The Dogs That Show Up When I Practice

Canggu has more dogs than anyone owns. They belong to a warung, or a family compound, or nobody in particular, and they go where they like. Every few weeks one of them decides my treatment room is exactly where it likes best, and it will not leave until the session is over.

The dogs of this street

Most of the dogs here are not strays in the way that word gets used elsewhere. Someone feeds them. Someone lets them sleep on a porch. They are just not fenced in, and they do not belong to one household the way a dog might in Germany or England. They sleep in the middle of the road at midday because the tarmac has not warmed up yet, or under a parked motorbike in the shade. Motorbikes pass close enough to hear a helmet strap flapping, and none of it seems to bother them much. They choose where they lie down with more care than the noise around them would suggest.

Balinese households set out small offerings on the ground each morning, a few flowers and some rice on a folded leaf, placed outside doors and gates. It is common to see a dog step neatly around one without disturbing it, as though it already knows the difference between what is there to be walked on and what is not. I do not know if that is training, or habit, or something a dog here simply learns by growing up alongside the offerings. It has nothing to do with my work. I only mention it because I think it is the same instinct that has one of them stepping past my doorway and choosing to stay.

What happens when one comes in

I have stopped being surprised by it. A dog puts its head round the door, has a look at the room, and decides. It is nearly always the same sequence: it noses in, takes a slow look around, and finds a patch of cool tile, usually near the doorway or under the table. Then it lies down with a sigh you can actually hear, and stays there for the rest of the session.

When my client gets up, the dog usually gets up too and wanders back out to whatever it was doing before. It is never the same dog twice in a row. I do not feed them and I am not trying to attract them. I leave the door open because the room needs air, and this is apparently what happens when you leave a door open here. My clients tend to find it funny or touching, sometimes both. Nobody has ever asked me to move the dog. It settles, and it is asleep within a few minutes.

What I am not going to tell you

I am not going to tell you the dog came in for the same reason my client did, or that it felt anything happening in the room. I do not know why a dog picks a doorway over a hot street. It might be nothing more than cool tile and an open door.

A Reiki session is rest and support for the person on the table. It is not a treatment for any condition, and I am not about to stretch that to a passing dog just because the story is a nicer one that way. What I can tell you is what I see: a room quiet enough, and still enough, that something that owes me nothing, and could leave any time it wants, chooses to stay.

What it tells me about the room

I think about this more than the story probably deserves. Part of what I am building, in that room and in the ones my training students go on to build in their own homes, is a place that reads as safe from the doorway. Not because of anything mystical about it. It is quiet, and nobody in it is ever in a hurry.

People arrive at that same doorway carrying a great deal, and they cannot always say why they chose to stop and come in either. I do not think the comparison needs pushing any further than that. But I notice it every time a dog settles by the table and falls asleep before my client does, and I have decided it is a fair enough way to judge whether a room is doing what I want it to do.