The Incidental Guru: Lessons in Healing from a Dog

Lori A. Dunn is an ESL teacher, instructional designer, and freelance
writer in New Westminster.

Cindy Stone is a psychiatrist and counsellor who underwent an epiphany
during a crisis of doggy faith that resulted in this coherent treatise
on creating healthy relationships. As an intellectual woman faced with
her own instinctive fear after her dog bit her, Stone found she didn’t
have the “words to grapple” with what she was now going through—a
key moment of crisis for someone who works with language. For the next
few months, as she and her dog were being retrained in awareness of
their essential natures, she continued to find the psychological
connections between her life, those of her clients, and that of her dog,
Harry.

Fear, trust, respect, and love are the basic concepts that arose out of
the author’s experiences with Harry, each element building on the
foundation of the one before. As she points out, we need to learn to
accept and accommodate our fear before we can learn to trust ourselves
or others. Respect for oneself and creating the personal boundaries
necessary to maintain and develop that respect are preliminary steps to
loving someone with commitment. And there can be no “fast track” to
love: the bribery of treats or affection for a dog or a human undermine
our attempts at love, which cannot exist without the foundations of
trust and (self-)respect.

The chapters are clearly written stories of Harry, linked to Stone’s
clients, her own life, and then to the lessons at large. At the end of
each chapter, she lists the steps that readers can take to incorporate
those lessons in their own lives. At times the hulking, growling
metaphor of the dog intrudes on the lucidity of the text, with
disconcerting leaps back to Harry from a discussion of human
psychological traits. But in the end, Stone’s humanity wins out.
One’s first impression of this book is one of New Age silliness, but
after that first glance, we find there is much more meat on this doggy
bone than expected.