Dog Yoga
My dog wants to merge with me when I do yoga. He is right there, nuzzled up beside me, glued to my every move and responding to nuance.
Turns out that dog yoga is a big thing. Look it up on the net. So why not teach Monty Dog how to do yoga as a service animal, for persons of trauma, who need yoga to make peace with their body?
Reading dogs are used as service animals in schools and libraries because they act as a benign intermediary to the stressed and anxious child who is struggling to read. The dog doesn’t judge or pressure or correct, just accepts and acts like this is the best thing that ever happened to him.
I am using my dog in the same way.
Persons of trauma shut down and get anxious when somebody is telling them what to do with their body (i.e., the yoga instructor, someone guiding them through breathing exercises or guided relaxation excercise). Doing the yoga stretch for the dog, not the instructor, relieves that pressure. The dog is a kind of interpreter. A person will move for a dog much more readily than move for a teacher or as a lesson or in front of a group.
I have started putting together yoga motions for persons of trauma, focusing on four core healing themes. The first is, curiosity.
Trauma shuts down curiosity, even making it dangerous to explore, question, reach out, move, ask.
So this is the meditation picture for “Curiosity.”
Curiosity
I want people to begin trauma yoga by looking at this picture and wondering, “what is up the road?” The dog in the picture is inviting them in.
Then I want people to wonder what it would be like to feel like their body is a friend, a safe place to be, connected to their opinions and feelings.
And, wonder, what it would be like if their arms and legs and muscles and blood pressure and breathing and posture were confident, self-willed, believing in positive outcomes.
Since I won’t direct people in how to move their bodies, I ask them to move with Monty Dog. Perhaps massage him at a certain spot on his back, between his shoulder blades. Getting into a rhythm of motion, then swaying their own backs into the massage, curious about how this would be to stretch their own shoulders, revolve their arms in a kind of dance motion, making a circle with their necks, making it up themselves as they go along, for the benefit of Monty Dog.
And they are doing this for Monty Dog. Monty Dog responds with gratitude and adores the person for being so very awesome, and the person has become a little more connected with their own body. On their own terms.
Finding safety in one’s body has to be on one’s own terms. Finding yoga moves that makes sense for a person of trauma means that they get to make it up, invent it, create it. Which is a product of creativity.
More on the three other core healing themes later,
Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.
Heidi's Art Life 