Two weeks after Myrnah and I began our project, a crew from the BLM came up to San Juan Island and spent some time putting together a story about us. Just posted this week! I love looking back at the beautiful simplicity of those first weeks.
Video is here:
The article is here:
http://www.blm.gov/or/nwpassage/
Elsa Sinclair
The Project:
One Mustang directly off the range, One trainer, No tools, Just body language
The Goal:
To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.
Fear and Curiosity
The dictionary describes Curiosity as “a strong desire to know or learn something.” Fear is described as “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.” I would like to present the idea that a highly functioning individual will have a tendency to tackle fears with curiosity, leading them to learn about the subject until it no longer causes unpleasant emotion. Fear and Curiosity may well be linked in a beautiful cause and effect. While fear is an emotion most would rather avoid, curiosity is one of the most enjoyable emotions to be experienced.
While I was with Myrnah today the wind was whipping wildly, trees violently throwing themselves in every direction, leaves and branches swirling, crashing, and falling gracelessly to the ground. I felt like a mad woman to be out working with my horses regardless of the weather, yet there we were.
We took our work out into the front yard today. The tarp on the large stack of 
firewood was flapping on one side, the cat chose to accompany us hither and yon, and the noise of stormy weather was often disconcerting. I was impressed that Myrnah chose to come out the gate with me none the less.
I put my hand on her withers and told her to lead the way, take me wherever she would like to go. Today was about exploring. Today was about confidence, curiosity and bravery.
Through the narrow gap between the porch and the house where Myrnah tends to scoot past at the trot, every few steps I would ask her to back a step and wait. Giving her thinking brain a chance to work and her flight instincts a chance to settle. Then on we would go. Success! For the first time we made it all the way past the car with no panic and flight from claustrophobia. Causing her to back up a step gave her a moment to look left and right, to be curious about the tight space, the car and the porch, instead of simply running from it.
In that situation Myrnah’s fear is high and curiosity is a weak fledgling emotion, so I didn’t ask her to stand any longer than she chose to. The back-up merely reminded her that curiosity was an option. When she chose to look hard at her surroundings, ears pricked and neck arched, I was still and quiet, breathing deep and relaxed as I allowed and supported her desire to understand the tight space. We stood still together until she was ready to move again, then we would repeat it all a few steps later.
Working with a young horse in particular, the world is new, experiences are all fresh, and fear and curiosity hang in a balance. While Myrnah seems like an old soul at times, and appears more mature than domestic horses her age, I want to remember, she is only three-years old. The time I invest now, fostering and developing her curiosity while allowing the reflexive patterns of fear to weaken and fade away is worth the investment a hundred times over.
So when she chooses to take me out on a walk, around the front yard, and into the woods we have never traveled through before, between the car and porch, between 
the bin full of hoses and shed full of hay racks, past the flapping tarp, while leaving her companion Cleo behind and out of sight on the other side of the house- just Myrnah and I exploring the world together. When this exploration causes Myrnah to stop short, ears pricked, body tight, eyes hard and focused, I stop with her and just breathe. That is the moment when curiosity and fear are in a battle: fear says it is too dangerous to go on, curiosity wants to pay attention and focus in to understand the world.
If I rush the moment, pushing Myrnah on, she may be brave and lean on my confidence, but I rob her of the moment to build her own curiosity and self-confidence. If I wait, Myrnah’s curiosity will bloom, and each time it does her self-confidence in the world around her will become a little stronger.
Yes, sometimes I want to be impatient and just get a horse going, and sometimes it is a useful skill for the horse to lean on their rider’s confidence instead of needing their own in a particular moment. Right now, in this project, with Myrnah so young and so much life ahead of her, I prefer to invest the time- no rush. On a day like today, every time a tarp flaps, or the cat runs by, or a branch crashes to the ground in the woods, I choose to use those moments to be still as I watch fear develop into curiosity for Myrnah.
The key is the willingness to be still and pay attention. Curiosity will bloom if you give it the time and the focus.
All of Myrnah’s basic skills with me continue to progress, going forward and backward, yielding the forehand, and even yielding the hind-end. All those basic skills can often help build curiosity. Fear leads to flight, so when I feel Myrnah pulling away from something- to flee from what she doesn’t understand- I can suggest a turn, or a back up to give her a moment to realize she has a choice. She can choose to learn, or she can choose to run. Both are valid; learning is just more fun than fear.
If I can help Myrnah know she has a choice and build her habits of curiosity instead of fear, I feel I have done well. Everything we do together is only better on a basis of self-confidence.
To wind and wild weather, to fear and curiosity, and to the quiet moments that allow us to become the best of ourselves.
Elsa Sinclair
EquineClarity.com
The Project:
One Mustang directly off the range, One trainer, No tools, Just body language
The Goal:
To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.
Training Versus Development
My recognized job title might be that of “Horse Trainer”; my business cards read “Equine Development Specialist”. Are they different or one in the same? The last week has me thinking…. training versus development, what’s the difference?
Here is what I think. Training is building a set of habits or skills in a time frame. Development is setting up the environment to allow growth at ones own rate and speed.
Training conforms the trainee to what we think they should be. Development allows them the freedom to be whatever they are fostering and encouraging the best they can be.
Training follows a predictable path of cause and effect creating results; development is an organic evolutionary process where the positive results are often dramatic and surprising.
What I do is somewhere in the middle. I feel that the grey area between training and development gives me the best of both worlds. Wherever safety might be an issue, I tend toward the predictability of training. Where I want that inexplicably beautiful connection and bond with my horse, I lean toward a developmental process.
With Myrnah, in this project with no tools, I have an opportunity to lean a little farther into development instead of training. Without her full participation in the process I am lost. She has to want to do everything I want to do, because I don’t have any tools to push her into doing things she would rather not.
Last week I fell more into a training routine when I pushed harder than usual to try to get the hind end yield. When I realized I felt I had missed a step in our process, I then felt we SHOULD have been able to do it by now. Without the training tools on hand to help me threaten her into submission, Myrnah kicked at me under that kind of pressure. Then when safety felt at stake, I maxed out the tools I did have to re-engaged her: running around clapping my hands, yelling…. and then getting quiet when she came to me with her ears forward again. Simple cause and effect: pressure to make the unwanted action unpleasant, release to make the wanted action pleasant.
Training has a time frame in mind and an idea of what the horse should know by now (such as not to kick at me or threaten my safety). The advantage of that method is the predictable results to pressure and release, and the horse seeming to know “wrong from right.” The disadvantage is the beast-of-burden, dull attitude that can occur in any of us when we feel like we should be different than we are. All of us want to be unconditionally loved and appreciated and we cannot really be the best of ourselves when we are told we are not good enough constantly. Horses are no different from people in that respect.
So what might last Wednesday have looked like if I had taken the developmental approach?
First off, when Myrnah started pinning her ears at me in the specificity exercise, I would have slowed way down, spent more time in advance and retreat, spent more time being playful and affirmative, and been less attached to specificity happening any time soon.
Secondly, once I realized the step I had missed, the hind end yield, I would have spent more time quiet and still with my hand on her side, waiting for her to choose her response to my presence, giving her all the time in the world to decide she wanted to yield and work with me, making sure I released my focus and appreciated her the moment our connection and cooperation got stronger.
Thirdly, if she had kicked at me, and I was in a developmental frame of mind, I wouldn’t have let fear dictate my response. Fear caused me to be desperate about getting our cooperative connection back in a hurry. If I hadn’t been afraid of getting hurt or losing out connection, I would have just stepped out of the way and backed off, playing with the gentle intensity of drive and draw just like we did in the beginning of our relationship to bring our connection back and start over.
It’s all about time really. There is a brilliance
in each of us that blooms with focus, attention, love, devotion and plenty of time. Under the pressure of a limited time frame, we can get a lot done and feel good about our competence, but the question remains: Is the immediate competency worth the brilliance we sacrifice in the process?
I gave myself a year to train Myrnah without tools. A dear friend said she wished I wouldn’t put a time limit on this process, and I think I now understand her sentiments. None the less as a horse trainer, and an equine development specialist, for my own education, I want to feel the pressure of a time limit. I want to see how close to a developmental process I can keep us in spite of a time frame. Nothing is black and white. Life is shades of grey between extremes. For me seeing the extremes helps me figure out where I would like to stand in the middle ground.
Training versus development is a thought-provoking contrast. While the world might ask me to train horses on a time frame, and I would like to think I am good at it I also hope to get so good at the developmental processes that people see it, and want it and will start to value the brilliance of connection above and beyond physical competence in the moment. Myrnah is here to help me strengthen my skills of development.
So here is to the unique, the surprising and the inexplicable connection between horse and rider. May I have the fortitude and patience to wait for it, nurture it, and encourage it in every way.
Elsa Sinclair
For all who were wondering, Cleo continues to be an amazing horse. Her powers of focus and her desire to connect make working with her a brilliant experience every day. Every time her tension drops another notch and she seems a little more comfortable in her life, I feel like I have just won the lottery. Its a slightly different process than Myrnah’s but I still do my best to keep the ideas of training versus development clear in my thoughts as we progress. Thank you Cleo for continuing to be such a wonderful teacher.
The Project:
One Mustang directly off the range, One trainer, No tools, Just body language
The Goal:
To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.
Specificity and skipped steps
It seems Myrnah and I have reached a step in the process that is not as graceful as all the previous steps have been. Specificity is proving to be more difficult for us than anything we have done yet. I don’t know if I am excited by the challenge, or disappointed in myself for not setting up the course of learning better. A little of both I think.
Last week was all about traveling together, developing our ease and relaxation in movement. Myrnah more or less got to choose where we traveled; I just asked her to keep moving. Everything Myrnah and I have done together so far has had a large element of choice on her part. If I wanted to trim her hooves, I let her decide where she wanted to stand to have them done; and, if she changed her mind, I picked up my trimming tools, followed her to the new spot, and started again. If I asked her to turn, I wasn’t too particular about where we were headed so long as she yielded the direction asked. If I asked her to back up and she turned around in the process, that was fine too, so long as she stepped back for me. We were building a basis of communication, and I wanted all the pieces to feel easy. Little by little she became more accurate in her responses and I was thrilled.
This week I set up a pattern to build specificity. Walking together, rest in movement, the gate open between the woods and the arena, Myrnah could take me wherever she liked. New addition to the game: I added a couple of tires, double-stacked in the arena. If Myrnah was interested in investigating them, we could stop and rest there; everywhere else we needed to keep moving.
The idea is to teach Myrnah to sidle up to something (like a stack of tires) to let me get on.
The first step in that is to get her to be interested in something tall that I can stand on. It worked like a charm and pretty soon those tires were like a magnet- the only place she wanted to be.
From the first step of investigating the tires to get a rest from perpetual movement, we built to my standing on the tires while we both took a break. 
Then on Wednesday I started getting specific; Myrnah needed to put her side to the tires before we could both relax. As soon as she was in position, I would sit down and take some time to just be still with her.
Getting Myrnah in exactly the right spot beside the tires was challenging for her. Anything so specific is new to us, and she didn’t want to do it. While I was happy to give it up and go walking instead, she didn’t want to do that either. She wanted to just rest at the tires in any position she chose, and so Myrnah started pinning her ears at me.
This is where I think there is a balance to be struck. “Confidence-in-one’s-self” and “confidence-in-others” need to be in balance. Myrnah has a great deal of natural self-confidence. When her confidence in me is lacking, it is easy for her to start being angry. Wednesday she had a perfectly good idea of what we should do together: (standing relaxed at the stacked tires) My idea of alternating walking and standing at a specific spot next to the tires seemed like a terrible idea to her. Too much confidence in herself and not enough in me lead to some angry gestures.
I am generally intolerant of anger, so I jumped right on it, and thought, what do I do with my other horses to build their confidence in leadership? I work on our yields: front-end, back-end, and sideways. Myrnah’s front-end yields are soft and easy; her back-end yields are relatively undeveloped. Back-end yields are something I kept putting off until our bond felt stronger. Well obviously here was a gap in her education and a missed step in the process.
What happened when I went to push her hind end away from me Wednesday? She told me NO. I pushed harder and she showed me she had feet to kick me with… hmmm, pushing harder obviously wasn’t going to get me anywhere I wanted to go. (and yes I was thinking all this would be so much easier if I had rope right now and could just make her do it).
So take a deep breath and break it down. We take a walk and then I play with gently putting my hand at the back of her belly to suggest she just look toward me with her nose. If her nose tips toward me, her hip will at least energetically yield, even if it isn’t physically apparent. The problem is she won’t even do that. On this day a hand on the side of her belly puts Myrnah into a strong opposition reflex, sending me running out of the kick zone. So I yell and jump up and down and clap my hands and run in circles driving her nose away from me until she looks at me with curiosity, and comes back with her ears forward. Then I sit on the ground, breathing hard, and wishing I hadn’t put off this step in the training. Breath caught, we try it again.
Sometimes, if I get my tact just right her nose comes toward me when I place a hand on the back of her belly, and I quickly reward that by moving my hand onto her withers and simply walking with her. 
Sometimes my tact is off, (or hers is), and I get the opposition of her hind end suddenly thrown in my direction; then I have to resort to acting like a crazy person, running around, moving her front end away from me until she musters up the positivity to look at me and ask what in the world I am doing, and wouldn’t it be nicer if we both stopped and just hung out together. ( I always say yes to that)
A horse’s confidence in others is based on their respect and their respect is based on their willingness to yield physical space. Willingness equals a positive attitude. When Myrnah started showing aggression, I knew her confidences were getting out of balance and we needed to build a little more respect and confidence in me, her person, and hopefully her leader.
I wish I had spent more time teaching her to yield her hind end earlier in the game. Without rope or stick I wasn’t sure I could, but now I see it is a critical piece that is fundamental to later progress.
On the up side, Myrnah’s extreme opposition prompted my own desperate measures, which caused her to look at me in a new and curious frame of mind. Her ear pinning seems to be melting away, her specificity of standing exactly at the mounting block has improved dramatically, and her offers of focus, arc and softness in her body while we walk together are so beautiful they make me want to cry.
So thank you to the exercise of specificity for showing me our missed step in the process. I love everything I am learning through this, even if I don’t always get it right the first time.
Elsa Sinclair
The Project:
One Mustang directly off the range
One trainer
No tools
Just body language
The Goal:
To discover how far Equestrian Art can be developed solely using body language.
Contrast
Week three has led us into a distinct contrast.
Myrnah’s development progresses ever so gently- a meandering path, peaceful and easy. We know each other a little better each day. She seems Zen- at one and at peace with everything.
Cleo feeds my soul with her thrilling beauty. From a logical standpoint I find myself wanting training to go softly and quietly, and yet, when circumstances cause Cleo to move too quickly for me to follow, the resulting explosion is breathtakingly magnificent. While I stand back watching her rippling muscles and agile movements in awe, she rockets around trying to escape the dragging rope she thinks is chasing her. On the one hand, I feel terrible I have set her up in a situation where she is afraid; on the other hand, it is generally short lived and not terrible compared to the steep learning curve most wild horses have to climb while adjusting to domesticity.
Generally Myrnah and I stand back, watching quietly as Cleo takes a lap around the pens and through the barns, hooves striking out in every direction as agile as a cat before she comes back to me shaking like a leaf. Then I can re-approach- reach out to her as she reaches out to me with her nose. I pick up the lead again, and we go back to working together. My gut instinct is that she needs to move slowly and quietly like she would in the wild, traveling from one watering hole to another. The halter is new to her so our progress is slow and gradual. We take few steps to the left, she reaches out to touch my hand, and we rest together. Then a few steps to the right, she reaches out to me, and we rest again. We take breaks to rub her all over and let her adrenaline drain away, and more and more I drag the tail end of the rope on the ground as she follows me so she gets to be the chaser of the rope and gain confidence in the idea of things dragging along the ground.
Life does contain chaos and I think sometimes it is okay to live through it and find your way out the other side, unhurt and realizing what it is to find calmness again after feeling shaken. I do my best to foster learning for Cleo as calmly and gently as I know how. In some circumstances though all I can do is let her find her own way through the fear: like yesterday when she decided the pressure of the rope was something she wanted to back slowly away from instead of giving forward toward me. When she backed into the edge of the trailer and then exploded forward in surprise, all I could do was let go and stand out of the way waiting for her to come back to me. It is a beautiful feeling when she does come back, looking to me for answers.
Between the occasional displays of magnificent action, Cleo is becoming reliable in her habit of walking right over to me when I reach out a hand to her. She stands quiet and easy for the halter to go on and off, and I can lead her almost all the way across the paddock now without needing to stop for a rest. I am as much thrilled with her progress as I am with her instances of awe-inspiring movement. I will keep looking for ways to help her learn through confidence instead of fear. While I may love to watch the display of athleticism fear can create and logically excuse it as one way to learn, it will never be my preference.
Last week Myrnah was starting to come over to me quickly any time I asked. She would touch me with her nose and then we would rest together or go back to our respective jobs of eating and lounging in the shade.
This week we developed a breakfast routine. The horses have free-choice, local, island hay all the time. The richer hay shipped in from Eastern Washington is reserved for when I say goodnight to them at the end of the day, and then to play around at breakfast time. In the morning, some of it goes in the trailer and some goes in a tub on the other side of the paddock.
The first day I let Myrnah eat in the trailer while Cleo and I practiced with the halter and I led her on a meandering path to the other feeder. The second 
day made me smile as I let Cleo get in the trailer to eat with the idea of having Myrnah follow me to the other hay trough. Myrnah was not fond of this idea. Again and again, she tried to get around me to get in the trailer with Cleo. I was an inconvenience and I loved it. How often do you hear of people having trouble keeping their horses out of the trailer? I love that I was confronted by my new “wild” mustang about the audacity of my insisting she stay outside the trailer on this particular day.
So here is training with a purpose- I was aiming to move Myrnah to a new good place to eat. She didn’t know it yet so on the way there she had a chance to practice yielding and drawing to me- one hand on her shoulder, one on her cheek asking her to yield away from me a step and stop when I rub her. With some persistence she understood and stopped, facing away from the trailer, pointed toward the other hay pile.
Once we got our direction sorted, I could step out in front and ask her to take a step toward me to touch my hand with her nose. After being frustrated about getting in the trailer, she wanted none of the next part of the game. So I would wait a moment, and then go over to pet her, and ask her to yield her front end over a step before offering for her to draw forward toward me again. Slowly she figured out I was going to persist moving her a step at a time left and right until she was willing to walk toward me and check in with her nose. Then I would sit down and we could just relax together for a while before repeating the exercise. It took us a quite a while to get to the hay that first time. I think Myrnah agreed with me though, the trip was worth it.
Each day Myrnah comes away from her hay a little more willingly and follows me a little more fluidly to a new eating spot. When she does get stuck I love it 
because it is an opportunity to practice her skills about yielding to pressure: the same pressure we will use when I ride her- the spot behind her shoulder where eventually my leg will sit, or the spot on her neck where I may lay my hand to guide her onto a new course.
Slowly and peacefully, one step at a time, Myrnah and I are building the language that will allow us to travel together. The thrill that comes from that is quietly breathtaking.
Cleo and I have had a more obviously exciting trail to blaze together this week. No matter how much I love the thrill that brings through me, I am determined to strive toward peace with her too. She may be wearing a halter while Myrnah is not, yet I want the same ease and confidence all the way through the process for both of them.
Elsa Sinclair
