I got a puppy for Hanukkah last year and life has been better ever since! I highly recommend getting a puppy as an antidote to the pandemic blahs. Our puppy Mesa is a rez-cue from the Navajo nation. She comes from a long lineage of sheepherding dogs.
“Ohh we got a working dog?!” my fiancé said to me. He was barely onboard with getting a dog at all, let alone one who has so much energy and is born to work and not chill like a little lap dog.
Mesa does need a lot of exercise, but I do too. We go out for an hour romp in the woods every morning, but the dog trainer (I use Good Pup and it’s the best!) warned against exercising her too much too soon.
“With these working dogs, some people will just run them all day long to tire them out, but then they never learn how to relax and then they can’t calm down,” she said. She recommended a good jaunt in the morning and then a slower walk (more like a sniff) later in the day.
It dawned on me that that’s what I need too! As a former cross-country runner, I was trained like a working dog. I never learned how to slow down and relax until I started forest bathing. Forest bathing helped me shift my focus from running miles to experiencing the world around me. But then I went overboard — I stopped exercising and would only go for slow sensual strolls. After a few years, I learned that a balance is best for me. Like Mesa, I need my exercise in the morning and then can go out again for a forest bath later in the day. Like most false binaries in life, forest bathing and exercising is not an either/or but rather a both/and situation.
Mesa has upped my forest bathing game in other ways, too. She loves to dig holes in the dirt and then sniff the around. I don’t think she even knows that smelling dirt is akin to taking an antidepressant. She just enjoys engaging her sense of smell and letting that guide her. As we’re learning with COVID and our loss of sense of smell, we too have a powerful ability to smell and can even follow a scent trail while blindfolded. Let your dog inspire your sense of scents.
Maybe it’s because she’s teething, but Mesa loves to have a stick in her mouth. We can also engage in the world around us but putting things in our mouth and licking them. Lick a rock (but please DON’T be like Mesa and swallow it!) or chew on a stick, a piece of grass, or a fresh fir tip.
Mesa doesn’t follow the trail like the rest of us — she runs around and makes her own path. We too can blaze our own trails (in some cases — in sensitive environments, it’s best to stay on the trail) instead of just blindly following in others’ footsteps (are you picking up on the metaphor here?!)
So, in short, you don’t need any fancily trained forest bathing guide to take you out. Just get a puppy and you’ll be doing just fine! There’s even a book on forest bathing with your dog!