“I Finally Knew What it Meant to Meditate…”

Back in January I set a food challenge for myself that went something like this:  No animal products, no sugar (unless from whole fruits) and no refined carbohydrates for 31 days.  It was an eye opening experience, as I found my energy levels rocketing through ceiling, and aches and pains in my body, that I had just accepted as part of who I was, vanishing.  It’s lead me to virtually remove dairy from my diet and limit my meat intake to some beef or fish a few times a month.  (Snack food and sugar… Hey, it’s a work in progress folks).

As I dabbled in the world of being a vegan I also started training for my first 10k.  I’ve always been a 2-4 mile runner a few times a week, but this was a new  distance goal for me, and, if I’m going to be honest, a rather daunting one.

If you’re working out on a plant based diet, pretty quickly you run across a guy named Rich Roll, author of the memoir Finding Ultra and host of the, aptly named, Rich Roll Podcast.  Check him out and it will completely redefine what your image of a vegan might be.

I’ve finally just started reading Finding Ultra (which I can’t recommend enough), and I was struck by a line of his as he described the first time he realized that his new vegan diet (he switched to a plant based diet at the age of 40, overweight and out of shape) was doing remarkable things for his body’s athletic ability.  Having never run a serious distance up until the day he’s recounting in the book, he realizes that he is effortlessly running a near marathon above the hills of Los Angeles.  As he’s writing about this experience in Finding Ultra, he says “I finally knew what it meant to meditate.”

The oneness.  The connection with your body, your mind and Mother Earth.  I’ve felt that too on certain portions of my longer runs.  An empty mind as my body effortlessly responds to the brain waves that it’s receiving.

This is going to bring me back to dogs… just bear with me.

When Ashley and I spent the weekend with The Monks Of New Skete at their The Art of Living With Your Dog Seminar two weekends ago, one of the highlights for me was Brother Christopher’s talk on The Spiritual Dimension in The Human/Dog Relationship.

I want to share some of my personal notes from his talk:

Spirituality is all encompassing, in other words it is beyond a religious denomination.  However, spirituality is usually not associated with our day to day activities, and therefore there is a tension between the sacred and the secular.  Too much of one and your’e in Lala Land, while too much of the other can leave one with a hollow, empty feeling.  And so we do our best to seek a life that is integrated (one may add: whatever that might mean for us individually on a spiritual dimension).

But we all have nature, and nature mediates God’s presence in a vital way.  In fact, nature is another book on God.

Brother Christopher then recounted a moment (or a collection of moments) that, to me, was just like Rich Roll’s experience on that trail above L.A.  It was an experience of oneness while working with a dog that he was training, an experience that was as prayerful as any he had had in Church.  It was, he said, a conversion to what’s possible in the Human/Dog relationship.  And so, for him, an intentional relationship with a dog puts us in direct contact with the act of living consciously in God’s presence.  The dog makes us more human.

I think this is important stuff for any dog owner to consider, but to go one step beyond that, it might even be more important for those of us living in an urban setting.  Often, we feel starved for that touch of nature, that connection.  But we have our dogs there.  As Brother Christopher concluded his talk: “The dog is nearby helping to heal us, helping to make us whole.  That is their gift to us.”

I feel lucky to have had experienced that oneness, in my own small way, that both Rich Roll and Brother Christopher talked about.  I’ve said before that most problems I see with dogs come from a certain amount of unconsciousness on the part of their human counter parts.  It’s easy to ignore, or deny the behaviors that we don’t like.  But they’re still there.  Just like a negative thought, it’s often a meditative awareness that will deflate them.

Training your dog is another form of meditation.  If done right it requires a focus on the now, and the presence of whatever God you might believe in, may just be a part of the experience.  Be present with your dog, respect the reality of the situation, and you might be closer to not just a deeper connection with your dog, but also with yourself.