the ability to recognise, acknowledge and participate in pain and suffering. the animals do well here for one very simple reason..i am not afraid of who they are inside...my caring is not dependent upon their worthiness in my judgement or the vision of how they "should" be in my eyes...my caring is only dependent on their actual being alive. and i will find a way to connect with them so they feel they are truly valued and loved despite themselves.
so many of our animals come in because they were not liked, not valued because of the challenges they presented. they lived in a circle of endless frustration, resentment and active dislike. dogs like phoebe, difficult in the extreme suffered the ultima.te abandonment by bring dropped off in the dead of the night outside the spca. dogs like rose, beaten and battered because for some reason they frustrated the family they lived with. dogs like daffy duck, who's assumed frustrating behaviors were not "doggy dementia" but oxygen deprivation from cardiac disease. people who put their old and restless dog or cat down in the basement, out in the yard, without any compassion or recognition that those midnight wanderings or yowlings, disturbing human sleep, might be a symptom of confusion from not only pain, or poor vision but from their helplessness against increasing negative resentful feelings surrounding them each day.
if you are not valued, if you are not loved, if your own family dismisses or resents your behaviors as too much, too problematic....how do you feel good inside? we all feel frustrated at times..but that is our personal issue, not the fault of the one suffering beside us.
i give them back their goodness, i tell them they are just fine..i might get mad when they act like moronic dipsticks and bite my feet but five minutes later, i truly love them again and all is fine.
we live in an imperfect world...we are imperfect humans..my expectation is that the animals who come into our care will naturally be imperfect too.
the animals do well in this atmosphere because then they are free of being suffocated by negative energy.
there is an old poster out there that is very long, about raising well adjusted children...it basically says, children become who we tell them they are.
well the same is true for our animals....if we tell them they are safe, they are fine, they are lovable..that is who they believe they are...tell them they are difficult, too much work, a continual headache to deal with and that is who else they can become too.
they believe what we tell them...we need to understand this so we don't make them into someone unhappy who they wouldn't really be if they didn't believe.
i read somewhere once that true compassion was the ability to fully participate in suffering without an easy fix, without a perfect answer or solution, without a time line for suffering to end... just the ability to feel the suffering of someone else and freely accept it.
once you truly feel the suffering of another, that is where solutions are found because now you understand that suffering and where it really comes from.
currently working on a full understanding of the suffering of griffin...it is not the biting that is the problem, it is his pain and fear inside him.
Thanks, Carol!!! This is precious => "the freedom of opportunity to help as best as i can".