Taming The Barking Dog

I was recently asked to write a piece for Maverick magazine about the story of the Barking Dog Necklace, which I write about in my memoir "Belonging: Finding Tribes of Meaning". It brought up for me a deeper awareness on navigating change when you have created shifts in your identity. When I was 60 years old I attended a global self-development seminar where an amazing woman took to the stage. Her name was Sonia Choquette. She was the author of no less than 27 books on intuition and spiritual philosophy.

But she didn't mention a single one of her books. Instead, she stood on stage in her floral dress and sneakers and spoke to each one of us as if we were the only ones in the room. There were a thousand people from 52 different countries, and yet we all resonated so deeply with her message. Beyond cultures, class, and country, it touched on our common humanity.

She spoke about the barking dog in your head. The constant noise that becomes the noise of other people's voices, of other people's prescription, of other people's expectations, of other people's templates for approval. I squirmed uncomfortably in my velvet covered chair. It was as if she was talking to only me. My husband turned to me. And his nonverbal gesture said "you see that's what you do to yourself all the time". We had been married almost 30 years at that point in time. My husband knew more than anybody else how the "barking dog" had dominated my entire life.

In the past few years, I started to live with more courage, but recently, the barking dog came back to haunt me. The voices in my head were drowning out any semblance of my own intuition, my own compass, my own true calling. But here is where it gets interesting. Before negotiating a difficult and complex dynamic in our main manufacturing company, it would have spiralled me out of control and sent me to the fridge to find solace in food. Emotional eating was a pattern that plagued me for decades.

This time, that did not happen. In fact, in the face of the cacophony of the barking dog, I chose differently. I chose to do everything that would actually support my mental health and not erode it further. In the past month, while negotiating a variety of challenges both personally and at work, I chose to guard my heart by pulling in patterns that would calm and support me and not inflame my turbulent mind and my eroded sense of self, whilst navigating a new way forward.

Instead of capitulating into emotional eating, into isolation and overthinking, into anxiety and despair, I consciously upped my gym and Pilates sessions as a way to bolster my courage. I ate more consciously and focused on nutrition that was about energy, not about comfort. I chose to meet up with people I could feel safe with, people I could be myself with, who knew me for decades. I chose to do more dancing with my husband so that the music of life, the rhythm of my soul, could find a new calibration, a new melody, a new song.

Sometimes, when things are rough, it's easy to default to our old patterns of survival and coping. But when we find a new way forward, even in the depths of our valleys, even in the depths of our despair, we are saying, "I am going to live patterns that protect me, not patterns that might hold short-term comfort but that hold the seed of long-term annihilation."

By focusing on what you can control, you calm the cacophony of the barking dog to the whisper of your inner voice.

That is the power of "Identity Intelligence". That is the power of understanding patterns of self-compassion and how they can fuel our faith in a new way forward.

What’s your Barking Dog, and how can you tame it?