The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
—Aristotle
After Cesar’s Way came out, I think I was asked the most questions about the chapter on the universal language of energy. In the book, I explained that energy is the way all animals communicate with one another, all the time—and that projecting the energy quality I call “calm-assertiveness” is the key to becoming a better dog owner and pack leader. Later in this book, I’ll explain how the power of calm-assertive energy can change other aspects of your life for the better as well. Some critics called this concept too vague and “New Agey” to be of any use to help people with their dogs. On the more practical side, many readers simply wanted to better understand what I was trying to say, and wanted to know in more detail about how to put the concept of creating calm-assertive energy to use in their lives. Truly, understanding the energy we project is the cornerstone of creating better relationships with both our animals and each other. It’s the energy that we share with our dogs that makes or breaks our effectiveness as pack leaders in their lives. Nothing else will be useful if our energy is not that of a calm-assertive pack leader.
Energy Level Versus Energy: Two Different Concepts
What is energy, anyway? In Cesar’s Way, I talked about energy in two distinct ways. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has several definitions for it, but let’s start by focusing on the simpler of two meanings it lists:
Energy 1a: dynamic quality <narrative energy> b: the capacity of acting or being active <intellectual energy>.
These definitions describe the kind of energy I’m talking about when, as in Discipline, Rewards, and Punishment, I described the energy level that all animals are born with. Here’s a human example. A family has two sons. From an early age, one is like an Eveready bunny, running around the house and destroying things. The other is quieter and likes to play by himself. Later on, the first becomes crazy about playing sports. The other is very focused and likes to read and play word games. We’d describe the first as having been born with high energy. The second would be described as a lower-energy person. Is one energy level better than the other? Of course not. They are simply different. As we discussed in Discipline, Rewards, and Punishment, we include energy level in what we call personality. In the dog world, energy is personality. I believe all dogs are born with a fixed state of energy. The possibilities for energy levels in a dog are:
• Very High Energy
• High Energy
• Medium Energy
• Low Energy
How Personality Translates into Energy
Let’s look at some familiar human beings and translate their human personalities into “dog.” Deepak Chopra is a pacifist. If Deepak Chopra were a dog, he’d be at medium-level energy, but a somewhat dominant type, because he does move forward and create things on his own. He’s not simply a follower, but since he is a pacifist and is very spiritual, he understands how to be a follower and the concept of surrender. In the animal world, he will not be seen as spiritual leader or best-selling author. He will be seen as having medium-level energy with the capability to be both follower and leader. Of course, Oprah is always my best example of calm-assertive energy. I see her as a high-level-energy, dominant type, if she decides to be who she is on television. And Anthony Robbins would be a very high-level-energy, dominant-state-of-mind animal if he were a dog. I see myself as a high-level-energy, dominant type person—though with my pack at home, I am able to become a follower and act calm-submissive to my wife.
When choosing a dog, I always suggest that people try to select an energy level that is lesser than, or at the very most equal to, their own. Because people so often mistake a dog’s excitement for what they see as “happiness,” when going to a local shelter, they sometimes fall in love with a dog that’s “happy” to see them, not realizing that the dog has a very high, excited energy that may not necessarily match theirs.
The Other Kind of Energy
Consider Webster’s other definitions of energy:
c: a usually positive spiritual force the energy flowing through all people 2: vigorous exertion of power: EFFORT investing time and energy 3: a fundamental entity of nature that is transferred between parts of a system in the production of physical change within the system and usually regarded as the capacity for doing work 4: usable power (as heat or electricity); also: the resources for producing such power
Chemists, quantum physicists, electricians, nutritionists, doctors, and athletes will all use different parts of these definitions, or have their own specific meanings for the word. In Cesar’s Way, I defined energy as a language of emotions, the way that all animals read the feelings and states of mind of other animals. Reading energy is about survival. It’s about animals experiencing and understanding every signal their environment is sending them right now. In the world of the animal kingdom, survival is not something to be taken lightly. Animals never say to themselves, “Well, I think this lion may be a predator, but I’m tired, so I’ll just sleep on it tonight and worry about it in the morning.” If two dogs meet each other and one bares his teeth at the other and goes into the attack position, the target dog doesn’t think to himself, “He seems like he’s going to try to kill me, but you know, he looks like a nice enough dog. Maybe he’s just had a bad day.” Survival for animals is about right now, about instant reaction. Is it safe? Is this other animal a friend or a foe? Should I fight, flee, avoid, or submit?
What we seem to forget as humans is that we project these signals, too. We are also reading them from other animals (including other humans) all the time, but since so many of us have lost (or simply stopped paying attention to) our instinctual sides, we don’t always understand the signals our bodies are both sending and receiving. Gavin De Becker is a specialist in security issues, especially for governments, corporations, and celebrities. In his outstanding book The Gift of Fear (and its sequel, Protecting the Gift), he describes all the instantaneous processes that go on in our brains and our bodies before we feel the kind of warning “gut feelings” that we usually don’t pay attention to. De Becker points out that those messages that we are getting (and usually, ignoring) are what we call intuition. “Intuition connects us to the natural world and to our nature,” writes De Becker, “but we ‘civilized’ people ignore it at our own peril. Intuition is usually looked upon by us thoughtful Western beings with contempt….But it isn’t just a feeling. It is a process more extraordinary and ultimately more logical in the natural order than the most fantastic computer calculation. It is our most complex cognitive process and at the same time, the simplest.”
Reading the energy in emotions and making life-or-death decisions on the messages we get from them isn’t something farfetched or New Agey. It is hardwired into our very biology. We may call it a “sixth sense”—but it really has its basis in all our other senses put together. Our brains are constantly receiving huge amounts of information that we’re not consciously processing. In his breakthrough best-seller Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman writes, “In terms of biological design for the basic neural circuitry of emotion, what we are born with is what worked best for the last 50,000 human generations…the last 10,000 years—despite having witnessed the rapid rise of human civilization…have left little imprint on our biological template for emotional life.” In other words, we are the same primitive animals that our ancestors once were—except now we have cell phones and iPods to distract us from all the danger signs that helped our ancestors to survive.
“The brain is a good stagehand,” writes author Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. “It gets on with its work while we’re busy acting out our scenes.” As an example of how all our senses are constantly working, sending messages to our brains about details all around us of which we’re not consciously aware, Gavin De Becker describes a harrowing experience undergone by a man named Robert Thompson. Thompson, a pilot, walked into a convenience store to pick up some magazines, then suddenly became afraid, turned, and hurried out again. “I don’t know what told me to leave, but later that day I heard about the shooting.” Thompson first attributed his survival to “just a gut feeling.” But after De Becker prodded him for details, the reasons for his flight became clear. Below his conscious awareness, Thompson later remembered that the store clerk had been focusing his attention on a customer in a heavy jacket, even though it was very hot out. He also had noticed two men sitting in a station wagon in the parking lot, with the engine running. His senses were busy inputting all that information into his brain, even though on the surface, he was totally unaware of the very details that would save his life. “What Robert Thompson and many others want to dismiss as a coincidence or a gut feeling is in fact a cognitive process, faster than we recognize and far different from the familiar step-by-step thinking we rely on so willingly. We think conscious thought is somehow better, when in fact intuition is soaring flight compared to the plodding of logic,” De Becker explains. “Intuition is the journey from A to X without stopping at any other letter along the way. It is knowing without knowing why.” Animals, constant observers of every detail of life around them, are processing many of these hidden signals all the time. They have to, in order to survive.
We tend to think of feelings as things that just happen in our “hearts”—as things that are somehow not connected to the physical world. The truth is, very obvious chemical and physical changes happen in our bodies and our brains when our emotions change. When we’re angry, our heart rate increases and our brains and bodies are flooded with hormones like adrenaline, to give us that extra boost to be able to fight. When we’re afraid, blood flows to our biggest muscles such as our legs so we can be ready to flee, and other hormones put our body on alert, ready for action. Love creates the opposite responses to fear and anger, and makes us feel calm, content, safe, and relaxed. When we’re sad, our body’s metabolism slows, conserving our energy so that we can heal, both physically and psychologically. And finally, happiness increases the activity in our brain, blocking negative feelings and allowing us better access to our available energy. In this regard, we feel and react to emotions in exactly the same way that our dogs do. With all these complex biological changes going on inside of us every time we have a feeling, is it any wonder that other animals can tell what we’re feeling at any given moment? “The truth is that every thought is preceded by a perception, every impulse is preceded by a thought, every action is preceded by an impulse,” writes Gavin De Becker, “and man is not so private a being that his behavior is unseen, his patterns undetectable.”
What Energy Are You, Right Now?
My goal is always to help people become more aware of and in control of the energy they are projecting at any given moment. After all, we are among the few species on the planet that has the amazing gift of self-awareness, right? But think about it. How many of you reading this are truly aware of how you are thinking and feeling when you are interacting with other beings—especially your dogs? The thing about energy is, talking or writing about it doesn’t always cut it when it comes to truly “getting” how it applies to you and your everyday life. That’s why dogs are such an amazing gift to us. As was the case with my friend the tycoon, mentioned in the beginning of the book, our dogs are our emotional mirrors. If we are unsure of how we are feeling or what energy we are projecting at any given moment, all we have to do is look to our dogs to figure it out. They will often understand us much more deeply than we understand ourselves.
When visitors come to my Dog Psychology Center, I am always very observant of the energy they are projecting, because they themselves are often clueless about it. But with a pack of forty dogs, any energy, good or bad, will be mirrored back to them forty times over. I have to evaluate people before they enter into my place. Obviously, some people feel overwhelmed, others feel very anxious. Until the latter feel more relaxed, I don’t invite them in. Because when a human being is unstable, his energy can trigger a dog to nip or bite or bark or run away. Either reaction is probably going to be bad for the dog or bad for the human. When a dog runs away from him, the average person thinks, “Well, I didn’t do anything!” But the reality is, he did do something, though he may not even know it. Something in his energy caused that dog to run away. Before he came, the dog was totally fine. The same goes for when a dog nips at somebody. For some reason, the dog feels a need to say, “Look, this is my turf. I run the show here and you’ve got to respect my rules.”
It is important to learn to sense and read your dog’s energy along with her body language. If you are waiting to hear your dog growling, barking, or whining to know how she feels, then you have already missed the most important part of the communication she is trying to share with you. The paradox is, before you can truly communicate with your dog using energy, you must learn to understand the energy that you are projecting.
A prime example of someone who intellectually understood the concept of how we project energy and emotion but wasn’t always able to reflect that in her life was my cowriter Melissa. During the summer we wrote Cesar’s Way, she would drive down from the Valley to South Los Angeles through traffic and usually arrive at the Dog Psychology Center tense. When she’d walk through my pack of forty dogs to get to the office area where we worked, she would be assertive but tense, and the dogs would react by swarming her and pushing up against her. They weren’t going to hurt her, but they were obviously not happy about her tense energy and were letting her know with their bodies and their own energy. You’d think that, after more than three years of working with me on the television show and writing the book with me, she’d finally get it, right? Wrong. Although she totally understood the concept, and could sometimes correctly assess energy in other people and dogs, she was not always aware of the energy she herself was projecting. The same thing kept happening a year later, when we started this book! Well, one sizzling hot day this past summer, she arrived at the Dog Psychology Center frazzled after being stuck in traffic, loaded down with her notebooks and a stack of research books she wanted to share with me. Her energy was bouncing off the walls, and I decided it was about time that she learned this important lesson on an instinctive and emotional, not just an intellectual, level. I’ll let her describe the experience from her point of view:
It must have been at least 108 degrees out and I had been battling the smoggy, bumper-to-bumper traffic of downtown L.A. for over an hour. I was late, and that stressed me out because Cesar was shooting four days a week and doing seminars on the weekends and so far we’d had very little time together to do our writing work. Dogs may live in the moment, but people have deadlines—and I was incredibly anxious about ours. When I finally made it to the center, I was sweaty, thirsty, and my heart was racing. I slid open the gate to the front entry area (the place where Cesar always tells new visitors, “Remember the rules: no touch, no talk, no eye contact” before they enter the dogs’ area) and I didn’t miss a beat, starting to babble at the top of my voice about time and traffic and all the things that were stressing me out. Of course, the dogs started barking and going crazy. They all ran toward the fence and wouldn’t stop barking, and it escalated when I moved forward to the gate to let myself into their area. There was Cesar right in the middle of them, sitting peacefully like a Buddha under an umbrella. “Just slow down,” he said to me. “Take a deep breath. Take a minute and just relax.” Oh. His comment stopped me short. I took a couple of deep breaths, a gulp of cool water, and centered myself. I quieted down, regulated my breathing, and closed my eyes. I felt the comforting warmth of the sun on my face and listened to the gentle splashing of water from the pool, where a couple of dogs were playing. When I opened my eyes barely a moment later, all the dogs had stopped barking and were calmly going about their business. “Do you see it?” asked Cesar. “Do you see how right away they change?” Of course, I’d been writing about this kind of thing with Cesar for a while now, but it wasn’t until that moment that the lightbulb finally went on for me. It was miraculous. The dogs transformed the very moment I changed. The ripple effect throughout forty dogs was instantaneous. “Wow,” was all I could say. Cesar just nodded. “Now you see why I always tell people to ask themselves, ‘What energy am I being, at that moment?’” Finally, I did see.
Horses “Speak Energy,” Too
Monty Roberts, the famous “horse whisperer,” taught the use of energy to tame and manage the behavior of wild horses. Working through energy has been accepted by many in the horse community for decades. Brandon Carpenter, a horse trainer descended from generations of horse trainers, describes the techniques that his grandfather passed on to his father and in turn passed on to him: “I often see people having problems with their horse during clinics or lessons. I ask them how they feel about the relationship they have with the horse. Within a short time we drill down to the core issue, and find that the person is scared of the horse, or scared of putting the horse into certain situations. Some have even said they don’t like what the horse’s behavior is and over time have begun to dislike the horse. They are looking for ways to fix the horse. What those honest answers reveal is an underlying emotional ‘state of being’ on the rider’s part. Before they even approach the horse, they envision how the horse is going to react. This thought process often takes place whenever they think of the horse and so becomes their dominant belief system. And what happens? The horse does exactly what the individual’s emotional communications has told it to do.”
These uneasy riders are doing exactly what so many of my clients do, yet they are probably just as unaware of what they are doing. They are communicating through energy a very strong impression of what they don’t want from their dogs—but never sending them the message of the behavior that they wish to achieve.
Calm-Assertive Energy
Animals in general respect a certain energy, and they relax around a type of energy that I call calm-assertive energy. They are programmed to respect and trust this energy. This is why I believe Mother Nature is perfect, because all animals except humans are attracted to certain frequencies and driven to make certain connections that are going to help them survive. We are the only animal that can be fooled by the “mask” of a certain energy, or can be attracted to an energy that is not calm and assertive, or in fact, is actually negative or bad for our survival.
If you wake up in the morning depressed, the energy you are projecting is considered weakness in the animal kingdom, and you’re not going to perform at your highest potential. Every time you’re feeling negative about yourself or doubt yourself—even if you don’t realize it—you are still projecting that negative energy. Or you can wake up very happy and project a positive, excited energy. Your state of mind creates that energy. Any animal—your dog, cat, or bird—is going to sense that you’re in a low level of energy state, and he’s going to respond to you based on that energy. You will never have to tell your dog that you are sad, happy, angry, or relaxed. He already knows—usually long before you do.
In The Gift of Fear, Gavin De Becker tells a perfect story to illustrate this point. He had a friend who was interviewing contractors and decided against one because her dog, Ginger, growled at him. De Becker reminded his friend, “The irony is that it’s far more likely Ginger is reacting to your signals than that you are reacting to hers. Ginger is an expert at reading you, and you are the expert at reading other people. Ginger, smart as she is, knows nothing about the ways a contractor might inflate the cost to his own profit, or about whether he is honest.” The problem, De Becker suggests, is “that extra something you have that a dog doesn’t is judgment, and that’s what gets in the way of your perception and intuition. With judgment comes the ability to disregard your intuition unless you can explain it logically, the eagerness to judge and convict your feelings rather than honor them. Ginger is not distracted by the way things could be, used to be, or should be. She perceives only what is.”8
Negative Energy—the Dark Power
I had a strange, uneasy feeling from the moment I stepped off the elevator of the upscale apartment building in an exclusive Atlanta neighborhood. When the door opened and I saw Warren—a handsome, stylishly dressed businessman, and his fiancée Tessa standing there, I knew something was very, very wrong—but I still wasn’t sure what. Working with animals, I am always aware and very respectful of my instinctual feelings. With aggressive animals, having that “sixth sense” and well-developed intuition can save your life. So, what were my “animal instincts” trying to say to me now?
Before I go on a consultation, I usually prefer not to have too much prior information about a case unless it’s absolutely necessary. By the time I arrive, my wife Ilusion and, in the cases we do for the television show, the producers, have already met, interviewed, and learned as much as possible about the new clients ahead of time, so they know whether or not I need to bring along a skateboard, a bike, some balanced dogs from my pack, or other special tools that the specific case might require. They have also already made sure the dogs in question have had thorough veterinary checkups and have no physical conditions that might be the cause of the bad behavior. Sometimes, they will give me some general information, such as in an ultra-aggressive case where someone has already been bitten. Still, my preference is to come in with an open mind and trust my own observations, experience, and instincts. Through these twenty years of working with dogs, my instincts have proven right for me nearly every time.
The consultation is an important part of my work, where I sit with the owners and let them tell me what they believe the problem is. My role in the consultation is to be quiet and nonjudgmental, and to listen. Often, the consultation reveals issues that the owners never even knew existed. Many times, those issues are very different from what the owners had earlier perceived. In this case, I didn’t have a free moment between entering the apartment and sitting down with the couple to address my feelings of foreboding—but once we began talking, it became crystal clear. There was a powerful negative energy in the room—and it was coming directly from Warren.
How do you describe a “negative energy” to someone, without sounding superstitious or just plain vague? The bottom line is we’ve all recognized negative energies in our lives. I’m sure all of you have examples from your own daily routines. Whether it was a teacher you had years ago in elementary school or the banker who turned you down for a loan or the man who takes your tickets every morning on the train on the way to work, there’s just something about this person that makes you want to get away from him or her. And sometimes we ourselves turn out to be the negative person. The problem with powerful negative energy is that no matter how positive or calm-assertive you maybe; the feelings and emotions behind that negative person—be they anger, anxiety, frustration, disgust, scorn, deception, whatever—are so potent that sometimes they can even bring the cheeriest person down. Why is negative energy so powerful? I haven’t found anyone yet who can answer that for me, although I do know that negative energy tends to be related to fear and anger—the two “fight and flight” emotions that are so tied up with survival. Maybe it’s the survival aspect of negative energy that makes it such a potent force, and maybe that’s why those of us who cultivate positive energy and positive people in our lives react so instantly to it, like an allergy. Because negativity is so strong, there are some rare people whose dark energy can overpower even the most secure among us, at least while we are in their presence.
Warren would turn out to be one of those people.
During the consultation, Warren wasn’t too bad—he was simply not respectful. When I come to someone’s house, I am there for two reasons—one, to help the dog, and two, to empower the human. Usually, people are at least a little bit open and willing to take in what information I have to share with them, even if I’m telling them something they may not want to hear. Like many negative people, Warren knew how to act “open” on the surface and he knew how to say the right words, but it was clear by his subtle hints and body language that he really didn’t respect what I was trying to do. I was supposed to be there to help the couple deal with their four-year-old female sheepdog, Rory, and her compulsive barking and aggression toward other dogs. Throughout our discussion, however, Warren would roll his eyes, whisper little comments to Tessa (who, as more of the “follower” in their relationship, seemed infected by his negative energy whenever she was near him), and laugh at Rory’s bad behavior and constant barking. Now, I am all for laughing and trying to find the lighter side of every situation. After all, laughter is one of the greatest joys that dogs bring into our lives. But this was the kind of snickering laughter shared by two kids in the classroom who are passing notes about the teacher. Warren would avoid my eyes and look around the room. He was anxious, tense, angry, and projected energy even darker than the chic, all-black outfit he was wearing.
Once we were outside, Warren’s dark side really came to the forefront. Rory had developed a habit of compulsively barking, pulling, and trying to get at other neighborhood dogs while on the leash. While Tessa was now relaxed and willing to learn, Warren was even more tense and started arguing with me about everything—about how Rory could never accept the leash I was using and would choke, about the fact that his dog had “never” not lunged at other dogs, about the fact that even if we could control Rory, we couldn’t control the other dogs who might lash back at her. Rory was “his” dog, and he wanted to be in control—despite the fact that he had asked for my help for the very reason that he couldn’t control his dog. When I looked him in the eye and told him that I believed what we were doing was best for Rory, he looked away, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Fine. Okay. No problem.” But of course, he was being passive-aggressive. He didn’t really mean it. I knew it, but even worse, Rory knew it, too.
Warren was what Emotional Intelligence author Daniel Goleman might refer to as a “repressor” or an “unflappable”—a person who is able to very effectively and consistently block out emotional upsets from his conscious awareness. This is a very workable strategy if you are a person with lots of stress who needs to appear “together” to other humans. But as I’ve pointed out above, it just doesn’t work with animals! Why? Goleman sites a study done by Daniel Weinberger at Case Western University, where “repressors” were given word-based tests about stressful situations. The responses they gave on paper indicated that everything was fine, but their body responses always registered signs of stress and anxiety, such as fast-beating hearts, sweaty palms, and rising blood pressure. There’s a lesson in this: as adept as any of us humans believes we are in hiding our emotions, our bodies and our energies will almost always give away our true feelings to the ones that really have our numbers—our pets.
An example of this happened when I began an exercise in which I walked Rory next to one of the neighborhood dogs that had formerly provoked her. The exercise would be going along fine, and then Warren would interfere by walking beside me, way too close—pushing past the normal social boundaries we call “personal space.” As soon as Warren started voicing his doubts—“But what if the dog snaps? What if you lose control? What if Rory pulls on the leash?”—Rory would begin to freak out again. I tried to point out to Warren that it was his energy creating the tense situation, and he would smile at the camera and say, “Okay, I see,” and then keep right on creating the anxious behavior.
The truth was, I felt as if all my positive, calm-assertive energy was being drained into Warren’s black hole of faceless, nameless anxiety. No matter how hard I tried, I simply could not get him to relax and just watch and listen. Finally, I called Tessa over and asked her to take Rory. Right away, Rory calmed down! Warren got upset, and actually began shouting. “But that’s my dog! I should be handling her.” I pointed out to him that Tessa had a calmer energy with Rory at that moment. “But Tessa has the same energy I do!” Warren whined. “Rory always does the same thing with Tessa that she does with me!” I turned around, looked him firmly in the eye, and said, “But she’s not doing that right now.”
I had to be a little more assertive with Warren than I usually am with clients, and I insisted that he stay back while I walked with Tessa, Rory, and the former “enemy dog.” As soon as we were less than half a block away, the energy returned to normal. Tessa and I and the two dogs walked around the block together in peace, having a nice conversation. Tessa was amazed—she had bought into all of Warren’s powerful negative predictions and was now seeing that there was a much better reality available to her. When we returned, Warren had also settled down a little bit. By this time, he was beginning to acknowledge how his own worry and negativity was creating a toxic effect on his dog. To this day, however, I’m not sure what the end result will be for Warren and Rory. As is true for so many negative personalities, it was clear that Warren had a lot of bottled-up pain and rage inside. But the problem didn’t lie in anything Warren had been through in the past. It was absolutely due to his unwillingness—or his inability—to see himself objectively in the now.
Energy and Reality
Warren’s energy was dark, and it was infectious. That doesn’t mean he was a bad guy. In fact, I believe he was totally unaware of all the subtle ways in which he was sabotaging Rory’s—and his own—progress. Psychologists share an inside joke. “Denial,” they say, stands for “Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying.” Human beings are the only animals who are happily lied to by our own minds about what is actually happening around us. Our lying minds can protect us from things that can be damaging to our sensitive egos, but they can also make us vulnerable to terrible dangers—especially those from members of our own species—that would be obvious to any other animal. We’re the only beings on the planet that get blaring signals from nature about threats to our very survival, but tell ourselves, “Never mind, it’s probably nothing.” But as far as science has proven, we are also the only species with the access to consciously change our mental or emotional states. I’m not talking about putting on a brave face when you’re actually trembling inside—that is simply halfhearted acting. I’m talking about actually working from the inside out in order to change our state of being at that moment. To be able to do this gives us an amazing power over our world—a power we don’t tap into often enough.
Eastern religions have long been champions of the idea that we create our own reality—that what goes on in our minds becomes manifested in our lives. Today, respected scientists—especially in the field of quantum physics—are coming to the same conclusions as the mystics of thousands of years ago. We live our lives under the illusion that we have no control, but the model of quantum physics says that what is happening within reflects what happens outside of us. What does any of this have to do with dog psychology and becoming a better pack leader? It means that you, with your more powerful consciousness, can do something your dog cannot. You have the ability to control your reality—and with it, the energy you project—in ways that you probably don’t even think possible.
“Mind over matter” isn’t just a saying anymore. At Cornell University, social psychologists David Dunning and Emily Balcetis wanted to find out if “wishful thinking” could actually influence what the brain perceives. They told volunteers that a computer would either assign them a letter or a number to determine whether they’d get to drink tasty orange juice or a bad-tasting smoothie. When the computer flashed an image that could be seen as either the letter B or the number 13, volunteers told that a letter would get them orange juice most often reported seeing a B. Those told that a number would get them the orange juice most often saw 13. Overwhelmingly, the volunteers saw what they wanted to see. Dunning says, “Before we even see the world, our brain has interpreted that world in such a way that it lines up with what we want to see and avoids what we don’t want to see.” I’m not a scientist by any measure, but that sure sounds like an explanation of “denial” to me! Take Warren, for example. He was so invested in the fact that Rory couldn’t be handled, that was all he was seeing, despite the fact that the opposite thing was happening, right in front of his eyes.
We as humans have the power to turn our perceptions around and use them to our advantage. Instead of seeing the negative things we are used to seeing, we can choose to see something different. Researchers have found that the brain can’t tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, because the same neural pathways are used when someone looks at a tree or is asked to visualize the tree. The processes in the brain are exactly the same. When people who fear snakes are shown pictures of snakes, sensors on their skin will detect sweat breaking out and other signs of anxiety, even if the experiment subjects don’t admit to feeling fear. The limbic system of the brain buys into the belief that the snakes are real, even if the conscious mind does not. Deepak Chopra describes another common thought experiment, where subjects are asked to imagine putting a lemon slice in their mouths, bite into it, and let the juice squirt into their mouths. “If you are like most people,” Chopra writes, “just that quick thought led to a rush of saliva in your mouth, your body’s way of saying it believes what your mind is telling it.”13 Centuries before science had the facts to back up those findings, holy men in India were using the power of their minds to walk across hot coals without being harmed. The power of their concentration left their feet unscratched, where other men’s feet burned.
The Power of Intention
In order to achieve a calm-assertive state of mind, your emotions and your intentions have to line up in harmony. If you are “acting” tough, but inside still feeling terrified, your dog will know it instantly. Your boss might not, but your dog definitely will. When your insides and your outsides conflict, you are powerless in the animal world. But our human minds are incredibly powerful tools, and with the power of intention, we can actually change our feelings—not just on the surface, but from the inside out. If you can positively project the intention you desire through real strength and honesty, your dog will instantly react to that calm-assertive energy.
As animals, we can’t change our instinctual feelings any more than our dogs can. As we’ve seen, our emotions have a purpose: to help us react to our environments and to keep us alive. But as humans, we can change our thoughts. That’s where the power of intention comes in. I first read about this concept many years ago, in Dr. Wayne W. Dyer’s book The Power of Intention: Learning to Cocreate Your World Your Way. In it, Dyer defines intention as the force in the universe that allows the act of creation to take place; not something you do, but as an energy field of which you are a part. I can’t stress enough how this concept changed and improved my life and helped me realize my dreams of being able to help unbalanced dogs. Some of the things Dyer said in the book resonated with me and confirmed so many of the observations I had made back in Mexico, before I had access to books like his. Recently, Deepak Chopra has explored the same topic. “Intent orchestrates all the creativity in the universe,” he writes. “And we, as human beings, are capable of creating positive changes in our lives through intent.” Intent works in the same way that prayer works, according to both authors. The key, say the experts, is to be willing to get rid of our ego—the “I” that tries to oversee and shape the process from a selfish point of view. If someone who is trying to walk over hot coals suddenly lets her rational mind say to her, “This defies the laws of physics—what if it doesn’t work and I get hurt?”, in the middle of the process, she sabotages her intention and ends up burning her feet.
I’m not going to teach you how to walk on hot coals, or to find the answers to the questions of the quantum universe. But I do hope to help you become more aware of what energy you are projecting at every moment, and to be able to use the power of that energy to communicate a calm-assertive leadership with your dog. That is something that hundreds of my clients have already done, and something you will learn to do in Leadership for Dogs…and for Humans.
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