Partner with Your Dog's Nervous System for Real Change #49

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Imagine a revolutionary approach to helping your dog move, feel, and behave better—without force, manipulation, or discomfort. Debono Moves breaks new ground in canine wellness by tapping into your dog's innate ability to heal and learn through gentle, pleasurable movement. Unlike traditional bodywork that temporarily fixes symptoms, this groundbreaking method creates lasting transformation by speaking directly to your dog's nervous system.

At its heart, Debono Moves is a dance of discovery between you and your dog. Informed by the renowned Feldenkrais Method, it uses subtle, supported movements to help your dog's brain create new neural pathways—like updating their movement "software" rather than forcing changes to their physical "hardware." This means no more temporary fixes or constant maintenance—just natural, lasting improvement.

Take Zip the Corgi, who struggled with persistent shoulder stiffness despite excellent care from massage therapists and chiropractors. While these treatments offered temporary relief, it was Debono Moves that finally broke the cycle of recurring pain. Through gentle exploration and supported movement, Zip's nervous system discovered new ways to move, leading to lasting comfort and freedom.

But here's what makes Debono Moves truly extraordinary: its benefits ripple far beyond physical movement. As your dog's nervous system relaxes and learns, you'll often notice remarkable improvements in behavior, focus, and emotional balance.

Dogs become more responsive, less reactive, and more connected to their humans. Meanwhile, you'll develop an almost intuitive understanding of your dog's needs, creating a deeper bond than you ever thought possible.

This isn't just another treatment—it's a transformation in how you and your dog move through life together. Whether your dog is dealing with chronic stiffness, recovering from injury, or you simply want to enhance their well-being and deepen your connection, Debono Moves offers a gentle path to lasting change.

Key Benefits:

1. Creates permanent change through your dog's natural learning ability
2. Transforms movement without force or manipulation
3. Improves behavior and emotional balance naturally
4. Deepens the bond between you and your dog
5. Develops your ability to "read" and respond to your dog
6. Customizes to your dog's unique needs and responses
7. Shows results quickly and maintains them long-term
8. Enhances overall quality of life for both you and your dog

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 does not constitute medical or veterinary advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider if you or your dog are unwell or injured.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. Welcome to Easier Movement Happier Dogs, where we explore gentle, effective ways to help your dogs move better, feel better, and connect more deeply with you. I'm Mary debono, and today we're talking about what makes this work, what I call De Bono moves, unique in the canine bodywork field because maybe, like a lot of dog people, you've done lots of different things to help your dog. Maybe you've done massage or chiropractic, and they're great.

They can be really effective at helping your dog feel better and move a little more easily. But I want to emphasize that this approach is quite different. Where those kind of approaches, massage, Cairo, etcetera, they focus more on structure. Whereas what we do here with debono moves, which is strongly informed by the Feldenkrais method for humans, by the way, we are working on the level of the nervous system and we're thinking more about the dog's function.

We're helping the dog change and create new neural connections so that the change is long lasting and often happens very quickly as well. So, and I'll tell you first what De Bono moves is not. It's not about forcing something. It's not about trying to make something happen with your dog. There's no manipulations. Okay, so I'll start. I'll give you a story about a dog I worked with named Zip.

And he was a corgi, and he had a persistent limp and stiffness with one of his shoulders. He had had an injury, he was treated by the veterinarian, but he just was not ever quite right after that. And so his person was wonderful, and took him to a canine massage therapist who was excellent, took him to a canine chiropractor who was also excellent. And those things helped temporarily.

He would feel better, he'd move a little easier. You know, he'd get up without being so stiff for a while, but then he'd go back to being stiff and sore again. And so when I worked with him, I had a very different outlook or even intention. I wasn't thinking about, oh, this is, like out of alignment, or this is too tight and I have to untighten it. Right?

I have to, like, force the muscle fibers apart or try to get the joints to align in a different way. I wasn't doing any of that. Instead, I was thinking, how can I connect with this dog's nervous system? How can I connect with him in such a way that her nervous system feels like he has different options, that he doesn't have to keep going back to that pattern of Tension and stiffness.

And so I do that, and this is what I teach in my work as well, is I can, you know, you learn how to touch the dog in such a way that it's, it's gentle, so it feels good, it doesn't feel scary. The dog isn't anticipating pain and it actually feels pleasurable. And this wakes up the nervous system in a positive way. So the nervous system of the dog starts to pay more attention.

And then you start to introduce ways of like supporting, for example, that shoulder or more importantly, supporting the surrounding structures, like, for example, you know, the rib cage and feeling how the rib cage can function differently and then bringing the shoulder into it and then bringing the hip into it and feeling how, you know, by inviting movement into the spine, it can take the stress off the shoulder.

So there's many ways. And this episode isn't about teaching you specifics of how to help a dog with a shoulder injury, because that's the other thing. Every dog is different. The way Zip embodied his shoulder injury might be very different than the way another dog would be embodying their shoulder injury. So there are no recipes. It's more this co creative approach that you and the dog enter into a dialogue.

This work is not something you do to your dog, it's with your dog. And you may find as you do it, you know, I'm thinking again of working how I worked with Zip, and I have worked with many dogs where I do this movement of I have one hand on top of the dog. So say the dog is lying. Picture this. Zip is Zip. Picture a little corgi is lying on his side and I have one hand on his shoulder blade and the other hand on the hip on the same side.

And I start just inviting this idea of gentle movement to both the shoulder and the hip, but in such a way that the shoulder is moving one way and the hip is moving another. But both are done in a way that I'm supporting those parts of the dog so it feels easy, it feels light, it feels pleasurable. Well, well, now the dog's nervous system is starting to lay down new neural pathways around how the hip and the shoulder relate to each other, how they can move in harmony.

And then I might work with the dog's spine in that case. I remember working with Zip. I worked a lot with his spine and then brought in again the shoulder, brought in the rib cage because they, they all function together. Like, they all have to coordinate for the shoulder to be free, for it to move more easily and comfortably. So this is definitely a learning modality. Your dog, when you do debono moves with your dog, your dog is learning something, which is so cool.

It's all about neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to form new neural connections based on sensory input. Okay, so. And you as well, because it's different for you, it's new for you. Your brain also wakes up, your nervous system, pays attention to these sensations. And you might find, I'm thinking actually of a woman. I was working with her dog and I was also teaching her how to work with her own dog.

And this particular thing, this hip and shoulder circles that we were doing with her dog, what she found was it, it helped free up her own back so much that her chiropractor noticed it and said, what have you been doing? You no longer get, you know, out of alignment. You no longer need to be adjusted in your upper and mid back. And she thought back to the work she had learned with her dog and how much it helped her.

So this work is all about a win win. It's for your dog to feel better and move more easily and the same for, for you. Okay, so you both benefit by doing the work at the same time. Okay, so it's, it's about bringing more mindfulness. But like, like this awareness, not just body awareness, but overall awareness. Like more of a connection to yourself, whether you're a dog or a human.

And then a connection with you and your dog so you know yourself better. Your dog learns to know himself better. Like not intellectually, but in the case of zip, you know, he learned that, oh, I don't have to keep guarding that shoulder anymore. When you invite this gentle feeling. Right. When you invite new possibilities, it's like the, the, the nervous system breathes a sigh of relief and says, oh, that feels good.

I want to do more of that. So I hope that makes sense to you. It's very different than structural approaches, this work. Again, I want to say, I want to emphasize, you do it with your dog, it's tailored to your dog. And I teach you how to listen to your dog, to know what to do to help them. Okay. So, you know, it's such a different thing. And I think that's why it has such a big positive effect on dogs behavior as well.

Because you're calming the nervous system. They're, you know, they're less likely to be reactive to things, more likely to be acting in harmony with the environment, more likely to be able to focus with you when you're teaching them things. Okay, so again, it opens up the whole. A whole new world of possibilities. It's not just about, you know, trying to, quote, unquote, get your dog to move differently or get your dog to behave differently.

It's about deepening connections. Deepening connections in such a way that the dog responds more harmoniously to their environment and to you. And you respond more harmoniously to your dog and to your environment, and you communicate on this deeper level. You learn to really communicate through your hands. And you start to feel things. You start to notice, ah, my dog is feeling this way today, like, because you, you've developed what we call sensory acuity.

You learn to tune in and then your subconscious, your unconscious starts to pick up information that you may not even have been aware of. And you start to get like, kind of like intuitive hits. You start to become, what I say, informed intuition because it's actually coming from a place of knowledge. And you start to, again, like I said, communicate more effectively with your dog. So I hope that, I hope that helps you understand the difference between this work.

Matter of fact, I don't. I don't usually call it bodywork because it's not really bodywork. It's, it's, again, it's communication. It's communication. It's, it's inviting. You can think of it as a dance. It's a kinesthetic. Let me say that again. Kinesthetic communication with your dog. Right. Learning or communication that happens through the body. So it's very gentle. It's, you know, non invasive. We allow plenty of pauses, like little rest breaks throughout a session so that your dog can kind of soak up the information, the nervous system can make sense of it.

It's like the information gets uploaded to the nervous system. And when we work with dogs, we're paying close attention to the dog's responses so that we can then adjust what we're doing accordingly. It's definitely a dance or a dialogue with the dog. Okay. And in a nutshell, it's like we are doing movement explorations that engage the dog's curiosity and really engage the dog's nervous system in a positive way.

And we include these different variations to help the dog discover what feels better to them. Okay. So that's why I'm going to say we don't push for change. We're inviting change through learning. So we become partners, true partners with our dogs. So I hope this was helpful. I hope this gave you some more insight into the, to the De Bono moves work. And if you want more information on it, you can certainly go to my website, marydebono.com

you can sign up for the free masterclass marydebono.com forward/dog. Or if you want to get that free video training. This is a, this is a good one. It's a big, you know, it's a nice little hub of resources for you. Well, they're all good resources. But if you go to marydebono.com forward/love dog, I'll set you up with that. Okay. Let me know what you're dealing with. If you have an issue with your dog, let me know.

And I'll do a podcast episode for you as well. So thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you listening to the podcast and subscribing and leaving reviews. Those are awesome. So thank you so much. I look forward to talking to you again soon. Bye for now.