The Leashed Mind Podcast, Mental Health & Dog Training · The Leashed Mind by Woof Cultr©

When Your Passion Finds YOU w/Erin Marion

·57 min·3 clips

Mandi Bautel opens the show with a conversation that feels more like a long check-in than a formal interview. Erin Marion, known through Down to Earth Dog Lady, talks about how her work shifted from running a dog hiking business into training special needs dogs. That move brought purpose, and it also brought a heavier emotional load. Erin describes what it means to specialize in deaf, blind, and disabled dogs. She talks about the rewards of that work, and she also talks about the concern she feels about the growing number of disabled dogs tied to overbreeding. The conversation keeps circling back to the human side of that reality. Mandi and Erin spend time on burnout. They do not treat it like a neat concept. They treat it like something that can shape identity, capacity, and the way you see your own role. Erin speaks plainly about how easy it is to become the person everyone leans on and then start wondering whether that is all you are. The episode also makes room for Erin’s personal life. She speaks about her relationship and her place in the LGBTQ plus community. That part of the conversation is not treated like a side note. It sits alongside the work because the episode is interested in how care, love, and everyday life overlap. PMDD becomes another anchor point. Mandi and Erin share that experience from different angles, and the conversation moves into the hard, day-to-day reality of living with it. The tone stays confessional. It feels like two people recognizing themselves in each other. There is also a strong thread about caregiving and control. Erin talks about her dogs, including a period when one of them was having seizures every two weeks. She describes how much that rattled her. She knows the training side of seizures well, but living through them at home brought a different kind of anxiety. That tension becomes one of the episode’s clearest points. It is one thing to coach other people through a crisis. It is another thing to face the same crisis in your own house and feel yourself crack a little. Erin talks through that gap with unusual honesty. The relationship dynamic with Jay gives the conversation more shape. Erin says she had to hand some of the dog care over and let it be a team effort. That admission matters. It shows how much support can look like surrender for someone who is used to carrying everything. The episode keeps circling back to the idea that care work is never just technical. It touches ego, responsibility, fear, and the stories people tell themselves about being useful. Erin and Mandi let those threads stay tangled for a while instead of rushing to tidy them up. That choice suits the show. The Leashed Mind Podcast offers a real conversation instead of a cleaned-up lesson. This episode keeps that pace and lets the emotional undercurrents stay visible. The result is intimate and a little messy in the most honest way. Erin’s experience as a trainer is real. So is her fear. So is the relief of being understood by someone who knows the same terrain. Listeners hear a professional life shaped by special needs dogs. They also hear the cost of that life. The episode does not pretend those things are separate. Mandi’s role is steady and open. She keeps inviting Erin deeper without turning the exchange into a performance. That makes room for the kind of vulnerability that rarely shows up when people talk about dog training in public. The show also widens beyond dogs into body, family, and future plans. Erin talks about being a dog mom and about uncertainty around children in the context of trans rights. Those details are personal, but they fit the episode’s larger concern with care and possibility. Nothing here is overly packaged. The conversation moves with the stop-and-start rhythm of people who already trust each other. It circles, lands, and circles again. That structure matters because the subject matter is not neat. Special needs dogs, overbreeding, PMDD, burnout, and queer life do not belong in separate boxes. The episode lets them coexist. By the end, the strongest feeling is recognition. The listener is left with a picture of someone who is good at her work and still affected by it. That is the point. The episode is about competence, but it is just as much about the cost of competence. It asks what happens when the person who helps everyone else finally has to say, I need help too.

As heard by us

A candid episode where dog training meets burnout, identity, PMDD, and the strain of care work.

Mandi Bautel hosts a personal conversation with Erin Marion of Down to Earth Dog Lady, a certified professional dog trainer focused on deaf, blind, and disabled dogs.

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Why you'd press play

For when dog training starts sounding a lot like your own nervous system.

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