The Project:
Mustangs directly off the range, One Trainer, Many Students, 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.
Travel
(This Blog Post was also a newsletter in May of 2017, re posted as a blog in June after an amazing tour of teaching Clinics and Workshops.)
I said something recently and it has been echoing around my mind ever since as a thing perhaps more profound than it first sounds.
“Travel is my second home”
This is the basis for my existence on a much deeper level than it sounds on first read.
We are all traveling through time, every moment of every day, how at home we feel in that journey has a great deal to do with our quality of life.
What I teach in my courses and I perpetually hone in my own life are the skills of feel and timing. Where to be. When to be. How to be.
This river of time that we are all traveling together is going to flow onward regardless of what we do, no one I know has mastered how to stop time, or go back and change the past. All we can do is find our FLOW, our harmony and, our places where we can effect change in future events.
Where to be. When to be. How to be.
I believe that all of us, horses and humans alike, are perpetually migrating though three states as we consider anything in life. Tolerance, Acceptance and Enjoyment. To have a truly great life we want to travel through the first two as efficiently as possible and dwell in the third for as much time as much as we know how.
Tolerance may look more like lack of tolerance sometimes, but that just means we are at the beginning of the migration. The key to traveling through tolerance is “Where to be” The question to ask is: Where in physical space can I locate myself in relation to this thing I am considering so it is tolerable – this is feel!
Acceptance is all about the ability to stay with something we are considering without having to change our relationship to it. The key to traveling through acceptance is “When to be” Even through acceptance is about the ability to stay with something, the wisdom of acceptance is knowing WHEN to change something. The skill of knowing when to do something more challenging and knowing when to do something easier is what puts you on the path to enjoyment. The question to ask is: Is it feeling better or is it feeling worse? Aim to retreat to something easier on the best feelings possible -this is timing!
Enjoyment is all about “How to be” with anything we are considering. Having passed through tolerance with an understanding of feel, and passed through acceptance with an understanding of timing, now we put feel and timing together to understand the degree of energy for the current moment. The question to ask is: What degree of energy would make this moment the most enjoyable?
To the degree we know how to use our feel and our timing is the degree we can feel at home traveling this journey of life.
Personally, I may be at my happiest when stepping onto an airplane, or traveling through the countryside with a horse, but the travel goes so much deeper than that. The travel that is important to me is the migration through my own feelings and the grace with which I make myself at home in the process.
If you want to know more about any of this, come join us at one of the tour stops coming up, or consider being part of a Freedom Based Training online course. The course runs four times a year, Summer, Fall, Spring, and Winter on an ongoing basis.
I look forward to seeing many of you on tour in the next couple of months. This world of collaboration and community with horses just keeps getting better and better, thank you for traveling this journey with me!
Hooves & Heartbeats,
Elsa
May 6th – Demo at the Natural Horsemanship trade show Pontypool, Ontario, Canada
May 7th Clinic – Partridge Horse Hill, Pontypool, Ontario, Canada
May 13 & 14 Clinic – Buckinghamshire, UK
May 18th – 21st Workshop – São Luís, Odemira, Portugal
May 25th – 28th Clinic – Ittre, Belgium
June 2nd Taming Wild Screening – Delta, CO, USA
June 3rd & 4th Workshop – Eckert, CO, USA
June 8th Workshop – Agoura Hills, CA, USA
June 10th Taming Wild Screening – Santa Rosa, CA, USA
July 1st & 2nd Workshop – Bend, OR, USA
August 5th & 6th Workshop – Victor, ID, USA
Aug. 26th & 27 Clinic – Mullingar, Ireland
Sept. 2nd-5th Clinic – Buckinghamshire, UK
Sept. 6th-10th Clinic – Ittre, Belgium
