My eyes began to water in the heat of the afternoon as I stood in the large dirt arena watching the scene unravel. I was glad it wasn’t likely anyone would notice. My back was to the onlookers, and Mark was working with the wild mare, too involved in what he was doing to notice. I’m not so concerned about tears in public anymore, though it’s not my favorite, but I was pretty sure anyone who did notice would misunderstand the reason for the emotions gripping me in the scene.
They didn’t come from watching my mare rear violently in reaction to even feather light pressure on the halter. Particularly when she became so reactive she fell on her side in the dirt which was quite dramatic. (She wasn’t hurt).
The emotion didn’t come from worry that Mark was being unreasonable in his approach, creating unnecesary fear and stress, and watching him work with her might upset me. I knew he did not create any of what I was observing, it had been inside her as long as I’ve known her.
What grieved me as I watched Wyoming flailing on that lead rope like a fish on a line was a snapshot I had somewhere in my heart of how many of us go through life or seasons of life like this. We are fighting and we can’t seem to stop fighting. We end up getting hurt, and hurting those around us while we flail and fight against what we perceive as life threatening pressure but what is intended to be a comfort. I saw myself at times. I saw people I love at times. I saw humanity. I saw my beautiful mare react in dramatic fashion as if her life was in danger, unable to let go of her past experience, trauma, and fear to trust the guidance. It touched me in an unexpected way in that moment.
Mark Langley working with Wyoming
Mark Langley, who was instructing the four-day clinic on the last stop of his USA tour, cares deeply for the horses and this thing in her that overreacts to any pressure is a torment she does not need to carry. He was hoping he could help her get through it to the other side of this trouble. There is a physical or mental memory (maybe a combination) in her that was seared into her on day one of her mustang make over competition training.
I was told the history when I picked up the wild mare in Tennessee: the trainer put the halter on Wyoming, the mare reacted in fear and came aggressively toward the trainer, the trainer (in her own words) overreacted, putting excess pressure on the halter, and sent the mare up in the air. Her first experience of education with a human ended in a rear up, back flip, and injury to her neck that took her out of the contest and put her on a trailer to Tennessee to have a slower longer training process through the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Trainer Incentive Program (TIP).
It’s likely with the trainer’s natural horsemanship approach: round pen, energy work and driving to create draw, the mare could be successful and avoid having the feel of restriction of the halter on her head. She became an amazing energy and body language reader. She became a punishment avoiding release hunter. When we picked her up as total strangers, just walking into the small arena, she would hook on to us or whomever it was, and follow closely. It didn’t occur to me that so much draw had been created in this mare that she felt the only good place to be was next to a human in order to avoid being sent out and driven.
Since I’ve had the mare, asking her to back up and out of your space brings pinned ears and stress. It’s a huge feat years later to ask her to comfortably stay just out of your bubble. If I do get her to step back three feet and stand she gets anxious and begins to try to offer a circle or creep back in. She has the expectation that the human is going to ask something of her and she throws out possible options anticipating what might come next. She has learned if she doesn’t comply quickly enough with a request, the enforcing punishment will come via escalating pressure: a lead rope to her hind end, a flag will touch her, the bump on the halter. She lives in the future of what might be coming, and how to avoid it. If she can’t avoid it she feels trapped, gets angry and fights back.
the potential for pull back is serious in a trailer
I stopped natural horsemanship style driving about 18 months ago when I watched Harry Whitney work horses in February of 2023. I think it’s begun to help change some of Wyoming’s experience and reactions, but the deep early formative work with her is still churning away at her core, and when it gets poked it comes out in big reactive displays.
The physical feel is only one thread of the knot which is inside this horse. Many horses comply to driving pressure (I have one who did), but Wyoming was one of the horses for whom the combination created a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde monster. She is either snappy quick, spot on with her reaction to a request or super angry and violent. Additionally in layer of wound up layers, she is a mare who has a hard time letting go of anxious thoughts.
Jaime working with Wyoming during the clinic
Not only is strong drive and draw set into her, but when she is very close to me she can keep track of me physically while keeping her mind out on the larger environment. Asking her to back off three feet also means the human become part of the larger environment and she has to give mental space to keeping track me as well as everything in the next three miles in every direction. She has yet to become truly mentally centered in the way she can let go of the “other things” she holds onto for her survival.
It’s stunning how she can be in this mental, physical, emotional place and still function to the level she does. If we could ever get to the other side of trouble there’s a phenomenal mare in there.
How do we get to the other side of trouble?
If I could answer this definitively I could have helped a lot more people and horses than I have to date. Yet somehow I’m still at this mystery even when I get discouraged. I wonder if I’ll ever know something definitely enough to be of value to a horse- or maybe even some of my fellow humans who are willing to take the mysterious journey into this wilderness of trying to understand how to help a horse feel better and be a more powerful willing partner.
I do believe it is possible and so I don’t give up even when there are setbacks and it gets hard. I do believe with a horse like Wyoming it is a matter of going through to the other side of the trouble and not letting the trouble make her world smaller and smaller until she is afraid of any pressure at all.
It’s likely that Wyoming’s early training taught her that pressure meant she needed to adjust in order to get the pressure to go away. Unfortunately, anytime someone takes a rein in hand it creates a pressure or imbalance that the horse has to respond to – if done well it should bring the horse comfort through guidance, but if they have been trained to avoid pressure and seek release we have lost the ability to guide them through the reins or the lead rope. Very few people work their horses in the real world without reins or a lead rope. Nor do I recommend it as the ideal. Yet this means anytime someone picks up a rein to communicate with their horse, instead of relaxing into a guiding hand, many horses respond with anxiety to seek immediate release of pressure/imbalance which creates brace and tension through the body which works against strength, balance and grace in forward movement.
Jaime & Mark with Wyoming & Khaleesi
I have a hope that Wyoming can get through this extreme fear of pressure that was created early in her training (and solidified for a time by me) so she can trust me to guide her. I want her to feel the rein or lead rope guide her into where she will find peace and safety in my leadership. I want her to correct the imbalance she notices and in doing so find she has choices, and the freedom to choose a path of lease resistance that is fairly available to her because I am able to offer that. But I also want her to be able to stay connected at the end of the rope in appropriate balance of pressure like I would hold my dad’s hand to cross the street as a child.
She has to stop fighting first. If she would stop fighting she could follow that feel and see it would not bring her danger or pain, but comfort and safety. I asked myself if this deep sadness that came over me momentarily was indicative that this scene was playing out in my own life, or was a memory now. I’d like to say I’ve learned not to fight against the hand that guides me with strength, kindness and love. I know that my own journey through the wilderness is far from over, and sometimes I don’t even realize that I’m fighting the guidance that feels like pressure and imbalance and sometimes downright life threatening to me.
I’m sure Wyoming doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do in the bigger picture just as I really don’t always understand the big picture of what is going on in my own life while I’m in the middle of it all.
We were not able to get Wyoming to the other side of trouble in the four days of the clinic, but I learned some things that I hope will help me continue to guide her through. As with most worthwhile journeys, I feel like we’re deep into the wilderness, but in recent years I’ve learned something about the wilderness. I’ve learned it’s the place we least want to go, yet it’s the place where the transformation takes place. If we are going to get to the other side of trouble, chances are we have to be willing to be led into the wilderness.
I am excited to announce to you first officially the first annual POWERFUL HORSE EXPO during what we’re calling Freedom Week. I have been working toward this event for a couple years now am incredibly excited to see it coming to life July 4-7, 2024.
Freedom week is all about helping our horses become powerful equine partners through freedom… We are coming together here to discuss ways our horses can be FREE!
Freedom from pain
Freedom from disease
Freedom from fear
Freedom from force
Freedom from stress
Freedom from confusion
Readers of the blog know HH follows horsemen who consider the mind of the horse first and how it affects the body and emotions. Some known horsemen who do this well and are teaching it include Harry Whitney, Mark Langley, Tom Moates (who also writes about it), Charlie Snell and Ross Jacobs. I highly recommend getting out to visit with some of these guys and see what they are doing to help horses and humans get along better and feel better about the process and become free from fear, force, stress and confusion.
You have a great opportunity to do just that here in Virginia. Mark Langley is on a rare USA tour and will make a stop in Greenville, VA for a 4-day clinic hosted by us here at Hope Horsemanship July 4-7, 2024. We will be at Penmerryl Farm working in the large indoor arena and we have a couple participant spots still available. I haven’t begun to advertise the clinic yet so I anticipate now they will go quickly. If you’re interested send me an inquiry at jaime@hopehorsemanship.com and I’ll get you all the details and registration forms. We are also taking auditor reservations. Auditors will have the ability to interact with Mark and ask questions and those spaces will also be limited each day so it’s a good idea to reserve if you know you plan to come join us!
Mark Langley is also presenting a public demo on Friday, July 5 from 6:30-8:30 at Penmerryl Farm. This is a great way to join us for the weekend events. Mark will work with horses in a live demonstration of his approach to horsemanship and take questions as he goes. Reservations Recommended Link Here.
Mark’s clinic is the anchor for freedom week but on Saturday, July 6 from 10am-5pm we will be holding the Powerful Horse Expo where exhibitors and vendors will be showcasing, offering demos and educational talks with Q&A sessions on topics such as functional saddle fit, forage-based anti-inflammatory equine diets, feeding options for the metabolic horse, rider posture and Alexandar technique sessions, proper balance in functional hoof care, and more! There will be chances to win great prizes from our sponsors including a pair of Scoot Boots!
Advance ticket reservations for admission for the Saturday Powerful Horse Expo are now on sale (click here for tickets) and they will be increasing in price as the event approaches with an at the door price available as well. Reservations are made by name. (We can take a few more vendors at the time of this email as well, contact Jaime@Hopehorsemanship.com for details)
I am so pleased to offer this fun week to celebrate freedom and excellence with our Powerful Horse Partners. Mark your calendars, share the info (download the flyer below), and come join the Powerful Horse Community for a fabulous celebration!
Last year I spent some time with Harry Whitney, read some books by Tom Moates– and invited him to come visit with us here in the mountains, and listened to a fair amount of Mark Langley‘s podcast. I was steeping myself in this way of considering the horse that was a fundamental shift in my approach as much as possible.
I had some nice changes with Khaleesi over the year that I’m loving watching take root into an early harvest this Spring. As we prepare for some events this year, I can feel her new levels of relaxation and adjustability in movement! However Wyoming and I had a rougher go of the changes and trying to sort out how to understand each other in a better way. Last summer there were a fair amount of death threats (probably from each of us) as the lines of muddled communication began to untangle, and sometimes things get looking worse before they begin to smooth out.
Regardless, I knew there was something important in the process so I kept at it.
Then the horses moved home in November which has been a big change for all of us that is settling in nicely now six months into it… and I’ve begun to spend some time working with them again.
The initial work with Wyoming this year has been promising, and in the subsequent sessions, I’ve seen continued progress toward more partnership. Certainly the difference rests mostly in me. Change is possible, but it has to begin with “me” because usually the horse is a perfectly good horse doing what horses are created to do, and usually what the exhibit is in response to the way their environment (mostly human caused) has shaped in them. So regardless of who that human (or humans) were and what it was that did the shaping- that’s not nearly as important as where to go next. The change has been happening in me as I continue to seek and grow and take an honest assessment of my flaws and weaknesses in order to commit to address them.
I’m encouraged by the start of this year, and it gives me hope that there really is change possible for the two of us. I have a sliver of excitement that maybe this could be “the year” for Wyoming and me to begin to function together in a positive way!
Change is possible, but it has to begin with “me”
People have mentioned lately that staying with this dysfunctional situation for over six years must mean I have a whole lot of patience and determination. I suppose in some respects that is a little true. However… I remind them that she had more patience and determination to help me, because she is the one who refused to get on a trailer for that long- and I live in the end of nowhere… which meant I couldn’t move her on if I wanted to and pass her education on to someone else! Unless I was willing to shoot a perfectly healthy horse (which I did consider once or twice, but never seriously!) I wasn’t left with many options but to keep slogging onward. Considering in all those years of lots of sound and fury and threatening, she only once gave me a bruise from trying to bite the halter and grazing my arm, I think she’s been the one to praise. Apparently she never gave up on me.
I won’t get ahead of myself yet. We have a long journey ahead of us, but I think we’ve begun to sort out a better path, and maybe you’ll begin to see some exciting changes in our story this season… stay tuned and see!
Meanwhile, here are two videos that will show more than my words are able how the progress is coming for now.
Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people, they give up their secrets also – if you love them enough.
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver revolutionized agriculture in the South after the Civil War. Working with children of ex-slaves in a land exhausted by cotton and a painful history, his hope was to “improve the lot of the man farthest down.” He made it his purpose to find ways to renew the land and teach farmers about self-sufficiency and conservation. An article from Tuskegee University revealed that: Dr. Carver took a holistic approach to knowledge, which embraced faith and inquiry in a unified quest for truth, believing that commitment to a Larger Reality than ourselves is necessary if science and technology is to serve human needs rather than the egos of the powerful. His belief in service was a direct outgrowth and expression of this.
This resonated with me. I also am on a unified quest for truth in each part of my life with a commitment to a Larger Reality (a creator God) who gave us an orderly world to be studied and deep truths uncovered that hold true in many different applications. I also believe if we seek in honest humility and the heart to love and serve other instead of self we will have more clear vision and understanding.
In other words, in the language of Dr. Carver:
Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.
This quote came at a time when I had begun to see what appeared to be positive changes in my progress with Wyoming, and I had been considering what was bringing about the change after so many years… It is always likely the change is more in me than she (my wild mare is already just about perfect at being herself) but what was the change in me? I knew it was a deeper level of serving her needs above my own, which coincides to a deeper love for her than I’d been walking out previously.
I am also a violinist and I’ve played more weddings than I could count. There was a local Catholic priest who always had the same wedding homily. He would talk about love. I remember him saying we throw the word around for too many things— we love chocolate or coffee or wine or soccer or traveling or staying home… we love people to death (what does that even mean?) in English we have one word and we use it to speak of our favorite sports team in one minute and our “till death do we part” spouse in the next. I don’t think I completely followed him to what this meant about marriage, but the point that our language falls dreadfully short in expressing more accurately what we feel-choose-carry in the way of affection.
I have always said, and believed, I love my horses. More than chocolate (anyone else humming along to that lyrics your love is better than chocolate… better than anything I think I’ve tried….) But what did it really mean to say I loved my horses, and was it true? Could it be truer?
What I propose in this meandering ponderance of truth, love, and deep secrets, is that a shift came in me that brought new levels of improvement between Wyoming and myself. I really do like her- even as she has been unable to cooperate with me in any way that could be seen as successful from any angle for about seven years (that’s a long time to have and try to work with an uncooperative horse I think for most people…) and regardless of her performance I have been dedicated to staying in the process with her. Yet though I’d say I love her, I realize how I saw her was a problem/project to conquer. This summer, gradually, I began to see her less as a complicated mystery to untangle, less a representation of my current failure to work with an equine I’ve had in my care for many years… and I began to see her.
As I was able to release more of my ego, to let go of my need to fix things and solve problems, I began to have a more authentic compassion for her, how she feels, and what her experience was in all of this. The filter I’d been seeing her through which created some minor distortions was disintegrating, and the more I truly loved her (instead of what I might be able to do with her, or how she could perform for me, or even what she could teach me) the more I had clear vision of what was happening in the moment between us.
Wyoming has been challenging, but I often related to her strong willed, fiery spirit and refusal to go along with a program that was not working for her. The mare in all these years has never given up on me, and I haven’t given up on her. We’ve gotten in a few near wrecks, and yet she has always come back to reconnect with me and try again. For a mare that occasionally threatens my life, she actually has a lot of grace.
But did I love the horse? I wanted to. I thought I did, and maybe I did in part, but not the way I have come to recently.
I didn’t understand: what was it that kept her from walking in the compliance I could extricate from Khaleesi? What on earth did this horse have to fret about? She didn’t want for any necessity, including pasture, a stable herd to depend on, shelter, non-invasive but attentive health and nutrition care… I’ve never been able to ask much of her- so her life is pretty ideal it seems from my human point of view. I could not wrap my head around why on earth she could be so snarky and grumpy at every interaction that wasn’t custom fit to her short sighted equine demands. I’ve had her checked out physically on just about every level. This inability to understand what could possibly be so bad that she’d threaten to take me out when I try to work with her has been mystifying.
This is not happy to see me…
Then I began to work with Tom Moates, who has been a Godsend for getting an outside pair of eyes on us and guiding me to work with her within the truths he has picked up from years of close work with Harry Whitney. His regular visits to help us sort out a better path have been a game changer to chipping away at the trouble we seem to get into.
That doesn’t mean it’s been roses and sunshine. Honestly, it has looked on the surface like everything was getting worse, yet I sensed something was different this time. I felt that deep tuning fork reverberate, telling me that we were going deeper in, digging out some wounds, some history, some infection, some sewage, but if we could face these things together and try to release them without fear, maybe this time we might get to a new place. So I kept trying.
Over the summer, armed with guidance from Tom in person and via email/video, I spent many hours a week trying to find common ground. Wyoming’s stall (aka the shark tank) has been my classroom this year.
The halter has always been sticky to some extent. Though for years I have been able to get her head in the rope halter (and she will comply), I have always sensed that it was not ok. My gut tells me this is a key: the halter is a basic loss of her freedom, and it takes a lot of trust to volunteer to submit to anyone in that way. I am still not on her list of trustworthy enough to relinquish that level of control.
It is worth considering that putting a halter on a horse- a very small piece of equipment- takes away almost entirely their ability to self govern. There are limits, horses can jerk a lead rope out of a human’s hands, or I’ve had Tom tell me I looked a bit like a kite as she pulled me right off the ground in retreat, but once we have the ability to control the somewhat delicate head with all those nerve endings and the soft tissue places around the nose, we have a powerful level of force over them, especially if tied secure to a post with a strong rope.
Over the years I have tried to find better ways to use the halter than force, and last year when I heard Mark Langley talk about guiding horses instead of driving them it impacted me as kernels of truth tend to do when I hear them. Being prey animals, horses can be driven into things especially if we have a halter/lead rope that prevents real escape. I have driven her over the years to do a lot of activities, but she has never felt good about it, and no matter how pretty and snappy she looks trotting or cantering around me, she is not relaxed or happy.
I didn’t not love her. I wanted what was best for us both, which is a cooperative relationship with her humans. She lives in a human world now. The wild life is not all it’s cracked up to be so I do not agree that she would be better off left on the range. There’s starvation, drought, predators, and extreme weather there. I doubt she would be less fearful than she is here when she goes into high alert when the deer roam through at night.
Still, I didn’t know how to help her or me, and I flailed around with various levels of success and unsuccess and the mysteries remained out of reach.
As I continued to regress this summer to the most basic fundamentals, I once again asked: can you be ok with me putting the halter on you? I found myself summoning the courage (thank you Tom for being the guinea pig and flag man) to open the stall gate and stand in the gap, vulnerable to attack,and offer the halter to her knowing she could choose to take me out. But oddly enough, if I came in with too much self-protection, she felt the fear brace in me, she would brace right back against me, and we could not breach the impasse. I had to make the choice to risk being hurt and show up with a white flag (actually no flag) instead of a weapon. With some basic safety in mind, I would hold out the halter from one knot away from my body so the noseband draped open and allowed her to make the choice to put her nose in on her own.
I did not encourage her to bite at the halter. It’s not good manners at the minimum, and I don’t want her nipping at my tools to “work out for her” but the other problem is, her reaction to that piece of equipment is actually that strong so I also had to acknowledge that without punishing her. I don’t want her to spend her life thinking it’s ok to bite at my equipment- or at me, and I don’t want to send the message that I don’t want to know what she’s thinking or feeling. It was a very fine line, how to express ones thoughts and feelings in an appropriate way! I’m sure I did not always successfully navigate this delicate balance and it takes impeccable timing. She must think it’s her action of nipping at the halter that creates the reaction that might be a poke from my finger at her cheek, but that she has control of not being poked (try not nipping at the halter!). The right instant timing is action-reaction; just a moment too soon in anticipation is picking a fight; enough delay becomes punishment (which we NEVER want). However, as I began to care more about how she felt and helping her, than getting my task done without being injured, something shifted.
It seems that letting go of what I really wanted was the path toward actually receiving what I really wanted.
Harry and Tom both talk about creating an imbalance that the horse will work to correct. Take for example how a bit works. When the human takes “hold” of the bit in some way, it creates an imbalance that the horse will move its entire body around to fix, which is how we can control so many things along a huge animal’s body with a small piece of metal carried in the mouth.
I had come to see that just my presence creates a strong imbalance for very sensitive Wyoming. I can stand in Hope’s stall doorway a very long time before she bothers to find out why I’m there. I might need to make some noise to get her to care at all. With Wyoming it’s different. Even without the halter, just standing at her stall gate, it did not take long before she stopped munching on hay and began to move. She looked out her window… but she was not unaware of me, she was trying to find peace, and if she could send her mind out the window it might help, but, as I waited I saw it did not work for her. My presence was still too disruptive even if I did nothing but stand there.
I added the halter and this was even more disruptive without making a sound. The same looking out the window was her first try to make things right, then she would look at me, then look back out the window, then look at me again. Then she would take a step in a circle toward me, and pin her ears giving me threatening dragon face. Maybe she could scare me away. Nope. I just stood there with the halter held out. She would step toward me and nip toward the halter, I would do various things to discourage that without picking a fight. Then she would stand with her nose over the half wall/gate to khaleesi’s stall, a position that would be very hard for me to force the noseband on her. And I would still wait. Someday, I hoped she might choose to allow the halter. If she would choose, it would change everything.
In the process of this I could see the depth of how disturbing this was for her. It didn’t make sense in my human brain, but I could not disregard what was in front of me. I began to be intensely curious toward this dynamic. She did not go back to eating hay. She would occasionally cycle back to the window, but never for long. For most of the time she would stand very close to me, I could touch her with the halter on the neck, or other parts of her body, but she did not want that noseband to capture her. In all this I did nothing to force her to participate, and yet participate she did, in the all the ways she could.
I had begun paying more attention to what the truth was for her, as strange as her truth seemed to me, than what I was trying to do or get done.
Gradually I was able to halter her with increasing relaxation. This process wasn’t a dramatic moment where she chose as I hoped to put her nose in the halter voluntarily. It started with a shift in position where she seemed to suggest: I cannot bridge this gap yet, it’s too much for me, but if I stand here quietly you can put the noseband up my nose and I will try not to fight you.
The reason I believe this is accurate, is because when she did begin to position herself allowing room where I could put on the noseband, she had minimal nippy reactions, and once the halter was on and tied she began to relax there in the stall with me. This is a time when I would stand there in the stall with the halter on, rub on her, scratch her, breath deep, and make it a really nice place to be together. It was here I began to notice just how much tension she carries in her neck. She has such a level of self-protection about her it’s no wonder she feels terrible.
Some of the work this summer staying in tune to how she is feeling in the work
As summer melted away to fall, I had a shift in routine that meant I had to bring the horses in and out of the barn across the yard to a remote pasture which meant I had to halter them. I knew this would come and it concerned me- having to take my life in my hands to manage the wild thing did not sound fun (in the summer I could get the halter on or walk away and it didn’t really matter, now I had to get this job done in order to move her). However the foundation we built through the summer set us up for success.
At first I’d move the herd one at a time. I liked spending the time and attention on Hope solo, who is slow, as we did the walk together. Khaleesi is pretty manageable at whatever pace or need, but Wyoming benefits from focus and clarity in everything we do, so walking her alone was preferable. This meant some days I would start in the barn and take Khaleesi into the remote field. When I returned Wyoming was already becoming stressed because of the imbalance in her environment (herd separation). She is smart enough to realize that it was the halter that was her pathway to rebalancing in rejoining her lead mare. Instead of a mess or violence I would step into the stall and she would come to me and dip her head at the noseband (very willing) and I had to ask her to slow down and not revert to autopilot with her brain already in the other field and her body stuck with me (this the the condition where a horse has lost her mind). In this way she began to invite the haltering process because it had meaning attached to it she wanted to engage in. Similarly in the large field where I worried I might never catch Wyoming again, she was usually the first one who came to me and agreed to the halter to go back into the barn for breakfast and a break. This new routine I worried might get one of us killed actually helped us establish some good patterns.
One of the days I moved them all at once for necessary efficiency…
Looking back however, it was one of the days I was rubbing and scratching the mare in her stall trying to help her see she could let go and relax and trust me even with the halter on, that the rock hard muscles in her neck simply would not relax. Even as her eyes began to soften and she was reveling in the butt and underbelly scratches she was getting, the tension was rooted deep, and it was here that something broke loose inside me.
Harry Whitney says it would really help horse people if they could learn to recognize the motions that go with good emotions, and the motions that go with negative emotions. As I stood next to this wild creature who has lived with us for seven years, I realized looking back how much tension and brace this horse carries all the time. Tears stung my eyes as I considered the depth of the worry she carries around, and I felt overwhelming compassion for her.
I have not loved her like this before.
I didn’t want to fix her issues. I didn’t want her to have safer “manners” for all the human interactions that would be required of a normal horse. I didn’t want to know I could get her on the trailer… I didn’t want to solve the problem of why I’ve had this horse seven years and can’t ride her still. I didn’t even want to know I could halter her without her nipping at me. (Although I did want those things, they became highly insignificant)
I wanted to know how on earth I could intervene in her world in a way that could help her let go of some of what she was packing around, and that she would feel better about her life. I found myself begging for the insight that would help her to feel good for maybe the first time in her equine life since being rounded up on the range all those years back.
This is when something began shifting anew.
What changed?
Me.
I have always loved this horse, I thought.
But not like this.
George Washington Carver was knows for his humility and service. He cared so much for the people that were struggling, forgotten, rejected, or oppressed, that he went into his lab with the peanut and love poured out of him. A kind of love that opened up the secrets of the soil, the peanuts themselves, and in that place revelation came and revolutionized agriculture forever. Crazy and unscientific as it might seem, it was in his posture of love and not ego or fame or self-interest, the secrets were revealed.
I had a glimpse that day in the barn with Wyoming, when my heart broke for the years I’ve seen her gallop across the field with tension through her body brought on by stress, neck raised and stiff, instead of that beautiful fluid movement that comes with relaxation and a stretching out of the muscles and joints, and I grieved that I hadn’t yet figured out how to help her. Not for my ego. For her.
Hope Horsemanship carries a verse instead of a tagline or motto. It is Jeremiah 33:3 Call to me, and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known. I then pondered another truth in the same big book of wisdom: If I had a profound understanding of God’s hidden secrets… but have not learned to love, then I am nothing.
We are not worthy of the deep secrets, we are not trustworthy of them, if we don’t love first and foremost.
Wyoming, and most people around us- know the difference between saying we love and having that love authentically pouring out of us. You cannot fake what is in the heart. Not to a horse at least. Until she knew that love coming through me authentically, her secrets were kept under a tough braced up shell. She couldn’t trust me with vulnerability. This is a road. I have not arrived. Still, I can see progress.
Wyoming trusts enough to willingly ride in the trailer for the first time.
I wanted to say she didn’t have much choice, as a horse she couldn’t choose another owner. But the truth struck me that I also didn’t have much choice! Considering she wouldn’t get on a trailer to save her life, I didn’t have much opportunity to sell or give her away either! We have been bound together for some greater purpose. Now she appears to be at least somewhat loadable, but it’s too late to go back now. I am hers and she is mine. Hopefully the mystery will continue to reveal and it will be a good story when it’s all told.
There was a time when a beautiful day was not complete if I couldn’t ride my horse. If I had to work or was otherwise occupied it was hard to not imagine myself in the woods with my mare and be sad about whatever it was that kept me from that experience. My work is pretty great. I run a rural area music education program teaching K-12 age violin students. I am also on faculty at a local college teaching violin and chamber music. So it wasn’t about having a dead end job that was torture to log hours at. It was about where my mind was, how it became mysteriously separated from my body on particularly nice days, and about the tension of having a mind and body in two different places. I had quite lost my mind and was struggling to function without being present in the good work I had in front of me because of it.
I currently have this island of misfit toys herd that I adore. I jokingly tell people I have a good horse, a bad horse, and a sick horse. It’s an oversimplification, and thus isn’t entirely true, but it makes for good conversation.
Anyone who follows my writing can connect the dots: my good horse is Ireland’s Khaleesi, the mare I took in as a feral four-year-old in 2014. I started her for better and worse, learned with her and grown alongside her. She is my endurance horse, and in June we finally conquered the single-day 100 mile race on one of the toughest courses the sport offers. I can get done just about anything I need to and she fills in for me a lot. She is a highly confident leader and makes me look pretty good much of the time. She is a beautiful gift to me and I enjoy her constantly. My challenge with magnificent K is I’m decent at getting things done with her in the natural horsemanship direct pressure style of working together that has left places our relationship can improve. The hard part that requires some vision is going back to learning new pathways together when things “work out pretty good” the old way. I know there’s more for us, but it’s going to take some time creating new experiences.
The lovingly identified bad horse is Wyoming the wild (by the way I also have a bad dog I adore, so this seems to be a pattern for me!). She of course, is not at all a bad horse, she is my complicated challenging horse who does not fill in for me, who is not confident in herself or my leadership, and has required a lot of consideration, thought, growth, experimentation, and help in order not to give up on her and find some wilderness area to release her back into and wish her good luck. She’d probably survive; she has the skills. In fact, all she thinks about is her own self-protection and survival since she doesn’t trust it to me, yet. And why should she? Truthfully I haven’t proven adequate of that trust to her yet, and so I refuse to give up and am determined to keep growing into the kind of leader a horse like her requires. She is constantly demanding I get better. She has been a valuable gift to my development.
The horse I hate to label but truthfully, in fact, IS the sick horse is darling Redemption’s Hope. She’s a discarded quarter horse that went through many hands before ending up in my barn. I took her knowing she was a shut down tangled mess, without realizing how big a mess was really in there. My plans for her were to help her feel better, learn the world of humans wasn’t such a terrible place, and voila, she would be a sweet natured horse kids or adults with less developed skills could get to know horses and learn to work with safely. She did that work about a year while her health devolved into such places where I have more than once been certain she would not survive. She has been the most expensive horse I’ve ever owned through vet bills and nutrition supplementation and support care in general.
I have come to see the gift she has brought me is an opportunity to love and support a creature who has zero ability to give back, and for an extended period of time. We are entering a third year of her very slowly coming into some kind of stable health, but due to the neurological signs from the EPM (I believe), she may well never be ridable, or even a horse who can physically respond to a request in a normal way again. I simply don’t know yet. Only time will reveal what little Hope’s redemption story will be.
Loving Hope has cost me emotionally and financially. I am limited with my herd, at the moment I cannot expand to more than three horses and she is taking up valuable real estate. She has taught me the long process of showing up every day to what often feels like a hopeless situation and staying engaged. She has taught me what it is like to invest and care and love with no reliable expectation of gaining from that relationship. How often are we given such an opportunity to love in that way? I haven’t always seen it, but recently it shines of a glory I cannot fathom, how did I get so lucky to have this horse come to me and teach me this important lesson? The lesson of showing up even when there seems to be little hope, to love anyway. This does not come naturally to me. I needed some help, and she came.
All of this came to mind recently as I rode my good horse around a local recreation area along the Jackson River. I am fortunate to live in a pristine and beautiful area that is still so rural and unpopulated we have not one traffic light in the entire county, the animals outnumber the people, and our pubic national forest land is somewhere like 75% over private property. I am insanely blessed, and also quite intentional about living here. I went out solo, rode about 7 miles around this beautiful park and in the couple of hours never saw another human. It was exquisitely perfect and I reveled in it not taking one moment for granted. It was perfection in the experience of riding a fabulous horse, on well kept trails, in a place of untouched beauty.
As I pondered this, I realized something has happened to me over time.
I enjoyed this ride, however, today it occurred to me that I equally enjoy the time I spend working with Wyoming the Wild, even when a decent percentage of our time together she is threatening me because I’m pressing her comfort zone (necessary to give her the experience of seeing she can trust me and her life is not actually in danger). I am helping bring her lost mind back to the present reality in order to help her feel better about her life, and about our connection. At the moment in our re-started education program I have begun again at the point of not being able to put the halter on her without her feeling threatened. So I don’t. If one cannot halter a horse reliably I think that reveals just how far we are from being a riding partnership.
I don’t know what will become of Wyoming the Wild one in her education. I am stubborn and I generally refuse to accept that a horse cannot come to an understanding and work with a human- there are just ones where the bar is set too high for many (sane?) humans to consider reasonable… I am considering that she could be one of these special creatures. The alternative, which is also possible, is I’m just not skilled enough… but each year I’m finding that less and less likely the root problem. Let me assure you no pride in my skill level… She certainly has required I gain experience and understanding in order to succeed in helping her. I know how much I have to learn is deep and wide, but my hunger to grow covers a multitude of sins in the process. I don’t think it’s only my inexperience anymore. She’s a unique and complicated horse. How have I gotten so lucky to end up with her? I don’t believe in coincidences, I know she is just as much a gift as the good horse is.
I have found that anymore I do not care nearly as much that I’m able to ride this horse as that we come together. I do want to be able to ride her, but I have found I love the time I spend with her, learning to show her she does not have to protect herself from me, that I am here to help her, and she is just perfect just the way she is, right now today. We will simply keep spending time together until things come right and then we will see what that looks like.
I thought of the time I spend with Hope now, every day walking her slowly and intentionally, watching how she struggles to lift her front end and thus her front legs paddle around not to drag the ground. How can I help her to think about lifting first even her eyes off the ground and begin to think lighter in the the front? How can I help her start to rebuild her atrophied muscles that would support her body in better balance? We do tiny weight shifting requests just to begin the form of thinking the change that someday will mean she can walk normally again. How can I work with her so she isn’t stressed out which is when she begins to panic and her feet begin to cross over unnaturally like a horse who has neurological damage (she doesn’t do this if she is not in a panic).
What creates this panic state for her? Her life has given her the experience that humans will demand things and then punish for non-compliance. Somewhere along the way I believe this horse wasn’t saying: No, I won’t… but she began to have physical limitations that meant No, I can’t. And when that happened her reaction leads me to guess she was punished. Now when I begin to ask things of her I can see the stress and worry set it. She either completely shuts down and is non responsive, or she begins to offer up anything she can muster getting her limbs all crossed and in a pretzel. The answer is not to quit asking anything of her (though I basically did this for almost a year thinking she needed the rest and recovery which may or may not be true), but instead to begin to ask her things she can do and to give her the time to think and do it, and not to punish her when she takes a long time to get there. She has been taught not to think but only to respond and quickly- my hope is that I can teach her she can think, she must think, and I will help her along the way.
What I am realizing is I am finally beginning to find the real gift in being present in the reality of each horse, and asking how I can help them. My own mind is letting go of the idea that I have to have a riding (or teaching) goal for each horse and each day we do not get significantly closer to that goal brings frustration or irritation. As I let go of that way of thinking, I find not only peace in the process but a deeper joy in every moment we share. Even the struggles of which there are many right now. I am able to see opportunities where there were only roadblocks. I am curious about things instead of annoyed by them.
I recognize fairly quickly when I am getting all twisted up again.
I have riding goals for Khaleesi. These are good. I believe the road I am on with Wyoming will include riding her again- and successfully – as well. I have a goal that Hope will someday have a body that works again in balance and be able to help humans to learn more about horses in some way.
I think having goals is important.
Sometimes we have to adjust the goal.
With Wyoming, I had the goal to be able to safely trail ride her including loading her on the trailer to transport. This year I’ve seen that she has way more deep anxiety that if I don’t address, none of that is going to function in strength. I’ve done the “grown up” thing and adjusted my goals to honor her needs…
This is where it gets so dicey and on a good day I can laugh about it…
I adjust the goals to helping Wyoming get feeling better working with me and pat myself on the back for being such a highly developed horse person who truly puts the needs of my horse first and is willing to patiently work with them in the way they need.
And then I find myself occasionally frustrated and annoyed when we have an “off” day and she comes at me with more violent snark than the previous day… or I had gotten to lay the rope over her back and she relaxed, whereas now if I stand in her zip code with the rope in hand and she pins her ears and threatens.
Why? If my only intent was truly to help her, there would be no frustration. Frustration comes because I’m not getting my way and that reveals that I’ve made the new goal the central thing and I’ve once again gotten all twisted up around the good thing that isn’t supposed to be the ultimate thing and now I’m frustrated that she isn’t getting better!!! I am not making clear progress toward the goal of her getting better so help me mare you MUST GET FEELING BETTER WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM!?
Lord. Help me. Every. Day.
I still get twisted up.
Do you ever get frustrated? I heard that a prey animal’s basic job is to frustrated a predator. Think about this… Predator wants a meal, so it chases the prey animal. Prey animal wants to live so it does all it can to evade and outrun the predator. The very definition of being frustrated.
Frustrated: feeling or expressing distress and annoyance due to inability to change or achieve something.
When we feel or express frustration we are acting like a predator. In the human world the definition of predator is: a person who ruthlessly exploits others.
This is not the dynamic I want in my barn. This is not the dynamic I want in my life. Therefore I have sought to become more aware of when I feel that frustration rising in the dark space of my heart and it is now a warning signal: you have become twisted again. Stop. Regroup. Begin again and ask: how can I help?
The good news is we are all given a certain amount of self-control and if we begin to use it, we can strengthen it! Each time that twist shows up in my relationships I can notice it and make a decision to change myself and my approach. I can decide not to be a frustrated predator.
Not controlling another (horse or human) to manipulate or force into what goal I have that day is a much slower road to my goals, but it is the only way to my ultimate goal. I know there are many who won’t understand (why take the slow way of freedom and love? It’s incredibly ineffective), but when we get there it’s a million times sweeter, and the roads and detours are more peaceful and full of life.
When it comes to any relationship, boundaries matter. I think Danny Silk has some great books out about powerful individuals, the importance of connection, how to love well (even your enemies) and the trap of confusing boundaries and punishment. He has a great book titled “Unpunishable” that addresses what he calls our culture’s addiction to the punishment paradigm and how to let go of this in our human relationships. I’ve read the book. I’ve put effort into understanding and walking this out in my own life.
Then there are relationships with horses. I remember hearing Mark Langley say that boundaries are fixed and they don’t chase you. If you think you have a boundary with your horse but your boundary is in fact chasing your horse then it is not a boundary.
To make a finer point, I’ve heard Harry Whitney give an illustration about electric fences. I’m pretty sure Tom Moats has written about this too, but since I’ve recently read a handful of his books I can’t remember which one it’s in and who might have borrowed it… Harry explains that horses graze peacefully near an electric fence, very close to it, even sometimes reaching under it as far as they can without touching the strand. Most horses familiar with an electric fence are not afraid of it although no horses like the shock of coming into contact with it. Their experience is that the fence will not surprise them, ambush them, or chase them. Certainly the fence can be moved into new positions, but once the fence is fixed, the boundary is firm, clear, and potentially most importantly: not personal. There is no question if a horse gets shocked by the fence it was unemotional and non-judgemental. The fence isn’t angry, frustrated, fearful or otherwise emotionally embroiled in the process. No horse need be shamed or considered a “bad horse” for touching the fence and getting shocked; not very smart, maybe, but evil or bad are not part of the equation. Horses figure out quickly that the shock is a direct consequence of running into the fence and once they do it a couple times, it’s usually enough for them to avoid the strand in the future.
Harry helping a horse with fear around its ears in a clinic in Vista, CA 2023
This all makes perfect sense to me.
I thought I understood what a boundary is…
Then I began to press into dangerous territory by interrupting Wyoming’s very strong thoughts — which opened the can of snarky-threats where she began to threaten me with dragon ears and teeth bared. What do I do about the violent threats?
I had to think this through and I regularly found myself changing my position on what to do about it. Clearly this is NOT OK. I don’t care how you feel Wyoming, you cannot threaten to harm a human and continue to live here. In Mark Langley language “That is not available.” And in Harry-land “Let go of THAT thought mare.”
I thought: there is a boundary needed where that behavior is not tolerated and has an electric fence style wire that is tripped when you go there. On the other hand, it’s not as simple as setting up a “snark fence” that sends an electric shock clearly, effectively, and unemotionally at exactly the right time when the snark threat shows up. I have to set and enforce the boundary, and with my human limitations this could easily end up being unclear, questionable on its appropriate firmness, and most importantly could be rife with emotion no matter how hard I try not to be. There is a thin line between a boundary and a punishment, and this particular horse is quite sensitive to knowing which it is, and punishment always makes things worse between us.
In June when I started over once again, I’d see her go volcanically violent when I asked for her attention on me while she was in her stall, and I’d stand still outside her reach as she would snake her ears and snap her teeth a few inches from my face. I’d say: thanks for giving me your attention, this is a start… And she would cuss me out in equine, threatening to chew me up and trample my carcass when she had the chance. But, I reasoned, I had all of her attention in that moment. Of course the hope was to get her to feel better about it, and I don’t think that interaction felt very good for either of us.
The problem seemed to get worse. There were times I would be doing something completely unrelated to her in the next stall and I had to pay close attention to the eyes in the back of my head because she’d stick her nose over the gate threaten me even when I wasn’t asking her for anything. Even my presence began to get under her fur. It seemed to be increasing, so maybe allowing her to have these fits was not the best way forward. If I want to help my horse let go of hard thoughts, I reasoned, I need to find a way to basically say: LET GO OF THAT! When she turns to violence. The violence needs to not work out for her. Right now, I’m not so sure if it is or it isn’t working for her in her mind. So I tried answering the violence with what I hoped was a boundary. If I had my rope, I’d be ready when she circled back to rush the gate with her teeth bared to meet her with the rope as adapt as I could get with my timing in the hope she would begin to think whenever she had snarky-violent outbursts, she ran into something when she came at me and it was not pleasant. Like an electric fence ideally, one that only came on when you have a bad attitude.
I would have to be very consistent, as unemotional as possible, and match her in firmness as closely as I could. I wanted her to learn there is a boundary here and violence will never be tolerated.
I had a couple lucky opportunities meeting her exactly when she came at me but it seemed to only make her more angry and more threatening, and if she backed off it was harder to see a change for her to soften and relax. I could get her to act less on her wish to chew me up and spit me out, but I don’t think it changed the fact that she wanted to. This approach didn’t seem to help her feel any better about being with me. In fact if anything I think she got better at planing quick sneak attacks in the hope she might get through the barrier. I liked the idea that I was trying to clarify that this aggressive behavior was NEVER acceptable, but it didn’t appear I was making real progress with this.
It did not seem to be working out for me.
The next shift back came one day when I was innocently cleaning the middle stall and Wyoming came over the gate with her head and began snapping her teeth at me. I wasn’t looking for her attention or demanding anything of her. This also means I was completely unprepared to meet her violence with what I hoped was a decent attempt at a boundary like a rope or a flag, or any useful tool.
So I just stood there.
I stood there and watched her, inches from my face. She pulled back, did her little ramp up circle, snaked her ears and stuck her nose at me, teeth clacking away. I stood unmoving and completely unemotional, and slightly at a loss. I wasn’t “working” with her, I was just at the barn at that time. I simply observed her and paused in curiosity to watch what she would do thinking that I had screwed up the consistency of meeting her behavior with a clear boundary every time. Now what?
As I watched she repeated the cycle which always included pulling back, doing a little circle, reflattening her ears, and throwing her head over the gate at me, teeth clacking. However, as I stood unmoving and completely curious (not upset, frustrated, angry or afraid) each time was less enthusiastic until finally she threw her head over the fence, froze with no bared teeth, softened her eyes and her ears perked forward. Now it was her turn to just stand there starting at me, curious.
An example of Wyoming feeling softer and relaxed.
It was this experience combined with the revelation about the cowardly lion who desperately wanted courage, that had me re-evaluate my attempt to “boundary” this behavior by meeting it with a tool of some sort.
First, I realized as I stood quietly out of her reach, there actually WAS a boundary. It was the gate that separated the stalls. That boundary was secure and clear. The truth of this scenario was that she cannot hurt me while the gate stays in place, and it’s screwed to posts with brackets, so it’s not going anywhere.
Second, my attempt to meet her violence with some kind of equal “boundary” with a rope or flag she would ideally “run into” wasn’t the wrong direction entirely, but in reflection I had to be honest with myself: I was meeting her fear with my own fear. I wanted to believe I was unemotional, but though I was decent at stuffing the emotion in the moment, it was there. I was afraid if I didn’t curb this behavior someone (probably me) was going to get HURT. I don’t think this concern was unreasonable or wrong, but regardless it was an underlying emotion. No matter how hard I tried, the boundary I wanted to put in place was smelling to her a whole lot more like a punishment.
Third, though I wanted her to “run into her own pressure” somehow when she came at me, having the rope or flag or stick meet her physically was still “at” her. I started experimenting with creating a big sound instead where she did not like the shock of the noise, but it didn’t hurt. These details are obvious to me now, and really important, but I suppose that’s what a life of learning is about- the mistakes and the fixing of them and the growth from them.
I know that we cannot meet fear with fear and ever find a better place. We can build a wall of self-protection and we can find ways to not get hurt when we meet fear with fear, but we cannot build connection that demands vulnerability and we cannot strengthen relationships. I pondered all that I’ve read and learned about these things and asked myself the million dollar question: so then, what must meet fear to dissolve it and heal the brokenness?
Only LOVE.
Don’t give up on me here as you assume I am about to suggest going into the shark tank with no protection and singing to the creature who has promised me physical harm a refrain of Kumbaya as my only hope. That is not what I mean by love. Love in fact, must have boundaries because connection is worth protecting. I believe Wyoming when she’s told me she is in enough fear to hurt me if I press her, and me being attacked is not good for either me or Wyoming. If I love her and I’m seeking better connection with her, I will not put us in that situation.
Danny Silk asks the question: how many pet rattlesnakes do you have? None.
Because wise people don’t bring dangerous things into our houses- the place we feel safe, can be vulnerable and expect not to be attacked if at all possible. This is a boundary. No rattlesnakes in the house. We can love rattlesnakes and not invite them inside to play. Rattlesnakes can be loved at a distance.
While Wyoming sees me as a rattlesnake and I see her a threatening dragon, we need to find a way to connect without expecting we will be in each other’s vulnerable place. My job is to find a way to connection with her, to answer her fear with love, and ideally have us not get hurt as we work through this process toward more trust. Both of us need more trust in the other. She has learned that I am wiling to drive and punish when I want something from her or when I am afraid, and I’ve learned she threatens violence when she is out of her comfort zone.
During this process something began to change that was helpful. Wyoming went from always trying to kill the flag to relaxing when it touched her. The flag became the first tool she not only started to accept without violence, but if I did touch her with it she immediately quieted and would relax as it rubbed her. If the flag was floating along nearby, that made her nervous, but once it made contact she calmed down and began making suggestions where it might scratch and rub her. This gave me the ability to “pet” her without getting in the strike zone. This enabled me to begin to build trust not to punish while staying across a good boundary which kept us both more safe.
Response to me asking her to give me her attention…
Thus another shift in approach began for me. I kept myself outside her reach and began asking for her attention. When she would circle, turn, pin her ears and come at the gate I would say under my breath to her (in order to remind myself what she needed from me) Courage! and I would give her a hug instead.
Me offering the ‘hug’ as a response while staying at a responsible distance for us both.
Once again, I’m not a total idiot. The hug looked like me lifting up the flag and getting right in there and petting her as close to her head as I could (usually on the neck at first since she wasn’t a fan of the flag strips in her eyes and ears, but that is also changing). I could be a foot out of reach, completely without fear, and only responding with love.
She considers my response…
The love was saying: I know you’re afraid and you don’t trust me not to punish you. I know you haven’t felt very good about us working together, and you are like a porcupine walled up with layers of self-protection. It’s exhausting to manage your entire space like this all the time. Let me help you. Give me a chance to try things differently, to connect and care for your needs. And then see if we can work together as a team. Here, I’ll start.
She softens as I refuse to meet her fear with my own fear and choose not to punish
I realized that I have wanted to express that to this horse for years. I wanted her to trust me and allow me to help her. However when I was working with her in the punishment paradigm of direct pressure my words and actions were, to her, incongruent. I wanted to say: I am here to help you and I care about you, but my actions were saying: if you don’t do what I’m asking I will hurt you. I need you to comply with my program regardless of how you feel about it because I am the human and you are the horse and this is how it works.
The flag-hug plan is showing positive changes in our time together. One immediate shift is I can walk around the barn and in her stall again without wondering if she will get flipped to angry-mode even if I’m not paying any attention to her. That was a disturbing phase we went through demanding me to be on high alert (more than normal awareness)— I’ve never been concerned about simply being in the barn with her ever before. I had not trusted being in her space enough since June to trim her feet and they had gotten way too long. Now I’m able to work on her feet and I do it a little each day. I do this without halter or lead rope right now as we are still trust building and she does not trust me yet to feel good about being haltered. For the time being I’m choosing patience on that as we sort out more pressing things.
She loves being scratched with the flag so lately, our routine goes like so: I greet her, she comes into the barn “aisle” area on her own and I give her some good scratches with the flag. I do a little cleaning and trimming on each hoof and intermix flag scratching. After I get that work done I switch to using the flag to ask her to do something, take a step forward or backward, move away from me, look a different direction (this is beginning to influence her thoughts when they are softer which is a great step!). These things are very small and the scratching reward for giving me something simple is a part of the way we are building trust. All of this she can do and stay in a good feeling place. Almost no snark-threats come from these activities.
Next I push a little deeper by getting in front of her and ask if she can let go of her vigilance to give me a moment of her attention, center up, and straight on me. I get different degrees of “not really” at this point. I have a little distance, and can effectively block a straight on snark-attack with my flag hug right between the eyes. She doesn’t love that kind of hug yet, and it redirects her to choose a response less violent- sometimes she stays with it and tries again a little softer (she IS trying!), sometimes she chooses to go back into her stall and disconnect with me entirely. That is ok. She gets to make that choice, and it opens the door for me to close the door, allow her the “safety” of her bedroom, and then to stand outside the door and knock so to speak.
Right now this is our most intense level of interaction, but I think it’s also where the most important work is being done. In her stall, with a boundary in place for both of us, I will press in to a deeper ask where I know she’s going to be less comfortable. If we never press into here, she can’t have the experience to see it’s going to be different than she expects. With a horse, one cannot use words to explain, we have to change the experience. I can’t change the experience without creating the situation she is afraid of and showing her it will not destroy her.
I ask for her to let go of whatever else has her attention and give her full attention to me. She reverts to dragon attack, threatens me and doesn’t even stay long enough to bite at me over the gate. She dismisses me immediately and turns her hind end to me going back to the more important thing. At this point I make the biggest slam noise I can with the flag against something (plywood wall, or an unopened bag of shavings is pretty loud too!). She hates this noise but it is not a threat of pain. I am not coming at her, I’m not driving her hind end around, I am staying outside her stall. In essence I’m setting a bomb off right outside her door. I want to be worthy of her full attention. I hope to draw her over because nothing is more important than the sound of a bomb going off right outside your door. Appearing enraged, at first she comes back with her dragon act and each time she dismisses me to turn away I make the sound as full and loud as possible until she realizes this will happen until she makes a different decision. If she threatens, I give her a flag hug. Eventually all I have to do is make a clucking sound with my tongue and she squares up looking directly at me over the gate and each day sooner and sooner she relaxes and looks at me curiously.
Well ok then? What is so important then you need my full attention?
I just want a connection with you. Thank you for that.
Then I pet her on her forehead with my hand as she relaxes there, and I open her gate so she can choose to stay or go- this is the last part of our time together so I want it to end with her feeling soft and relaxed, but also as I am leaving, she can put her attention wherever she likes.
Most often, if I have the horses locked in their stalls, and then I come (not to interact) only to release them, Wyoming is respectful enough to walk past me, clearing my space before she bursts into the field at a full on canter to be freed at last. When I release her after we have connected she stays in place for a time. Sometimes, after I walk off to leave, she will leave her stall at a walk, sometimes she circle back into her stall and munch hay, but she never blasts off, because her mind and her body at that moment are united where we had connected.
I sometimes hear horse-folk say the most important thing we can do for a horse is to train it to be a good citizen. They have rational reasons behind this, especially like: “I may not (God forbid) be able to have this horse it’s entire lifespan.” Implying a horse that is not a good citizen is more difficult to re-home (which is true… most horses are tricky to re-home, throw in any complication — physical or behavioral — and this becomes exponentially more challenging). Then there is the embarrassed owner who finds the equine health professional’s life in danger just trying to help… In the end there is great agreement (which is actually rare in horse-folk) that anyone should be able to handle a good citizen with no trouble at all. I usually smile and nod along, because to disagree makes you seem like an idiotic crazy person. I mean how could one disagree on the one thing everyone generally agrees on? Just ruin world peace while you’re at it why don’t you?
My “not so” good citizen
It’s not so much that I disagree as I’m fuzzy on the details. I think a more interesting conversation would be had about what the definition of a good equine citizen actually is. It’s easy to nod and assume we agree on a proper way to handle a horse in the first place, but that is far from true. I’m pretty sure I don’t want a horse that “is obedient” to a request from everyone exactly the same way. I’d bet the farm that no one is going get hurt handling Khaleesi no matter what you do with her… however, how you ask, and your ability to read a horse and interact appropriately is going to impact what you get out of her. Shouldn’t it be that way?
I have an illustrative story of a farrier years back who tried to help me out by checking on a lost shoe one day when he couldn’t get in touch with me, but was in my area. He was trying to do me a favor by grabbing a halter and going to see if he could tack the shoe back on for me. He left a message I got later, quite frustrated that no matter what he did including bringing a bucket of grain, he couldn’t catch her. Stupid mare. (I think she thought he was a stupid person thinking she would be lured by food!) I am pretty sure if you asked him, even today, he’d say my horses are not good citizens. But K never trusted him, and he used fear and intimidation with horses, telling me more than once that a good horse (his definition of a good citizen) has a healthy fear of humans and that’s the way it should be. He was considered one of the best farriers around, but we had to part ways. And I was glad he couldn’t catch her that day.
I thought this blog would expose my disagreement with the good citizen idea, but as I process, I see that it’s more the definition that separates us all. My ex-farrier thought a good citizen has fear of humans. Some call their horse a good citizen and then say things like “you can’t do anything with the horse on the ground but once you get on them it’s all just fine…” What I’ve been coming to see is the most important thing (as I’ve heard Harry Whitney say) to teach a horse, is that they can let go of a thought.
Over the two weeks I’ve been working daily with Wyoming to help her feel better, a simple truth has begun to rise in a new clarity. This mare has gotten good at hanging on — with a death grip — to her own thoughts.
There was a time I observed: you can get along just fine with Wyoming as long as you never require anything of her. If you exist with her on her own terms you can be best buddies. She’s friendly and fun, and the life of the party. However if you require something of her, she switches pretty quickly to what Tom calls “snarky.”
A day with some visitors, Wyoming put herself dead center of all the attention… life of the party!
Regardless if my definition of a good citizen aligns with the general horse community, a horse willing to fight over something like “will you please take a step backward” is absolutely not acceptable. And yet… now what? We have already established in the last two entries that she doesn’t feel very good about her life. That’s what I’m trying to address.
In over seven years, by no one’s definition, has she been transformed into a good citizen no matter what kind of training I’ve practiced from harsh (becoming more scary than her threats) to compassionate (free choice and positive reinforcement). In all the places I’ve searched, so far I haven’t been able to break through for a real change.
Now I’m getting better at understanding where the horse’s thought is, and how they are feeling. Currently I am going in deep to see if I can change Wyoming’s experiences to change her thoughts, and then get a change in how she feels.
Begin at the begining?
A soft moment during our R+ phase…
The halter. I have worked on getting her to accept being haltered willingly from many angles over years with her. I can put the halter on, but it doesn’t take a horse whisperer to know she is tolerating, but not relaxed or willing. I love linear rational thought: If I can’t get her to willingly accept the halter, is it a wonder the rest of it is like poison fruit of the tree? I wanted to go back to the source and work from the root.
When I walk into Wyoming’s stall she immediately comes to meet me at the gate. I offer the halter and she will grudgingly allow it to be pulled up over her nose. Gradients of messy depending on the day, but I get it done.
Something I found interesting is Khaleesi will not come to me in the stall and put her head in the halter, yet I never have a problem walking right up to her and offering the halter and she will dip her nose dutifully. (We are experimenting with this but that’s a different story right now) Wyoming coming to the gate to meet me, which on the surface seems “better” than having to walk over to halter K. However, actually putting on the halter is a totally different experience. Khaleesi is willing to cooperate, Wyoming tolerates and sometimes gives little threatening nips at the rope with her lips.
I began to grasp something that I had not thought through before: Wyoming was not connecting with me by walking over to meet me at the exit gate. If one was only reading action it looks pretty cooperative. Where was her mind? With me? Not at all. Her mind already left the stall. This is not good if one misreads the situation to think we’re working cooperatively. What I can get away with because it’s actually Wyoming’s plan isn’t going to give me accurate information about what’s going on with her. And if I don’t have accurate information we are going to eventually run into trouble.
The truth will set us free.
So being the truth seeker I am, I decided to try something different. I walked into the stall. She came over to me. Then I walked to the adjacent corner of the stall. This was going off script. She stayed at the exit. Standing with me in a stall corner, was not on her list of plans so she did not join me.
I made a light shuffling with the lead rope to get her attention and encourage her to consider coming over to me. Just think about it? I was asking her to add me to her list, maybe bump me up to a higher position there. She pinned her ears and looked over at me with a warning.
Nope. Not gonna do it. Don’t ask.
Interesting. The ear pinning threatening behavior I thought was reserved for asking her to put out effort. Simply coming two steps over to me in the stall did not seem worth the fight she was threatening. But somehow, to her, it was.
I paused and considered, if she was already threatening violence, maybe I needed to find a safer spot from which to press this issue. Her stall has an exterior barn wall, a partial wood wall with a four foot exit gate, then two farm gates that separate her from Khaleesi and from the other half of the barn which is storage for hay and equipment.
pondering climbing out of the stall completely before we begin…
From this position, I asked again with more insistence: I see your brain is already out in the field. Let go of that for the moment, bring your brain back here to the stall, and find a place of peace with me.
I walked over to what makes the back “wall” of the stall which is a green farm gate, and climbed up to sit a moment. It seemed like a better place…but as I sat there now looking at her rear end (with her head still pointed out the exit), I realized that when I began to push the comfort zone there seemed a decent chance of getting a chunk taken out of my leg. And so I climbed over the gate into the safe zone of the barn outside her stall. With the open plan of this particular make-shift stall, I had great access to her with the ability to stay out of reach.
Let’s freeze frame a moment.
Before I get into the action to come, let’s walk through the present snapshot of the story. Wyoming is not at peace with her brain out in the pasture and her body in the stall. In order to find peace she has to reunite her body with her brain. She thinks she would prefer to put her body out in the field where her brain is. I must show her that since it is not always possible to get her body where she sent her brain, she can choose the real option to bring her brain back and engage in the present. She can find peace this way.
This is not so different from human experiences. Anxiety, which is at an all time high in the world today I’ve heard, happens when a human allows their brain to go places their body cannot. Sometimes into the future to worry about things they cannot control or even deal with because they are not yet real. Sometimes to a place they cannot actually be, to try to control things there. This is always a losing game, and it creates sickness in the mind and the body. We hear more often than ever the importance of becoming present where and when we are. Find something that can return you to the reality of the present, where it turns out, most of the time… you actually ARE ok.
Trauma, I think, without going out of my own depth which is not much here, is when you DO come back to the reality of the present location and time and find out indeed… you are NOT ok. Acute trauma usually has an end point, but the effects linger. If we don’t address it (which is painful), we will continue to suffer- which is more painful.
It’s a pretty good bet this horse has experienced trauma. She was wild for at least two years in Wyoming before being rounded up. She might have lost herd mates in that time to starvation or predators, or injury, or random barbed wire fence lines or suffered some of these herself. Being rounded up and penned is traumatic to a wild animal. In her first training-gentling experience she was traumatized by the halter, bit her handler, reared up, and flipped over. Some horses do not get so traumatized by being haltered the first time. I wish I could say her life has been carefree and perfect since she found her way to me, but that’s not true either.
I thought I was getting a green-broke mustang who was doing well under saddle and needed some consistency and mileage. Perfect for me! Instead, looking back, I brought home a traumatized animal whose personality was more fear based than most and I did not have the tools then to even recognize what was happening forget what to do about it. I delved into natural horsemanship type work and began driving the creature to her fight/flight mode in order to work with her and certainly added to her experience of trauma in the hope of helping her. The same work that created a pretty good citizen in Khaleesi by most definitions, did not create the same thing in Wyoming.
And so, armed with new understanding and some rough tools, we are back in the moment with the horse gazing out of her stall, with her mind out there and her body in here. She is not at peace. My presence was upping the ante on this and it didn’t sit well with her at all.
I’ve moved away from driving pressure, so my plan was to create a kind of “indirect pressure” in her environment that would not scare her to have to fight or flee, but to be big enough eventually that she couldn’t block me out or ignore me anymore. I wanted her to choose to put me on the list, because I knew her being present would bring her peace. Peace is what she wants more than anything, but she’s stuck in her patterns and doesn’t know how to get there alone. Now I had to be ready to not add to her fear/flight/fight system, but make it so her other choices to stay stuck didn’t work out so well anymore. Then, when she did come check in with me, I had to be ready to offer a place that felt better than she felt in vigilante mode. I had to find a way to offer her rest, security, and peace in my presence. It had to be real.
I made a noise with the rope. She turned her head and death glared at me, snake ears and flashing eyes. Then turned back to her field.
I made a larger noise. Same reaction but faster and more intent.
I swung the rope to hit the wood barn wall next to me with a bang. She swung herself around, dipping her head low and raising it like a dragon, ears flat against her neck and came at me over the top of the gate with her teeth bared threatening me that this demand for her attention was worth fighting to the death over.
Well, I wanted the truth.
This is what’s been in there the whole time. I was now poking at it from a safe place in the hope what I stirred up and revealed, maybe… maybe we could release it and make a deeper change for the better.
Here I saw it more clearly: It is not that Wyoming is offended by any request to do a thing. This horse has a fear-based natural bent already, and has gotten a self-preservation life and death grip on the thoughts she manages about her environment and her herd. If you want her to let go of those, she is convinced her very survival is at stake. And though I believe that Wyoming basically “likes” me, she doesn’t look to me highly enough to let go of her survival mechanisms to give me her full attention (yet). If I ask her to let go of the other thoughts she is managing and put me in the center of her mind, she is kind enough to warn me that I’m stepping into a dangerous place. If I continue to press this, she threatens… I don’t think she wants to have to kill me. But in the end, if she believes its her or me, right now she would follow through to whatever extent she could in order to get me to understand and back down.
And so I began to press into Wyoming’s self protection mechanism. I don’t do it because I need her to become a “good citizen” (though I would love that to be an outcome). I don’t do it because I need her to become an obedient riding horse (that would be awesome, but I already have one of those). I am doing it because somehow this horse has come into my care, by ignorance, mistake, or willful stubbornness by the grace of God, she’s here now and we are going to have to find our way to a better place.
The truth (sometimes ugly when it comes out of the dark) is what will set us free.
I continued this basic program of making just enough noise to break her loose from her other thoughts and have to focus on me at least for a moment. I left a lot of time in between for her to search out this puzzle and to process it. I am not trying to use fear to manipulate Wyoming, the tool (whatever it is) will not come after her, just make enough noise and fuss to have my thing bigger for the moment than the other thing she’s trying to hold on to when she gets stuck.
When I did get her attention, it came with her best dragon impression. Today I wanted her to be “rewarded” for checking in with me even if it was with a massive wave of what looked like murderous rage.
Oh, thanks for giving me your attention! Good job!
Video clip of one of the times she realized she didn’t have to feel bad about being present in the process.
I don’t know if that was the best response or not. I’m kind of in the wild myself here with her now. I’m learning by trying and trying not to get hurt in the process. When she comes at me with that kind of face, it does not feel good for her, but she has momentarily had to let go of that other thought, and she is present. The truth, it appears, is she is convinced being present will feel bad. I say that because as she would come at me with murder in her eyes, as the time went on, she would hang there a moment with her snakey ears pinned and eyes flaring and I just stood there two inches out of her reach and then we’d pause for just a moment, and she would begin to soften. She would look at me and start to relax, her ears would float back up, and I would be still and breathe evenly with as much peace as I could muster, trying to translate from every pore: I know you’re ready to fight, but I love you, you are mine, and we are going to get better together in time. I am here to help you.
She would stand there and everything in her body would begin to soften until her lower lip would drop slightly and she would let go of the entire weight of the world she was used to carrying. The first time this happened in entirety, she stood in as much peace as I’ve seen her maybe ever, then she had a big release reaction. She shook her entire body and neck, she went into yawning that twisted her head both directions and her tongue would come out of her mouth in all directions.
It took two hours to come to this place where I could reach out and touch her on her forehead and she stood relaxed and peaceful, no fight in her. Not a hint of trying to send her mind out the gate or window.
Finally peace.
I know this made a deep change in her, because after I walked away to do some things in the barn she began to eat hay. That might seem normal for a horse. However, I left the horses in their stalls for which is normal this time of year for a few hours a day. Khaleesi eats the most hay in these periods. Hope eats the next amount but less because she spends a portion of time laying down resting as she is not fully well. Wyoming always ate the least.
When I returned later to release the horses from their stalls, Wyoming had eaten every almost every blade of hay which is highly unusual. I always suspected it was because she was distracted with checking out her window and stall door, but she never paced or pawed or showed bigger signs of stress. She always went into the stall voluntarily. I think she would choose the stall because her herd was inside, so that’s where she needed to be- but her brain was in fact roving the field still on guard for danger.
As I worked with her for the two hours, not only did she gaze out the exit door, but there is a smaller window. She would cycle her mind out that window, to the exit, then with Khaleesi in the next stall. Those three places were all on her list to cycle through making sure all was in order. At some point she must have added in eat some hay to the list, because she did eat some of her hay. She’s not lacking for calories, has never shown sign of colic, and drinks her water, so I never concerned myself with addressing her low hay consumption over the 6-9 hours they would spend inside.
Now, if the herd is put in the barn, she eats all her hay and I keep adding more. This reinforces to me that the work I did with her over those two hours convincing her to let go of her thoughts to be present in the stall with me did not ONLY give her a few moments of peace while I was there, but she learned that she could find peace being present in the stall even when I was not there. She was finding more peace even on her own now.
That is a very big deal. That is a very big why to continue to try.
I wish I could say that in this first big day of finding a place of relaxation that we now have solved her issues and all is well!
Not quite. The journey has only begun, and so far this one promises to be one of plot twists, steps forward and sideways, and sometimes backward… one that will require patience, and the ability to notice the smallest things as landmarks along the way. However I am seeing evidence that teaching a horse they can let go of a thought truly is one of the most important things to helping them live as good equine citizens.
Right now, asking Wyoming to let go of a thought feels to her like an attack on her self-preservation and tips her into fight mode. In other horses, it is a reason they bolt, flee, buck off a rider, or try to kill the vet. If a horse can let go of a hard thought they have a better chance at working together with us in our own thoughts – like you need hoof care, or to come safely with me as I lead you somewhere you aren’t sure you want to go… These are things most people could agree a good citizen would be able to do.
Stay tuned as I process the days I spend with Wyoming. The ups and downs of that journey will be the focus for now, and I’ll be back soon with another installment!
In the last post (Complicated), I posed the root question:
And so, the whole thing depends on the question: can I help change Wyoming’s experiences and thus her mind, that working together with me is something she can feel good about? And in changing this, could she feel better about her life all around?
Over time I have been given advice about Wyoming suggesting a few basic horsemanship concepts. I was told You’ve got to make the “wrong” thing difficult and the “right” thing easy. Also This is a horse where you have to get it to be her idea if you want to succeed.
This is all well enough… but somehow I wasn’t able to get a next step from the well meaning clinicians and horse-folk who suggested these better ways, to actually sort out exactly how was one to do this? The devil, they say, is in the details.
As for the first premise, I have been astounded at how easy the “right” thing can be (walk quietly in a circle) to find this mare will choose ear pinning, rearing, and even trotting or cantering in order to NOT comply with my “easy” request. Have you ever heard that it takes more effort to frown than to smile? I’m certain that ear pinning and rearing take way more effort than quietly walking relaxed a turn or two around me.
Khaleesi had this figured out pretty quickly. She did the math and came to the conclusion complying with my general requests were going to be the path of least resistance. I think she also knew my heart (is that a stretch to write about?) for however a horse knows these unseen things, I think Khaleesi has always known that for better or worse, overall I am trying to do right by her. This horse seems to reward the least try by her human, and she seems to have a lot more grace in my failings. Khaleesi is the kind of horse of which it is said: they will fill in for you… a lot.
Wyoming is not such a horse. She may or may not know my heart is to do right by her, but she tells me every single time I am not quiet enough in a request, every single time I get impatient and don’t allow her the time to consider and choose. She responds to my energy and where I am looking and if my body is not exactly angled in the ideal way to ask that thing. She responds in a huge way if I am at all confusing to her in any signal. Wyoming has a very low tolerance for mixed signals or confusion.
As for the second piece of advice, the making it her idea. I never got someone to show me effectively what that would that look like with her. In the past I figured it’s obviously one of those things you have to struggle through on your own (what are you an idiot to have to ask that follow up question of HOW to do it? Or maybe it was like the force… you have to find it on your own grasshopper). That was another assumption. I should have probably asked better follow up questions. Maybe someone might have been able to show me.
Observing Harry Whitney and Tom Moates, it seems altogether less magical and more practical. The horse gets to choose and whatever she does IS her idea now. And as I’ve heard Harry say: when it’s her idea, then she will own it, then it’ll stick.
Harry Whitney in TN patiently allows for the horse to come to the idea on her own
Oh, I thought. So I must not trick, force, or otherwise manipulate and threaten her into doing what I want. And yet somehow I have to help her make better decisions? Which then follows that if I’m dealing with her honestly and not manipulating or otherwise controlling or punishing her… then it actually has to work out better FOR HER when she chooses the thing I am presenting. Which might incentivize her to truly seek to join with me because… it works out for her when she does.
The devil is in the details.
I hear a lot of talk in horse circles about putting the horse first, then watch the presentation of folks’ interpretation of that in action and am skeptical. Let me clarify a finer point, often I observe my own presentation of my own interpretation of putting the horse first, and I am highly skeptical even of my own stewardship of this concept.
And yet, as I perch outside the round pen as Harry helps a horse, I think there is actually a simple truth in… well… put the horse first? Harry Whitney, in the scant week or so I’ve spent around him in California and Tennessee, puts an emphasis on how the horse feels above everything else.
Harry in Vista, CA February 2023 helping a horse center and find peace in the midst of distraction
I am pretty good by now about sorting out what a horse does. I can see the way a horse steps over a hind foot, or if the horse’s body moves backward, or if the horse is walking, trotting or cantering. I am even good at seeing a weight shift and feeling which foot is lifting underneath me. It is not that hard to sort out: I asked you to walk, and you are not walking. This I need to “fix” somehow. Harry wants to know how the horse feels.
As I circle back to the question, can I help Wyoming FEEL better about her life, it seems now to rise above all the other questions I have asked: Can I get Wyoming comfortable on the trailer? Can I get Wyoming to respond to a simple request unoffended? Can I put on a halter without her nipping at it as I put it on? Can I convince her to carry me as a rider without being so pinched up inside?
And so I went to work last week, and the devil is in the details.
Day one and day two were spent withTom sorting out the fact that Wyoming is not only complicated, but that she does not feel good most of the time. Even in the herd she is never fully relaxed, she is the one who appears to take on the role of defender of any possible harm. This is a heavy load to carry. Any new environmental stimuli, even a chainsaw a mile away in the woods across the street is cause for concern and alert.
Khaleesi has a more balanced sense of what is concerning, and what can be noticed and let go of. Same herd, same stimuli, still aware of her environment and sometimes on alert, but quicker to let something go and relax again.
If I were to consider Wyoming’s “worry cup” (as in the amount of anxiety a horse is building up until it runneth over – usually in a negative expression of some sort), Wyoming is not a cup half full kind of mare… she is like 5/8th most of the time and now has learned to carry that kind of worry in everything she does. This would mean when I want to do something together I have precious little room to press her before her cup runs over. I think this constant anxiety is a big part of this not feeling good all the time.
If she lives at 5/8 full, I think me showing up puts her at 6/8 (or 3/4 for those who prefer to simplify their fractions) then whatever we begin to sort through together leaves only 7/8 and then bam… self-protection at all costs shows up in fight/flight with the fight being unusually high on her list of options.
I am considering the possibility that her 5/8 full worry cup at all times being a way of life could account for why she is so quick to flip over to fight/flight and the fact that we’ve had to get decent at dumping out the part we just filled if we both want to survive together. If this is an accurate hypothesis, then it follows that I have not been effective at getting down into the bottom 5/8 of the cup she carries constantly in order to empty some of that and give us some emotional space to work in.
If I had to find an analogy to compare it to, it’s like working with a machine that is not running quite properly and you have to learn how to manage it without it overheating and blowing up if you want to get anything done. We exist too close to the red zone as an every day functioning.
I think until I find a way to dig into some of the chronic discontent/anxiety she carries as her normal and help her to let go some of that somehow… then I’m constantly in the zone where every move I make could be the thing that takes her over the edge. It’s an eggshell kind of life. My guess is she would rather not live that way either. If she knew there was another way.
As Tom says: this is the horse she would rather be.
This winter and at other times I’ve put her into the benign neglect zone, first because I didn’t have any promising answers to bring a change. Second, in the winters I’m busy with my teaching work and have far less time for the herd.
I used the think caring for her basic needs, allowing her to settle into a herd in a life of basic freedom could not only do no harm, but would help her reset again and feel better in order for us to possibly try again after that refreshing time off. Maybe the horse can drain the cup on her own? Since meeting Harry I am convinced that they actually DO need intervention in a different experience in order to make a change. Leaving them alone to “be a horse” if they are troubled will not fix the trouble.
The biggest take-away I had from Harry in Tennessee this spring was:
Our understanding runs our emotions, our emotions dictate our actions. If you want a change in the horse, you must change their understanding.
Harry Whitney
After Tom’s visit it had come into focus for me, somehow Wyoming needs new experiences to get that cup drained enough that she could withstand a little pressure in order to grow and expand her world. Leaving her alone to a world that gets smaller and smaller due to fears is not kindness. Creating a shake up in order to help her was going to be necessary.
No Wyoming… tell me how you really feel?
And the devil is in the details.
This is where the hoof hits the dirt. The first question from the last post was: can I help Wyoming feel better with new experiences that will change her mind. Once everyone was gone and it’s just me and the mare I now to have to ask: How on earth am I going to do this?
I have a feeling this is going to demand more from me that I currently possess in knowledge, skill, creativity, grace and most of all patience. As I got started, I realized this horse is probably going to be the kind that makes me or breaks me – meaning I will either grow and learn, or she’ll be too much for me and I will truly fail her. I can not at the moment accept the latter as a possibility, so I’m prepared to be changed from this process.
I was able to steal away for two days to catch up with Harry Witney in Rogersville, TN. He had taken roost for a few weeks at Mendin’ Fences Farm, a Horsemanship Education Center somewhere between Johnson City and Knoxville. The short trip was well worth the effort as I loved how Mendin’ Fences is set up and functions and got some good ideas about how I’d like to set up a location whenever that becomes a reality. I was able to watch and chat with Harry and the gathering around him for two days- and the gathering included Tom Moates who has become a Hope Horsemanship friend and comes to work/play with our horses from time to time- but also made a new friend from SC (Sue) and got to chat with Molly Sanders who does great interviews on her podcast: A Learner’s Journey.
I had a few good take aways this particular trip I plan to write about, but the one that felt most compelling for me personally was watching Harry work with a beautiful strong independent mare named Kate.
The way Harry worked with Kate wasn’t any different than other horses I’ve watched him work. Kate wasn’t all that particularly different from other horses either. Why this story particularly touched me was probably as simple as timing. Recently I have found myself distracted from my own path and my own story and though I knew it was happening, sometimes knowing doesn’t solve the deeper problems. Sometimes being aware is only the first step and not enough to make an internal shift that brings about change. I knew I was becoming anxious because my mind was not centered on my current place in my current journey. I knew this shows up in my wanting to start rushing around…
What brought new clarity and impacted me came from seeing a story unfold that revealed to me, in a simpler version, what I was happening in my own life. That story enabled me to shift back to where the peace would be. Here is what I observed:
Kate the mare.
Kate was 26, not young for a horse. She’d had a life of performance, hurry and worry. Kate had been there and done that, her new owner explained, including long miles on the Appalachian trail, racing barrels and various other jobs in her life. She seemed now to get resentful about being pushed to perform. Sometimes she would dig in her heels and refuse to connect with a human and work together anymore, if pressed she would rush and go fast to get it over with. I just want her to have a happy rest of her life now, her owner said, that’s why we’re here.
They brought Kate into the round pen and set her loose. She went about hurrying and worrying… and didn’t see any value in checking in with Harry. When he’d make a suggestion that she could let go of her anxiety and the thoughts that took her mind away from the roundpen she’d respond in a cloud of dust.
Harry took his time with her and never encouraged her to add energy or up her effort. He kept it all slow. After a while of working in this relaxed slow way someone asked: Would you start working her at faster speeds now? (The horse before Kate Harry had done a lot more work at faster speeds) Harry responded: No, she just needs to get realizing that she can feel good right here. We don’t need to rush.
The mare took a fair amount of convincing that Harry had anything at all to offer her. She was independent and strong willed and didn’t seem to need or want a leader in her life. When the mare let her thoughts wander away from what was happening at the moment in the pen she would get anxious and rush around. And yet Harry’s convincing was quiet, soft, and patient. He never chased her around to get her attention. He wanted her to work it out. If she could come through working it out herself, he explained, it would be more meaningful to her.
She considers her options from across the sand
When the time was right, Harry asked the mare to let go of the thoughts that took her away from being present: Be here now he said. Be here now. And he would wait, and help her notice him, help her see she could relax and feel good if she would choose to let go of the worries and choose to be with him, present in the pen. Yet she had to choose. When she would momentarily choose to pause and even consider connecting he would say: Good for you mare, good for you.
She gives Harry a chance…
I couldn’t help but think: who wouldn’t want to be one of Harry’s horses? Who wouldn’t want a leader who has the steadfast patience to do what the horse needs when the horse needs it to help the horse feel better about themselves and their world? Who isn’t looking for guidance on how to be here now, and someone willing to care enough to firm up to help, never to punish, and to encourage the freedom to work it out in your own way? Who actually cares that it’s meaningful for the horse not just that it’s effective to get to a goal? Who doesn’t want a leader in their life like Harry- whose priority is first that the horse feels better?
I reflected how when Harry works a horse he doesn’t consider what he did with the horse before her or what the horse after her will need. He doesn’t consider what will entertain those observing. Each is unique and he focuses only on that horse and what she needs at that moment – and at this point in his experience he’s gotten pretty darn good at knowing – for each horse, their story, and their needs.
I reflected how beautiful it is that in truth, I do have that very thing. And it was at work in that very moment. How healing it is to have an experience that changes an understanding, that changes emotions, that changes how I function and respond. What a piece of hope right there at the round pen.
I spent few days with Harry Whitney last week. I hope I will never be the same.
I have been to a handful of horsemanship events and clinics ranging in size and popularity and I did not know what to expect from a Harry Whitney clinic. Harry doesn’t have much media out there to get a detailed understanding of what he is doing, though it’s not difficult to get the basics, so if you want to learn from him, you’re going to have to go find him.
Brandea and I did just that and we flew across the country to catch him in Southern California on a week we both could manage to get away. It was well worth the investment.
I was surprised and soon delighted to find how intimate the group was. Harry does mainly one-on-one sessions and the clinics are limited to 5-6 horses. Auditors (or fence sitters and rail hens as Harry chuckled at the different terms for a clinic observer in other parts of the world) are also limited, but this clinic was below even the limit. At any given time there were less than 12 of us gathered around a round pen close enough to touch the master horseman hardly having to raise a voice to have a question heard.
Intimate group around the round pen
I have been in clinics where questions were “legal” but I’ve never seen anyone else address questions so willingly, easily, graciously and genuinely as Harry Whitney. He seems to invite questions because in order to learn, I think he wants those engaged in the process to be seeking and if we are seeking we should have questions. Harry creates a safe environment to ask any honest question, never leaves the human feeling stupid or embarrassed though he might lead you in a direction that brings a good natured laugh from everyone but always in a way that keeps us from Ftbecoming too serious about ourselves or the horses and his puns, jokes, and teasing take a potentially long exhausting day of mental heavy lifting and bring some lighthearted joy to mix into the kettle (pardon the vulture reference… one day to break things up Harry let us know if he could be any bird it would be a vulture and why).
Possibly the thing I will remember the most in my first experience of Harry Whitney is the way his face can go from an attempt at very very serious to the grin that spreads so far and wide it always reaches his eyes. In a world of frustrated, annoyed, exhausted, exasperated, disillusioned master horsemen, the environment around Harry is true lightness and joy mixed with a weight of wisdom and experience. Where many well known horsemen seem to have compassion for the horse and disdain for the ignorant people who ruin them, Harry appears to have as much concern for the people who come for help as the horses who brought them.
I won’t try to encapsulate his approach in one blog post, however in some ways I could. There is an integrated core that roots beneath everything he does, and if one could get a handle on that it seems there isn’t anything that wouldn’t be possible. It reminds me of the “seek ye first” idea because when you sort out what that thing is… “and all the rest will be added unto you.”
If I were to attempt a boil down to that core treasure it is about the mind and emotions of the horse. If you seek a present, calm, integrated mind and body (which will mean the horse feels good, has peace or in in a good emotional state), then you can have it all. There is nothing you couldn’t do together.
The bad news is also the good news: it’s a lifetime in how to get there.
In four full days of notes I skimmed through them to see if I could organize something out of the many hours of conversation and observation of Harry working horses and Harry walking others through working their horses. One quote seemed to rise through the roundpen dust:
We must get more familiar with the motions that come with good emotions and the motions that come from negative emotions.
Harry Whitney
What Harry Whitney offers to those who have the patience, is a vision to see what a horse looks like when it truly feels good and how to see the signs of when a horse is doing the thing, but doesn’t feel good about it.
I might have said before that identification of the problem is key, but today I will go to another place and say identification that there IS a problem is more key. We have so normalized… no… we reward and celebrate getting things done with horses when they are worried, shut down, or elsewise functioning in tension through the highest international levels, that I wonder how many people actually even have the eyes to see what it looks like to have a horse moving freely, in balance, with it’s mind and body aligned to commit willingly to the work it is engaged in. I long for the day when it is unusual to see a troubled horse in work instead of unusual to see a relaxed confident horse competing or even pleasure riding.
Lest anyone take this statement to suggest that I have sorted this out and point the finger around me, I will clarify that though I have been desperately seeking this without even knowing it was possible for years, I saw even today just how far I am from bringing my horses forward a shining example. But we will take ground together in this because I am committed to it. I am dedicated to learning and disciplining myself to the shifts necessary to be the one who is able to make my horse feel better about everything we do together.
I have never been to a clinic where someone made what I’ll call an adjustment when I didn’t see a horse move a nose hair or whisker. I have previously thought (maybe I made this up, but I think I got some help from many sources over a few years) that if a horse didn’t move in their physical space then we don’t have anything to correct or adjust. And yet as I watched Harry in the round pen with a particularly bothered gelding the first day, I saw him knock the coiled up lead rope against his chaps making a decent striking sound and I hadn’t even seen the horse move.
I had some ideas but I don’t want to assume. So I asked. I wanted to understand.
Harry explained he created a kind of interruption or distraction at the point he saw the horse’s thoughts begin to move from present in the round pen with him to back to his stall and buddy in the shed row. He wasn’t trying to punish or correct the horse for a change of thought, he was interrupting or even blocking that thought because the horse had basically two options available: he could be present and calm, or he could allow his thoughts to meander (or lope directly!) back to his stall which would mean his mind would not be present with his body. When this happens he will be anxious until he is able reunite his body and mind. Considering we had no plans of taking his body back to his stall quite yet, bringing his thoughts back into the round pen and keeping them there bringing peace to the horse and all of us was Harry’s aim.
Furthermore, it is preferable to reconnect that mind to the body at the soonest possible opportunity. It is exponentially more difficult to bring back a mind when it has gone far or gotten very hard in it’s direction. Harry Whitney is a master at helping a troubled horse come back to being present and feeling better about himself, and he has developed the understanding of noticing when a horse has just begun to have it’s thought leave to ask the horse: Hey there, let go of that and stay with me. He does it in a way the horse feels better about things.
The things that can come from this cornerstone is infinite. People are so used to horses working while they are troubled that it takes a special circumstance to get a good look at what untroubled looks like. Compliant, obedient, slow, or snappy to give us what we ask for – these are not in themselves signs of a horse that’s untroubled. Horses can do very high level activities even without a rope connected and still be troubled on the inside about the work. Many dull shut down horses who are so troubled they have “gone away” when humans are present are considered perfect bomb-proof kid horses of high value. This horse might be quiet and basically compliant but it doesn’t mean it is relaxed and happy in the work. And that bomb proofing creates its own kind of danger. Someone will in time be hurt by it- the human or the horse.
On the other side of the coin horses that wear their emotions on their outsides and who begin dancing around in giraffe mode every time they are asked to do anything are not shut down the way the dull horse is, but snappy reactive activity even if it’s responding to our cues does not mean willing and feeling good. Horses are fantastic at avoiding us in a myriad of ways and yet convincing us they are “on board” in order to get us from bothering them more. They are incredibly smart and as Harry said more than once through the week:
It’s amazing they haven’t killed us all off by now.
With so many examples of troubled horses competing and winning across the board of horse sports. I have wondered if I was just being overly sensitive, or if I was not reading things clearly, or if this is necessary if one wants to do things with horses.
I have wondered if it might just be true that horses want in their hearts to be left alone to graze and be in their herd and feel safe and everything else we do is going to bring trouble…
If so, maybe the best we can hope for is to do our things with them and then apologize and set them free again and at least try to give them as much horse life as we can in between the work?
Now I don’t believe that. I do believe much of what we do troubles them, but from the glimpse of what I saw, it IS possible to actually be a force for peace when the horse gets anxious. The question as Harry put it is:
Can we actually be effective at going into a situation where the horse is bothered and help the horse feel better?
I saw that yes. This is possible. But it’s not for the faint of heart.
Not because it’s a dangerous process at all, in fact Harry joked one day one that he doesn’t get a lot of auditors because his clinics are too boring for people to sit that many hours and watch. I thought he was kidding… he might have been, but there was more truth in it than even I realized. In fact there were many hours of things getting done and getting addressed at a level where you’d have to be watching closely to understand. No one is discouraged from getting firm or having a meltdown in order to do what needs to be done to bring a horse back to present with us. So these moments did occur- there is no tiptoeing around a horse allowed- however once the horse returns the moment is over and the leading onward continues in a quiet and relaxed thoughtful way. Harry took horses that were feeling scattered and fragmented (hot) and helped them relax into beautiful transitions that were soft but had life, and he helped horses that were dull and shut down to bring up that life without driving them around with force and pressure that worried them into the movement.
The reason this is not for the faint of heart is because I observed the people present all had a very LONG view on their paths. They talked over years not days yet without losing track of the day to day and what can be done in a short time if done with quality, feel, and a quiet mind. This both takes a ton of patience because real change (which absolutely has to begin within the human and that is a process too!) takes real time, yet also once the shift happens it is astounding how other problems melt away without focusing on them. It is both a painfully slow and a ridiculously effective way to live. I think it brings hope.
So for anyone else out there who has had enough horses (and for some people one is enough) to have come into one that the other things seem to hit a roadblock, or work for a while and then unravel, consider finding Harry somewhere as he gets around the country pretty well in a year, and sit along the fence and see if there might be something there that could change your life.
Hope Horsemanship 