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Hi collaborator! (Thanks for being here! Your discount code is at the bottom of this email!) In the HDHH podcast this month, we’ve been talking about “urgency”. Urgency is that sense of needing to do something “right now!” or else something bad will happen. But it’s not like you feel safe and the urgency is pushing you to maintain the safety. Once you feel urgency, you have already lost your sense of safety. When dogs are reacting to something (eg. barking at the delivery truck or lunging on the leash toward another dog) they are feeling a sense of urgency. They have lost their sense of safety, and they’re trying to make something stop or go away so that they can feel safe again. When our dogs are reacting with urgency, we lose our sense of safety, too. We feel a sense of urgency in trying to make our dogs stop reacting “right now!” so that we can feel safe again. How can we find our sense of safety so that we can help our dogs also feel safe? The dogs know the answer to this: Slow down. Muggins shows me how to slow down when they lay in the middle of our street to watch the neighbors, when they never miss an after-breakfast nap, when they build a routine of chest rubs into our post-walk cooldown, when they inhale every millimeter of a blade of grass, and when they pause to look back on a trail and say ‘goodbye’ after a good hike. By finding moments throughout my day to pause, breathe, watch, hug, rest, observe, and just be, I build a sense of safety into my daily routine.
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