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!

Are Horses Intuitive?

A 'timely' Bank Holiday chat!

I spent time tonight, with a fellow livery hand grazing our horses enjoying the last rays of a balmy august evening, the sun setting in a dusky pink surround.

Out of the blue she commented on how "happy" she thought her horse was. Not that she believed he was normally unhappy, "but" she went on to explain it "wasn't a look, or anything in particular it was just a feeling... a sense that at this moment in his life he was particularly content".

I was struck with the timeliness of her words given that I've spent time today considering if horses are intuitive. Now, here was a lady explaining her own intuition at work.

Maybe that's how it works this intuition thing - we simply get a sense about someone, something, or a place that informs us - for no reason other than we believe it to be the case, with or without evidence to back it up. When we get that sense it sits right, it feels right, it resonates as true and we speak it as if it is so. That is intuition at work.

Are horses capable of a similar process? Why ever not? Our dogs wait at home by the front door apparently sensing when we are about to return. Cats are renown for sensing our negative emotion and absorbing it to help relieve our emotional pain.  So why on earth couldn't a domesticated horse, whose life is so entwined with ours and who is so 'plugged into nature' - not possess similar intuitive ability?

Do horses have hunches?  I'm not the expert. I am sure they sense our 'intention'; they know if someone's intent is positive, loving, helpful or not as they approach!  They seem to know when we are there to help them - if tied up in a fence line, snarled in a rug strap, or in physical pain.

They know when to be careful, even slow moving and gentle around young children, or the elderly.  Even the arrival of a puppy or kitten on a yard can bring out the 'delicate side' of a strapping warm blood!

So how do we explain an apparent change in character of a normally flighty, spooky horse into one calm enough to carry a 3 year child?

I'm sure there are some who would suggest horses are creatures of great observation, nothing more than that.  I would agree with that view point, as any prey animal will need strong powers of observation to survive. I don't subscribe to it being the whole story though - although who is to say that intuition is nothing more than 'high' powers of observation? 

Essy 2010

I'm not advocating that horse intuition is something ethereal or mystical.

On the one hand I think that because they operate with a wonderful simplicity, being present, living moment to moment and not worrying about later today, or next week, does help them to pick up on vibes, energy or whatever it is that informs intuition, being it is a very in the moment event.

Being in such a consistent space, responding to what's in front of them now, must free up mental capacity leaving space for intuitive skills to develop.  I suspect this is why so many of us (unlike our horses) are so out of touch with our intuition - having comparatively less 'free mental disc space' in our brains.

Surely intuition in a horse is no less probable than the phenomena of deaf or blind people reporting heightened acuity in other functioning senses, or elephants sensing water through vibrations in their feet.

Up to date research has now proved that human thoughts can be measured and are known to have a physical 'strength' - tangible and quantifiable.  Therefore it seems that pretty much any living organism (including plants) sense vibrational energy in words, thoughts and intent.

Given that all 'things' are actually moving and vibrating (see movie What the Bleep) with more space in them than actual matter - it's no big stretch of the imagination to consider horses pick up on all these vibrations and use their intuition to respond.

We too, have the same ability (dormant or active) if we want to see beyond the obvious and look at the spaces between the notes!

"Simples"... Right?