Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and
Ourselves by Kevin Behan.
This book
is different from other examinations of the canine/human connection because it concentrates on what dog and human share in common rather than what makes us different. We’re not going to consider how the canine sense of smell is far more powerful than ours, what frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum they can see that we cannot, what range of sounds reaches their ears and not ours — as interesting and valuable as such discussions may be.
Instead, we will examine the idea that emotion is energy, that it is how consciousness makes contact with nature.
Feelings are universal to all sentient beings in nature, whereas thoughts, instincts, and genes, and all the specific adaptations that arise from these, are what differentiate our two species and in the final analysis keep us separate. Therefore, to truly know a dog, especially our own dog, requires reconnecting with our own emotional nature so that we learn more about the nature of what we’re feeling because this is precisely how our dog’ s mind work
s.
The energetic principles of emotion are the operating system of a networked intelligence.
Perhaps the most amazing thing I’ve learned from dogs is that the heart, the organ in our chest that pumps our blood, is this network’s brain.
I will examine these ideas through three themes: 1) We don’t know what we’re feeling. 2) The behavior of dogs can teach us about emotion and feelings.
And 3) the real reason for the dog in our life is emotional.
We carry around in our body/mind the physical memory of every emotional experience we’ve ever had; I call this physical memory our “emotional battery.” This is what our dog tunes into and responds to accordingly.
When we understand that dogs are emotional beings, that emotion is a force of nature as real as gravity, and that our dog’s emotions are a source of information for us that is often obscured from our eyes by human reason, then we will see our dog not as being apart from us but instead as being a part of us.
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