Did you know that we dont have to teach horses as much as we might think? Horses are experts in working together and finding openings. When we observe the horse, we will notice that important facets within the herd are safety, cooperation and growth. No one who has to teach horses anything about these, it’s a natural process. Every horse has responsibility for their own emotions within the herd. From the day it is born the horse will learn about itself and the herd. It will learn about synchronizing, balance, timing, observing, imitating, soft and hard energy. When a horse does not learn to deal with its emotions and is not able to adjust them to the herd. That same horse will have a big problem, the poor animal will not be excepted by the herd and chances of survival will get a lot smaller. A horse chooses to stay with their buddy, out of their own free will. When we form a team together with our horse, we are only as strong as the weakest link as a team. And when it comes to cooperation, I fear that we really might be the weakest link of the team. We humans have much more to learn when it comes forming a mutually beneficial relationship than horses do.
In connection with a horse, we also has responsibility for our own emotions just like the horse within the herd. A safe person is a person who knows him or herself and is aware of emotions that take place within us. But everyone also has a blind spot. A blind spot is that part of you that you don’t notice yourself but people around you do. By picking up signals that can point you to your blind spot, you can work on yourself and minimize that weakness. Within the herd, horses give each other calming signals to get back in balance with each other. You could say that horses alert each other to blind spots and help each other to learn to deal with them. Part of working together is knowing what is happening in yourself and noticing emotions. And on top of that also being able to guide yourself, take responsibility for your feelings and be able to perceive yourself. Often your strongest quality is also your pitfall.
For example, I myself have a very strong personality and that part of me comes in handy on a regular base. But that same energy can also overwhelm people. It still happens where in my enthusiasm I did’t notice that its too much. That the other person doesn’t want to go further. My first impulse is to push “ah, come on, its fun, you will love it” when the other person actually wants to tell me NO, IM DONE FOR TODAY. And although at that moment it seems that I have won if I get the other person on board, that pushing can eventually become too much for the other person and irrevocably slap me back in the face with a hard NO that I did not see coming. This kind of situations can be encountered exactly like this within horse training. A safe person is a person with a soft energy who, with a loving eye, has time and space for what is needed at that moment. Horses are not much different from humans in that respect, just like us, they want to be seen and heard. If we can offer that kind of safety to a horse, we will get a lot in return. We will find ourselves in an equal relationship with a horse based on mutual respect. Equal in the sense that we realize that a horse can bring us at least as many lessons as the other way around.
Step-by-step learning to work together.
One of the things that most of my clients struggle with is “yes, I get what you are saying…But he’s doing something I don’t want him to do!!” Wanting to stop behavior is something that runs very deep in most people. We feel personally attacked, unsafe, as if we are falling short. And we don’t really know how to deal with these feelings. All our built-in safeties, where we do nice on the outside while we are angry or insecure on the inside, for a horse that is incredibly confusing. We must learn to reconcile our insides and our outwards, because failure to do so will be at the expense of security and cooperation. We must learn to speak without words. And that’s not an easy thing to grasp, it’s a process of trial and error. and It’s important to start small with one step at a time.
I will tell you more about this in the next blog.
Tadita Orenda 