What resting cows taught me about trust

Ever since I learned about how the cows find their resting ground years ago, it has fascinated me, and I find it to be truly a beautiful thing. It even helps me to think about when I catch myself being uncomfortable around certain people and places…

I actually touched on this once before, in passing, in my post about discovering Brother Klaus's healing garden — the line about farmers who built their homes where the cattle chose to lie down. I never stopped to explain why that idea has stayed with me for years. So here it is, properly, at last.

There's an old belief, still told on farms across Norway and Sweden, that you could learn something important simply by watching where the cattle lay down.

Farmers would let their cows out to graze freely through the day, and in the evening, watch where they settled to sleep. If a spot was chosen again and again, it wasn't dismissed as chance. It was taken seriously, sometimes seriously enough to decide where a house or a barn would be built. The idea was that animals could sense something people couldn't: whether a place was healthy, whether it had good rest in it. (Love this!)

Looked at plainly, there's nothing mystical required to explain it really. Cows, like most animals, gravitate toward dry ground, shelter from wind, a gentle slope, fewer insects. The same qualities that make good pasture also make good building land. The "energy" people spoke of was really just comfort and good vibes. The openness and attentiveness of the animals is truly beautiful.

But what stays with us isn't the biology. It's the trust. Nobody asked the cow to explain herself. Her choosing was the evidence. People built their homes on the strength of an animal simply lying down where it felt right.

That kind of trust is unfortunately harder to come by now, I find, and not only toward animals. Most of us have quietly stopped trusting our own sense of where rest lives. We ask an app to tell us who we are, even who our perfect mate is! (I do love my Garmin watch telling me how good or bad I slept.) We check whether five minutes of quiet "worked." We look for proof before we believe the feeling, because maybe we stopped trusting our own senses.

But the cows never needed proof. They lay down when a place was right, and got up when it wasn't. That is a kind of intelligence — plain attentiveness to what actually feels restful, without needing to justify it first. So simple and so honest!

Meditation is not so different from what the cows were doing. It isn't necessarily a search for a mystical state. It's the practice of noticing, honestly, whether a moment is a place to rest, or isn't. No one else can tell you where your good ground is. You feel your way to it, the same way the herd once did — one minute, one hour, one day, one week at a time.

A few minutes with your eyes closed won't tell you anything you didn't already know how to feel. It just gives you the quiet to notice it again. Find your preferred meditation and you will be guided back to your innate state of mind — and the hopeful, awesome truth is that you are born with the ability to gravitate back to balance and peace of mind.

See you "in there".

Your friend, Aja