Your Dog Is Your Mirror Quotes

“What is a dog? A dog is nature’s ultimate empath. It knows by heart. A dog is a feeling.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“contrast, when an owner is submissive, or wishy-washy in dealing with his dog, his dog will tend to become assertive, brash, “overly protective” — the classic hallmarks of the so-called dominant dog.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“the gut had a mind of its own”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“The little brain in the gut develops from the same embryonic tissue as the brain in the head, and the two are connected via the massive vagus nerve. Most intriguingly, there is a nine-to-one rate of data transfer from the gut to the brain, as opposed to the brain to the gut.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“little brain in the gut” or the enteric nervous system, also known as the emotional brain. It was discovered in the late nineteenth century, and it is endowed with both sensory and motor neurons; this region contains half the body’s neurons and has a full range of neurotransmitters, hormones, and opiate receptor sites. According to Dr. Jill Ammon-Wexler, a pioneering brain researcher, “Your ‘gut-brain’ is also able to learn, remember, and produce emotion-based feelings.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“Somehow I knew all things were connected, everything but a point on some continuum. This felt more real to me than anything I was ever to learn in any class or read in any book. This feeling of resonance became my standard, so when a teacher told me something or I read something in a book, if I didn’t feel the depth of resonance I found in the woods I never completely accepted what I was reading or being taught. I learned to give the right answers to pass tests and complete assignments, but if I didn’t feel resonance, I posted a mental asterisk on that fact or concept.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“When two beings want the same thing, they can communicate. And when two beings want the same thing that neither can attain on their own, they can connect. A want held in common weaves life into one network, a worldwide web of feeling.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“What was most compelling to me was that on the training field, whenever a dog was having difficulty with an exercise, a good Schutzhund trainer always worked the problem down to the insecurity or the element of confusion that was invariably the root cause. Very often a dog’s difficulties were shown to be caused by its handler.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“we’re not trying to take the dog’s energy away from him; we’re merely showing him what to do with his energy and in a manner wholly consistent with his temperament,”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“I want that puffin,” and behold the puffin-hunting Norwegian lundehund, double and triple jointed, able to touch its nose to the base of its tail so as to climb”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“When one spends a great deal of the formative and imaginative period of his life alone in the woods, the ability to note and track detail becomes highly developed. He becomes attuned to the subtlest changes in his surroundings, and it’s easy to imagine that there might be hidden, immaterial processes beneath the surface.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“in the woods there was a persistent sense of anticipation, an expectation that something was about to be, as if the forest held some secret, and were I still enough and always looking as far as my eyes could reach, I might catch a glimpse. I’d find a spot and then pay attention — to my thoughts and sensations, to the subtle changes around me, and how all of these made me feel. After a while I lost a sense of where my feelings ended and my surroundings began. These sites felt sacred, and the thought of making any noise felt a violation of a pristine, ancient quiet.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“With every dog I trained or handled, and there were hundreds each year, I practiced the skill of not projecting a thought, intention, or expectation onto anything the dog might do. This allowed me to bypass thinking and let the dog’s actions show me what was the immediate-moment energetic equation in what was happening before me.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“I believe there is only one way to evolve: by staying true to desire; the wellspring of passion — the prime kernel of code that factors out feelings and behaviors as expressions of emotion in order to consummate desire — is the same in human and dog. What is most wild in human and canine — Heart — is what bonds us.”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“I mean actually feeling the other person’s emotion, without any thinking whatsoever, an empathic communication of pure energy, a one-for-one transference in every nuance and subtlety of one individual’s feelings to another. If such direct communication were possible, then the other person’s words and even their actions wouldn’t matter most to us (in fact they might be irrelevant) — only what they were feeling would matter. Interestingly, if they wanted something, we’d want them to have it. We wouldn’t negatively judge what that person was feeling because we would be feeling exactly the same way. It would feel good to give”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves

“Before I lay out my theory, I ask Linda to suspend everything she thinks she knows about dogs and to not think of Rosy as a “being” in her own right, as an intentional agent equipped with an onboard, self-contained intelligence, framed by a personality that’s been determined by genes and sculpted by life experiences. I’m going to teach Linda that Rosy is not an individuated consciousness, endowed with her own will that’s empowered by personal volition and informed by a self-contained sense of self or ego. A dog’s consciousness derives from its participation in one overarching will that is enabled by emotion and informed by feelings. Emotion isn’t something that happens inside of us, separate and distinct from what’s happening outside of us. Emotion, nature, and sentience compose one seamless “networked intelligence.” Since I interpret emotion as a networked consciousness and as the energy that animates as well as informs dogs, when I am observing a dog, I know that its behavior and personality are a manifestation and expression of emotion and feelings it’s picking up from the ones with whom it’s bonded. From my life in dogs I now see a dog as a living, walking, breathing sonogram of the emotional dynamic within its owner. What’s going on inside Rosy is a mirror image of what Linda herself feels. When Linda speaks of Rosy, she’s not speaking of Rosy as a dog; she’s really speaking of her own heart. I”
― Kevin Behan, Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves