Episode 201 - What Fostering 20 Dogs Taught Me About How to Love
Do you ever hold back to avoid heartbreak, even though what you really want is to love wholeheartedly?
In this episode of Come To Your Senses, I'm sharing what fostering dogs has taught me about love, presence, and showing up with an open heart, even when loss is inevitable.
Fostering has been an unexpected masterclass in relationships, attachment, boundaries, and letting love move through my life, and I'm excited to share what gems of wisdom I've learned with you today.
Here's to all the ways that only love can break, and open, our hearts.
Topics include:
What fostering dogs taught me about relationships, love, and healthy attachment
How to love, even when you can't fully attach
Dating, boundaries, and intuition
Being willing to fall in love (again and again)
This episode is perfect for anyone who loves dogs, has known heartbreak, believes in loving fully, and wants to live with more emotional freedom.
Links from the show:
The Healing Heartbreak Support Kit
Like opening a jar of comforting salve for an aching heart; a calming and supportive balm for your healing process
Inside you’ll find:
An Affirmation Audio specifically designed for the experience of heartbreak
A 15-page Support Journal with three powerful exercises, printable affirmations and rich resources
A Honey Heart Meditation with vivid imagery and deep relaxation to bathe the heart in a golden glow
A rich playlist to guide your healing journey
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What Fostering Dogs Taught Me About Unconditional Love
Hello, beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode. So when we think about coming to our senses, you know, living a more embodied, authentic, awake, present life. A big part of that is connection and relationships, and one of my greatest teachers in life about relationships has been fostering dogs. And as I'm recording this, I decided to pull up a few pictures of some of the dogs that I've fostered. I've fostered about 20 dogs, and it has made my life such a rich bouquet of love and resilience and just the joy of being of service. You know, and I know for a lot of people, you can't imagine fostering a dog and having a dog in your life and in your heart and then giving them up. And today, I would like to share with you some of the things that I've learned from fostering dogs about loving, not just. With the risk of having my heart broken or the risk of loss, but with the knowledge and the inevitability of loss. And it reminds me of that phrase die while you're still alive. Like surrender to the life, death, rebirth process and the way that that happens for us, not just in our own personal transformation, but in our relational transformations. And my hope is that in sharing some of these stories, it will help you not just allow your heart to grow taller in terms of what it can reach, but to grow broader and wider in terms of what it can hold. And with that, let us now dive into our gems.
So how I began the journey of fostering is my beloved pup, Winnie. The punky Brewster of dogs. Died in 2022 and a few months after her death. I was really yearning. To have a dog in my life. But I knew I wasn't ready for the commitment of a lifer, and so I decided to give fostering a try.
And, you know, fostering for me has been like attachment system strength training. I remember my first foster penny. She was a sweet hound who was very gentle with humans, but she had a really high prey drive. So when she would see a squirrel, it would take her like 20 minutes to deactivate. And she also had wicked allergies where her whole body was covered in these just inflammatory, not really sores, but just she was one big ball of inflammation and she had hardly any fur on her body. And I worked with her. I fostered her for about two months and, you know, letting go of Penny, even though she was a very high care animal. And so there was relief in no longer having that responsibility. It was a real wrecker of of the heart. And just like any other ending of relationship, there is this arc of healing that I find is very similar to a wound on the skin, which is that there's a period of acute, maybe pain and inflammation, but with care and with time and with oxygen and with tending, eventually heals and gets to the point where the memory of it is still there, but the sensation of it is no longer there. And that was really helpful for me in future, fostering relationships to kind of know what to expect. But also in all of my relationships, in knowing that the pain of loss after relationship can be utterly excruciating. But ultimately, there is an end to it. And then that wheel of life turns again and a new relationship comes in, and then another loss. And. You know, just this inevitable strengthening of the spiritual muscle of the heart that comes with being human. And if you have ever known heartbreak or are in an experience of heartbreak, my heart is with yours. Because heartbreak, especially relational heartbreak, is quite the labyrinth to walk through. And a few years ago, I created a little kit for anyone who's experiencing heartbreak called the Healing Heartbreak Support Kit. It's called balm for Broken Heart. So if you or anyone you know could use a little bit of a calm, free balm on the achy corners of your heart, particularly after a romantic heartbreak, you can find that at Mary Lofgren. Heart. And this topic of knowing how to safely and soundly walk the landscape of the heart brings me back to Penny for our next gem.
My experience with Penny also taught me about how to show up in these relationships, where I could protect my heart without armoring my heart. So, for example, I am a sucker for the little guys ten pounders who won't leave your lap. Those are. I mean, if I fostered those, I would have a legion of dogs in my adoption history. But I made sure that I only foster dogs that were bigger than what I would be capable of adopting, and that has been really helpful for me in dating, because I could go out on a date with a person, and I think when I was a little younger, if there was like a spark of romantic connection. I would just follow that star until I fell off the edge of the earth. It did not matter whether or not the parts and pieces were in place for us to be compatible. And as I've gotten older, I've learned that if all the parts and pieces aren't there, it doesn't make sense for me to move forward with a relationship because it will end up in a wreckage. And this reminds me of the Jungian concept that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. That in many past relationships, dating, relationships, friendships, I might have looked past some red flags around compatibility and then ended up developing an attachment where even though my cognitive reasoning based mind knew that this was not a match and that I was hurting myself by continuing to move forward, my heart had developed a strong attachment and wouldn't let me let go.
Because our attachment system is very much linked to our reptilian survival brain, and our attachment system is mainly concerned with survival because we need to attach to one another in order to ensure our safety. We are heard mammals and we are wired for connection and that survival brain. Dozen above. Reason doesn't love logic and it doesn't love the modernity. I don't know if that's a word, but like the modern reality of needing things other than someone's pheromones for being a compatible partner in business, in romantic relationships and any kind of relationship. And so by choosing dogs that were bigger than what I knew, I would develop that ride or die connection with that oxytocin laced. This is my fur child connection with, which is what I tend to experience with smaller lap dogs and Velcro dogs. I'm a bit of a Velcro human when it comes to dogs. I was able to show up in those relationships and give the fullness of my heart that was available to give. So not necessarily my whole heart, but as much of my heart that was available. And that feels very different than withholding or armoring a part of my heart out of fear of getting hurt. And this is a question that comes up a lot when I'm working with a client. An embodiment coaching is that my clients often come with an inability or a lack of practice with being able to successfully decode the messages of the body, because they have been so practiced at living solely from the directives of the thinking mind that when they turn towards the body, everybody screams at once. You know, it's like, is this intuition or is this fear? Is this impulse, or is this instinct? Is this true desire, or is this self-sabotage? And that is just so normal? It's so normal because up until that point, the thinking mind has been the engine, and it's just natural that one might process the sensations and emotions that come up around relationship through this filter of analytical thought. And so a practice that might help make this relevant for you in your own life is when you're faced with one of these moments of confusion and ambiguity about which part of yourself you might be coming from. Is to listen to your inner dialogue, not just what's being said, but how it's being said. And you might think back to a time where you made a decision from a clear knowing in your intuition and clear not meaning. There was a guarantee it was going to work out.
But you were clear that this was a sovereign voice from within you that was coming from a willingness to move forward, even with there being a risk involved, as opposed to a time where maybe you made a decision that was deliciously self-sabotaging and where you were coming from, that place inside that was like, screw it, I'm just gonna do it anyway, you know? I know I certainly have that part. She wears a circus leotard and loves to jump off the high dive. Whereas my wisdom self loves to swing on the trapeze, but she makes sure she's gotten in plenty of practice with a net. And that's enough for the circus metaphors for right now. Next gem is that falling in love will happen over and over and over again. So right now I am just beginning the process of becoming ready to adopt a dog. I moved to California about a year ago, and I knew I wanted to be really rooted and settled in before taking on that commitment. And I look at Pet Finder the way I used to look at Tinder. It is the new dating app in my life, and there are many times where I see a dog that I'm like, oh, that's my dog. And I submitted an application and I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for them to get back to me. And then like, the dog has already been adopted or, you know, I go and meet the dog and it's just not a perfect fit. And there are so many dogs out there that you can fall in love with. I mean, I remember. Okay, listen, there is one dog that stands out in my memory. His name is Randolph. He's a husky lab mix. If anybody out there adopted Randolph from Brother Wolf animal Rescue and you're looking for a dog sitter, I will fly to the East Coast because I would call Randolph husband material. He was the Pierce Brosnan meets Clint Eastwood of dogs. He was so handsome. And we just had it. We just had the spark. We had the love. We had the boundaries. He just was like a redwood tree in my life, while also just having this Mr. Rogers warmth and kindness. And I loved him so much. And he was a husky mix, so he needed like 90 minutes of exercise every single day. And I'm just not up for that. And so that's my tribute to Randolph, that I really fell hard for Randolph.
But then came bow. And bow was a pit mix. Sweet bow was the cuddly dog I have ever encountered. He was like a professional big spoon and he has left such an imprint on my heart. Fred Fred was so traumatized when I got him that he was also a little white pit mix, and he couldn't even make eye contact. He had this ratty little pad that we had gotten from the shelter that came with him in the shelter that was like a donated little doggie bed. He wouldn't leave the pad. He wouldn't go outside. He was so traumatized. And through just like two weeks together, he had this miraculous transformation. After spending some time in Auntie Mary's house of convalescence and treats. And, you know, these stories are just evidence that even though sometimes it can feel like, oh God, I will never love like that again. Our hearts are so much wider and have such greater capacity, and the world is so much more abundant with love than I think our minds can even conceive of. But our hearts know how to navigate that. And the final gem of wisdom gleaned from my fostering career is that love is always worth it. So I want to share a story about a foster that I had named Melanie, and she was a sweetheart, but she had this kind of edge that I could tell I felt a little unsafe with her at times, which was pretty uncommon. And you just never know what you're going to get with these pups, you know? And one day we were out on a walk and there was an incident, and she ended up biting someone to a degree where she was deemed unacceptable. And sometimes in that case, it makes most sense to do what's called a behavioral euthanasia. And even in no kill shelters, this happens sometimes. And so I got the call after the bite incident. And at first I, you know, strongly advocated for her and eventually just came to understand that this was the only choice available. And we had three days together where I took her on the most magnificent walks and gave her all the peanut butter and just really got to be present with this soul covered in fur. And I chose to be there with her and hold her during the procedure. And many members of the shelter staff were there to just be with this creature. And I got to hold her while she passed. And, you know, it was, uh, soggy with tears event, but I sure would do it again in a heartbeat. And I was the recipient of her ashes, and I took them to the river and released her, and. Just what a privilege it is to have had the honor of walking with that little one. You know, in this moment where I don't know anything about her story, if she was an owner, surrender. If she was a stray. But there she was, you know, without her person, without a person. And even though she and I only knew each other a short time, what a privilege it was to give her a graceful exit. And, God, it makes my heart just, um, ache in the best way to talk about. And so love is always worth it. As Neil Young says, only love can break your heart. But also, I think only love can open your heart. And so my sweet, open hearted friends and listeners, thank you so much for wandering down this sweet trip of memory lane today. And if you enjoyed this episode, it would mean so much to me to hear from you in a review to receive a five star rating or subscribe Those tiny gestures really make a difference. And so my gratitude for your support and we will pop a link to that Healing Heartbreak support kit in the show notes. Once again, you can go to Marie Lofgren if you'd like to learn more about that. And I will see you in our next episode, friends. And if you see Randolph around town, give him my number. Ciao! For more gems on how to celebrate life through the richness of your senses. Head to https://marylofgren.com/. There you'll find an abundant library of free gems and resources. You can check out my award winning coaching programs or flirt with stepping through the garden gates of the sanctuary community.
Come and learn how to make beauty, presence, and everyday luxury a lifestyle at https://marylofgren.com/