Downward Facing Blog

How my dog friend taught me to be a better yogi
Without concentration there is no meditation. Without the ability to concentrate yoga simply won’t happen. That doesn’t make concentration some special skill however. Nor is it sacred.

My favorite teacher of concentration is my friend Todd’s dog named Buster. Buster is totally obsessed with food, to the exclusion of all other concerns. Needless to say, the dog is a bit fat. It seems even basic dog-loyalty isn’t fully there, provided the enemy has something that smells nice and makes a sound like a crinkling paper bag. Buster taught me how to concentrate on a morning after I had just gotten done teaching concentration and meditation. I had been stressing the need to develop concentration as the platform for meditation, which could have been a reminder to myself as much as it was to my students.

After the class, I turned up at my Todd’s house with a plastic bag of warm, deep-fried bananas, a kind of delicious Thai street food. Buster was entranced. As I snacked on my breakfast, I began taking pleasure in teasing him. I couldn’t resist, it was just so important to him. I savored the crispy bananas with extra slow enthusiasm, making sure my pleasure and the crunching was audible. Buster followed every movement of my hand from the bag to my mouth with the most perfect, rapt focus.

Is it a stretch to say that Buster is a good yogi? Because according to Patanjali the dog had pretty damn near perfect Samadhi: “Concentration is fixing your mind at one point or region, meditation is a continual steady flow of attention towards that same point, and Samadhi is when the object of meditation engulfs the meditator, and self-awareness is lost” I tell you that when I looked in the dog’s eyes, he had become the banana. It was his entire reality, if but for only the time before I ran out of things to eat.

So concentration is not holy or something that requires high intelligence to develop. It is however, totally necessary for success in life, and critical for yoga.I have experienced concentration again and again as healing the suffering of being distracted. It’s not something that came easily, it’s like a muscle I’ve had to work on to develop. When I was younger, I had been accused of having attention deficit disorder, (although it was a fashionable disease to assign to children in the late 80’s) so it’s ironic I’m such a proponent of developing concentration now. Like I said earlier, it’s just a skill you develop by reigning in the mind again and again to a single point.

What does the breath do when you try to thread a needle? It stops! In the same way the preceding practices of pranayama and pratyahara make concentration possible. You can practice on anything, internal or external, real or imagined.

Love to you all, Adrian Cox

PS: Dogs will also teach you downward facing dog and upward facing dog anytime they wake up from a nap. It’s pretty cool actually.