When we talk about awareness and mindfulness in the here and now, our friends the dogs would be the Mindfulness par excellence. Our great advantage over them is that we can project our mind forward, we can project into the future, we can plan.

Planning is good. Planning allows us, in the first instance, to visualize what we want, what we desire and then put it into practice. Dogs cannot project into the future.

In summer, before going out cycling with my dogs, I always and naively encourage them to drink: "drink, the stage will be hard". It is useless. The dog is not able to anticipate that after a few minutes of running he will be thirsty. Even if we have relived the same situation countless times, the dog will not drink. The dog drinks when it is thirsty. To quench his thirst.

The great advantage of canine Mindfulness over human reasoning is that for them there is no future. Their mind is always present. They live in the present conditioned by past experiences but they are spared the human cognitive complexity. Complexity that the human try to simplify, to empty through practices such as ioga or Mindfulness.