Pausing with Purpose: A New Approach to Dog Care and Well-Being #33

💥Grab your FREE video training. Includes Connected Breathing!
 https://www.marydebono.com/lovedog 💥

In this episode of Easier Movement, Happier Dogs, Mary Debono introduces the concept of the "power of the pause" and its profound impact on mobility, dog training, and overall well-being.

Drawing inspiration from Tara Brach's teachings on mindfulness, Mary explains how taking a step back, even for a brief moment, can create a space for new possibilities in your dog's learning and behavior.

Mary shares real-life examples, including the story of Zoey, a dog who experienced a remarkable recovery through the simple practice of Connected Breathing. She also explains how the various hands-on practices she teaches, including Rhythm Circles, can be enhanced by incorporating pauses, allowing you AND your dog to release unnecessary tension and approach each interaction with less physical and emotional baggage. 

Whether you're dealing with a specific training challenge or looking to improve your dog's mobility and connection, this episode provides practical tips to help you harness the power of the pause.

By integrating these small but significant breaks into your routine, you can foster a deeper, more harmonious relationship with your dog.

Key Takeaways:

• The Power of the Pause: Learn how stepping back from a challenge can lead to breakthroughs in training and behavior.
• Incorporating Mindfulness: Discover how mindfulness practices can enhance your dog's well-being and deepen your bond.
• Debono Moves  Practices: Explore the benefits of Rhythm Circles and Connected Breathing, with a focus on incorporating pauses for optimal results. (See link in Resources below for a free video training on this!)
• Real-Life Application: Hear the inspiring story of Zoey, a dog whose recovery was accelerated by the practice of Connected Breathing.

Resources:

Grab your FREE video training. Includes Connected Breathing!
https://www.marydebono.com/lovedog 💥

Read about Zoey and her recovery from hip surgery.

Join our free Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DogHealthAndVitality

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. ⬅️⬅️⬅️

All information is for general educational purposes ONLY and doesn't constitute medical or veterinary advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider if you or your dog are unwell or injured. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. Today I wanted to share with you why taking a little break from something you're doing with your dog can often be the most beneficial thing you can do for yourself and your dog. So in case we're meeting for the first time, my name is Mary Debono, and this is the easier movement, Happier Dogs podcast. So thank you for being here. So, yes, I want to talk about why taking a little respite, a little break from something can be so valuable.

And I'll start out with telling you a little bit about. There's a woman, she's a well, really well known meditation teacher. Her name is Tara Brock. She wrote a book called Radical acceptance and wonderful stuff, by the way. She has a lovely podcast and all kinds of good things. She talks about the power of the pause and what she's referring to is this middle way, as they call it.

Like, in other words, you're neither grasping for something nor pushing things away. It's just like this middle ground where you're just. You're just being right. You're just. Your presence is there. And I'll tell you how this can relate to your dogs. So, for example, let's say you have something you're working with, a training issue with your dog. Like you, you want to train, you teach your dog something.

Okay? And it may be that you're dealing with a behavioral problem, or maybe not. It just maybe you want to teach your dog something. So, you know, maybe you're doing it and you're kind of drilling it because your dog isn't quite getting it. You think? So you drill, drill, drill, and you're really running into a lot of resistance in different ways. Or you're not feeling like your dog is giving you the right answer, so to speak, that they're trying other things.

They're not really understanding what you want, or they're not motivated to do what you want. Well, we find that when you just take a step back from that, just let it go for a little bit, coming back to it again with a fresh set of eyes, a fresh set of just a fresh nervous system, if you will, for both of you can be really, really helpful and you can kind of like start over.

Gives you that clean slate. But this is something like, again, if you're having any kind of difficulties, like maybe, and doesn't have to be like difficulty difficulties, it's just maybe little glitches or something, something you want to improve. But maybe it is something like with your dog. Like maybe you walk your dog in the neighborhood and there that your dog is easily, you know, reacting in a way that you'd rather not at certain things in the neighborhood.

Maybe lots of other dogs or lots of traffic or lots of people. You know, whatever it is that maybe is not good for your dog. And instead of just continuing with that, like continuing, well, I'm gonna, you know, I read about this and I know how to train this, and hopefully you're using positive reinforcement. There's a whole way that, you know, you can train that well, but just say you're still running into issues.

It can be so helpful to just take a step back from that and maybe not walk in the neighborhood for a while. Maybe put your dog in the car and go to a quiet park or some, some other place, some trails or something that will allow you to reestablish that connection with your dog and that level of, you know, comfort for your dog and yourself. Because we feed off each other.

As you know, we've talked about this before. So, so that's one way of using the paws. But I'm going to also talk to you about how you can use it in a more hands on kind of way. So, as you know, if you've listened to this podcast before, I teach people how to do specific hands on movements to improve their dog's mobility and their overall well being and deepen their connection with their dog.

So there's a particular move that we do a lot of, and I call it rhythm circles. And there is a free training. If you haven't gotten it yet, I encourage you to do it. You'll find the link in the description of wherever you're listening or watching. But if you maybe can remember this, it's marydebono.com forward slash love dog. And you'll get that. So in this training, where it teaches you something we call rhythm circles, you're using your hands very specifically to kind of lift the dog's tissue in a circular way.

Now, it's not an even circle. And again, you get, you'll get the full scoop of this when you sign up for the training. But just briefly, it's nothing, even pressure all around. The pressure is always very gentle and it's emphasized in one direction. And I teach you in the video how to find the direction you want to do that you want to emphasize. But here's where it's really powerful because you take a slight pause as you lift it and you emphasize that direction.

You hold it for just maybe a second, and then you slowly let go. But it's enough time for the nervous system to feel that sense of relief. Sometimes you hold it longer, right? But it's that power of the pause, as Tara Brach calls it, right? That power of just being present, being present, not trying to do anything or push anything away. Maybe it reminds you, too, to take a breath with your dog.

Okay, so this is really, really powerful. And this is something that I learned from the work of Doctor Moshe Feldenkrais, which, again, if you've listened to the podcast, you know that his work is, you know, strongly informed. The development of my work, which I call Debono, moves. And we added some other things as well, but has a strong basis in Doctor Feldenkrais's work. And he recognized, and this is from decades ago, he recognized how important these little rest breaks are, these little respites.

And it's often the time, too, when you take a little break from something. That's when learning takes place. So real strong, like, it gives more opportunity for the nervous system of dog or human to kind of upload the information and integrate it to create these new neural connections. And this is before, like, people could prove this through functional MRis and all kinds of things, but now we know that to be true.

But Doctor Feldenkrais was saying this a long time ago, and so that's when we know that. So the rest breaks. These little pauses, if you will, can be so valuable. And sometimes they're longer than just a couple of second or two. Sometimes they're much longer. But it's this idea that it's a chance for the nervous system to register something. The other thing it does, you can think of.

It encourages you and the dog to let go of any unnecessary tension. So this is a big part of what Doctor Feldenkrais work was all about, because most of us, we run into problems, and this is true whether we're humans, dogs, horses, cats. We run into problems when we're habitually tensing certain parts unnecessarily. And that ends up degrading our movement, causing more wear and tear, create, you know, increasing the risk of injury, not allowing injuries to heal fully, etcetera, because we've held on to that tension habitually.

And when you take a pause in between movements, what you're doing is you're encouraging the nervous system to let those muscles go. So you're like, training the nervous system to let go, and then it's available for easier movement the next time around. So we do this work with humans. When I'm teaching Feldenkrais awareness through movement lessons with people, I'm emphasizing, take those little breaks between a movement. Maybe the movement is moving your arm in a certain way.

You don't just move it, you know, repetitively, like, you know, like doing reps. You move it, first of all, with a lot of awareness, but then between each movement, it's like you take that short little rest again, encouraging the relaxation of the muscles, and then starting each movement fresh, meaning you're potentiating the movements. Again, this applies when you're working with your dog, doing the hands on step. You're potentiating it, even your training.

I'm going to say this is also true. When you take those breaks, when you have that power of the pause, you increase the efficacy of what you're doing. Okay, this is really important. So it's like you get this clean slate, if you will. You've given the nervous system time to upload the information, and now you can do things like each. When you take that little break in between something, you have that little pause.

Now you can do the next thing slightly differently. So we know that that gets the attention of the nervous system in a really helpful way. Right. And again, it increases the potential of the dog to improve in a pot, you know, in a pleasurable way and a positive way. So don't neglect this. Like, really think about this. Think about how you can incorporate this into your life. What is a pause for you?

Maybe it's like a season of the year. Think about how people take vacations. In some countries, people are encouraged to take four weeks off at a time or something like that. Or you think about school. Now, some kids go to school all year round, but oftentimes there is the summer break, right. And so it gives you, like, a definitive, okay, we finished 9th grade. Now you're going to 10th grade or whatever it is, right.

Or you were a freshman in college. Right. You know? And now you're. You're. You're going into your second year, so you have to. That. That is so helpful, because, again, it gives you, like, a demarcation. So I always think of it, like, think back to when you went. Maybe you're still in school. I don't know. But if you've passed that, think back to the excitement, maybe a little trepidation, but definitely there was an excitement and a sense of new possibilities when you started each school year, right?

So September was coming for me. Growing up, we always started right after Labor Day. I know some people start now in August. Whatever time you start, there is a different sense. Right. There's a little bit of that excitement, a little bit of that. Wow. What are we going to. How am I going to be different this year? What am I going to learn? You know, think about that with your dog as well.

So again, having these little breaks can be very helpful. Very, very helpful. So again, whether you're doing the hands on work and you're incorporating even something as small as like a second pause, like literally, like 1 second is your break or pause or longer, maybe it's 30 seconds, maybe it's something else. This is also, in your free training is something I call connected breathing, and that is simply being with your dog, listening to their breath.

I mean, there's a whole thing, I also teach variations of it where it's a whole meditation of taking in the breath as loving energy and letting it go out to your dog as loving energy. So we get a little bit more, you know, more along that line, more like a meditation. But even just simply taking some time, putting your hands on your dog's rib cage and listening to their breath again, you're going to be in that space, as Tara Brach says, the middle way, where you're not trying to influence your dog's breathing.

She doesn't talk about dogs. I am. But in other words, I'm relating her strategy to dogs where you're not trying to change the breath, you're not pushing anything away, you're not grasping, trying to get something to be better. You're just present. And I found with dogs, this connected breathing acts very much like a reset. So this is very much goes in line with the power of the paws.

All you're doing is you're bringing your dog back to themselves. You're bringing yourself back to you. I have a wonderful story about this with a dog named Zoe, who, she had a hip surgery, a femoral head, they call it. So the head of the femur needed to be removed. And a lot of dogs do super, super well with that. The. The body lays down like a false joint.

Matter of fact, I talked about her in last week's episode, or one of the episodes recently when I talked about one dog had a broken back and one dog had hip surgery. Zoe was the dog with the hip surgery. And what was interesting was even though the surgery was successful and her person was doing all of wonderful rehab, following everything to the letter, Zoe still wouldn't use her leg.

She couldn't stand on it on land. She used it in the pool, but she couldn't use it on or wouldn't use it on land. Surgeon was baffled. Therapist was baffled. She happened her person happened to attend a presentation I did about dogs and humans and doing this work. And she went out and got my book, grow young with your dog, and she followed the instructions for doing connected breathing, and that served as a reset for Zoe.

She got up and started using the leg. It was crazy. Absolutely crazy. She's not the only one that's had, um, that's had incredible results like that, where the. The connected breathing has been like this incredible reset. And, um, and by the way, there's a video, too, when I. That's in my blog post. I wrote about this, whether you can see Zoe doing zoomies, even like, she not, not immediately after that, but she just went on to be fine after that.

So it's interesting. And again, this speaks to the power of the pause, that ability for us like that, to step back for a moment, to allow ourselves to just be present. And that presence potentiates the connection we have between our dogs. In other words, it allows for more benefit to come through with the work we're doing with them, with our interactions, can be more powerful with that pause.

So I hope you found this helpful. Let me know how you're incorporating the power of the pause into your life with your dog or even just for yourself. What are you doing? That's a little bit of a break. You know, how have you, how have you applied this or anything else? Maybe there's something I can help you with and we can do a podcast episode for you, so let me know.

And you could just email me marydebono.com. so thank you so much for joining, you know, for listening, subscribing, and reviewing the podcast. I appreciate you so much. I look forward to talking to you soon. Bye for now.