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.
Coming Home to Freedom Based Training
This is the hundred and fiftieth blog written for Meditations on Equestrian Art, and it seems momentous. Because of that importance I have sat down to write it a million times and a million times I have stood up and decided I have something else that needs doing.
After filming “Taming Wild: Pura Vida” and walking across Costa Rica, my public persona went a little quiet as I pondered, Who am I and what exactly am I bringing to the world?
After Costa Rica I found myself on a teaching tour through Australia and New Zealand and then back home to the lush green of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, all the while pondering, Who am I, and what am I sharing?
Here is what it comes down to.
I will be me and you will be you.
Out of that a relationship will develop.
The horse is perfect just the way it is, regardless of whether the horse is happy or unhappy, more stressed or less stressed.
The human is perfect just the way it is, regardless of whether the human is happy or unhappy, more stressed or less stressed.
How is it that I can have a job if everything is perfect just the way it is? What is my role in the world? When I teach a course or a clinic or a workshop, isn’t my job to create change for the better?
That is often what I have thought, but I am coming to realize my job is not to create change. Change is inevitable; in fact, change is one of the few inevitable things in the world.
My job is simply to shine a light and develop the awareness of options.
Specifically, I choose to shine a light on the options that most people do not talk about in horse training: personal choices. Not the choices we make for our horse, but the choices we make for our own bodies.
When most people think about training horses or developing relationships, the goal is to change and develop the horse into being more of the horse you want. It becomes about limits, boundaries, direction, and teaching the horse right from wrong.
Often humans want the same kind of learning structure. They want to know the right or wrong actions to take in training their horse.
Freedom Based Training is different though. It isn’t about changing the horse or changing the human. It is instead about finding the harmony between horse and human exactly as they are.
THEN and only then do we start to consider what personal actions we might take that evolve and develop and grow the partnership into a greater variety of harmonious Flow states.
This is the slowest possible way to train a horse because the primary focus is not on changing the horse, or even on changing the human. If neither the horse nor the human changes, we find there are actually a very limited amount of things horse and human would choose to do together.
So this is why I filmed “Taming Wild: Pura Vida”. I wanted to show the human world that I understood human needs with horses: to set a goal, work towards a goal, and achieve a goal, all within a shorter time frame.
I learned so very much in the process of doing that!
Exploring the grey areas of what is, what might be, or what could be, when we use tools to get a partner to an end goal with us, I realized I wanted so much more Freedom for the horses in my time with them.
I don’t want to have to make it to camp by nightfall, I don’t want to figure out the best way to manipulate the horse so that it makes it to camp by nightfall. I don’t want to use everything I know about lowering stress in horses to then take advantage of their lowered stress to cross terrain that possibly should never be crossed with horses.
Did I do all those things? Yes.
Did I learn important things by putting myself in that position? Yes.
Am I glad I did that? Yes.
Would I do it again? No.
Now I feel a need to take a step back into who I really am and what Freedom Based Training really is.
I want to live a life where my horse is in a safe enough situation that they can make their own choices about what they want, and as the human I work within the range of what I want for my own body in time and space. Eventually, those choices I make for my own body will prove my worth in the relationship and I will earn the right to start asking for things from my partner.
The together part of the equation where horses do things that humans want – that goal is still there, but in Freedom Based Training the time frame gets taken away and we figure the relationship takes the time it takes.
This is the most important piece of Freedom Based Training for me. Taming that wild streak inside myself that wants what I want when I want it.
Costa Rica was an amazing adventure, and I am so glad I learned so much doing it. Now I am settling in to the purer practice of gentle evolution between horse and human.
My wild streak wants the world to appreciate the slow process with horses right now. My wild streak wants to please people and give them answers that train their horses faster. My wild streak wants to take the slow process of relationship evolution and make it faster. My wild streak is contradictory and wants all the things right now!
My wild streak is perfect exactly the way it is, and slowly, as I tame that wild streak that wants all the things it doesn’t have yet, life gets more enjoyable. Slowly.
As I get ready to leave for the European teaching tour I am feeling the conflicts of my wild streaks. I want it all, and I want it now. I want to teach people that setting limits and consequences for our horses is one way to teach them, but not the only way. I want to shine light on all the options for training horses and building relationships that do not rely on boundaries, limits, and time frames. At the same time, I want to make people happy and help them get their horse to stop eating grass all the time so they can do more things together.
How do I accept everything as it is, shine light on what it could be, and work towards the possibilities without telling anyone they are wrong or bad for wanting what they want? Horse or human! Both the horse’s wants and the human’s wants are valid, even if the horse only wants to eat grass and the human wants to do something more interesting.
Between the human’s wild streak and the horse’s wild streak is where the art of Freedom Based Training is.
Everyone gets to be exactly who they are with their own personal wants, needs, and wild streaks, and I get to explore all the options for developing endless varieties of harmony between horse and human while letting them all be exactly who they are.
If any of this piques your interest, I hope I get to meet you and we can share some of the evolution of Taming Wild.
Hooves and Heartbeats,
Elsa
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