Her face is caved in on the right side. The right ear is smaller than the left and the tip has been bitten off. She came from the pound in New Jersey. She grew up in Brooklyn living in a loft apartment in an old rocket factory. Her first fight that we know of came when she was attacked by another dog in a park in Williamsburg, an attack severe enough to send her owner to the ED to repair a puncture wound on the wrist.

When she comes to visit us in Vermont, she can run free in the woods, swim in the reservoir and in the last year, play with our new dog, an Irish Setter at least twice her size, and still with a great deal of adolescent exuberance, playfulness and lack of judgment. There is lots of tussling, and dominance posturing, everything in balance. When she was too rough, the puppy would give a yip and that would end it, until the puppy jumped on her again. Everything in balance until now. Twice there has been a real fight, ending with both of them limping away, bloody with puncture wounds, and lacerations; ending only when we pulled them apart.

After the fight, I take her to a safe place, alone with me. I go over her body with my hands and with my eyes. I see the injuries. I look at her face and I see a history of injuries and trauma. I sense her pain, fear, desperate anger. I want to hold her in my arms and let her feel relief, feel secure, feel loved. But when I go to pat her head she resists and draws back. I can see the tension increase throughout her body. I was not really seeing her but rather my own fears and my own needs to hold and comfort and also be held and comforted.

I remember Thich Nhat Hahn’s comment that to be able to help someone, you have to be able to understand their suffering. To be able to understand someone else’s suffering, you have to be able to fully understand your own and to hold it as your own. It is at this point that being with this dog becomes an active zen practice, and it begins with the focus of my attention on my own emotions and reactions to the fight.

In the same way that I follow the breath in and out whether it be full or shallow, slow or fast, I hold in awareness the emotions which arise; not holding onto them, not pushing them away, not letting go of them. Just staying with them in awareness. It is after staying with my own feelings of having been hurt, of feeling angry or resentful, of wanting to be held and loved, after watching them wax and wane and seeing the roots of the fears and the roots of the desires, that the letting go occurs of it’s own accord. I am also offered the opportunity of seeing not only the impermanence of the thoughts and feelings but of the observer as well. This becomes a personal realization of Dogen’s “in attachment blossoms fall, in aversion weeds spread” and it is only when it becomes personal that it becomes real.

It is then that I can see when the dog is ready to be patted and when she wants to be left alone. I can see more clearly what actually gives her comfort and what she needs and wants. It is not only because of being able to read her body language. Dog mind and human mind are distinctly seen through their fundamental oneness.