Meditations on Equestrian Art

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

In Search Of Meaning

 

It has been an uncountable number of days, weeks, and months since my last blog post. How does one go on as only a shred of what one used to be? I am whole in myself, and yet feel less than I was when Myrnah was part of my life. I find myself questioning, am I still relevant to the conversation of these blog posts? You don’t need to answer that, I am not searching for reassurance, I am searching for the meaning of my moments threaded together.

 

Without Myrnah to bounce ideas off of, who am I to share as I did before?

 

I certainly have continued in other ways, sharing tea times and videos with my boys Ari, Atlas and Occasio. They still have my back and guide my learning and I am beyond grateful, yet still I search.

 

What do I have for all of you who might read my words? Perhaps I still have a filter to offer from which to see through. A filter that Myrnah helped me shape that lives beyond her physical lifespan.  

 

We all are offered up a plethora of information to gather at every turn. A sea of things we think perhaps we should know, understand, encompass and act on. If Myrnah taught me anything it was that nothing is as complicated as you think it is. It can be if you want it to be, but it really doesn’t need to be.

 

When I look at life and all its natural excess of information through the lens Myrnah helped me curate, everything makes more sense than it might otherwise, so perhaps it is time I picked up my writing again and shared what has helped me.

 

The book, the one I mentioned writing for years and years, has finally made its way to completion, found its home to be published with Trafalgar Square Publishing, and is due for release in November of 2024. I will not share the inner workings of its pages with you all yet. Instead, I will let the sweet anticipation of its reality sit. A promise of greater clarity both looking back in time and a shining light forward, clarity of what can be between horse and human.

 

This post is a tip of the hat toward life in all its paradoxes, and horse training for all of us who find meaning in life through that lens.

 

We are all herd creatures, we long for community and connection. Also, every one of us is unique and different in a million complex ways.  We struggle to define terms like community and connection with horses in ways that satisfy everyone’s unique perspective and live within the paradox of wondering if it matters while feeling certain that it does.

My specialty is in the study of freedom, in a world where horses and humans may only feel free in brief and temporary ways. We long for it, yet perhaps when faced with freedom it feels as much overwhelming as it is wanted.

 

There is no world of community where my freedom does not brush up against someone else’s freedom and then which needs and desires win out?

 

I want to be close to my horse, feel the fur in my fingers, ride like the wind feeling the bunching of muscles under my thighs and let the ground pass behind us like a forgotten dream. That description is about me and my unique being wanting what it wants, but my being wants community and connection with the horse more than it wants anything else.

 

The herd creature in me wants the horse to want what I want, but this is where my freedom brushes against theirs.

 

“I want to be close to my horse.” My horse will only want that too if past experiences in that vein yielded feelings of being alive, not overwhelmed.

 

“I want to feel the fur in my fingers.” My horse will only want that too if their nerve endings celebrated the contact as mine did.

 

“I want to ride like the wind feeling the bunching of muscles under my thighs and let the ground pass behind us like a forgotten dream.” My horse will only want that if it can relate the experience to a pattern of familiarity that has in the past led to increasing vitality.

 

How I behave today will shape the things my horse wants to do with me tomorrow. It is that simple.

 

Freedom is the ability to make choices one wants to make, but where does the freedom of oneself collide with the freedom of someone else’s self?

 

This is what I study and this is where I am eternally grateful to Myrnah for the lens she helped me form to answer these paradoxical questions confronting all of us, horse and human alike.

 

We are all perpetually gathering information through our five senses. Even as you read this through your eyes, you may feel some of it through your inner physicality and perhaps link it back to the smell of that wind whipping past you under a fast horse. We are physical beings gathering information, linking it to memories and using our reasoning to sort through the information. Both horses and humans do this.

 

If it feels overwhelming, you may not finish reading this page and that is ok too. If it doesn’t tickle your sensory system at least a little you probably have not even made it this far through the words.

 

We seek meaning through feelings. If the feelings are too much we abandon them and shift to something that isn’t too much for our system. Or perhaps we fight against the part of our community that seems to be inflicting that overwhelm on our system. If the feelings are not enough we seek out something more dramatic or entertaining to feel something. Horses do this too.

 

I am here to suggest that perhaps we can all support each other in this search for meaning, and it doesn’t need to be as complicated as one might think.

 

You have only two choices with your horse, from moment to moment:

Action or Passivity.

 

Action distracts from the current moment. To give an example, if I jump up and down on the couch next to you as you read this, your sensory system will not be able to fully absorb the information that might come in through these words. This may be a good thing if you find the words overwhelming and you need a reason to put down the computer and attend to something different. This might be a good thing if you find the words underwhelming and you really need something more entertaining to feel alive. If I distract you from what you are doing or feeling I give you support to find something better and forget this moment ever happened. There will be times and places we can do that for our horses and when we do so we will foster the belief in our horses that we are on their team with their best interests at heart.

 

Passivity allows all the feelings to be felt and all the information available to flood in through the senses. If I read my book quietly next to you as you read this blog post I show you we are similar, we are connected, we are community and I value your perspective to feel all the things you choose to focus on. This “matching steps” is the most beautiful form of passivity when we can see someone we value is having an internal experience that is forming into a memory which will educate the nervous system to enjoy future moments like this.

 

There are a million types of Activity and a million types of Passivity, but it isn’t exactly what you do with your friends that builds a bond between you, it is when you do it.

 

Horse trainers around the world will tell you WHAT to do better. I would like to help you know your horse so well you know WHEN to do those things.

 

Do you know your horse well enough to see when their nervous system is overwhelmed or underwhelmed and they could use your action and distraction? Do you know when your horse is feeling all their feelings in a moment of life that is so precious it may never happen again? If so, help them remember that and remember it linked to you.

 

Your freedom to want what you want when you want it is all tangled up in your horse’s freedom to want what they want with equal intensity. This entanglement is the beauty of community and connection, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems. You can train each other through your awareness of activity and passivity to want more of life together. It is that simple.

 

When I want to feel the wind rushing past me, depending on the past experiences of the horses around me, they may or may not want the same thing as me. As my own unique being I can seek out the feelings I crave independently from my horses.

I can also over time shape a relationship with them that may lead to their freedom of choices aligning with my freedom of choices. 

Their fur in my fingers, riding like the wind, feeling the bunching of muscles under my thighs and letting the ground pass behind us like a forgotten dream…

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

Goodbye to Myrnah

The voice echoed in my ears through the phone.

“Elsa, you have to come to the pasture right now.”

 

It was a tone of voice that wasn’t to be questioned, there was no time.

I didn’t know what was wrong, only that my feet were moving to the truck as I replied,

“I am on my way”

 

As I bumped down the long dirt road between my house and the pastures in the valley, I braced myself for what I might find. I calmed my mind, ready for my part in soothing horses or humans or dogs or whatever member of my community I might find there in the kind of desperate chaos that leads to the voice I had heard on the phone.

 

Candace met me at the gate.

“It’s Myrnah, she is gone.”

 

My thoughts tumbled around each other, where had Myrnah gone to? Had she gone on a walk about? I was missing something here, this tone of voice readied me for blood and pain and chaos and vets and so many reasons to hold steady as a rock for everyone I loved… but there was none of that.

 

As we came around the corner of the shed there was Myrnah, but not Myrnah.

 

There wasn’t a mark on her, the wisps of hay on the ground lay perfectly around her where they had fallen gently over weeks and months of normal wintertime living. Myrnah evidently had died suddenly, simply falling over where she stood.

 

Without drama or chaos, from life to death in a heartbeat.

 

The day before I had spent hours with her, grooming her fur and marveling at the bubble of contentment that could hold us in its arms so effortlessly. We were happy and then the next day she was gone.

 

Cleo and Azul were eating hay in the other shed, clearly they had said their goodbyes to Myrnah already and had moved on to supper. Cleo allowed me to hug her massive neck fiercely as I cried those undeniable tears of disbelief. The steady calming rhythm of her chewing a thread of reality for me to focus on.

 

The hours, days and honestly weeks that followed were a blur for me. I felt I must carry on with all the practical aspects of life with as much grace as Myrnah had. I must follow her example living in the moment, each moment as it was given to me.

 

Life and death are simple, the feelings that weave us together are not.

I said goodbye to my Mother last May, my beautiful shadow of a dog Breeze in June, my life long horse partner Zohari in September and now Myrnah, the mare that changed my entire life, in February.

 

I felt empty without them. I also felt stretched beyond anything I had ever been as I held their essences within me. I carry forward their memories, their stories, their beauty. This isn’t a choice, this is simply reality.

 

I am not alone in this. I know many of you reading this carry the grief with me. I know you all will help me carry Myrnah’s stories forward into the world.

 

I also have my horses, here for me in the gritty hour by hour process of learning to live on.

Ari is a rock, squaring his hooves and leaning into me as I lean into him. No matter how many times a night I leave my bed to find him and whisper my fingers through his fur for reassurance, he is there for me. His big deep breaths remind me to breathe myself; his soft nicker lets me know we are in this together.

Atlas too shares his breath with me, as time and again his nose reaches out. He isn’t brave like Ari, but he is kinder than all of us put together. Atlas will give everything he has for his friends, and when he has nothing left to give he will dig deeper and give anyway.

Occasio reminds us all to laugh, because laughter is a feeling too. Occasio lives to feel his senses in concert with the world around him. When I am not sure I can bear to feel anything more, Occasio lends me his sense of the world and together with him I feel things as he does.

Raam…

Raam was my mother’s horse and now he is here with me.

Raam knew Breeze well as he shadowed us all.

Raam was Zohari’s best friend for 22 years before Zohari left us.

Raam was Myrnah’s emotional twin in the herd for all of her time here on San Juan Island.

 

Together Raam and I hold these memories.

 

Together Raam and I now travel the woods and the hills we knew with them.

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

The Cause Of Stress

 

This summer as I have watched my bachelor band of horses turned out on pasture I have been mulling over the causes of stress.

 

I know that stress causes horses to act in self-defense and that self-defense will show as Fight, Flight, and Freeze.

 

But what causes the stress in the first place?

 

I know when horses act in these self-defensive ways, friends dislike it and respond with their own self-defensive actions.

 

In order for herd life to become good again, someone has to be the “bigger horse”, and respond to the situation instead of reacting. By this I mean they need to find a way to lower their own stress enough to respond in community-oriented ways, such as, Play, Yield and Think.

 

As soon as one horse invests in the community with enough Play, Yield, and Think actions, the rest of the herd can join the good behavior and for that moment stress goes down and the entire herd can rest and enjoy that togetherness.

 

Lately, I have felt the strain of being the “bigger horse” or the “bigger human” in my case.

 

I watch the herd, watch for the horse with the most reactiveness (Fight, Flight, and Freeze), causing stress for the rest of their herd mates. I step in and spend hours every day doing the things I know will help the stressed horse feel better, so they can then pass it on and help everyone else feel better.

 

But for me the stress of feeling like I can never do enough is draining.

 

Last week I felt like I had gotten things to a good place with Atlas when I noticed Ari needed some help and Occasio was running a close second in overreactions and obvious stress.

However, before I could make time to do the work I knew would help, something had overwhelmed Occasio and he bolted around the paddock like an overweight ping pong ball, tearing down hot wire, pulling wood posts out of the ground on both sides of the paddock, and then jumping two more sets of simple electric wire fences before freezing at the far bottom corner of the field, terrified to do anything other than wait for someone to come rescue him.

 

I was glad for the far fence line I put in with care this spring. Tall, tight, elasticized, and safe Finishline Fencing that did finally stop Occasio’s mad dash long enough for me to show up and give him the help he needed.

 

Was it a bee sting or a fly bite that raised Occasio’s stress so dramatically?

 

Did Atlas overcorrect Occasio’s bad behavior to set off that chain of events? (I don’t think so as they were the best of friends with no hint of apprehension when I put them back together.)

 

Did Occasio touch the electric wire on purpose with his nose out of boredom and then overreact when it hurt more than he expected? (Yes, I have seen him do that, so it is possible).

 

Did Occasio get his tail caught in the fence and then tear it all down because the wire was chasing him? (This feels like the most likely explanation, but it is still only a guess).

 

I have no idea what happened because I wasn’t there when it did.

 

All I can do in a situation like this is pick up the pieces, rebuild the fences, and keep Occasio in the solid metal enclosure of the round pen he can’t destroy for long enough to allow his stress levels go down.

 

In the state he was in after the event, it looks likely he would tear down more fences with the slightest provocation. My job always is to keep him safe from his own bad decisions until he is in a state of mind to make better ones.

 

When I get back in the morning the round pen is covered edge to edge in a million tiny piles of manure. Occasio is an emotional wreck, still jumping out of his skin at every sound and Atlas, who is keeping him company, is coping with his friend’s self-defense mechanisms by ignoring them.

Atlas is the master of freeze, if he can’t do anything about it, just pretend it isn’t there for as long as possible. This is a pretty good self-defense mechanism and I like that it doesn’t seem as destructive as other options he might choose.

 

The surest way I know to help a horse out of stress is to alternate walking with resting, a LOT of walking and resting.

 

I offer Occasio the halter and he gratefully nuzzles his nose into it. He has learned a halter is helpful when he is wearing one with a responsible person attached to the other end, a person who can make good decisions, a person he can trust.

 

With a wiggle of my fingers in Atlas’s direction I get him moving at a steady, rhythmic pace and Occasio follows, tucking his nose in Atlas’s tail while I walk beside them both.

We do 20-30 minutes of walking until I hear them both starting to breathe better, then I take the halter off of Occasio and leave them to rest while I go take care of other chores.

 

I come back, offer the halter to Occasio again and we repeat the process.

 

Four hours of walking the first day after the event and Occasio is settled enough to be allowed out in the big pasture with Ari where he can spook or startle and have a long way to go before he hits a fence he might tear down.

 

Three and a half hours of walking the second day leaves me confident enough to let him spend some time free with Atlas in the smaller pasture too.

 

I am cautiously pleased we sorted out the stress from such a big event in only two days and I turn my attention to other things that need doing.

 

A few days later, Occasio’s stress has risen again and I have not had time to help him. The wind picks up and Occasio decides the leaves moving in the trees are now far too frightening and he can’t leave the bottom of the pasture anymore. Ari, Raam, and Zohari can all walk around the pond to find shade and get to the water, but Occasio just stands at the bottom fence line calling mournfully for his friends to come back.

They do come back, and then leave him again and still he will not follow. I watch as I do other things, hoping Occasio will become brave and push through his fear, but after it has been almost 24 hours without water I relent and go offer him the halter to bring him up past the trees to the water trough where he gratefully drinks.

 

I am glad I can help, but I have to ponder, what is the underlying cause of so much stress that sets off the cascading set of bad choices that leads to more and more stress?

 

This past week I have had many hours to think about it as we walk and walk and walk together.

 

The walking is effective when I do it and I see Occasio getting braver, taking care of himself, and making good choices. There are also days I just cannot make the time and then I can see the difference. The less walking we do the more reactive he gets and the less his friends want to interact with him. Then I see the downward spiral into self-defense and over reaction.

 

If I could figure out why this happens, maybe I could help Occasio help himself instead of having to show up for him every day?

 

The conclusion I have come to is this:

 

The cause of stress is powerlessness.

 

When a horse believes life is going to get uncomfortable and there is nothing they can do about it – stress goes up.

 

When stress goes up the body instinctively defends itself with Fight, Flight, or Freeze. Survival reactions.

 

Often these survival reactions alienate companions who have the power to help.

 

Personal power for a horse is the ability to think through a problem and make choices that ease discomfort without alienating friends. This means using Play, Yield, and Think to solve problems.

 

Trust in friends and leaders gives that power to someone else to think for you and solve problems to ease discomfort.

 

If the friends you trust don’t want to help, or can’t, and you feel powerless to solve discomfort… all that is left is self-defense, and that I believe is the cause of stress.

 

The more stress a horse feels, the worse they behave, and the worse they behave the more stress they feel, it can be a very difficult cycle to reverse.

 

When you are born like Occasio was, acutely oversensitive and athletic, with incredibly fast short-twitch reaction muscles, then it is possible a shadow on the ground can catch the eye by surprise, causing fear and flight that results in full body impact with another horse. When that horse also acts in self-defense by fighting back and biting or kicking Occasio hard, this chain of events leads Occasio to feelings of powerlessness.

Occasio simply lacks the self-control it takes to think first and act in a community minded way to feel better, and it is this lack of self-control (and frankly, immaturity) that makes him feel powerless. It is this powerlessness that raises his stress enough that the smallest trigger sends him into self-defense and perpetuates the cycle.

 

Life presents a problem, something that will cause discomfort for a horse.

 

The horse uses its brain to come up with an action to solve for comfort.

 

If the horse can solve for comfort for both self and community, stress goes down, thinking gets clearer, learning gets faster and harmony comes sooner.

 

If the horse reacts to the problem solving only for self-comfort, community bonds get weaker. When community bonds become fragile enough, that becomes a new problem to solve.

 

The more problems a horse faces, the more tired or overwhelmed it becomes and the more likely it becomes it will solve for self-comfort without any consideration for community comfort.

 

The opposite of powerlessness is shared power.

 

Shared power is the solution to stress.

 

If a horse can help themselves and their community in solving a problem (this means solving a problem using Think, Yield, and Play), their stress goes down and they become a better member of the community and they are more likely to get help from their community at a future time when perhaps they feel overwhelmed.

 

How is this different from codependency or giving power away which can create higher stress?

 

Giving power away is when horses discover the only way to feel better is to stop thinking and freeze, letting someone else make decisions for them. This is fine as long as the decision maker has a low stress level and makes good community minded decisions. It is incredibly destructive when the decision maker becomes stressed and starts solving all problems with Fight, Flight, or Freeze.

 

Codependency is where a horse discovers the only way to feel better is to cause someone else to feel better first. Then they start solving every problem for community comfort at the expense of their own comfort. Eventually the dependency will leave the individual stranded without resources and that will become a problem of its own.

 

Now we have come full circle.

 

Remember I said: “But the stress for me of feeling like I can never do enough is draining.”

 

This shows my codependency with my bachelor band of horses. I am solving for their comfort at the expense of my own comfort. It works as long as life doesn’t throw us too many problems in a row and I feel like I can keep up. Keeping them comfortable so that I can be more comfortable.

 

This past week there were too many problems to solve and the imbalance was made obvious.

 

If I am going to solve for both community comfort and personal comfort, I might need to take some of the responsibilities off of my plate.

 

If I really think Occasio is going to tear down the fences perhaps he needs to move to a safer place. If I really think the stallions are going to fight it is better to not put them in the same paddock that week (I did get this one right).

 

I am learning I cannot solve all the day’s problems, every day.

 

I can solve a few of them, and I need to keep the balance of solving for personal comfort as well as community comfort if I want my own stress to stay at a level that makes me the best part of the community I am capable of being.

 

Shared power is the solution.

 

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

 

Idealism versus Reality

As I walk through the paddock, Atlas’ eyes track my patterns. I notice how soft the muscles through his face are now. Those deep dark eyes a physical expression of the quote, “still waters run deep.”

 

Atlas is not so still anymore though; he is less and less still every day. As if the emotions he feels are slowly being allowed to surface. For all of us mere mortals who live with him, we need his emotions to show so we can adjust our behavior appropriately as his friend and companion.

So far my work with Atlas, understanding the needs of a horse from a deeply traumatized background, has led me to some distinct conclusions.

 

1. The quality of the three Fs (friends, freedom and forage) has huge impact on a horse’s ability to heal.

 

2. Friends and Freedom give a horse circumstances where exercise naturally occurs. If those two factors are limited, adding rhythmic movement to a horse’s daily life dramatically improves their ability to heal.

 

3. If a horse has learned to hide their emotions from past traumatic experiences, mistakes in action around them (re-triggering trauma) becomes inevitable.

 

4. Re-triggered trauma raises the current stress levels dramatically, and it will take time for that stress to come back down to functional levels.

 

5. Even after stress has come down to functional levels, trust will need to be rebuilt around the actions that triggered the high stress state.

 

6. The best way to rebuild trust is extreme predictability.

 

7. Challenge (anything that causes a horse to think and adapt) needs to have more predictability. Reward (anything that reliably triggers better feeling in the horse) needs to have more variety.

 

8. The correct balance between challenge and reward is what helps the horse show their emotions appropriately instead of hiding their emotions until an explosion of action occurs.

 

I write these eight points down for you because I feel some regret that I didn’t know these points sooner for Atlas’s benefit. I do my best for him with what I know, and then, when I have learned more everything goes better.

 

In my idealism at the beginning of this project I put Ari and Atlas together too soon. Two stallions with hugely different temperaments from hugely different backgrounds in a space that was likely too small for all those differences. My idealism about friends and freedom led to the reality of fight and injury and broken trust.

 

Reality led me to adapt. Settling Atlas with a quieter undemanding friend in Zohari. While settling Ari with a more suitable companion in Occasio.

Idealism gave me hope that my herds of two had enough space to move together that they could take care of their exercise needs. Reality showed me this was only true for Ari and Occasio.

Reality showed me that Atlas’ stress levels and corresponding reactions to the environment (freeze and explode and freeze again) put him in a downward spiral of re-triggering trauma, perpetual and awful to watch.

 

Reality led me to step in with some clear boundaries and consistent exercise routines that broke the downward spiral and allowed Atlas to settle, building trust in everything again.

 

Idealism led me to believe I could read Atlas’ body language well enough to touch the edges of his comfort zone and stretch it without pushing him to react in fight or flight, perpetually strengthening his trust in my decision making.

 

Reality showed me that Atlas often hides how he feels too deeply, I push too far at the edge of his comfort zone, trust is broken, and much more time than I imagined is needed to repair that broken trust.

 

Idealism led me to think I could apologize to Atlas and try again. Do all my actions with better feel and timing the second or third or fourth time I tried them… again.

 

Reality showed me that I could not read Atlas as well as I thought I could and was making more mistakes than I was taking correct actions. Breaking more trust than I was building.

Reality led me to read more, study more and ultimately understand the necessary balance between the predictability of challenge and the variety of reward.

 

Idealism led me to think persistence in trying harder to do the right things around Atlas would eventually win him over and let his past trauma melt away.

 

Reality led me to understand the idealism of a pure Freedom Based Training® approach was probably only possible with this traumatized horse if the friends, freedom and forage equation was in the right balance at the start, and I truly felt I had all the time in the world.

 

Idealism still dances in and out of my every day. It is the thing that keeps the sparkle in my eye and the inspiration in my work.

Reality is the force that keeps me coming back to the drawing board to learn more.

 

The reality with Atlas is settling into a beautiful rhythm in the last few weeks, and I think I have finally completely accepted I need a few more tools to help him manage the fight and flight he feels when I get my part of the dance wrong. Too much too soon is not something that I can successfully avoid with this horse, so instead I will embrace it.

 

I approach him exactly the same way every day, several times a day. As I work through the steps stretching the edge of Atlas’s comfort zone, I watch carefully to see if I can read his emotions accurately and predict when he will become overwhelmed and take flight from me.

 

Some days I do not read him correctly and some action of mine sends him into flight. We take that opportunity to make our way to the round pen that is part of his paddock and let him exercise at the walk or the jog for twenty or thirty minutes.

 

Atlas needs consistency of challenge in his life. Hidden emotions, leading to miscommunication with humans, leading to flight, always leads to time exercising. Slowly and gradually moving in a rhythm to let that spike in stress work out of his system. If I need a flag and a round pen to support that for Atlas, I will use those for him.

At least once every hour, at a moment when Atlas is particularly comfortable in his own skin I add the reward of a handful of sunflower seeds in a pan. Intensifying the rewards of working with me allows me to add more variety to reward. Sometimes I sit with him while he eats, sometimes I stand, sometimes I sing, sometimes I lie on the ground, sometimes I watch him, sometimes I watch the environment, sometimes the pan is up high on a box, sometimes the pan is down low in a hole in the ground, sometimes the pan is near me, sometime it is far from me. When you have a food reward that is strong enough you can add variety in how the horse experiences it.

 

This food reward was not possible in Atlas’ first year because he refused to trust eating anything other than hay. For the first year I struggled with my idealism of using flow and harmony as the only reward with Atlas. This has worked well with most horses, but Atlas’ past trauma led me to getting it wrong as often as I got it right. Varieties of flow and harmony only work if you choose the right places and the right amounts of time to be in harmony, as soon as you do it too long or in the wrong place it becomes a subtle form of punishment instead of the reward intended. Adding food to our patterns this year with an understanding of successful variations has helped Atlas greatly!

 

Some days I do read Atlas correctly all day and I am successful in staying under that threshold of fight or flight, and I can walk away from the conversation with him at a high point of comfort and good feeling in under an hour every time, so he can go eat some hay in peace and freedom before his stomach gets too empty.

On a day like that I feel I am working the project as I intended. My idealism of Freedom Based Training® intact!

 

The downfall of this I find, is how many days Atlas goes without exercise. The more days he has gone without exercise the more hidden his emotions become, the harder time I have reading him and more likely it becomes that I will make mistakes in my feel and timing.

 

Instead of holding too tightly to my idealism of Freedom Based Training® and then regressing back to the place of making mistakes, I will choose to push the edges of the comfort zone past the safety zone on purpose, to see how much Atlas will stretch, and how well I can read exactly where the breaking point will be? If I run my hand down his neck to the shoulder and see him freeze, does stroking his shoulder three more times before I retreat back to the neck cause him to run or cause him to think and settle? Can I guess which one it is going to be?

 

If I do too much Atlas will go to flight, and then we can do the exercise he seems to need for his mental health, so that tomorrow will be easier.

 

If I progressively and consistently build up to what I think is too much for Atlas, but he chooses to drop his head, twitch his ears, and take a deep breath, that is the edge of the comfort zone successfully stretched. Perhaps on a day like that we can skip the exercise and just enjoy being together with a little less intensity.

 

Variety of rewards, consistency of challenge.

This seems to be the key to helping a horse from a traumatic history heal and connect with others again.

 

I believe the foundation for progress is always going to be the three good Fs in balance, Friends, Freedom and Forage. When we can’t get that balance right we may need to add other things for mental and physical health.

 

When you get the foundation right then you can play with idealism.

 

Atlas is teaching me the reality of working from a less than perfect foundation, to build forward into a better life.

 

May the learning continue! I am sure Atlas still has much to teach us all!

 

Hooves and Heartbeats,
Elsa

TamingWild.com

 

 

 

 

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

 

Emotional Sit-Ups

 

This week Atlas and I had yet another heartbreaking backslide in progress.

 

There were long sleepless nights spent beating myself up for not seeing it coming, for not taking the right actions to support Atlas, for feeling like I had failed him yet again.

 

As much as I do my best to remember this is a learning process and in learning there are mistakes that we then learn from, I am still so very sad when I see a horse overwhelmed by stress.

 

I retrace my steps a million times in my mind trying to determine what I might have done differently that would have supported that horse to feel okay instead of overwhelmed.

 

This particular week the weather got a great deal colder and I didn’t realize that would be a problem. Then, one morning when I was sitting next to Atlas my mother walked by in the woods above us and she and I had a casual conversation. During the conversation and as she walked away, I noticed all of Atlas’ muscles locked up in extreme freeze as he looked at the environment in a state of high alert. We worked for a while longer (mostly distance work of being together in harmony) and I thought the tension had melted away.

Then my daughter came by and I walked over to the far fence to chat with her. As she and I were laughing and talking Atlas started pacing the far fence line from us in extreme agitation like he couldn’t get far enough away from us (something he has never done before).

When my daughter left I closed the round pen gate to give him some structure and moved to the center to sit down, asking Atlas to walk around (instead of pacing one side) hoping some time in rhythmic movement while I was quiet and still would settle him as it has in the past. This has been a daily practice for us to help him have some healthy physical movement that he lacks living without a herd to move him and to help wear his hooves down since I am not able to trim them yet.

 

Instead of walking calmly off as he usually does, Atlas started pinning his ears at me and getting closer in an agitated, aggressive looking way. I didn’t feel directly in danger but I thought it was going that direction if I didn’t do something proactive soon.

My paddocks are just not big enough for the kind of distance Atlas wanted in the state of stress he felt in that moment… so instead of stepping outside the paddock as I would have done if I felt I had unlimited time, I chose a small amount of dominance, moving abruptly to send him into trot every time he pinned his ears at me.

Within a half an hour the ear pinning had stopped, but even as we settled back into flow and harmony, Atlas would no longer let me get within a horse length from him. No matter how tactfully I tried, he would bolt away from me if I stepped within his personal bubble… that behavior continued for a couple of days and I felt heartbroken that we were in this place of deep mistrust yet again.
In hindsight I wish I had moved my conversation with my daughter farther away the moment I saw the pacing begin, and when I came back I wish I had taken 10 minutes to work at a distance from Atlas outside the pen (maybe even from the woods above where my mother had been earlier) before going in and suggesting he move his feet with consistency and rhythm to walk that stress off. I don’t think I did things completely wrong… it was just a little too much too soon on top of stacking triggers for Atlas and I think I could have handled it with more grace to begin with.

 

We live and we learn, and this week Atlas helped me make some mistakes to learn from.

 

In hindsight, in this particular week with Atlas, I was able to pinpoint three specific triggers: the cold, the conversation with my mother standing in an unusual place outside the paddock, and then the conversation with my daughter closer to Atlas than he was comfortable with. However, there were probably more triggers I do not know about. It is rarely one thing that causes a backslide, instead it is many.

 

I can’t know if perhaps:

• A fox ran through the paddock scaring Atlas just before I arrived
• Atlas tweaked his back getting up from a nap and he was in pain
• Atlas ate something funny in his hay and his stomach hurt
• There was a smell in the air or a noise on the wind that reminded him of a past event that was traumatic for him

 

There will always be too many factors for us to know exactly why our horses feel overwhelmed by stress. The good news is, we don’t need to know why to be able to help.

When the horse is overwhelmed, it has an automatic reaction to go to fight or flight or freeze. My job is to find the edge of that reaction and work on the tolerable side of the issue where the horse is capable of responding in a functional way (thinking, yielding or playing).

 

The more repetitions we have of positive response to stimulus around the horse, the stronger the emotional “muscles” get and the less likely the horse is to feel overwhelmed in future situations that are similar.

 

I refer to this exercise as “Emotional Sit-ups”.
As humans we like to know why a horse feels overwhelmed, but I encourage everyone (including myself) to not worry about it too much. Simply take into account the factors you can see that overwhelm your horse, break them down into smaller sections and see if you can work under the threshold of being overwhelmed so your horse can practice as many good responses as possible.

 

I find the analogy of physical work to emotional work helps me be patient with the process. Emotional sit-ups, just like physical sit-ups can be exhausting and the horse can only do so many in a session before they need to rest and recover for the next session where we can start again with new strength.

 

My job as a trainer is to read the probabilities: is this going to get better or is this going to get worse?

 

How much practice can we functionally handle, staying within the realm of positive responses?

My job as a teacher is to admit I do not always get it right. I too stumble, fall, scrape my emotional knees and feel overwhelmed. Then I pick myself up and wipe off the coating of shame I feel after a fall, after causing overwhelm in my horse, or after failing to see the environment was becoming overwhelming. I learn from the experience and then do better next time.

 

For Atlas and I, when we fall down and make mistakes and get overwhelmed, we build resilience together from the experience.

 

When we get the feel and timing just right for the perfect sets of  “emotional sit-ups”, we get stronger and more confident so that we can keep our feet and navigate the world as it comes at us, no matter what happens.

 

Part of me hopes we get so strong we never experience a backslide of progress ever again. Part of me knows it is the balance of successes and mistakes that keeps life interesting, so we will simply take it all as it comes.

 

If any of you are curious to see this concept of “emotional sit-ups” in action, I have posted a video on Patreon this week of Atlas and I practicing.

https://www.patreon.com/tamingwild

 

Here is to living and learning, resilience and strength.

 

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com

 

 

 

 

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

 

Discovering Interests

From my early childhood of galloping trails and jumping jumps with wild abandon, to my intense study of dressage and biomechanics of horse and human in my early adult life.

 

From my study of the equine mind and motivation patterns in “Natural Horsemanship” style training to my later development of Freedom Based Training®.

 

From the filming of “Taming Wild: A Girl and a Mustang” as a challenge to myself to think outside the boxes of horse training I understood, to later challenging myself again to cross a country with rescued horses while filming “Taming Wild: Pura Vida”.

 

Now I am at home in the present moment filming the third movie, “Taming Wild: Evolution” looking even deeper for answers.

 

I ask myself often, why do I do this?

 

What is my motivation to show up day after day and explore the realms of what is possible in the company of a horse?

 

There are many things we could fill our time with, yet for some of us everything feels better in the company of a horse.

My “why” reaches back to the childhood awe I felt when I realized a horse could lend me their strength and speed when I was riding, so that I too became stronger and faster like the horse whose grace I was borrowing.

 

Now, as an adult, I still ride but it isn’t the ultimate goal of being with horses for me anymore.

 

My ultimate goal now is the development of diversity in shared enjoyment, horse and human together.

 

If I want to share in the strengths of my horse, what do I offer in return?

 

I like the challenge of asking myself, “can I offer my strengths and skills in a great enough diversity of ways to the horse that they are interested in offering theirs to me in return?”

 

When I opt out of using halters or sticks or fences to control a horse, I also opt out of the dominant boundary setting that many horses appreciate.

 

When food is not something I bring to the horse and it is only one of many environmental options we share, I lose an intensity of power to reward or develop specific behaviors that shape the horse to share my human interests.

 

When freedom becomes the basis for building relationships, the mental agility of horse and human becomes the valued commodity.

This mental agility is what I develop when I take away all the tools and obvious rewards between horse and human.

 

This is why I train horses.

 

My own mental agility is both the challenge and the reward.

 

In reality, I am spending time with horses while they train me.

 

The end result is that we train each other to be better versions of ourselves.

 

The question of relationship starts with a natural community instinct that horses and humans share. Are you interested in the same things I am interested in?

 

At a core level, all of us seek a state of feeling better, however our individual strategies for feeling better vary in style and effectiveness.

 

A horse that seeks boundaries, someone else to tell them what to do or where to be, is a horse that does not know how to direct their own focus in ways that develop better feelings. I enjoy the challenge of keeping that sort of horse company in freedom as they develop skills of focus that make them the sort of partner that doesn’t need boundaries to lean on in the future.

A horse that eats perpetually is a horse that has a very narrow perspective on what might cause better feeling. I enjoy the challenge of keeping that horse company and celebrating every small stretch of their comfort zone that shows them better feelings come from far more opportunities than food.

 

Mental agility happens when the thoughts are collected enough to allow focus to change and move and adjust in the best direction in each moment.

 

What is the best direction for focus? The direction that makes us feel better. The more varieties of focus we have that make us feel better, that we can choose from moment to moment, the more diverse and interesting life becomes.
When a horse focuses on something that makes it feel worse, you will know, because it triggers actions of fight, flight or freeze.

 

When a horse focuses on something that makes it feel better, you will know, because it triggers actions of thinking, yielding and playing.

 

In freedom, a horse can choose what they want to focus on, and sometimes they choose something that feels bad. In those situations, I am happy to be their companion, but I will not be in harmony in any way with the decision to feel worse.

 

In contrast to that, when a horse focuses on something that makes them feel better, I am going to find as many ways as possible to be in harmony with those choices.

 

This is the base on which Freedom Based Training® works.

 

Horses (and humans) crave companionship. We all want friends who are interested in the same things we are interested in.

In freedom sometimes we lack the mental agility or mental collection to make the right choices of focusing on the things that make us feel better together.

 

As a horse trainer in freedom, I have to develop my own mental agility and mental collection first, leading by example, showing the horse that I am with them when they are making good choices.

 

From this foundation, the relationship is all about building variety.

 

How many different ways can we experience the world together and feel better?

 

Matching behavior and matching focus is the obvious reinforcer in Freedom Based Training®. When both horse and human value the same things there is harmony.

 

Horses will work and develop their behaviors to achieve harmony if it is offered the right way. The need for community is built into us all and is a deeply powerful motivator for development.

 

Complementary behavior and focus is where the art of the relationship is developed. Complementary behavior is where we are different from each other, yet still in harmony

 

The horse looks to the right, the human looks to the left. Looking different places, complementary to each other because as a partnership we now know the world is safe in both directions.

 

The human looks at the environment and the horse sinks into self-focus getting a little rest for a moment. Focused in different places, complementary to each other because one is keeping the other safe while the other rests, later the roles may be reversed.

 

The human stands still the horse moves around in a circle at speed, complementary to each other because one is the center point of the action and the other is the action, later the roles may be reversed.

Those are three simple examples, but the variations you might think of are potentially infinite.

 

My point is that, in a relationship you do not need to always be the same as the other to be in harmony. Harmony can be either matching or complementary and both are of value.

 

The key is variety, how many different ways can life be experienced as we seek better feelings together?

 

The discovery of variety is why horses want to play with humans, and humans want to play with horses. We don’t know what is possible until we try it.

 

Life with horses is endlessly diverse, and profoundly simple all at the same time.

 

Today, I feel the awe of those contrasting and yet balancing thoughts.

 

I will never know everything there is to know, but each day I practice I will learn a little more, and my mental collection and agility will become a little stronger.

 

Here is to all the horses who help me develop.

 

Here is to all of you, interested in some of the same things I am interested in.

 

Here is to our community, sometimes matching, sometimes complementary.

 

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com

 

(I have made a video about this subject, titled “Matching Focus, Complementary Focus”. If you are curious for some visual demonstration of the ideas in this blog post, join us at: https://www.patreon.com/tamingwild )

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

 

Pressure Added to Tension = Explosion

 

It has rained and rained and rained and rained since I have been home.

 

Beautiful soft northwest dripping, followed by torrential downpours, followed by living in a cloud, followed by steady relentless streams of water making their way through every part of the living experience.

 

Each sort of rain experienced individually is beautiful, however, when you put them all together in a seemingly endless experience, it leads to a fair amount of tension in the horses.

 

I watched Occasio start to tiptoe around Ari, giving him more space than usual and watching his best friend with care for permission before walking past him to drink at the trough or eat at the hay hut.

 

I watched Atlas get more and more sensitive to noises in the environment, startling and spooking at things that wouldn’t have bothered him a week before.

 

I watched the herd out in the big pasture seem to spread out more than usual across the valley, giving each other more of a buffer against irritating each other.

 

Then the sun came out, the world became the peaceful haven of comfort it had not been in the weeks before and everyone slept. Long deep sleeps of recovery from the tension built up in endless rain.

 

Following the sun and the sleeping, I watched Occasio and Ari eating hay with their noses touching once again, and engaging in the play that looked more fun and natural than the restlessness of the weeks before.

 

I watched Atlas’ ears twitch and follow sounds in interest again instead of leaping out of his skin in the explosive movements of defense seen the week before.

 

I watched the herd in the field gather a little closer together in enjoyment of company.

 

This natural ebb and flow of stress is one that is always changing and will always be changing, and yet as a human with a training plan I sometimes forget I need to adapt along with the environment we live in.

The variable of stress that is most interesting to me right now is the variable of past experience and trauma in a horse’s life.

 

Trauma is any past experience that hardwires a brain to automatically defend itself against others, instead of connecting and collaborating with others.

 

Some horses like Atlas have good reason for the trauma they feel seen in the physical scars of past abuse.

 

Other horses like Occasio are born with such a high natural sensitivity that living what would be a normal life for most horses seems to trigger some degree of emotional trauma. Occasio is a story for another day, but he is an interesting side note on the subject of trauma.

Any degree of stress will predispose a horse to defend instead of connecting, but the interesting thing about a horse with trauma is that an act of defense will often lead to more stress that leads to more defense etcetera… the circle goes on in a devastating pattern.

 

A horse without a history of trauma will defend itself in a state of stress, then it will feel better, stress will go down and connection with friends and the world returns to normal.

This is a profound difference I am learning to respect in my training with Ari and Atlas.

 

With Ari, I am allowed to make mistakes and I am forgiven when I misread the level of stress in a situation. If I blunder into a moment of stress, adding too much pressure to pre-existing tension, Ari might defend himself for a moment with some degree of fight or flight. Then when I take an action to help lower the stress in the situation and re-approach the subject I blundered through so badly before, I am allowed a second chance to get it right.

 

With Atlas, I have to proceed with considerably more care. If the environment we are in is causing tension in Atlas, I must take care that any pressure I add has an outcome of lowering that stress he feels, not pushing him over the edge into fight or flight.

If I get it wrong with Atlas it can sometimes feel like watching a long chain of dominos, one clicking into the next and the next and the next, knocking down that long chain of trust we took months to build.

 

The weather, or the any random factor in the environment might raise my horse’s stress, but depending on their past experience with trauma, my contribution to their experience can feel like a shoulder rub relieving tight muscles, or the careful detaching of wires in a bomb about to explode.

 

The training in a horse/human relationship has two parts to it.

1. Positive development of connection above and beyond defense.
2. The ability to recover from mistakes that trigger defense.

 

When I get my training right, I know exactly how much pressure is acceptable or even helpful to a horse in the natural state of stress they feel. This strengthens the first point of training.

When I make mistakes in training, I learn more about how much stress is too much stress for the horse I am with, and the horse learns how to recover from that feeling of momentarily being overwhelmed, when I have mistakenly added too much pressure to tension. This strengthens the second point in training.

 

In Freedom Based Training®, one of the things we work on is strengthening the horse’s ability to self-soothe using their brain and focus changes.

 

We do this by linking feelings of pressure to thinking.

 

Anything that would cause fight or flight in high doses, will cause thinking in lower doses.

 

The stronger this link becomes between pressure and thinking, the further apart those theoretical trust dominos become for a horse like Atlas.

As we space the emotional dominos farther apart by linking pressure to thinking, hopefully Atlas will be able to handle pressure on tension with more grace, and he will be able to recover from mistakes in the relationship where too much pressure on tension is applied and we perhaps knock one domino of trust over, instead of an entire chain.

 

It is my job to read the situation and strive to be the kind of person my horse wants to connect to.

 

It is also my job to get it wrong sometimes, knock hopefully just one domino of trust over and show my horse it is ok to have a moment and recover from it.

 

We can get it wrong, then re-approach, and then stand that domino of trust up again, stronger this time.

 

As the horse learns to self soothe, and emotionally stabilize themselves, pressure on tension becomes a good thing on the way to feeling better. Instead of a bad thing, diffusing a bomb that might go off in your face.

Now, I simply must pray for grace and the awareness to know when Atlas’ emotional dominos are stacked too close together and proceeding with care is the game. Also knowing when he has the emotional resilience to allow me to be more human, making the occasional mistake.

 

The reality of life will always play a part in this understanding of what is possible between me and the horses. Living in the pacific northwest, the cascades of water all around us are a common factor that I love on most days, while I also acknowledge for all of us that puddle dancing might look a little more like a stoic rain meditation when too many days of it get strung together.

 

Wish me Luck!

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com

(If you would like to be part of the group with access to weekly video updates on the study of all this I talk about here in the blog posts, I encourage you to join us at https://www.patreon.com/tamingwild )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

 

How you feel is more important than what we do

 

After seven weeks of teaching around the world I am home again.

 

The dripping rain falling on evergreens and moss soothes my soul and feeds my mind. My thoughts are swirling with all I have seen and processing so much I have learned.

 

This morning as I woke up to the crunch of footsteps over gravel as the horses walked under my window, I realized, in a nutshell the thing I now understood most deeply is this:

 

How the horse feels is more important than what we do together.

That is the basis for the relationships we build.

 

It sounds simple, but there are immense and fascinating depths to that statement that I study every day.

 

The end goal is that my horses have habits and patterns of feeling so good in my company that together we will reach into the unknown and do a wide variety of things that bring richness and joy to our lives.

 

The reality is all of us have to know hardship of some variety before we know what good is in contrast.

 

As much as I would like to find a way around that, I haven’t found it yet.

 

The type of training I do is called Freedom Based Training®.

 

This means the horses are free to do absolutely anything they choose, as we work around them in patterns that show the horse, we make good choices for ourselves therefore we can be trusted.

 

It is standard classical conditioning we are doing, but it builds a new level of feel and timing in the human as we learn to build associations in the horse.

 

With practice and repetition the horse begins to see a pattern: When they are naturally feeling better, they will see and feel that I fall into harmony with them. When they are naturally feeling worse they will see I keep moving around them until the emotional tide changes and they start to feel better. When I see they are feeling better again I will fall into harmony with them again.

With enough repetition the patterns of harmony or disharmony become linked to the emotions.

 

Harmony = feelings getting better

 

Disharmony = feeling getting worse

 

To be clear, getting better does not mean great, and getting worse does not mean terrible. It is just an indication of ebb and flow of the tides of emotion.

 

It is only after these associations are built that I think any concept of togetherness can exist.

 

Togetherness and harmony must be to be linked to feeling better if we want to do things together.

 

Any living being will instinctually avoid doing things that make them feel worse.

 

In contrast, any living being will instinctually seek out the things that make them feel better.

 

We must teach the horse to avoid disharmony between us if we want to build a strong sense of togetherness.

 

In contrast we must teach the horse to seek harmony and by extension, togetherness.

Exactly how we do that is an art form.

 

This is the art form I have devoted my life to studying, and as study goes, I often have to remind myself; When I get it wrong, I have learned something important and when I get it right, my horse has learned something important.

 

I have to admit, I prefer it when the horses do more learning than I do, but we are a team so, sometimes I also have to experience the worse to see the contrasting better.

 

When I say “How you feel, is more important that what we do,” I don’t mean I will always make you feel good, that isn’t my job. I mean to say I will continue to make good decisions around the horse, until they associate me with good feelings and good times.

 

Then, from that foundation, we can build a wide and diversely entertaining range of things we might explore doing together.

 

That is the life I choose to live with horses!

I hope my study gives the world little food for thought.

 

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com

If you are curious about this ongoing study I am doing, check out Patreon/Tamingwild.com for weekly updates in video form. I promise to share both my successes and my mistakes with you, so we can all learn together.

 

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

 

The Good F Words and the Bad F Words

I was working my way through airport security this morning, at the beginning of a two-month teaching tour, with a grin on my face and a spring in my step.

I am keenly aware that not everyone feels this way about travel, and I feel a wash of gratitude when I look around and observe the overwhelming stress around me in my fellow travelers, that I simply do not share.

Why is that? Why does the same situation elicit profound and overwhelming stress in one being while stimulating joy, exuberance, and entertainment in another?

As a horse trainer I am always bridging the gap between my own human experiences and the things my horses might experience that are similar. I know I run the risk of over anthropomorphizing, but so long as I keep that in mind, I think the comparisons are worth making.

Stress is interesting to me as theoretical construct explaining why, when, and how we feel the way we do. Horses and humans.

Add just enough stress to life and curiosity, interest and learning are stimulated. Life becomes better.

Add too much stress and those very things that bring color and fullness to life become overwhelming, anxiety producing, and injury causing.

What causes the same situation to be a perfect level of stress in one individual, and too much stress in another individual?

I think change and focus are the keys to understanding this.

Change is constant in everyone’s experience. For instance, the change from breathing in to breathing out, everyone experiences a certain number of times in a minute.

When you raise the number of respirations in a minute out of the normal rate, that is an example of another change in experience. Some individuals will be exhilarated, and some will be riddled with anxiety by that change. Why?

Because we all judge and assess constantly on a subconscious level. The last time a change like this was noticed, did it lead to feeling better or feeling worse?

In a healthy individual, focus on new change in life is balanced with familiar change and this is what keeps stress at a positive, intensity.

The thing an individual (human or horse) focuses on becomes the main contributor to raising or lowering stress.

I might focus on my feet on the ground. My feet on the ground always feel this way as I shift my weight from heel to toe in a predictable pattern of walking. This set of changes triggers familiar and positive predictions in the brain and lowers stress.

I might notice the air smells different than usual, unfamiliar as I am surrounded by new and different things. I don’t have enough life experience in situations like this to know if the different smell is going to lead to life being better or worse, so this raises stress.

I drink some water and notice it sliding down my throat in the same way it does every day, quenching my thirst and this change from less hydrated to more hydrated is familiar, comfortable, and lowers stress.

The pattern of life experience goes on. Focus on a familiar good change, stress lowers, focus on an unfamiliar change, stress rises.

There are a million changes happening to us and around us all the time, which changes we notice determine if the stress is going up and down in a life enhancing way, or if stress is going perpetually up in a way that triggers actions of self-defense.

Our self-defense against too much stress looks like Fight, Flight, or Freeze. The bad F’s

The opposite of self-defense is connection and connection exists in the good F’s. Friends, Forage and Freedom (and yes, you can laugh if you want, but I think this is as true for people as it is for horses).

Depending on what momentary change you focus on, stress is going up or coming down in waves all the time.

Friends communicate, triggering thinking which is the opposite of freeze (freeze = a focused fixation on something). Thinking lowers stress, freeze shows us stress is rising.

Friends make space to be together, triggering the feelings of yielding which is the opposite of flight (flight = trying to get away). Yielding lowers stress, flight shows us stress is rising.

Friends play, causing laughter and entertainment, which is the opposite of fight (fight = pushing against someone to cause discomfort so they change).  Play lowers stress, fight shows us stress is rising.

Forage is the food, water, and air we consume every day to stay alive. Good quality in the right quantities has a profound impact on a body’s stress levels and the likelihood that an individual will be able to find balance in patterns of focus that raise or lower stress in healthy or not healthy ways. I think perhaps all of us would do well to acknowledge how big an impact this has.

Freedom is the degree to which an individual realizes they have choices.

That is probably the most profound statement in this blog post and instead of explaining it, I am going to let you think on it yourself and realize how far reaching the implications are.

The good F’s friends, forage and freedom lead to patterns of focus that see a balance between familiar good changes and new changes or familiar bad changes that keep life rich and beautiful.

The bad F’s, fight, flight, and freeze can be tolerated in small doses, but when these patterns of self-defense become the most common reaction to life, we know stress has gotten too high.

In an ideal world when training horses (or traveling through airports) we find a balance between noticing familiar good changes that lower stress and new changes or bad changes that raise stress, and we help our friends do the same.

I am realizing that Freedom Based Training® is simply about training focus, within the scope any individual is willing to consider it.

If I can help a horse find a balance between focusing on the things that lower stress and the things that raise stress, they experience stress as a good thing that makes life interesting and beautiful.

If I can nurture and develop a horse’s focus changes, they realize they have increasing freedom to choose what they think about. With practice they can choose to focus on the things that keep stress in the good zone.

I can be that friend for a horse that nurtures connection and lets self-defense fall away as unnecessary.

I can do the same in an airport as I strike up a conversation with a stranger and we laugh together at some unfamiliar change.

Life is beautiful when we see it that way.

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com

Sunset from the Brussels Airport.

The Project:

Horses from many walks of life, communication through body language, tools used only for safety, never to train.

The Goal:

To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.

 

Lean In

The sultry summer heat on San Juan Island has brought with it the mid-day flies that come with this time of year. The horses run for the deep shade of the trees and stand stoically noses low and strategically placed next to swishing tails with their friends to keep the insect irritation to a minimum.

 

This time of year I am up early to work in the pre-dawn and dawn cool, I settle down to my computer for writing and video editing in the mid-day heat (and napping too, if I am honest). Then as sunset approaches and the day cools off once again, the insects retreat to wherever insects retreat to, I am back to work outside with the horses.

 

Every time of year brings with it a different variety of challenges. We adapt and adjust as best we can to whatever reality is in the moment and that leaves me thinking more deeply about this concept of adapting and adjusting.

 

The reality of life will never be all good or all bad, there will always be some mixture of things in life we enjoy, accept, tolerate, fight against, or run away from.

 

In Freedom Based Training® we help horses develop as much enjoyment of life as possible through our feel and timing of actions around them and with them. When the horse is in a state of enjoyment we do our best to be quiet, be in flow, and harmonize with them deeply, so the horse links that feeling of enjoyment with being in the company of a human.

Reality is more dynamic than that though, what do we do with the rest of the inevitable feelings?

 

Lean in.

 

Lean into the experience of reality. Sometimes we can change it, sometimes we can accept it, and sometimes we choose to leave that moment in favor of something different.

 

We can’t know which response to a situation is the right one until we take the time to be deeply curious about it.

 

This is what I teach my horses.

 

Some people call it desensitization, anything the horse doesn’t enjoy or accept needs desensitization work so they don’t run away from it or fight against it. That is fine as a basic understanding of desensitization but when we look more deeply at the idea it lacks the real art of relationship that makes this work with horses so fun!

 

The deeper art of desensitization with horses starts with developing the understanding and perception of the human. Whatever the horse is feeling, good or bad, my job is to lean into it so I can be interested and curious about it. Do not fix it as fast as possible, be interested and learn from it!

If the horse is in a state of acceptance about anything this means they don’t particularly care one way or another. This thing we are doing or this place we are in, it doesn’t matter, it could continue or it could end and it doesn’t seem to matter one way or the other.

 

Then when we lean into this moment, we get curious about it. Looking more deeply, is that really true? The only constant in life is change. Where we are and what we are doing is going to change at some point. Can we predict how it is going to change? Is that horse going to move from acceptance into that ultimate goal of enjoyment in a few moments? If we think that might happen we wait for it.

 

If our leaning in and being curious leads us to think acceptance is going to downgrade into a feeling of tolerance where we are still doing or being where we are. Then the time becomes limited before the inevitable fight or flight response in the horse shows, so it is time to change something. Change the tide so the feelings will head towards better not worse.

 

The more we lean into understanding feelings with curiosity, the sooner we see the potential emotional tide shifts coming. The sooner we can see the potential of the horse feeling better or feeling worse the better choices we can make about being in the right place at the right time for our relationship with them. The better our timing can be.

 

Now, it is going to go all wrong sometimes! This is reality, and we can’t be in the right place at the right time all of the time. Sometimes we are going to find ourselves in the middle of a situation where the horse has left all the reasonable emotions behind and is stuck in a full stress response of fight or flight. We get to lean in and be curious about those moments too. As we observe we can notice what seems to trigger more stress and more of the coping systems of fight or flight? On the flip side, what seems to trigger a lowering of stress and less of the coping systems of fight or flight?

 

It is only after we lean in and are curious that we can make fully informed decisions about what actions to take. The goal is to turn the tide toward better feelings, but we have to remember it is a tide that ebbs and flows. Change is the only constant in life and it will always be getting better or getting worse in a feeling sense.

Our job is to paddle out in the surf and lean into the experience. Be deeply curious and interested in all the currents around us, then catch the next wave of enjoyment. As the wave carries us toward shore each time we get to decide, do we walk away now for the day remembering that note of enjoyment, or do we paddle back out into the surf to lean into the experience again and catch the next wave of enjoyment we find?

 

Ari and I have been practicing this as I start to lean over his back from above and let him hold my weight for moments here and there.

 

That moment of holding a human’s weight on his back, it is in a stage of tolerance for Ari right now. If I use my powers of observation, feel and timing, I know when to wait and I know when to change something, and I know when to walk away for the day. I intend to teach Ari the same skills.

 

When Ari feels something unfamiliar, he will freeze first for a moment. If Ari can lean into that experience and be curious about the weight of a person draped across his back he will move from that freeze state to a thinking state. That thinking state is the start of enjoyment.

 

For Ari it will be a process of thinking and freezing, thinking again and freezing again, if he can keep moving back and forth between the two he is leaning into the experience and it has a high probability of developing into more and more enjoyment.

When I work this process it isn’t really about teaching Ari about weight on his back, that is the shallow goal. The deeper goal if I lean in as a horse trainer, is to teach Ari to lean into the experience with me.

 

Get curious, not afraid.

Get interested, not aggressive.

 

The more we lean in, the better life gets.

 

The other stallion, Atlas, and I are working on this also. When I reach out to stroke his cheek, every instinct in him yells to run away from that touch (and honestly I consider that an improvement over the natural fight and attack tendency Atlas had in him when he arrived here).

 

On the surface it looks like my job is to desensitize Atlas to touch. To teach him to accept it.

I want to take it farther than that though, I want to teach him to lean into experiences he doesn’t understand. I want to teach him to reach for thinking out of the natural moments of freeze. I want to teach Atlas to surf the waves of emotion that are the reality of life. Not running from them or fighting against them as he has had to to survive in the eight years he lived before he met me.

 

So I lean into the experience with curiosity and interest as I hope to teach Atlas to do also. Is it getting better or is it getting worse?

 

When I stroke Atlas’ cheek inevitably he freezes first and with curiosity I assess the potential for the feeling to get better for him? Can he lean into this? Lately, the answer is yes and as I see the eyes turn toward me, and the ears shift in my direction in curiosity and interest. I can see the thinking starting and the enjoyment being triggered in him. I drop my hand to my side and give Atlas space to lean in, in a thinking way, and get to know me. He breathes on my cheek, and nuzzles my hair, and runs his muzzle up and down my arm in investigation.

 

This is Atlas’ wave of enjoyment and at its best moment I walk away to leave him with that feeling and that memory of us together.

 

The more we repeat that, the more Atlas realizes it is good to lean in. It is good to be us.

 

If you want to see some of this “leaning in” training in action. I post update videos each week in Patreon and I would love for you to join us.

 

https://www.patreon.com/tamingwild

 

I will never know everything there is to understand in this world, but I will keep leaning into the things I don’t know yet, and as I learn I will share.

 

Thank you for enjoying the journey with me.

 

Hooves and Heartbeats,

Elsa

TamingWild.com