The best life coach has four legs and terrible breath.
Rosie is a sixty-pound rescue mutt who naps without guilt, plays without purpose, and forgives without being asked. She has never downloaded a mindfulness app. She doesnāt need one.
Her human is... working on it.
My Dog Is Better at This Than Me is part memoir, part self-help, part love letter to a dog who ate a sock and showed zero remorse. Across ten chapters, B.K. Larrikin chronicles the lessons Rosie teaches without trying ā presence, letting go, rest, vulnerability, play, curiosity, and connection ā pairing laugh-out-loud personal stories with real psychology and practical exercises that take three minutes and cost nothing.
But beneath the comedy is something deeper: a story about depression and recovery, and a rescue dog who arrived at the exact moment a human needed a reason to get out of bed.
Featuring original illustrations, a book club guide, and a sneak peek at Book Two.
For dog lovers, recovering over-achievers, and anyone who suspects their pet has life figured out better than they do.
Sit. Stay. Read.
The best life coach has four legs and terrible breath.
Rosie is a sixty-pound rescue mutt who naps without guilt, plays without purpose, and forgives without being asked. She has never downloaded a mindfulness app. She doesnāt need one.
Her human is... working on it.
My Dog Is Better at This Than Me is part memoir, part self-help, part love letter to a dog who ate a sock and showed zero remorse. Across ten chapters, B.K. Larrikin chronicles the lessons Rosie teaches without trying ā presence, letting go, rest, vulnerability, play, curiosity, and connection ā pairing laugh-out-loud personal stories with real psychology and practical exercises that take three minutes and cost nothing.
But beneath the comedy is something deeper: a story about depression and recovery, and a rescue dog who arrived at the exact moment a human needed a reason to get out of bed.
Featuring original illustrations, a book club guide, and a sneak peek at Book Two.
For dog lovers, recovering over-achievers, and anyone who suspects their pet has life figured out better than they do.
Sit. Stay. Read.
What Sprinting in Circles Can Teach You About Living in the Moment. In which mindfulness via app achieves anxiety, while a dog achieves transcendence via ottoman.
7:43 PM on a Wednesday
It begins without warning, as the best things and the worst things always do.
I am on the couch. This is not a surprising development. I am on the couch and I am doing what I do most evenings between dinner and the moment I pretend I'm going to read a book but actually watch my phone until my eyes feel like two dried apricots: I am scrolling. Not scrolling toward anything. Not scrolling with purpose. Just scrolling in the way that a person treads water---not to go anywhere, but to avoid sinking.
My phone screen is a collage of mild dread. A news headline I won't click but will worry about. An Instagram post from someone I went to college with who appears to be living in Tuscany now, which seems unfair. A push notification from a language-learning app telling me, in a tone I can only describe as threatening, that I haven't practiced French in 147 days. And beneath all of that, throbbing like a bruise, the wellness notification. It's still there. Still sending reminders. Still believing in me.
On the opposite end of the couch, Rosie is lying on her side in a position that looks medically inadvisable---spine curved, one leg extended fully, head at an angle that suggests she has given up on the concept of necks. She has been in this position for forty minutes. She is, as far as I can tell, experiencing perfect peace.
And then, with no warning, no buildup, no discernible trigger---she's up.
Not "up" in the way a person gets up, which involves groaning, checking the time, and negotiating with gravity. Up in the way a firework goes up: instantly, completely, with total commitment to the vertical. Her eyes are wide. Her ears are forward. Something has shifted in the molecular structure of the universe that only she can detect, and she has responded by going from unconscious to fully operational in the time it takes me to blink.
She looks at me. I look at her. There is a half-second of perfect, loaded silence---the kind of silence that exists between a match being struck and the flame catching.
And then she runs.
Not toward anything. Not away from anything. She runs in a circle. A big, stupid, glorious, full-throttle circle that takes her from the couch to the kitchen doorway, through the kitchen, past the dining table, back to the living room, and around the ottoman so fast that I feel a breeze. She clips the coffee table with her hip. She does not care. She does not slow down. She does not even seem to notice. She has transcended furniture. She has transcended the physical limitations of a creature with four legs and no plan. She is running because her body contains more joy than can be expressed while stationary, and the only appropriate response is velocity.
Lap one. Lap two. Lap three. By lap four, I have put my phone down, because this is now the most interesting thing happening in my evening, and possibly in my week. By lap five, I am laughing. Not chuckling---laughing. The kind of laughing that comes from somewhere below your ribs and arrives without permission. She is so fast. She is so certain. She has absolutely no idea why she's doing this and she has never been more committed to anything in her life.
Lap six. Lap seven. She takes the corner by the bookshelf too wide, skids on the hardwood, recovers, keeps going. Her tongue is out. Her ears are flapping. She looks, and I mean this as the highest possible compliment, completely unhinged.
And then, as suddenly as it began, it's over. She stops. She stands in the middle of the living room, panting, eyes bright, tail going like a metronome set to allegro. She looks at me with an expression that, if I had to translate it, would read something like: You saw that, right? That was incredible. I'm incredible.
She walks back to the couch. She lies down. She is asleep within ninety seconds.
The whole event---from dead stillness to full-speed chaos to dead stillness again---lasted maybe two minutes. I stare at her sleeping form and I think a thought that is both very stupid and very important:
I have never committed to anything in my life the way this dog just committed to that lap around the ottoman.
My neighbor---the one on the corner who waves at everyone, though I wouldn't learn his name was Arthur for another few months---told me later that he'd watched the whole zoomies incident through his front window and considered calling to check on us. "I could hear the laughing from across the street," he said. "And then this blur of brown fur past the window. I thought you'd lost control of the situation." I had. That was the point.
The Problem with Being Everywhere at Once
Let's talk about where you are right now. Not geographically. Not in any grand philosophical sense. I mean: where is your attention? If you're anything like me---and you are, because you bought a book about a dog and mindfulness, which puts you squarely in my demographic---then the answer is: scattered.
Right now, as you read this paragraph, there is an excellent chance that part of your brain is also composing a grocery list, reviewing something that happened at work today, and periodically checking whether your phone has buzzed. You are reading this book, but you are not only reading this book. You are reading this book while also monitoring six other channels of input, like an air traffic controller who also has to do their taxes.
This is not a character flaw. This is the modern human condition. We have, collectively, become extraordinarily good at being sort-of-present in multiple places simultaneously and genuinely present in none of them. There's a name for what I'm describing. A researcher named Linda Stone calls it "continuous partial attention"---which is a very polite way of saying I am paying half-attention to seventeen things and full attention to nothing.
I want to be careful here, because I'm not interested in the "phones are bad, the old days were better" argument. The old days had cholera. I'll keep my phone. But I do think there's something worth examining in the fact that we have created a world so full of competing claims on our attention that being here---just here, just now, just this---has become the hardest thing we do.
Or rather, the hardest thing we do. For Rosie, it's not hard at all.
The Gospel of the Immediate
Here is what Rosie was doing in the moment before the zoomies: sleeping. Here is what she was thinking about: nothing, or possibly a rabbit. Here is what she was worried about: literally not one thing on this earth.
And then, when some unknowable internal signal fired---some nerve, some impulse, some canine alarm clock that said NOW---she didn't deliberate. She didn't weigh the pros and cons of running in a circle at 7:43 PM on a Wednesday. She didn't think, "Is this a good use of my time?" or "What will the human think?" or "Should I wait until after the meeting?" She just went. Full speed. Every atom of her being in exactly one place, doing exactly one thing.
In Zen Buddhism, there's a concept called shoshin, or beginner's mind---the practice of approaching each experience as though it's the first time, with openness and a lack of preconception. It's considered a foundation of mindful awareness, and it's the kind of thing dedicated practitioners spend years cultivating.
Rosie has beginner's mind about everything. Every walk is the best walk---not because the route changes, but because the world smells different every morning. The rain rewrites the sidewalk. A new dog has passed through overnight and left messages she can read. The bakery on Elm Street opened its vents, and the air carries the ghost of sourdough and butter. She processes all of this with the focus of a sommelier at a tasting, nose working in quick, deliberate pulses, and I walk beside her checking my email.
Every meal is a revelation. Every time I come home from running errands, she greets me as though I've returned from war. She does not habituate. She does not adjust her enthusiasm downward to account for the fact that I only went to the pharmacy and was gone for twelve minutes. The twelfth homecoming is as ecstatic as the first. The four-thousandth sunrise is as worthy of investigation as the one she witnessed this morning from the backyard, nose to the wind, ears forward, fully operational in a way I haven't been since before I got a smartphone.
In Which I Try the Dog's Approach and Stub My Toe
The night of the Great Zoomies Incident, I decided to try something.
Not because I had read it in a book, or because an app told me to, or because I'd set a reminder on my phone labeled "BE PRESENT (IMPORTANT)." I tried it because I had just watched my dog experience more pure, uncomplicated joy in two minutes than I had experienced in two weeks, and some combination of inspiration and embarrassment compelled me to act.
I stood up from the couch. Rosie, already asleep again, cracked one eye open---a look that said, roughly, "Oh, you're doing something. How unusual."
I looked around the living room. I tried to see it. Not glance at it. Not scan it for things that needed cleaning. I tried to actually see it. The way the lamp threw a warm circle on the wall. The way the bookshelves looked at this time of evening. The scratch on the coffee table from the time Rosie decided to use it as a starting block.
I took a breath. I noticed the breath. I noticed the temperature of the air, and the sound of the refrigerator humming, and the weight of my feet on the floor, and I thought, just for a moment: Oh. Here I am.
And then, because I am a person who cannot leave well enough alone, I decided to try the zoomies part.
I ran. Not gracefully. Not with the aerodynamic efficiency of a dog on a hardwood floor. I ran like a person who hadn't sprinted in months and was wearing socks on a slippery surface, which is exactly what I was. I made it two-thirds of the way around the coffee table before my foot caught the leg of the ottoman and I went down like a sack of regret.
Rosie woke up. She looked at me on the floor. She looked at the ottoman. She looked back at me. If dogs could raise one eyebrow, she would have.
Rosie, for the record, does not stub her toe during zoomies. She has four-wheel drive and no self-consciousness. I have two feet and an inner monologue that was already composing the anecdote I'd tell about this later. Even in the act of being present, I was drafting the story of being present. The layers of irony were not lost on me.
I sat on the floor, holding my toe, and started laughing. Not the polite laugh of a person maintaining composure. The real laugh---the one that comes from the same place the zoomies come from. From the gut. From the part of you that remembers what it feels like to do something without calculating the outcome first.
The toe was fine. The lesson was not subtle.
The Lesson (No Ottomans Required)
Here is what the zoomies taught me, bruised toe and all: presence is not a skill you learn. It's a skill you recover.
You already know how to be present. You were born knowing. Watch any toddler lose themselves in the discovery of a cardboard box, or any kid sprint across a playground for no reason other than the fact that their legs work and the world is large and running is the best possible use of both. That's presence. That's the whole thing.
Somewhere between childhood and now, most of us traded that instinct for efficiency. We learned to multitask. We learned to plan ahead. We learned to divide our attention into seventeen thin slices and distribute them across our responsibilities like butter over too much bread. And these are useful skills---I am not suggesting we all abandon planning in favor of spontaneous living-room sprints. (Although, honestly, it couldn't hurt.)
But in gaining those skills, we lost something. We lost the ability to be in one place at a time. And what Rosie shows me, every evening between seven and eight when the zoomies strike, is that the good stuff lives in the single moment---not in the planning. The joy is in the running. It's in the being-right-here, right now, with nothing else competing for the moment.
The night I tried the zoomies, the thing that stayed with me wasn't the stubbed toe. It was that half-second before I ran---when I stood in the living room and actually looked around and thought, Oh. Here I am. That half-second was better than six weeks of push notifications. It was free. It took no effort. It required only that I stop doing seventeen things and start doing one thing: being where I was.
Rosie does this all day. She is always where she is. She is never mentally in another room, another hour, another version of events. When she eats, she eats. When she sleeps, she sleeps. When she runs, she runs---with everything she has, holding nothing back, saving nothing for later.
That's the lesson. Be where you are. All the way.
Practical Exercise: The Zoomies Reset
Time required: Three minutes. Equipment: None. Dignity: Optional.
Here's what I want you to try. Not tomorrow, not next week, not "when things calm down" (things will not calm down; they never calm down; the calmness is a myth propagated by people who sell scented candles). Try it today. Try it now, if you can.
Step One: Put your phone in another room. Not on silent. Not flipped over. In another room. If the idea of this makes you slightly anxious, that's useful information. Sit with it.
Step Two: Stand up. Look around. Pick one thing in your environment that you see every day but never actually look at. A painting. A plant. The view from your window. The crack in the ceiling that you've been meaning to deal with for three years.
Step Three: Look at it for sixty seconds. Actually look. What color is it, really? What details have you missed? What does it look like when you approach it the way Rosie approaches a fire hydrant---as though it contains all the information in the world and your job is to investigate?
Step Four: Take three slow breaths. Notice how your attention has shifted. Notice that, for sixty seconds, you were in one place, doing one thing, and the world did not collapse.
Step Five (Optional, Encouraged): If you feel moved to sprint around the room afterward, do it. I won't judge. Rosie certainly won't.
That's it. That's the exercise. It's not a twenty-minute guided meditation. It's not a weekend commitment. It's three minutes and one act of genuine attention. If you want to do it once a day, pick a different object each time. By Friday, you'll have actually looked at five things you've been walking past for years.
If you don't have a dog to watch, look out a window. Find a bird. Find a child. Find anything that is entirely absorbed in what it's doing without wondering if it should be doing something else. That's your teacher for the next sixty seconds.
Your dog already notices them. She's been waiting for you to catch up.
On the Difference Between Knowing and Doing
I want to be honest with you about something, because I think honesty is important between an author and a reader, and because Rosie is incapable of dishonesty and I'm trying to live up to her example.
After the zoomies night, I did not become a mindfulness master. I did not suddenly start living each moment with Rosie-like intensity. I deleted three of my four wellness apps---I kept one, because the sunk cost of a \$79.99 annual subscription exerts a gravitational pull that even self-awareness cannot fully overcome---and I started trying. Trying is the operative word.
Some days I manage it. I stand in the kitchen making coffee and I actually taste the coffee instead of using it as fuel for worrying about my to-do list. I walk Rosie around the block and I notice the trees, the sky, the way the light hits the sidewalk at seven in the morning, the fact that she is so comprehensively delighted by a particular mailbox that she inspects it for ninety seconds as though it contains the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Other days I am back on the couch, scrolling past my own life, mentally drafting emails I won't send while a notification gently reminds me that I am failing at serenity.
But here's what changed, and why I'm writing this book instead of just getting another dog: I stopped thinking of presence as something I needed to achieve and started thinking of it as something I needed to allow. The difference matters. Achieving requires effort, planning, and the right app. Allowing requires getting out of your own way.
Rosie doesn't achieve presence. She can't even spell it. But she is, in every moment I observe her, the most present being I know. She accomplishes through instinct what we struggle toward through instruction, and she does it while simultaneously smelling like a wet towel and stealing socks from the laundry basket.
I find this both humbling and hilarious, which is the precise emotional territory I'm hoping to occupy for the rest of this book.
Your Assignment (Should You Choose to Accept It)
This week, try one Zoomies Reset per day. Just one. Three minutes. One object. A few breaths.
By Friday, you'll have noticed five things you've been walking past for years. You'll have spent fifteen minutes---total, across the whole week---actually being in the room you're standing in. You'll have practiced, in the smallest and most manageable way, the thing Rosie practices every second of every day: the deceptively simple act of being where you are.
You don't need an app. You don't need a retreat. You don't need to sit cross-legged until your ankles file a formal complaint.
You just need a moment. One moment where you stop trying to be everywhere and start being here.
Rosie's already here. She's been waiting.
What the Couch Cushion Philosopher Wants You to Remember
Presence isn't a skill to master---it's a habit to recover. You knew how to do this when you were four. You just forgot. The good news is your body still remembers. Ask it.
At the time of writing this, Iāve just sat down and updated one of my spreadsheets where I keep a daily log of the steps Iāve walked, the number of pages Iāve read, the total minutes I've studied, or been otherwise āproductive", to determine whether Iāve finally earned that bowl of ramen I've been craving for the past week or so (spoiler alert: I haven't). If that isnāt telling enough that I needed this book as a quiet acknowledgement of a sense of kinship in our shared epidemic of forced productivity, I donāt know what is.
B.K. Larrikin's book introduces us to Rosie who is sixty pounds of brown fur and a part-time ācouch cushion philosopher.ā Through a series of heartwarming essays, Larrikin reflects on what heās learned about life and all its fine details from watching his dog simply be. And that emphasis of being over doing is where the book finds its emotional and conceptual anchor. When he writes, āWe have turned ābeing presentā into a multi-billion-dollar industry,ā it lands like the uncomfortable truth that it is, instead of just a clever one-liner.
Structured as anecdotes in a slow journey from hitting mental rock bottom to taking each day one at a time, with each realization followed by a "lesson" and a little "exercise" for practice, the book takes the standard of the self-help genre and makes it better by the plain virtue of not conforming entirely to it. Some chapters linger longer than others. My favorite is Rosieās (and eventually the narratorās) belly-up moment at a dinner, where the seemingly unassuming act cracks open not just social awkwardness but the narratorās own rigid understanding of emotional guardedness. Larrikin ties this personal honesty beautifully with researcher BrenĆ© Brownās observation on how we tend to perceive vulnerability as weakness in ourselves and courage in others. That contradiction is explored with a soft balance of humor and tenderness, as is the chapter on self-deprecation and the reflex to deflect praise before it can land, which made me feel equal parts glad and uncomfortably seen.
That said, the book fumbles occasionally in its delivery and it does so in the admittedly unfortunate choice of too much repetition, too often: sometimes thematically, sometimes almost verbatim. After a point, what feels like an attempt at emphasis begins to edge into redundancy. The frequent disclaimers, too, dilute moments that could have hit harder. But oddly, and perhaps charmingly, this excess mirrors the very behavior the book critiques: our need to over-explain and over-correct, even when weāre aware weāre doing it. Itās fitting, if a little cloying.
Still, it remains an incredibly readable, funny, and surprisingly warm book. It nudges you toward the realization that many of the epiphanies we now chase through apps and workshops were once instinctive. The lessons, for the lack of a better word, need remembering, not learning. And as a fully paid-up member of the club of people easily convinced to spend upwards of $300 for a stranger to tell me how to live in a time of pervasive commodification, this feltā¦ ironically worth it.
Itās important to remember, as Larrikin himself reiterates often throughout the book, that Rosie, and the essay-collection by extension, may be a great therapist, but not a qualified one, but while the book cannot be a replacement for therapy and professional support, I believe it can prove to be a gentle, steady companion along the way.