I continue to learn from our dog. After over five decades without a canine companion, I’m remembering how marvelous they are in so many ways. What I see above all is their ability as empaths. They don’t shy away from being empathic. They lean into it. They give everything without a thought for holding back.
Our precious Honey cherishes us. It’s that simple. She follows me around the house seeking always to be of assistance. She’s my little four-legged spirit guide who happens to have a body. And she reminds me to Love with a capital L, that love is the most important thing in all the world, that giving love is itself a reward (and may lead to treats).
So many of us born as empaths look at our abilities as a sort of affliction. I’ve heard some friends call it a curse. But here’s the truth: If we were empaths in the same way animals are, we might acknowledge this ability as a great gift. You see, they recognize and feel our needs, feelings, and issues and simply love us through them. Dogs don’t pity us, which would attach said issue to them. Instead, they exude love and hold space for us to move through whatever the problem is. Yes, they want to help. But their innate means of doing so is always the same across the board no matter the challenge we face: love, love, love, love, love (and, of course, lick, lick, lick, lick, lick).
As humans, feeling someone else’s distress may lead us to embody that energy because we either (1) mistakenly identify it as our own or (2) we pity the person and allow the energy to attach to us. So far as I can discern, dogs don’t do this. They sense our distress and, rather than taking it on, emit tons of love in response, which we can choose to either receive or block given our feelings in the moment. When we receive that love a dog so freely offers, it acts like a salve to soothe the senses. While it may not solve our problems, that love can ease our feelings, not because the dog ingested them the way so many empaths do but because we allowed the love to nurture us and help us to heal.
This is a huge lesson for someone like me. I spent much of my life pitying those who were feeling sad. Pitying them only reinforces those feelings. I know this from being on the receiving end of that situation. But pouring out love costs absolutely nothing and can only serve to aid. It never depletes energy as pity can do on both sides of the equation (for the pitied and the pitier). Love always offers the hope, the prayer, the intention, and the energy for the person to rise above self-pity or sorrow.
I also spent a large portion of my life ingesting people’s hurts by claiming them as my own. I’m grateful to our dog for showing me a better way. She innately understands the feelings of others do not belong to her. She can sense them without embracing them. She recognizes from whence they come because dogs are extremely aware energetically. But empaths are as well if we focus on that inner awareness rather than hiding from it. Leaning into our empathy means being aware of what we’re sensing, pinpointing its source, and recognizing that we can honor the gift of being aware and still avoid imbibing and claiming the feelings ourselves. We do that by loving—just loving that person (the source of those emotions) so completely that nothing else can infiltrate our hearts or minds.
So the endpoint of the lesson, which I’m still getting, is to love unconditionally. Doing that allows me to feel without holding any of the energy of the other person. We can give thanks for the knowing and then let go of the emotions that belong to others by tapping into the infinite stream of Divine love and letting so much of it fill us and flow through us that it washes away all traces of anything less than itself.
I believe dogs (and many other animals) maintain this as part of their natural empathic gift. They would likely never consider doing anything else. Someday I hope to be as true an empath as our precious dog, living daily in that stream of unconditional love.