Don’t Panic in the middle

Storm and I on his 23rd birthday

Stop panicking when it gets difficult.

I see this all too often with my clients, and I’ll freely admit that I’m not immune to it either.

I guess we can blame our culture for the instant gratification trend, that seems to spill over into every area of our life - we think that things should just magically be better when we try.

That’s not how the universe works… Caterpillars turn to GOO before they become a butterfly (but retain awareness of their experiences as caterpillars somehow… 😬)

Going from seed to plant requires being in the DARK, and busting out of the hard shell of the seed.

Things are hard before they become easy.

This carries over to things with our pets.

Teaching our pets a new skill - whether it requires physical muscle building or just mental training - either way it’s going to get “hard” before it gets easy. It’s going to look messy in the middle, no matter what it is.

And that’s not wrong.

Storm is just coming out the other side of yet another one of these layers. In the middle of last summer he seemed to “fall apart,” he was struggling with his balance, he lost a LOT of muscle in his hind end, he was lame and stiff after we worked. I was terrified that something was truly wrong that would mean making a lot of hard decisions. He’s no spring chicken after all.

My trainer and I talked at length about what was happening, and she encouraged me to just hang in there, adjust the work as needed, but don’t stop working. She wanted to see what happened if we kept going.

She was right, he moved through it, and is (mostly) out the other side at this point, looking stronger and more fit than he did just four months ago. He still has more ground to make up, but he’s on the right track - and it took staying the course in the very messy middle of that moment in order to get there.

Where would we be if we had stopped?

His changes were muscular, he was releasing some very old tension patterns that he has obviously carried for his 22 years that are finally unwinding after all of the years of work that we’ve been putting in. It’s paying off, but the bumps in the road have been scary, not going to lie.

So make sure that when you bump up against the messiness that comes with the middle that you don’t panic. Stay the course and keep going because you never know what amazing things will lie on the other side.