What If Your Dog Is Part of Your Meditation Practice?
By Katya Lidsky
Attempting self-care while living with animals is nothing short of ironic. You light a candle. Roll out your yoga mat. Close your eyes to meditate or begin your breathwork. And then the dogs start wrestling. Someone licks your face. The cat decides this is the exact moment to play with your hair.
You are ready to find peace, but your animals have other plans. Well, what if these interruptions aren’t obstacles to the practice? What if they’re part of it?
It’s easy to feel serene when the world is quiet, when nothing is asking anything of us, when everything is exactly as we’d like it to be. Yet when the world refuses to cooperate, perhaps we get to learn something else, like how to feel mad but not get mad, how to acknowledge what’s going on but not get swept up in efforts to control it, how to detach and stay with ourselves instead of being pulled into chaos.
Meditation isn’t about never being distracted. It’s about noticing when we’re distracted and returning to ourselves. Again and again, we can choose to return to the breath. To the body. To the present moment. And our animals offer us endless occasions to face the challenge.
Try this the next time your dog interrupts you in your lotus position: Can you notice your irritation? Can you feel the tension rise? Can you recognize the familiar story: I can’t even have five minutes to myself! And can you decide not to give up, not to use it as proof of why meditation isn’t for you or possible in your life? Can you consider sticking to it, taking another breath in the midst of the noise, softening your shoulders, and observe what happens inside of you? We don’t have to immediately act on what occurs. We can watch instead, and with eyes open, let that be meditation in life.
As we welcome and accept our pets exactly as they are, we afford ourselves a chance to return to calm. Maybe we gently move the dog to another room. Maybe we recognize that we genuinely need our own still space and create a boundary to protect it. The point isn’t to tolerate every interruption with a saintly smile because we are allowed to have needs. But the practice is to surrender again, not to the outer world’s demand or to our inner world’s eruption in response to those demands, but to our awareness that is holding it all.
We can love someone without being yanked into their every movement, and we can have relationships with our dogs that don’t require our constant management and direction. We can be present to what’s happening around us without losing our connection to our own aligned center. We can remain compassionate without merging with others or abandoning ourselves.
Interruptions won’t stop with pets. There are children and doorbells, emails and unexpected requests. There is a nonstop slew of urgency swirling around each of us in today’s world, and if we’re not mindful, it can threaten to become our urgency, leaving us in a cycle of anxiety, overwhelm, and stress. What if we prepare for life to interject? Allow people to have needs, feelings, and agendas of their own. Know that things will happen at inconvenient times. Because the world will not always arrange itself around our needs or our desire for quiet, and we cannot control it all. But we can determine how we want to meet each interruption. Notice. Breathe. Choose. Return.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, and we may not achieve it every time, but we can commit to a little more consciousness a little more often, and let our dogs be a glorious, wild, comical part of that muscle building. We can even regard their playfulness, their naughtiness, and their quirks as unexpected gifts, granting us many opportunities to rehearse staying with ourselves while remaining in relationship with another living being.
Now, we don’t have to make every inconvenience a spiritual lesson! Sometimes your dogs really need to go outside, or we really need to close the door and keep them out. But other times, when we’re tempted to treat a disruption as the enemy of our peace, we might pause and wonder if it’s also an invitation to notice our reactions, strengthen our boundaries, and follow the path of patience without requiring perfect conditions.
Keep taking your deep breath. Stay on the cushion. Drop into life as it is and return to the practice. In fact, perhaps you never left it.
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Katya Lidsky offers grief support and burnout-prevention workshops specifically designed to help animal shelter staff, volunteers, and rescue teams stay in this work with less stress and greater wellbeing. She is a certified, trauma-informed Breathwork Facilitator and Creative Grief Coach, has worked in the animal welfare nonprofit space for over a decade, and is a long time animal shelter volunteer, foster, and advocate. Katya is also a writer, and her award-winning book, Be Your Dog’s Best Friend: The Benefits of Mutual Bonding and Relationship Building was published by McFarland (2025) as part of their Dogs In Our World series. Follow her @KatyaLidsky on Instagram.