The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat

Trainers, behaviorists, and big businesses have embraced the liberal use of positive techniques, philosophies and equipment for decades. Accompanying this is the buzz about leadership, alpha statuses, along with advice on what we should or shouldn?t feed our dogs, when to feed them, and how much to feed them. What if it is as simple as ABC and 123?breathing, eating, playing and smiling? Awareness Centered Training (ACT) gives us permission to

? joyfully and easily train (JET) our dogs without fear of right or wrong

? mindfully shape natural behaviors with SAM (socialization and manners)

? quickly integrate training for a few minutes each day, playing Doggy Diner

? reduce sensory overload with ?ahha!? moments of peace and stillness

? connect using body language, breathing, and the magic of your smile

? empower yourself and your dog with skills you can use anywhere

? creatively balance energy while enhancing well-being

? let go of what doesn?t matter and go with the flow (wolf )

? change life for the better with dogs as translators for learning and healing

While you train with awareness, unhealthy patterns in your life can begin to vanish. This is not because of a book, social media, or life doing something to you. It is because you and your dog are doing something different together. Enjoy the journey.

“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. And when I
am walking alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts
are sometimes preoccupied elsewhere, the rest of the time I
bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness
of this solitude, and to me.”
—Montaigne
 
In the year 1570, at the age of thirty-seven, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his château to brood on his own private grief—the deaths of his best friend, his father, his brother, and his firstborn child. On the ceiling of his library he inscribed a phrase from the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius: “There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer.”
 
But finding his mind agitated rather than settled by this idleness, Montaigne began to write, giving birth to the Essays—short prose explorations of an amazingly wide range of subjects. And gradually, over the course of his writing, Montaigne rejected his stoical pessimism and turned from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life. He erased Lucretius’s melancholy fatalism and began to embrace the exuberant vitality of living, finding an antidote to death in the most unlikely places—the touch of a hand, the smell of his doublet, the playfulness of his cat, and the flavor of his wine.
 
Saul Frampton offers a celebration of perhaps the most enjoyable and yet profound of all Renaissance writers, whose essays went on to have a huge impact on figures as diverse as Shakespeare, Emerson, and Orson Welles, and whose thoughts, even today, offer a guide and unprecedented insight into the simple matter of being alive.