There is a command we are trying to teach Sam, the puppy. It's to train him to leave things on the ground that he, being a puppy, would much rather ingest. This is a survival skill he must learn so he won't lap up the Excedrins you just spilled out of the medicine cabinet, or chow down on that weird seed pod you encounter on your walk.

What you do is take a treat and hold it under your hand on the ground. The dog goes crazy trying to get at it. You keep it covered, all the while saying "leave it... leave it... leave it..." And the second he looks away or loses interest, you take your hand away and say "Take it!" And he does.

This is the ultimate Zen Doggy training. The only way he can get the treat is to give up on it. The only way to fulfill his primary objective is to detach long enough to get a capricous God (me) to give him his heart's desire. I have been obsessing on this trick -- which, by the way, Sam is abysmal at performing, perhaps sensing his owner's profound attachment to good old Western instant gratification -- and am seeing it everywhere in my life.

Leave it...

Leave the hope of ever having full knowledge of how I'll someday get solvent. I just passed on a "too good to be true" home loan that enticed me with the illusion of finally making ends meet. It wasn't a good loan. It would've ultimately made things far worse. I had to let it go, and go back to living on faith that it will all work out eventually.

Leave it...

Leave the messy entangled relationships that may simply never get worked out. Leave the people in my life who need to heal themselves. I can't do it for them, no matter how much I love them, how much I have knowledge that I know could help them, no matter what I say. People follow their own path on their own time. I have to leave them to it and love them no matter where they are on their journey.

Leave it...

I just spent a weekend with a dear friend, a former lover. He is going through some pain over another woman. Much as it hurt to hear about it, much as I want to be the center of his emotional universe again, we had to talk this through. I didn't get to have the treat of being the only one. I had to look away. I had to detach long enough to just listen, just care, just love.

Leave it...

My stepfather is dying. My mother is coping by taking Xanex and agitating about her husband's relationships with his children. She doesn't want him to die in their home. She has found a good nursing home for him to be in. But that's not good enough. She calls me this morning at 7:30 to tell me she's going to get his kids to take him to his old family home and let him die there. She wants to move his dying body around so that the story will work out the way she wants it to.

I can't do anything to ease her pain. She is doing what I do in yoga when the stretch is too intense: she is fidgeting, she is avoiding going deep, she is afraid and unwilling to withstand the pain. I can't do anything and I can't blame her. I can't stop his death. I can't make her cope in any other way.

The reunion with my former lover takes place in the nursing home. We never did do things half-way. So we find outselves again connecting on the frontier of living and dying. The conversation bypasses four years of chit-chat, goes right to the issues: when is a good time to die? When is this prolongation of life too artificial? When do we pull the plug on this whole mess?

Leave it. The only way to get through some of this is to simply leave it. To look away. To not just pretend it doesn't matter, but to actually know this one thing: whatever the enticing thing is we want so badly, we have to let it go. In training, we train ourselves to look away, and then we'll get the treat. In reality, we look away and avoid mindlessly ingesting the poison that will kill us, make us sick, deaden our spirit.

The universe is my capricious trainer these days. Holding its hand over the treat of financial security, love, serenity. I want my relationships to get smoother, less contentious: they won't. I want people to love me unconditionally: they can't. I want to lay my head down and rest in the safety of a happy, healthy relationship: not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

The more I wag my tail and paw at the impediments, the longer they will stay in my way. Like Sam I need to look away, give it up, go on to other concerns. Give up the idea of the treat altogether, and then see what the universe reveals.