Meditate With Your Dog

 

People ask if its all right to do yoga, kriya, and meditation with pets in the room.

The official answer of the "pure" who teach these courses is, "no." They tell you all sorts of scary reasons why you shouldn't meditate with pets. Pets will steal your spiritual energy and drag you back on your evolutionary path, sort of like vampires. Or your vibrations will make them crazy; their spines can't handle the kundalini energy. Right. My cat's spine is a lot more flexible that mine, rippling with wisdom.

So here's what I do: I ALWAYS meditate with my pets - a cat named Basquiat, a dog named Willy, and a stray named Bowie. My blessed little Sanga. I could never shut the door on them because I love them too much. Maybe they'll drag me back to earth for an extra lifetime. So what? Maybe they're helping me relax and open my heart.

Close the doors of compassion: what kind of meditation is that? I cannot call shutting out the beings who dwell in my heart, or my bedroom,  a "spiritual practice." Such fussiness leads to ominous rules of religious purity, found in many ancient cultures - Vedic culture of India, and many tribal cultures  too - which, though New Age seekers romanticize them, are deeply conservative, imbued with class-ism, authoritarianism, and patriarchal hierarchy.

You begin by shutting out pets. Then you shut out the homeless and the poor, the untouchables. Then you shut out the other gender, race and religious sect. How's that been working out for humanity?

My body is a dark ember, with a hidden fire inside. All I need is the breath of the Mantra to fan the ember into flame. The flame is love. Love expands around the ember and consumes it. The warmth of love enfolds the room, the dogs and the cat, the forest beyond the window, every white-tailed deer and bob cat, the raven wheeling and calling over the wetland, all my ancestors.

As awareness settles into its natural relaxed omnipresence, the flame of my aura keeps expanding, until I have become a perfect zero encircling the earth. From the Cascade Mountains on one side, to the Olympic range on the other, I am a hollow bowl, holding the Salish sea (known to white folk as the Puget Sound).

Breathing in, I surrender, and in my infinite loss, the vacuum in my throat, chest and belly fills up with stars. Each proton in my body is an abysmal chaos of divine information, gently sucking in the galaxies, reordering them in spontaneous harmony, breathing them forth as constellations. The cosmic archetypes in the heavens are also my animal guides - the honey-pawed Black Bear Orion, Mountain Goat Capricorn, Salmon Pisces, the Northwest Cougar Leo.

Whether full of purity or impurity, one who gazes into the shamanic Eye of the supreme Lord, the diamond clarity of consciousness itself, gains inner and outer purity in this instant, even with a fuzzy golden poodle in your lap.