New Years Resolutions be Gone - New You, On it's way!

Rumour has it that by now, early February most of us have abandoned our New Year Resolutions aimed at creating a "new me".

Worry not!  There is more than one way to a better you!

Meta physicians award each year with a theme.  These themes relate to a massive spiritual, emotional, and physical transition that the world is going through, driven in large by us humans!

The theme for 2015 is Remembrance meaning remembering!

2015 is about defining the year and defining the future, and ourselves along the way!

Sometimes I think that many humans have horses (or spend time with them) to help us find ourselves - past or present!   They bring out in us buried feelings of loneliness, anger, despair, hope and happiness. 

The meta physicians will tell us that the important elements of 2015 includes:-

-  revitalising

-  respecting

-  re-discovering and,

-  renewing

Horses, I believe, if we are open to the notion, can help us connect with each of the elements important for this year.  Horses not our shrinks, convenience stores or pharmaceutical drugs can put the disparate pieces of our lives ,and who we truly are, back together again. 

Wouldn't it be a wonderful new BHS code for us all to follow in our dealings with horses if we acknowledged how much they have to offer us for our future well being?

Revitalise: Have you ever noticed how much horses revitalise our spirit, our senses and our energy?

Respect: What if we truly acted towards horses with respect - focusing on their needs and rights, in how we care for them and hopefully keep them for life?

Re-discover: Business ventures have been born out of merging the world of healing and leadership development through interaction with horses.  In summary, such interventions enable dysfunctional adolescents and wayward Executives to re-discover themselves with a view to making personal change.

Renewing: Every hour spent with a horse is a renewal process with no end in sight.  No matter how tired, stressed, physically aching or mentally distracted I am; time spent with my herd always releases a new and improved me! 

Now that's a code to live life by!

In my work with riders I always start by asking them to remember why they ride as it will influence the things we set in motion.  It empowers us.  It is fuel for our imagination, it takes us back to our childhood or latterly explored need for freedom. 

Remembering tones our gratitude like a muscle! Horses help us come home to ourselves, remembering who we truly are, which helps us become more of whom we want to become!

Before we get "there" we often have to wade through our past - namely our memories (real or distorted) - and this can feel like crawling through mud!  Yet, crawl we must in order to seek the prize called clarity.  To be stronger in ourselves and have the courage of our convictions, we have to be able to free up our passions and that again, can have it's origins in our past.

Mud + Clarity + Passion = Stronger us!

In an earlier post I mused (briefly) on the notion of a world without horses.  In an even earlier post than that, I wrote about a small herd of abandoned ponies close to my home.  Both posts raise questions of commitment and determination.  Where have such qualities gone?  Do we have enough of either, anymore? 

When we abandon or sell our horses because we can't handle them or they can't give us what we want - do we have the resolve to persist?  How do you know your vision of 'moving on' and 'passing him/her on' is the right one?

I ask this because time after time I see riders sell a 'problem horse', acquire another blemish free one in it's place only to find that 6 months later the perfect horse has developed into another 'problem horse'.  We will only find a true fix to this dilemma, when we develop a real desire to unravel the current reality we experience with horses or with fellow humans.

Horse selling is too often nothing more than an optimistic hope - whimsical and lacking substance. A desperate hope by its last resort nature is always weak hope.

What's the root cause of our false hope?  Often it's lack of trust - in ourselves and others. What gets in the way of us developing that trust includes impatience! We want things to work quickly, change must happen now which demands action - often without thought or depth of understanding behind them.

I have come to believe that horses, other animals and nature in general all help us to rediscover trust and encourage us to remember a time when the world was more simple!

Time spent with horses and nature is how we will find the space we need for our own recovery.  

As well as being a year about remembrance and remembering, it is also a year with an '8' vibration - meaning 'as above so below' - The symbolism of 8 is to balance the material and immaterial worlds.

The year is as spiritual as it is materialistic. Horses at the heart of our lives will play a central role (if we let them) to shake us out of materialism and into our full spiritual selves!

The spiritual side of the 8 is practical, realistic and intelligent - sounds like the nature and true spirit of The Horse, doesn't it?

Will you make 2015 a year to be remembered?

 

Let's make it an incredible year well worth remembering in years to come, for us and our horses!

My Horse is a parcelmouth!

"How many languages do you speak?"

I first asked the question 'How do horses know what we want and mean them to do?' when I was 14 and taking riding lessons.  It amazed me then, and still today, how a horse understood that when I slightly moved one of my legs back a bit the horse knew it meant to canter. It blew my mind away.

The awe I felt then (and still remember feeling 35 years on) hasn't died with age, years or experience.  Thank goodness!

This weekend a friend and I spent time lunging our respective horses and coaching ourselves through it. I was explaining how Grace understands two different "languages on the lunge".  First is the more 'traditional BHS language of whip, triangle position and tone of voice'.  The second language is the Parelli language of 'chi, no voice, levels of asking and lots of hind quarter yields', (as examples). 

A 'parcelmouth' speaks snake!

Having decided to use the BHS approach with Grace on Sunday, the significance of having a choice of which language to use when working with her, and what I was therefore saying, was clear: Grace is multi-lingual! 

To me it is pretty impressive that horses can retain and recognise two different languages, when used separately or in combination,  and not appear to get confused.  As a contrast I used to speak fluent French and Spanish in my teens and twenties.  Nowadays, I get my tongue tied and end up saying things that I don't even think are legitimate words, and can't remember if they're French or Spanish!  (To think my mum had her heart set on my being a tri-lingual interpreter in Brussels for a living)! 

What's even more great about the language of lunging is that you are only limited by your imagination.

I shared with my friend how my horses and I have been developing our fluency levels in both languages:

Step 1 : Was to find the voice commands and tone of voice I would use consistently, for signalling faster, slower etc

Step 2: Was to coordinate voice and whip so that the horses will respond off either

Step 3: Was to rely less on voice and whip and to substitute both with my body language and how to use both it and the space between me and the horse with differing effects

Step 4: Was to introduce breath based commands - taking a few lessons from Jenny Rolfe and others who connect with their horse through breath control - inhalations and exhalations

This is the Step where Grace and I have currently reached.

 Step 5:  Will be to move from breath commands to intention.  Meaning I want to start changing my horses gait by thinking it - nothing more! No voice, body, whip, back up!  To just send out the intention of walk, trot, halt etc.

Step 6:  Will be..... I don't know yet!  When we get to step 5 maybe step 6 will emerge..... that's what I mean by we are limited only by our imagination.

As most of us Harry Potter fans will know - being able to speak parseltongue makes you a parcelmouth which although normally entails lots of hissing like sounds, absent from my horses most of the time thank goodness, working with them does feel a kin to magic and wizardry!

I'm not sure if my carrot stick or lunge whip is quite as potent as Hermione's wand but I am convinced that horses are bright, quick to learn and fluent translators.  All we have to do is communicate clearly, be it in one or two tongues and our horse will compute and conform. 

It has me spell bound every time!

 

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

 

- Albert Einstein

Who makes up this shit?

Why do we do the things we do with our horses?

Who is to say if it's 'this way or that way'?

I had to laugh at myself this morning.  There I was doing what I do each morning, grooming Grace and each morning brushing her mane over onto her right side - you know; as we all do cause that's where manes sit....

As soon as Ive brushed it over and gently given it a push in that direction with my hand (for good order), Grace shakes her neck and her mane splits; half on one side half on the other.  This happens EVERY day!

This morning for some reason, instead of feeling a twinge of frustration I found myself (or maybe it was Grace sending me her thoughts) stepping back and  thinking "why change nature Deb?"  Seriously why?  What possible problem is it causing to have her mane fall wherever it wants to?  I tried to answer thinking 'well for shows it needs to be on one side'.  Then I remembered that for shows her mane would be plaited so that's irrelevant. There and then I couldn't come up with another reason, other than 'everyone knows that's how it should be' and sensing that somehow the BHS or the Army are to blame! 

Obvious it may be to us humans, but it sure isn't obvious to everyone!  Horses certainly don't seem to have had the email as Essy's mane does exactly the same (taken this morning also).

Thinking about the 'obvious' left me wondering in what other ways we try to change nature without there being any valid or current reason? When did we last stop to think 'why do I do this and is it still relevant'?

Maybe when there is a life saving reason for all manes to fall in one direction then our horse's manes will comply.  Until then, like my own fringe it will land where it falls and I will accept it, knowing at least that's one less thing to fret about.