Coaching Canine Companions-2

01/09/2025

K9 BUBBLE TRAINING
Wag Wisdom Daily Brief — Let’s See: The Ritual of Looking Together

(Five minutes of science, soul & strategies from my heart to yours—motivation you can’t resist, for pup parents and pet pros alike)
In Wag Wisdom, dog trainer and behavior expert Lorrie J. Harris invites you into a new kind of dog training—one that listens before it leads, breathes before it speaks, and notices the space between behaviors as sacred.
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❗️ Problem Theme
“Why does my dog freeze, stiffen, or even lunge when they see something in the distance?”
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🔥 Opening Paragraph
You’re mid-walk when it happens. Your dog’s body goes taut, breath shallow, eyes locked on a shape ahead. A stroller, a dog, a shadow. The world contracts to one point. Instinct says tug the leash, break the spell. But what if the answer isn’t pulling away or pushing through—what if it’s pausing together? That pause has a name: Let’s See. Let’s dig in.
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🧠 Science & Brain — The Bubble of Safety
Dogs, like us, carry an invisible shield called peripersonal space. Neuroscience shows this safety bubble expands when threatened and contracts when safe, guided by circuits in the premotor cortex and amygdala (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945221001933).
What it means: When your dog stiffens, they aren’t “being dramatic.” Their brain is defending that bubble.

Training Tip: Say “Let’s See” in a calm, steady voice. This phrase becomes a ritual marker, allowing your dog to investigate without fear.
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🐾 Training & Behavior — Let Curiosity Lead
Ethological research calls it flight distance—the invisible line where approach flips into retreat (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark%3A/67531/metadc5120/). Crossing it without choice sparks reactivity.

What “Let’s See” does: It turns that moment into shared curiosity. Instead of dragging away or forcing closer, you let your dog look. When they sigh, blink, or soften, you reward not the staring, but the return to balance.
Training Tip: Keep the 3Ds in mind—Distance, Duration, Distraction. If your dog locks on too long, adjust one of the three until the bubble holds steady.
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🌞 Mindset & Well-Being — Permission to Pause
Your nervous system might scream, “Fix this now!” But here’s the reframe: stepping back or waiting is not weakness. It’s fluency. It tells your dog, I will not rush you through what feels dangerous. That promise builds more confidence than any correction ever could.
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🌀 Psychology & Self-Discovery — The Archetype of the Watcher
In myth, the Watcher stands at the edge of the forest, scanning shadows before the hero steps in. Your dog carries this archetype—sensing, pausing, assessing. Where in your life do you rush past what deserves looking at? Ritual: next time your dog halts, whisper “Let’s see” for both of you. Let the world widen again.
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🌟 Energy & Connection — Breath Beside the Look
Before your dog can soften, you must. Heart-brain research shows your calm rhythm can entrain theirs, syncing nervous systems across species (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00617/full).
Practice: When you say “Let’s See,” exhale fully. Don’t yank the leash. Kneel, if needed. Your body says: We are safe to look. We are safe to wait.
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🎉 Parting Tail-Thump
“When you let me look, you teach me trust. When you breathe beside me, you teach me brave.”
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💌 Your Closing Whisper
Want more like this? Come walk with me at 👉 www.coachingcaninecompanions.com/online-dog-training-store

Where science meets soul… and every leash leads to love.
With heart,
Lorrie J. Harris
Founder, Coaching Canine Companions 🐾
https://youtu.be/Ow9i_8Ro6r4

Want More Free Dog Training Videos?Check out our BLOG:https://www.coachingcaninecompanions.com/dog-training-blogWag Wisdom Daily Brief — Let’s See: The Ritua...

10/08/2025

The Dog Knows the Way

Developing a Psychiatric Service Dog as My Natural Chill Pill
🎙️ Five minutes of science, soul & stories from my heart to yours—shared for the ones who feel it all and need a way to walk through it.

Want More Companion Dog Training Blogs? Go Here:
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🎙️ Opening
Some mornings, the air wakes before I do. It stands at the edge of my bed, humming with a low, wordless tension—my old friend, anxiety—arriving like an uninvited guest who knows exactly where the coffee is.

And then there’s Maui.

The weight of his body spooned to my belly is not heavy. It’s anchoring. A pulse of quiet in my storm. If my breath is a fluttering moth, his presence is the open palm it lands upon.
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💔 The Problem

I was not born with an easy nervous system. My body collects alarms like seashells—sometimes from real storms, sometimes from the imagined ones my mind rehearses.

I had learned the “official” way to train a Psychiatric Service Dog—structured lessons, checklists, the tidy curriculum that the professionals taught me when I attended the School for professional trainers. Obedience first, then task work: find any item, deliver it, be steady in any environment.

It worked… on paper. But paper doesn’t soothe a racing heart at 6 a.m. Paper doesn’t breathe with you.
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🔥 Story Narrative
By the time Maui “graduated,” I had a dog who could ace any skills test. But when I brought him home, I realized the real work was just beginning.

I invented a morning ritual—not in the manuals, not on the certification checklists—born from equal parts need and instinct.

The rules were simple:
● First thing in the morning, after my ritual long deep breathing exercise, before words or screens, I’d greet him with a soft, “Good morning.”

● He’d roll onto his side, sleepy-eyed, tail sweeping in slow arcs.

● I’d guide him gently onto his back so that his paw could rest against my leg, my grounding post.

● And then, slow body rubs—long, steady strokes—while I sang his “I love you” song.

It became his favorite. Mine too. The same song would later become his safety anchor, a way to tell him, even in the middle of a chaotic store or on a crowded street: We’re safe. You’re safe. I’m safe.

Most mornings, we did this before I even sat up. Maui learned to wait for it, expect it,and welcome it. I learned that if I started his day in joy, my own anxiety loosened its grip.
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🧠 Science & Psychology

What we were doing—without naming it—was co-regulation.
When two beings rest in each other’s presence, breathing slows, heart rate steadies, cortisol drops. Touch paired with predictable, gentle rhythm activates the parasympathetic nervous system—the “rest and digest” mode that is the opposite of anxiety’s fight-or-flight surge.

Dogs, with their ability to attune to human heart rate and breath, can serve as living biofeedback. Studies show that petting a dog can lower blood pressure, slow respiration, and reduce stress hormones in both human and canine.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5573772/
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🌿 Symbolism & Archetype

In Jungian terms, Maui became the Servant-King archetype—not one who commands, but one who offers his gifts in presence, mirroring my own slow journey toward self-service through service to another.

In Sanskrit, Seva means selfless service. Yet it was never one-directional. Each morning, as I tended to his joy, he tended to my peace.
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🌌 Dream Sequence

Around this time, I dreamt I was carrying a glass jar full of fireflies through a crowded train station. Every bump of a stranger’s shoulder risked shattering the jar. Maui walked beside me, and the crowd seemed to open for him—space blooming around his body. I made it to the platform without losing a single light.

Interpretation: The fireflies were my fragile moments of calm. Maui was both the shield and the space-maker, guiding me to a place where what was delicate could remain intact.
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✨ Turning Point
The turning point was realizing that Maui’s service was not in performing tasks but in being woven into my nervous system’s rhythm. The checklist-trained dog was useful. The dog who knew my breath was medicine.
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🧘‍♀️ Closing Ritual or Reflection

Morning Anchor Practice

Before your day begins:
1. Begin Long-Deep-Breathing
2. Sit with your dog.

3. Invite touch in a way your dog enjoys—long, predictable strokes.

4. Pair it with a gentle, repetitive phrase or hum.

5. Match your breathing to the rhythm of your strokes.

6. Let the moment finish before the world rushes in.

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🕯️ Final Echo
Sometimes the truest training begins after the certificate is framed.
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📋 Quick Reference Guide

Your Dog as Morning Medicine

● Anchor Before Action
Start the day with touch and breath before tasks—this sets a nervous system baseline.

● Pair a Phrase with Peace
A song or mantra now can become a safety cue later.

● Let Them Serve by Being
Tasks are helpful; attunement is healing.

● Make it Mutual
Service is a two-way current—when you give, you receive.

You don’t need to be still to find peace—you just need a place to rest your breath.

And the Dog Knows the Way
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04/08/2025

The Dog Knows the Way

Article 2: The Ache with No Name
A Soulful Guide to Raising a True Companion Dog—Through Healing, Listening, and Becoming Together

🎙️ Five minutes of science, soul & stories from my heart to yours—shared for the ones who feel it all and need a way to walk through it. For those who aren’t just training a dog, but becoming a companion worthy of being followed.

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It was never loud, the ache.

It didn’t knock me off my feet or steal my breath. It didn’t weep in public or unravel me at traffic lights. No, it was more elegant than that. Refined. Polished.

Like silk drawn too tight across bone.

I called it tension. Busyness. Maybe even purpose. But in truth, it was a kind of hollowing. A soft panic dressed as professionalism. And for years, I didn’t question it—because I had mastered what the world told me mattered:

Polite dogs. Packed schedules. Perfect posture.
Even my joy was organized.
But my dog—my companion—knew.
He always knew.
His name is Maui.
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The Mirror Beside Me

He was never disobedient. He just… didn’t exhale.

Even when we weren’t “working,” Maui moved like he was still on the clock. Hyperaware. Poised. Watching me the way a child watches a parent who is present in body but not in soul.
I told myself he was alert. Sharp. A quick study.

But looking back now, I see it clearly:
He was trying to track a guardian who was half a second behind her own life.
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The Sophisticated Soul-Block

Carl Jung once wrote that neurosis arises when the psyche is blocked from its natural flow toward meaning.

Not just trauma. Not just fear.

Blocked meaning.

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
— Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

What I carried wasn’t panic. It was un-lived meaning. A quiet unrest, humming just beneath achievement.

Modern psychology doesn’t always name it. But Jung did.
It’s the dis-ease of the soul estranged from its own myth.
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Science & The Shadowed Bond

Recent studies show that dogs sync their stress levels not just with our actions—but with our suppressed emotions. Cortisol patterns, heart rate variability, even breath rhythms can mirror our inner state, whether we speak it or not.
📚 www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43851-x

Maui didn’t need words.

He felt the hum behind my smile.

And so he lived beside me like a sentinel. Never resting. Never softening. Always listening for the Self I kept behind glass.
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🦉 The Night I Found the Owl

One night, after teaching four back-to-back sessions, I crawled into bed too tired to meditate, too wired to sleep.
That’s when the dream came.

I was standing in a house that looked like mine, but quieter. Timeless.

In the center of the room sat a large birdcage, brass and gleaming. Inside, a white owl. Still. Watching.

Its wings were too large for the space.

I tried to open the door. My hands wouldn’t move.
So I whispered the words that rose from someplace ancient, beyond language:

“I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.”

And the owl blinked—once, slowly—and spoke:
“I’ve been waiting for you to stop training me.”
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A Practice (For Those Who Feel Too Much and Say Too Little)
If your dog is alert but never soft, obedient but never settled—
If your presence feels like something you perform, not inhabit—

Try this small ritual:
● Sit on the floor.
● Let your dog approach or not.
● Close your eyes. Place your hand on your own heart.
● Whisper aloud: “I release the role. I return to the room.”
● Breathe—not for performance, but for presence.
● Stay five minutes longer than comfort allows.

This is not obedience.
It’s reunion.
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🕯️ Final Embers

Sophisticated anxiety is not a flaw. It is a myth in hiding.
Maui didn’t come to heel. He came to show me where I’d gone missing.

And in learning how to rest beside him—not command him—I remembered how to sit beside myself.
Because the ache with no name…
Was just the soul’s way of saying:
You forgot where you live.
And the dog, faithful as myth,
Already knows the way.
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https://coachingcaninecompanions.com/so/78PXsqa4x?languageTag=en

The Dog Knows the Way ~ True Companion Dog Training

04/08/2025

💠 The Wisdom of the Nose

Rediscovering the Hidden Scent Language That Calms Fear, Builds Trust, and Heals the Dog’s Heart
By Lorrie J. (Bhagavati Harris)

With soul scent trails from the fields of neuroscience, energy work, and ancient canine knowing
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🌙 Prologue
The Language Beneath Words

There is a world inside your dog that does not wait for your words.
It reads the air like scripture—every molecule of fear, every sigh of relief, every scent left in your sleeve when you walked away.

You may think your dog listens to your voice. But long before that, she listens to your chemistry. She tracks the shifting weather of your nervous system, breath by breath, scent by scent.

And she remembers.

Dogs live in a scented world layered in dimensions we forget. Not just “smells,” but stories: the worn cotton of your joy, the musk of a stranger’s intent, the pheromones that rise from your skin when you panic or grieve. This is not imagination. This is science. And it’s soul.

There is an ancient organ in your dog’s body—Jacobson’s organ, or the vomeronasal organ (VNO)—tucked behind the nose, just above the mouth, like a secret receiver for emotional frequencies. It does not smell like the rest of the nose. It feels. It translates invisible chemicals into a felt sense of safety or alarm. It is the organ of intuition.

It speaks in pheromones. And it listens to yours.
This book is about how to whisper back.

Not through commands, but through rituals. Through breath. Through scent. Through the gentle reweaving of trust where fear once lived.
We are not training obedience.
We are translating devotion.

🌀 Introduction
The Nose Beneath the Nose
Where Scent, Science, and the Soul Meet
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There are two kinds of noses living inside your dog.
One you already know. It’s the curious, twitching one that follows a squirrel trail or searches for a crumb beneath the couch. This is the conscious nose—the olfactory system that processes everyday smells like lavender, grass, or fear-sweat. It’s marvelous. It’s powerful. But it isn’t the whole story.
There is another.

Hidden above the roof of the mouth, in a small, ancient chamber behind the upper incisors, lies Jacobson’s organ—the vomeronasal organ (VNO). This second nose does not sniff in the usual way. It senses invisible molecules—pheromones, social hormones, chemosignals—that bypass the thinking brain and go straight to the emotional brain.

It’s not about odor. It’s about feeling through scent.
The VNO acts like a soul-antenna, picking up messages from the world’s undercurrent: danger, belonging, arousal, calm. Dogs use it to interpret intention, trust, or threat. When a stranger walks in, your dog doesn’t need to wait for a voice or gesture. If the stranger carries the scent of adrenaline or fear, your dog feels it before anyone speaks.

This is not a metaphor. It’s neurology. And it’s mythic.
Because what your dog perceives is not just your smell—it's the emotional climate of your body.

And that climate is shaped by more than scent.
It’s shaped by energy.
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🕊️ The Invisible Weather of You

The space between you and your dog is not empty. It’s alive with frequency. Your heart emits electromagnetic pulses. Your breath modulates your energy field. Your stress or serenity is not a secret—it radiates. And your dog? She’s tuned to that frequency like an old-world radio.

In The Spirit Between Us and Embodied Connection, we explored how dogs co-regulate their nervous systems with ours. They match our breath rate. They sense our groundedness—or lack of it. This isn’t just emotional mirroring. It’s energetic entrainment.

You can find the PDF and audiobook downloads, protocols, and quick reference guides for all K9 Bioenergy balancing audiobooks on our website's online training store.

When you rush, your dog reads the current.
When you soften, she exhales with you.

When you tremble, her cells prepare for chaos.

Your dog doesn’t just watch your behavior. She receives your broadcast.
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For the whole online dog training class on Separation Anxiety, please go here:https://www.coachingcaninecompanions.com/online-dog-training-store🌙 PrologueTh...

01/08/2025

Transform Your Dog’s Training Through
K9 High-Intensity Interval Training (H.I.I.T.)
Unlock a Bond Built on Trust, Joy, and Resilience
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Discover the Power of Sensory-Based Training
Are you tired of traditional training methods that only scratch the surface? The Art of Dog Training Through H.I.I.T. offers a transformative approach that taps into the heart of your dog’s instincts and emotional responses, leading to a deeper bond that will last a lifetime.
This revolutionary audiobook will teach you to use High-Intensity Interval Training (H.I.I.T.) to engage your dog’s senses and foster emotional resilience. Step beyond the old command-based training and discover a world where every session allows your dog to thrive in a sensory-rich environment.
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What You'll Learn Inside:
• The Science of Sensory Learning: Learn how your dog’s sensory preferences shape their learning and how you can use this knowledge to design practical training sessions.
• Creating Emotional Resilience: Discover how to build trust and empathy with your dog through sensory experiences that foster emotional resilience.
• Short Bursts, Big Impact: Use brief, high-intensity training intervals to maximize your dog’s learning potential without overwhelming them.
• Personalized Training Plans: Customize your training to your dog’s unique needs, whether they respond best to scent, touch, or sound.
• The Role of Rest in Learning: Understand the importance of rest in the learning process and how to balance intense focus and recovery.

Want to learn more about K9 High Intensity Interval Training?Visit us Here: https://www.coachingcaninecompanions.com/online-dog-training-storeTransform Your ...

30/07/2025

The K-9 Bubble Training ~ Series
Transforming Canine Behavior Through Spatial Awareness

This Experiential audiobook will serve as a comprehensive guide to space management in dog training, using principles rooted in canine communication, social boundaries, and instinct-driven learning. Drawing inspiration from Patricia McConnell’s The Other End of the Leash, this book will help pup parents harness the power of movement, distance, and spatial pressure to improve obedience, trust, and behavior modification.
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📖 Book Overview
Imagine this: Your dog stands frozen, ears back, body tense as a stranger approaches too quickly. You shift your stance, creating a small space buffer, and instantly, your dog relaxes. Without a word, you’ve just communicated safety, control, and reassurance.

This isn’t magic.
The Space Factor is the ultimate way to transform obedience and behavioral training through an often-overlooked dimension: how dogs perceive and respond to space.
For too long, dog training has focused primarily on commands—words humans expect dogs to understand. But dogs communicate mainly through movement, proximity, and body language. By learning to speak their spatial language, we unlock a new level of understanding, trust, and effective training.

What This Book Will Teach You: 🐾 How to use spatial awareness to reduce reactivity, aggression, and fear.

🐾 Why understanding your dog’s social zones is key to better communication
🐾 The role of pressure and release in teaching self-control and responsiveness
🐾 How to shape behaviors using subtle movement adjustments rather than force
🐾 How to train in a way that respects your dog’s instincts and builds trust

Are you ready to step into your dog’s world, refine your communication, and create a more harmonious relationship?

If you would like the audiobook, handouts, PDF book, workbook handouts, please follow this link to my CONTACT page:https://www.coachingcaninecompanions.com/c...

29/07/2025

Dog Separation Anxiety

🐾 Introduction

The Door Is Not the Danger

What Dogs Teach Us About Presence, Longing, and the Sacred Art of Leaving Without Loss
Your dog panics the moment you leave.
They cry, scratch, refuse food.
They pace hallways like ghost hunters searching for a vanished heart.

And you—no matter how many tools you’ve tried—feel the guilt coil tighter each time the door clicks shut.
This is not a behavior problem.
This is a heartbreak story.

In The Door Is Not the Danger, you’ll sit at the edge of thresholds with dogs who tremble not because you’re gone—
but because the world has yet to show them that love returns.
Blending trauma-informed neuroscience with ritual, symbolism, and the sacred rhythm of departure and return, this book isn’t about tricks.

It’s about trust.
Not about forcing calm—but teaching the nervous system that goodbye doesn’t mean gone forever.

You’ll learn to:
● Rewrite the story your dog tells themselves when you leave
● Use breath and presence to tether safety across distance
● Decode the invisible “departure cues” that start the spiral
● Transform crate time into a sanctuary, not a sentence
● Practice absence not as abandonment—but as a devotion ritual
● And walk back through the door in a way that heals everything

This is not obedience training.
This is soul restoration.
Because sometimes the most important thing you’ll ever teach your dog is that they’re still safe—even when they can’t see you.

And that the thread between you
doesn’t break when stretched—
it shines.

What Dogs Teach Us About Presence, Longing, and the Sacred Art of Leaving Without Loss. Downloads can be found here: https://www.coachingcaninecompanions.com...

27/07/2025

The Dog Knows the Way
Episode 1: Aloha’s Medical Emergency ~ My Untraining Begins

A Soulful Guide to Raising a True Companion—Through Healing, Listening, and Becoming Together

🎙️ Five minutes of science, soul & stories from my heart to yours—shared for the ones who feel it all and need a way to walk through it. For those who aren’t just training a dog, but becoming a companion worthy of being followed.

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It began with a sound I pray never to hear again.
Not a bark. Not a whine.
Just silence—split by the wet, choking drag of something thick and terrible hitting the floor.
Dark. Phlegmy. Blood, heavy with fear.
I found her there, crouched low just beyond my bedroom door, trembling in the hush before dawn.
And of all nights—this was the one I’d chosen to let them sleep apart, a quiet ritual I used now and then, meant to nurture their confidence away from my closeness.
But that night, the space between us felt like a continent.

Her eyes—those soulful, ancient eyes—were rimmed with confusion.
And her mouth… oh, her mouth.
Her saliva was dark and thick, not fluid but syrupy, pooling and clotting as it slid forward, interrupting her airways.
Her huge tongue lolled unnaturally outside her mouth, not in relaxation but in desperation—leaving barely enough room to breathe.
From her mouth, blood poured, not like a wound but like a faucet unlatched by some unseen force.
And there it was:
The horror.
Raw. Red. Unrelenting.
It wasn’t just what I saw.
It was what I couldn’t do.
I couldn’t stop it.
I couldn’t reach the source.
I could only kneel into the moment and try to hold back my own trembling long enough to speak her name.
“Aloha… I’m here. I’m here.”
And in that breathless hush between panic and movement,
I knew something was about to be unlearned.
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The Moment Everything Slows
We rushed from one emergency vet to the next.
The first offered heartfelt concern and injected pain meds.
The second offered—a steely impersonalization of care, an unsuccessful procedure — and sent us home with three bottles of meds and cold instructions:

“TAKE WITH FOOD.”
But how?
When my beloved companion couldn’t even close her mouth,
her swollen tongue lolling out—leaving barely enough space to breathe,
let alone chew.
The third was a surgical specialist who never called.
I waited.
Hour after hour.
Day after day.
No answers. Just static.
“Obstructed gland… possible hereditary rupture… surgical intervention likely…”
But inside that whirlwind—fluorescent lights, clinical phrases, clipped syllables—
only one thing pulsed loud and clear through the fog:

She needs me to be still.
She needs me to stay.
I need to STOP & pull myself together for her sake!
Aloha was slipping.
Not just in body—in spirit.
She was tired.
And afraid.
And I had moved too fast for too long to notice the signs.
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What Jung Might Say
Jung said the Self will send signals when the ego drifts too far from truth.
First a whisper. Then a pull.
If we still don’t listen, the body gets involved.
“Crisis is the breaking of the shell that encloses understanding.”
(Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
That morning, Aloha’s body became the crisis.
But the truth that broke open was mine.
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What She Had Been Trying to Say
In the weeks before this, she had offered hints.
She slowed.
She avoided her food bowl.
She looked at me—really looked—as if asking whether I’d notice the subtle shift in her breath, her posture, her pulse.
I didn’t.
Because I was moving too quickly—ticking off checklists, showing up for others, doing the good work of “being strong.”
But Aloha didn’t need my strength.
She needed my stillness.
And when I wouldn’t offer it,
her body collapsed into the only message I would finally hear:
Stop. Come home. Stay.
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What the Science Says
This isn’t just myth. It’s medicine.
Studies in veterinary behavioral science confirm that emotional resonance between dog and guardian affects health outcomes—immune regulation, respiratory function, even wound healing.
(See: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8330780/)
Dogs whose humans are chronically stressed often experience somatic symptoms—especially if the bond is strong.
Aloha’s system, already predisposed to weakness, had likely been carrying my pace… until it couldn’t.
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A Sacred No...

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The Dog Knows the WayEpisode 1: Aloha’s Medical Emergency ~ My Untraining BeginsA Soulful Guide to Raising a True Companion—Through Healing, Listening, and B...

14/07/2025

🎙️ Wag Wisdom Daily Brief —

(Five minutes of science, soul & strategies from my heart to yours—motivation you can’t resist, for pup parents and pet pros alike)
In Wag Wisdom, dog trainer and behavior expert Lorrie J. Harris invites you into a new kind of dog training—one that listens before it leads, breathes before it speaks, and notices the space between behaviors as sacred.

Ever feel like you're repeating yourself a hundred times—and your dog still acts like they’ve never heard it before?
You're not imagining it. But the issue isn’t disobedience.
It’s perceptual overload. Today’s brief is about what happens when your dog’s brain—and yours—gets too full to listen.
Let’s dig in.
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🧠 Science & Brain
Cognitive Overload Shrinks the Learning Window
Summary:
A study from the University of California, San Francisco found that when too much information hits the prefrontal cortex at once, learning pathways shut down to protect working memory. Overstimulated brains default to automatic, often unhelpful, behaviors.
🔗 https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2022/06/421371/cognitive-overload-leads-errors-under-pressure
What it means:
When your dog seems to “check out” mid-training, they’re not stubborn—they’re maxed out. Dogs, like us, need space between inputs. The magic isn’t in more commands—it’s in the pause between them.
Training Tip:
After 3–4 cues, stop. Let silence stretch. When your dog re-engages on their own, you’ve just built attention naturally.
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🐾 Training & Behavior
The Power of Predictable Patterns
Summary:
Research from the University of Vienna shows that dogs trained using structured, rhythmic routines (vs. random reinforcement) demonstrated faster learning, better retention, and lower stress markers.
🔗 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024372/
What it means:
Your dog doesn’t just need motivation—they crave rhythm. When the cues and consequences follow a clear flow, their nervous system relaxes. Predictability is the scaffolding for confidence.
Training Tip:
Try setting your training reps to a beat: 5 steps—cue—pause—praise. The body loves cadence. So does the canine brain.
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🌞 Mindset & Well‑Being
Micro-Restorations Build Long-Term Resilience
Summary:
According to research from the University of Sussex, even 40 seconds of visual exposure to nature improves attention, emotional regulation, and reduces mental fatigue. These “micro-restorations” compound over time for both humans and animals.
🔗 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169204619300181
What it means:
A deep breath at the window. A sunbeam. A soft touch on your dog’s fur. These are not luxuries—they’re restoratives. You don’t need a retreat to reset. You need a moment.
Training Tip:
Take a nature pause with your dog—even if it’s just 60 seconds in the yard. No cues. No pressure. Just presence.
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🌀 Psychology & Self‑Discovery
The Mirror and the Mask: When Dogs Reflect Our Hidden Beliefs
Summary:
Carl Jung described the “persona” as the mask we wear to meet the world—and the “shadow” as what we hide. Often, what triggers us in others (or our dogs) lives in this unconscious mirror.
🔗 https://www.britannica.com/topic/persona-psychology
How It Applies to Dog Training:
Does your dog’s stubbornness enrage you? Could it be reflecting your fear of being ignored? Or your discomfort with rest? When we feel disproportionate frustration, it’s rarely about the dog—it’s about the shadow being seen.
Training Tip:
Next time you feel triggered by your dog’s behavior, pause. Ask: “What part of me is being seen right now?” Insight softens resistance.
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🌟 Energy & Connection
Touch Sends a Neurochemical Signal of Safety
Summary:
Research from the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami confirms that gentle, intentional touch releases oxytocin, reduces cortisol, and enhances attunement in both giver and receiver—including across species.
🔗 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6073499/
What it means:
Before your dog can trust your command, they must trust your energy. A calm hand on their chest, a slow sweep down the spine, or a fingertip at the base of the ear can change the entire conversation—without a single word.
Training Tip:
Use calming touch before difficult transitions (like leashing up or grooming). Anchor the energy first. The behavior follows.
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🧰 Wags Wisdom Exercises Pack
1. Beat-Back Training Rhythm
Sync cues to a slow walking rhythm: step-step-cue.
→ Builds anticipation and bodily grounding.

2. Window Gaze Reset
Look out the window with your dog for 60 seconds.
→ Clears mental static and recenters focus.

3. Silence Between Cues
Add a pause after every third cue.
→ Gives the dog space to process and choose.

4. Shadow Journal Prompt
What frustrates me most about my dog—and what does it reveal about me?
→ Turns reaction into revelation.

5. Oxytouch Moment
One slow breath, one calm hand, one full presence.
→ Rebuilds trust from the body up.

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🎉 Parting Tail‑Thump
If you speak too fast, I miss the melody. Pause, and I’ll dance with you.
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💌 Your Closing Whisper
Want to go deeper? Come walk with me at:
👉https://www.coachingcaninecompanions.com/online-dog-training-store

Where science meets soul… and every leash leads to love.
With heart,
Lorrie J. Harris
Founder, Coaching Canine Companions 🐾
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https://youtu.be/j8EXw2Q8sJA

🎙️ Wag Wisdom Daily Brief — Five minutes of science, soul & strategies from my heart to yours—motivation you can’t resist, for pup parents and pet pros alik...