The high mountains have always been my cathedral. They’ve been the place where my spirit soars; something quite wonderful happens throughout my whole being when I’m in them. There was a time in my twenties and early thirties when I did a lot of backpacking. I often went into the Sierra Nevada Mountains for two, three, or even four months in the summer, coming out only to get supplies. At one point, I decided it would be nice to do this with a dog to have a companion, because I spent so much time out there by myself.

It seemed reasonable to find a dog that needed an owner, a dog somebody had rejected or had been found wandering. I went to the pound (now they call them animal shelters) and started looking at all the dogs, I was drawn to one in particular—a German shepherd and husky mix. Anyone who has had a pet knows how this goes. I studied the dog, and he had a certain gaze. Even though I could tell he wasn’t happy about being there, I felt a spontaneous, intuitive connection with him, as if I recognized something in him just as he recognized that something in me. I patted him through the fence and talked to him to see how he responded. He took to me quickly. Then I read the little write-up the shelter had written about him, but it wasn’t hopeful: the reasons his previous owners got rid of this dog were because he dug holes all over their backyard and he wasn’t good with small children. Two qualities that you look for in dogs are that they aren’t going to tear up your house by chewing everything and are going to be good around people, especially children. Despite this, I had a deep intuitive sense about the dog. I hung out with him for a while and decided to rely on my intuitive sense: I didn’t know why this dog had caused those problems, but I had the feeling he was fantastic.

I took him home and named him Kinte. He ended up being the dog of my life. We grew very close. He followed me through the house; wherever I went, there he’d go. If I walked into a room and closed the door, he’d sit and wait for me. He’d ride in the car with me. He was so well behaved that I didn’t have to put him on a leash. He turned out to be very gentle around children. I’ve never seen a dog or human being who had Kinte’s patience with kids. They could do anything to him, and he’d let them. He never dug up our yard. Maybe it’s because I exercised him a lot. He was a fantastic Frisbee player. He loved going out with me on ten- or fifteen-mile runs, and he loved to play and have fun. I took him backpacking and he carried his own food and water in a side pack. We had some amazing experiences in the high mountains. Because of his breed—German shepherd and husky—he had great endurance and strength, and relished being out there; you could almost see a smile in the way that he parted his lips a little bit. He ended up being a wonderful, wonderful dog.

Kinte was my magical and beloved companion throughout my early twenties. Everyone who met him loved him because he loved people. He was active, yet kind and gentle and sensitive to people’s feelings. He was one of those animals who is extraordinary at reading emotional energy—much more sensitive than most human beings. He had so many wonderful qualities, and we were extraordinarily close, which is why Kinte was my teacher in so many ways.

Humans like to share experiences, share life, share significant moments and we can do this with pets. Not just the extraordinary times, but the everyday ones as well. Kinte taught me about forgiveness, about emotional attunement, sensitivity to others, about running toward in order to comfort people in difficulty—because that’s what he did. He showed me that there’s something intuitive about the emotional intelligence that many of us grow into as we get older, and our spiritual lives help with that emotional intelligence.

I loved Kinte and like to be around dogs in general because they simply are where they are; they feel what they feel. Everything is out in the open: they’re not hiding anything; they’re not protecting self-consciousness or self-image like human beings often do. We love to relate, and yet we have to open up in order to relate.

Part of loving anything or anyone is having to say goodbye to them. Maybe they leave or you leave. The journey of loving begins by saying “hello” and welcoming something or someone into your life, and the journey ends with saying “goodbye” and letting a loved one exit. They may not exit your heart or your mind, but they’re certainly going to depart—each one of us will.

Sadly, Kinte was no different. He developed a seizure disorder, a form of epilepsy that is common with German shepherds. I tried everything I could to treat him for it, but he had one seizure that went on for a long, long time and nothing we did could stop it. The vet said my dog had to be put down. It was devastating. I was overwhelmed with grief. I had lost my grandparent, who I’d been very close to, and other loved ones had died, but nothing struck me like the loss of this dog. I’d find myself in tears, sitting in the middle of the living room not knowing what to do. It seemed even more ridiculous because I was a twenty-five-year-old guy, and I thought it odd that I would be so overwhelmingly struck with grief at the death of a dog. I had lost other dogs I’d grown up with and had always been sad when they left, but this was something of a different order. German shepherds tend to pick out one person to deeply bond with—it’s like their lover for life—and we shared that profound relationship.

My family had a little ceremony for Kinte in the backyard. We buried a few of his toys with him. I started to read the eulogy I’d written and the well of grief began to spill over—I could feel the sorrow coming. As I was reading, I decided to let go and allow myself to ride this profound wave of heartache that swept over me. Tears fell down my cheeks, over my chin, even onto the ground, and yet I kept reading.

That’s when the strangest thing happened, perhaps because I’d completely let go to the experience of grief. Something unusual occurred right in the middle of my chest. It was as if a pinprick of light glowed from my sternum. As I continued to read and grieve fully, this pinprick of light grew bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and went beyond my body, filling the space all around me. This light radiated a feeling of profound well-being—extraordinary happiness, contentment. It was my first deeply nondual emotional experience in the sense that it included both grief and happiness. It was the first time I realized that two completely opposing emotional states, or states of being, could simultaneously exist in the exact same space without any contradiction whatsoever, that in the core of my grief I could discover a profound sense of joy, contentment, peace and well-being. One didn’t overshadow the other—when the pinprick of light and well-being showed up, it didn’t sweep away all the grief, it happened in the midst of the grief. The grief wasn’t getting in the way of the joy, and the joy wasn’t getting in the way of the grief; they existed as one totality, one gestalt, one moment.

I had faced grief and happiness before, but never simultaneously. Kinte’s death marked the opening of a whole new dimension of understanding for me. I came to see as years went on that any deeply negative emotion that we completely open ourselves to will have a way of showing its opposite. I think of it now like looking at a coin—on one side it’s heads, on the other side it’s tails, but it’s the same coin. Grief and peace aren’t actually separate—they exist as one complete entity. I experienced this whole, this unifying of contrasting emotional experiences, because I completely and absolutely let go in the midst of a difficult experience.

As time went on, I realized that if we can get deep enough into an experience, it almost always includes its opposite. It’s one thing to read about it, but it’s something else entirely to practice it. When we do it’s liberating because we realize that even negative emotions can contain something extraordinarily positive. The nature of things is that everything arises as simultaneity—like a package. We might see it as a package of duality—negative and positive. We can’t necessarily find the light within darkness unless we completely surrender to the darkness, but then the light can show up. It’s the same thing with positive experiences. One of my teachers used to say, “All true love sheds a tear,” and we know when we experience the most profound love that there’s something bittersweet about it—it’s not all sweet. The deepest encounters with love include a bitter quality. Have you ever loved so intensely that it almost hurt to love that much? That’s more in the range of what I’m talking about.

This coexistence of opposites is the true nature of human emotion and experience. It is an immense gestalt, although we usually recognize only joy or sadness, only grief or contentment, separate from the other. This happens for two reasons. One is that we are obsessively focused on the emotion we’re experiencing but we’re not totally surrendered to it, or we haven’t completely let go. The other is that we’re trying to contain and control at the same time that we’re obsessing. When we do that, we only face one side, one aspect of the spectrum, or one side of the duality.

There are times when we undergo something deep and profound and something in us stops resisting, stops pushing against it, stops trying to contain whatever it is we’re experiencing. When we can do that and not fall into indulging (starting to think about thoughts that make us feel worse), we can be with pure experience. There is no thought content, there is no storytelling going on one way or the other, it is an absolute openness to what is or whatever was in that moment. This was my dog Kinte’s last gift to me. Even though I know the realization was coming from within myself, we had such a profound connection that it makes sense that his passing would in some way embody the profundity of our connection.

I felt called to share this story of my wonderful and beloved companion because that’s what he was: more than a pet. And like any good companion, it’s a journey, because you take care of each other. I did a lot to take care of Kinte, but he did as much to take care of me, and I’ll never forget that lesson and that last gift I received while reading his eulogy in the backyard of my parents’ house. As difficult as it was, I encountered a profound grace when I realized that the heart of our experiences is more multilayered and deeper than we often imagine. Loving and saying goodbye to Kinte was a lesson about letting go. I don’t mean letting go of something in order to get rid of it. When I let go into grief, profound joy showed up and the grief and the joy existed simultaneously. When we encounter the immensity of our own experience, we learn that it’s so vast—it’s not what it appears to be on the surface. There are multilayered, multitextured aspects of our experiences if we open deeply and profoundly to them and trust them—a lot of it comes down to trust.

No matter what or who you love—and by “love” I don’t mean “are entertained by” or “like,” but rather what or who you love and give yourself to—it’s expressed in that beautiful dance of giving and receiving in which the more you give, the more you receive, and the more you receive, the more you give. So it goes with humans and with pets—with me and with Kinte. Every part of our experience follows this profound way of unfolding.

© 2011-2025 by Adyashanti.