easily slip into autopilot. It's like we go about our day.

We have our habits of, you know, the way we move, the way we think, you know, our emotional reactions. So much of that is just like a habit loop that we fall into. You know, we. We kind of brace or tense in the same ways. We assume the same thing about our animals, you know, over and over, we think they're a certain way, and we kind of just reinforce that with our thoughts.

We make up stories. We make up stories about ourselves and about our animals, and then we just keep reinforcing them habitually. A lot of times, those thoughts we have, we're not even conscious of, but they're happening over and over, right? And so they're keeping us stuck. It's not a good thing. Okay. So. And then, you know, you have to remember you're kind of rushing through your day without really noticing your day.

It's like, that's. That's your life. It's your life we're talking about, right? When we start to bring mindfulness into our lives in a. In a very intentional way, there's Something shifts. It's like they've done studies with this where. Where the perception of time actually slows down. I talk about this in my book, grow young with your dog that paying attention to things like noticing Your sensory experience can help you feel younger and kind of grow younger because time can slow down.

I think so many of us, you know, we, we, we feel like time is like going so fast. Like one minute, you know, it's January, the next minute it's December. We're ready for the new year. And instead, you know, we are not savoring our lives as much as we could. And again, a lot of that is because we fall into these habit loops. So, you know, just noticing things like slowing down, even just for moments at a time, allows you to shift that and to change your perception.

So maybe you notice that your jaw is tight or you're holding your breath, or maybe you start to notice something about your dog that you didn't notice before. That maybe your dog looks away when you kind of raise your voice a little bit, or you get tense about something, or you notice your horse braces when you pick up contact with the reins. So you start to like really slow down and allow your nervous system, time and space to notice things.

Okay, and then you can change those things. That's the cool part, right? So instead of repeating the same loop, you now have the option to try something different, to soften, to breathe more fully, to be more present. And that presence opens the door up to connection, to curiosity, to, and yes, even to joy, to really fully being present in your life and feeling the joy in your life, allowing it to blossom, to bloom.

Okay, so mindfulness really helps you break out of your habitual responses, your habitual patterns that you have. And again, whether they're physical, emotional, mental, it brings a freshness to the experience and it allows you to actually experience your life instead of rushing through it. So that's why I often say mindful moments are meaningful moments. I'm going to say that again. Mindful moments are meaningful moments. They're the ones we remember.

Those are the ones that just bring up those lovely feelings of joy and well being. And they could be just like simple things, right? They're the ones that touch us and the ones that change us. And you know, here's the really good part. You don't have to sit in silence to become more mindful. Meditation is great. I do it. I love meditation. You know, it's really powerful. But you don't have to do that.

You don't have to sit on a cushion to become more mindful. So mindfulness can happen in motion. So in the work that I teach, both the Feldenkrais method for humans and the hands on work that we call de Bono Moves for horses, dogs and other animals. We're bringing our mindfulness there. We are developing our mindfulness in those experiences. So maybe for example, you're doing connected breathing with your horse or your dog.

And so you're resting your hands gently on your animal's rib cage and you know, I guide you through that process of noticing, noticing and we do different exploration so you're feeling more connected with your horse or your dog. Well, that allows you to be mindful. That's promoting present moment awareness. All you're aware of is what you're sensing. That is a beautiful thing. And by the way, in the description of wherever you're listening or watching this, there'll be links.

There'll be a dog link where you can learn how to do connected breathing and something magical that we call rhythm circles. And that'll be for the dog people and there's also a link for the horse people. So you could learn to do it whether you have a horse or a dog, or both. Sign up for both if you have both and you'll get free video videos, okay? Free videos that'll walk you through this process.

Okay. When I talk about connected breathing and doing rhythm circles because. And of course we have a lot of other things we do in the de bono moves for horses and dogs, but these are two fundamental and extremely valuable hands on practices that you can do. And again, they're, they're designed to help both you and your animal at the same time. So again, embracing that idea of mindfulness, of slowing down of nervous system regulation, of deepening your connection, bringing more awareness physically and emotionally so your, the animal's mobility improves as well.

All that can happen. It's amazing. And again, it brings us to that special place of being really mindful or being really present with our animals. Changes everything. Changes everything. And again, doesn't mean you're going to be in that state 24 7, but taking the time to even do it for just minutes at a time, you're starting to train your nervous system to be in that state more frequently.

So again, it improves you physically, emotionally, improves your connection with your animal. It helps them and it helps you just live a fuller life. Instead of just rushing through your life, you actually get to savor the joy in life, okay. And feel it. You get to feel life in a deeper way. So you know, again, it's, it's something that seems so simple, but how often do we do that?

And that's what I love about the work that I teach, is that I'm helping you learn how to get into that state with your animal and then your horse or your dog starts to listen more closely to you too. It's a state I call shared awareness. When you're both interested in the same thing at the same time. So those physical sensations, so what you're doing with your hands, whether it's connected, breathing or rhythm circles or one of the other many, many, many hands on methods that we have, right?

Your both you and your animal are tuning into those sensations simultaneously. And that is so powerful for your ability to communicate. It's like you listen on a much deeper level. You may find that you just know things intuitively. What you think is just intuition, but it's really what we call informed intuition where you're picking up different cues from your animal that you may have bypassed before that just didn't get filtered in.

You know, you just kind of ignore them, right? Because the brain has to ignore most sensory information that you that comes through. You know, it doesn't allow it to come through because there's just too much of it. But you can train your brain. We've talked about this in previous episodes about training your reticular activating system, or ras, to notice more about your dog or about your horse. So staying in these moments of shared awareness where you're both really interested in the sensations is a way to tell your nervous system, yes, this is what I'm interested in.

Start filtering for that. It's kind of like when you put a keyword into Google, into the search engine, right? You have to tell it what to look for. So it's like you're telling your brain, okay, this is important. My horse, my dog is important to me. So let me notice more things about them and you could really develop your eye, you can develop your feel. It's all kinds of cool stuff.

So again, you want to think, you know, next time you're with your horse or your dog, take a breath, take a moment. You know, think of just taking a mindful moment, notice your breath, what moves when you breathe. And notice your animal's breath. What do you notice about that? So again, you're starting to develop this quality of paying attention. It's one thing, it's another one of the things I say all the time, right?

How you move, how you breathe and how you direct your attention all felt by your animal. And they all shape your interaction with your horse or your dog. So take that moment, notice your breath, notice your animal's breath. Doesn't mean you have to do anything about it, but you just start to notice that, become more mindful. So, and you know, and this is not just for your animal, but it's also for you to be more present.

In other words, it'll improve your mobility, your, you know, physical and emotional well being. So, and it's not just about slowing down, right? It's about waking up. That's a better term to think of. I mean, yes, we're slowing down so you can notice more, but you're waking up to what's right here in your life. To what your dog, to what your horse is telling you, to what you can experience together, to the sense of new possibilities, more expanded possibilities may be quite different than some goals you had for your dog or your horse.

But you're, you're waking up to your animal and to your life. And you know, when you do that, like I mentioned earlier, time actually feels different. Okay? Your life doesn't rush by so quickly. You know, you're not lost in the past or worried about the future you're living now. And that becomes a really rich, vibrant and deeply connected place to be. So again, try to weave these mindful moments more frequently into your life.

They can change everything. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I want to again emphasize that in the description of wherever you're listening or watching this, there'll be two links. One for to help you learn how to do some of this with your dog, the other for the horse. People feel free to sign up for both. Okay. Free videos and I want you to have to do them.

Have fun with it and let me know how it goes for you. So thank you so much for being here. So appreciate you listening, downloading and subscribing to the podcast. And you know, when you review it, by the way, if you enjoy it and you want to give us a good review, that is super helpful in getting it out to more and more people so more and more humans and their animals can benefit from it.

So thank you again. I look forward to talking to you soon. Bye for now.