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Tag Archives: Negativity

Far from Perfection

The Project:

One Mustang directly off the range, One Trainer, Many Students, Communication through body language, Tools used only for safety, never to train

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The Goal:

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

Far from Perfection

Since the movie came out and I have been working on the book, I am realizing a personal trend that needs some course correcting. The temptation to focus on the positive lures me, as though filling my mind with all that is good, can completely drown out the bad days, the hard moments, and the places where I get everything wrong. I want to set the story straight here, I am a very flawed as a human being!
Being flawed is part of what drives me to be better, and perhaps it is high time I wrote about that more of the time.

We all tend to think our less than stellar moments are something to be covered up and hidden, as if people won’t like us because we screwed up. That is true to a point; no one likes a friend who treats the world with negativity and does nothing to make things right. We all mess up, get it wrong, and then the important part is we do our best to make it right.

I have spent years working on and writing about the peaceful possibilities when working with horses. The building of relationship and the pieces it might take to have a relationship with a horse that is voluntary and cooperative. No force, no bribes, just a shared language where we find a harmony together, where we want to do the same things.

Let me assure you though, on the path of all these methods and patterns of working positively there are many many moments that are not so positive. In those not so positive moments I have to bow my head and consider, how do I make this right?

Perhaps I should admit that to my readers more of the time. It’s not all perfect at my barn.

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Tonight, carrying a bucket of grain across the paddock for my skinny older warmblood, everyone crowded around me wanting some. It was raining and dark and I had had a long day and I thought, they SHOULD have more respect for my personal space! Before I had a chance to get out the gate with the bucket, someone jostled me and the bucket fell to the ground spilling all its contents. An anger filled me in that moment and before I knew what was happening I was yelling and waving my arms and throwing the bucket across the paddock. It was embarrassingly inappropriate, and, if my neighbors had been outside – unlikely in the rain and the dark –  I am sure I was a spectacle to behold.

The horses scattered a little ways away and watched me, remarkably undisturbed by my temper tantrum – was I going to relent and let them come over to clean the grain up from the ground? I was furious, irrational, and the tantrum continued, “ Everyone out!” With very little grace I chased them all into the far paddock and closed them off so I could clean up all the grain and throw it in the bushes; they would get none of it!!!

A new batch of grain retrieved from the barn, and safely placed in a separate space, I stormed out to the paddock and beckoned my warmblood with a twitch of a finger – yes, I am still furious and not taking to the others. My mustangs of course assumed I meant them and started sauntering over, and I threw another fit, -yelling, jumping up and down – “If I wanted your company, I would have looked at you and I didn’t!” (of course that is confusing, because now I am looking at them, and not in a good way.) “Go away! I am not talking to you!” It wasn’t pretty.

Zohari walked slowly over to me, head low, every movement cautious. I was still too mad to be appropriate, all my moments rough and too fast. I told him to come with me. He has known me for twenty years now and was surprisingly patient and gentle with me about my outburst.

Crying, I sat next to Zohari as he art his grain… I blew it again. All this work I do to have a peaceful existence with my horses and tonight I totally lose my cool. Where did I go wrong?

First it occurs to me, emotions happen. It has to be OK to feel angry or sad or happy or elated… However there is an appropriate space to be kept between our emotions and our actions.

Feeling things is the richness in life and I would never want any less emotion. However, I would like to set my life up so my emotions have space to exist without flooding into everyone else’s experience.

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So on a night when it’s raining and dark and I am tired, perhaps I could plan ahead for the frustration I know might be a hair trigger away. I could have walked the long way around to the private paddock with the grain pan, instead of taking the short cut through the herd. I could have picked up a rope or a stick to make it clear I am not to be messed with tonight. I could have just taken a few extra minutes before I went and got the grain, to check in with each member of the herd and establish today’s relationships before I challenged them with temptation.

I am thinking about the lessons I taught to students this week. Perhaps if I had applied the same concepts to my herd at home, everything might have been different tonight.

This week has found me talking a great deal about drive and draw. You see, once we have some draw with our horses, where we can call them to us or walk together or stop or turn or back up TOGETHER, it feels so good we tend to do less and less of the drive that created the draw in the first place.

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I walk people through 5 steps with their horses:
First- we follow the horse.
Second- the horse follows us.
Third- the horse touches us.
Fourth- we touch the horse.
Fifth- we mix and interchange the first four steps.

 
That first step is the most important, and tends to get forgotten as we develop farther into our relationships. You see, if the horse won’t let us follow, we have to use a little bit of drive to motivate some motion for us to follow.

With people I see it all the time; we like the draw so much we drop the drive as soon as possible. I am as guilty of this as anyone else. I would much rather draw the horse to me and do things with them, than push them away and follow. The yin and the yang balance each other though; we need the drive and the follow to balance the draw and be followed.

Here is something I read that might cause us all to think a little: “True leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders”.

I tell people that true leaders are simply the last one of the group to make a decision. True leaders hand leadership over to the others all the time; however, they always have the last word. By making the last decision before a time of harmony or rest, a true leader gets associated with all things good, and chosen as the leader time and again. True leaders also know how to use some drive to ask someone else to lead for a while.

If I had taken a little more time to practice this with my herd this week, perhaps things would have been different when I asked for space around carrying the grain pan through the paddock. Perhaps I need to practice what I preach and spend more time asking horses to do things for me to follow, instead of always having them follow me.

I did my best to end my evening right. Each horse got a little time in the private paddock with me, and each one got a bite of something yummy – I do share after all – and then I sat in the hay while they all gathered around me nibbling away.

I promised them all I would try to do better at knowing when my emotions are close to boiling over and act in ways that would safeguard our relationship better than I had tonight. I also know, that just isn’t possible all the time, so, I will pour my heart into continuing to develop our bond in ways that give them a sense of safety, even when I fall apart and make a mistake or two.

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Here is to owning our mistakes, our bad days, and times when emotions get hot.
Here is to making amends.

 
Elsa Sinclair
EquineClarity.com
TamingWild.com

Playing with Stress

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.

 

 

Playing with Stress

Myrnah and I are still waiting for this foal. I think we have a couple more weeks to wait, yet this stage of pregnancy and the waiting involved seem to be stressful for both Myrnah and me. My mare who has been so rock solid through all the life changes we have experienced together is all of the sudden a different horse. When stress levels are up, life’s simple occurrences can cause an unwarranted intensity of reaction. The birds fluttering in and out of the bushes used to be a back drop for life, now who knows which bird is going to cause Myrnah to jump out of her skin, heart racing, causing both of us to search high and low for the saber-toothed tiger that must be lurking nearby. Looking for that tiger every few minutes is exhausting and stressful all on its own. Holding a level of tension that makes hyper vigilance, shock, and reaction likely is not a fun way to live. All other goals aside, this week has been simply about playing with stress. What can we do to lower the stress and make life easier to live in these last weeks of Myrnah’s pregnancy?

There are three solutions I know of to lower stress: movement, stillness and connection. As Myrnah becomes larger and her physical comfort decreases I think she moves around the pasture less. When she becomes still that baby is still dancing a salsa inside her belly and being utterly distracting from any sense of quiet or peace. Adding to those two factors it becomes more and more challenging for Myrnah to connect with me, or the herd, if she feels stressed, reactive, hyper focused on perceived danger, or spacey and unfocused in a rebound from being hyper focused a moment before.

 

What is stress? I think emotional stress is simply the energy you feel when life isn’t the way you want it to be, and you feel powerless to change it for the better. Stress can be good and it can be bad; the trick is to play with it in a way that brings the most benefit possible. We stress a muscle to make it stronger. We can’t make a muscle stronger without the stress to motivate change. Stress too much and you create injury; stress too little and the resulting change is little to none. In order to play with emotional stress we need to look at it the same way we look at the physical.

 

Myrnah is going through huge physical changes right now; her physical stress and her emotional stress are all intertwined. So the question for me is: what can I do to help Myrnah feel a personal power to make her life better?

Movement, stillness, and connection- first things first, we move together, side by side, shoulder to shoulder; we walk as far and as quietly as we need to. Doing it together gives us both a sense of connection. When that bird, dressed as a saber-toothed tiger, comes out of the bushes at us, after the reactionary leap we practice stillness for as long as Myrnah needs. Her ears pricked, eyes scanning every shadow for possible danger, she just needs to be still until she feels safe enough to move again. Once her heart rate has calmed and her hyper vigilance softened, we move again- step for step, each moment of rhythmic footfall bringing confidence back into the picture.

 

When I show up in the morning and Myrnah and I take our customary walk to the trailer for breakfast, some days she is connected and calm, and the trip takes only a moment. Other days, if Myrnah is stressed, it can take up to an hour to travel the hundred steps from the barn to the trailer as we weave loops and circles, double back, and start again, movement and stillness alternating until she has the confidence to walk that short distance up the hill.

 

Some mornings she stomps in the trailer and eats her handful of vitamins with gusto; some mornings all she can manage is a bite before she bolts out of the trailer telling me she is too worried and stressed to eat. So we walk some more, and rest some more, and I let her know I am there for her. Whether she feels connected or not, I am right there for her to connect with any time. Once we have walked for long enough, and the emotional stress has lowered, she can then walk into the trailer, finish her breakfast in peace, and we are ready to move on to other things.

 

I long for the calm and steady mare I brought home with me from southern Oregon in August. Yet I have to trust that making it through the stress she feels now in these last weeks of pregnancy is going to make us stronger together. It isn’t her fault that she feels the way she does. The changes she is experiencing internally are huge. If I can help her learn how to move and be still and connect in ways that lower her emotional stress, then hopefully the physical changes that she has no control over will be building and strengthening instead of overwhelming.

This week has been about playing with stress. The best way I know to lessen the negative consequences and increase the positive are to make it a game. Life is supposed to be fun as well as challenging.

 

Elsa Sinclair

Equine Clarity.com

Five things I can count on

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.

Five things I can count on

It snowed this week, beautiful white mounds of fluffy snow adorning every surface around my house- the landscape brilliantly beautiful, and yet for me, not as much fun as one might think. Unfortunately emotions and logic don’t always dance in the sane and controllable fashion we would like them to. I can logically appreciate the beauty, yet at the same time find my emotions beating me to a pulp underneath all that beautiful sane logic. Snow and cold send me into panic attacks of vertigo and nausea, blinding anxiety, and difficulty breathing. I am however far too stubborn to let that stop me, so for the most part everything proceeds normally. I have found there are five things I can count on to help. No matter how good, or how bad I feel, these five things will always improve the situation.

Thank-you Sally Swift for creating the five basics of Centered Riding. Thank-you Stephanie Mosely for introducing me to the existence of Centered Riding; and thank-you to all the brilliant Centered Riding instructors who have helped me understand those five basics in deeper and more profound ways.

I have been exposed to, and devoted to many different models of horse training. Each model and idea has created a facet of who I am and how I train today. I would have to say though, Centered Riding remains at the core of everything I do. The principles reach far beyond riding a horse. They apply to every action in life, and within these five simple ideas lies a power to improve any moment.

  1. Grounding – The feeling of having your feet rooted down through the Earth. Sally Swift added this to her original four basics when she wrote her second book. No matter which training idea I am currently working with, taking a moment to wiggle my toes in my boots and feel my feet become grounded always lends a solid and reliable feel to whatever I am doing.
  2. Centering – The feeling of your weight down low in the core of your body, the idea of chi or qi that martial arts talks of, all action originating from the center of your body. This idea always gives me a sense of connection with my horse and that legendary “feel” between horse and rider that instructors are always saying is so essential and so hard to teach.
  3. Breathing – Deeply, using the diaphragm and letting the air fill every part of your body like a professional singer would. This is perhaps the most challenging for me, yet I know how important it is. Horses are herd creatures and are constantly assessing the well-being of those around them. My ability to breath allows me to work at my best and signals my horse that I am feeling ok- there is nothing to worry about in our herd. Constantly I remind myself and my students, when your horse does something you like, just take one deep breath before you do anything else. That deep breath and the resulting positive feeling it brings to you and your horse is the simplest and best reward you can give.
  4. Soft eyes – Using a soft balance of focus and peripheral vision. In an ideal scenario we are using our muscles in a state of release contracting muscles or extender muscles used to the degree we need them. When we use both the contractors and the extenders at the same time an unnecessary tension and stress is present. We tend to create a great deal of stress in the small muscles around our eyes… the relaxation of those muscles allows us to use our peripheral vision as well as our focus.
  5. Building Blocks – The feeling of each part of the skeleton stacked in balance on top of the piece below- using only the essential muscular effort needed to stand, sit or move, nothing extra.

All these five principles can be evolved and developed, pondered and meditated on, however they work best for me in their simplicity. They are just five words to remember, each with a profound impact on positivity in any given moment.

Grounding

Centering

Breathing

Soft Eyes

Building Blocks

So when Myrnah and I are walking through the woods in the snow, my mind tells me this should be a marvelous novelty of fun, while unfortunately, my emotions batter my skull, blur my vision, lay lead weight on my lungs and make me want to cry or throw up. I reach for those five words, because I know they are five things I can count on no matter what to make everything better.

Grounding, I can feel my toes wiggle in my socks, I can feel the snow crunch underfoot, I can feel my weight roll from heel to toe, step by step in harmony with Myrnah. I can imagine that she feels grounded too as we walk together. Centering- Every movement of mine originating from the core of my body, every movement of Myrnah’s felt and followed from my core. Breathing- It’s not easy for me out in the cold and the snow, but if I think about it I can feel Myrnah breath, and I can match her rhythm, let her breath through me, an underlying rhythm to every movement we make together. Soft eyes can feel impossible when for me the world is spinning and everything looks blurry from vertigo, so this is where having practiced on a good day is invaluable. I remember what it feels like to release the muscles around my eyes, I remember what it feels like inside my eyes when I soften them and allow all my peripheral vision to become part of what I see. As I do these things it helps the world become still and more clear. It helps the stress dissolve and the beauty of the day become apparent again. Building Blocks- a nod of the head up yes and then no, smaller and smaller until the center resting point is found, a shrug and circle of the shoulders around until they too find the central balance, the ribs, the hips the knees and the ankles, all have their central resting point, in fluid balance with all the other parts.

Each one of these five ideas has benefit without need for perfection. Simply walking through them with whatever awareness I have on any give day has a power I would not want to live without.

We all have our highs and our lows, as do our horses. We hope that when one of us is low, the other in the partnership can step in and support, building the bond of connection stronger and deeper.

It often feels perhaps I should not train when I am low or stressed. I become afraid of spreading the horror of what I feel like a menacing rain cloud darkening everyone’s day. If I can allow myself simply to be as imperfect as I am and just show up anyway, I find very often my horses seem to enjoy stepping up to the plate to take care of me for a change. We can walk through the simplest of our movements together, my job being to remember my five basics and attend to them with whatever skill I have that day. I can let my horse take care of the rest of the details.

The five things I can count on will always be there for me. High or low, rain, snow, sun or wind. Life isn’t always easy, but with a partner like Myrnah traveling alongside me, it is pretty wonderful regardless.

Elsa Sinclair

EquineClarity.com

The Plausibility of Positivity

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.

 

The Plausibility of Positivity

 

Five thirty in the morning, Thursday: the sky was dark, the moon was bright, the air crisp and dry, the world cold and frozen in a quiet stillness. In the sand arena, with its puddle of deceptively warm golden light emanating from the lamp under the walnut tree, stood Myrnah, Cleo, and I. The end of the week was rapidly approaching and I felt at a loss for words. What do I write about this week? In those quiet moments with the mustangs, building our skills one small action at a time, life feels positively perfect. So today I want to suggest the plausibility of positivity being perhaps the best feeling on earth.

 

The interesting twist: positivity needs negativity in order to exist. There is no black without white, and no up without down. We are all raised from childhood with the stories of good winning over evil. As we mature we discover nothing is that simple and perspective plays a large part of any story. We learn that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and a moment can feel perfect or hopeless with the simple twist of emotion and perspective.

 

Horses have a simpler outlook on life, as they don’t make things as complicated as people do, none the less the shades of grey in perspective exist for them too. They can feel good or bad, just like we can, and it is a plausible argument that positivity feels just as good to them as it does to us.

 

Positivity- Consisting in or characterized by the presence or possession of features or qualities rather than their absence.

 

Negativity- Consisting in the absence rather than the presence of distinguishing features.

 

When you break down the definitions, it becomes “a glass is half full” versus “the glass is half empty” point of view. If we become mired in either viewpoint, life becomes half of what it could be. When we see the whole picture, then and only then can the experience of life reach into its full potential.

Last week I wrote about waiting for the emotional change: the art of choosing a task slightly beyond our skill level and sitting with the negative feeling or lack of skill/lack of comfort that goes along with learning- sitting with it long enough that the emotion changes, and the feelings start to become positive as we begin to believe perhaps we do have the skill for this task after all.

 

Positivity and Negativity are intertwined in a dance. With training horses we (as a partnership- horse and rider) need to feel just enough lack or negativity to motivate us to grow and develop, and to give us the contrast that makes positivity ever more sweet. For the most part though, we all do better in life if we feel good. Positivity is what makes life feel worthwhile.

 

In a perfect world the majority of our training is spent in a state of flow where we can see the whole picture, negativity and positivity in balance, the emotional outlook on what we have and what we don’t have, equivalent in weight, the challenge and the skill evenly matched and evolving as we work together.

 

In the world I live in, life is sometimes more dramatic than that as I am torn between the negative understanding of what I want and don’t have yet, and the bliss of what I do have that might just be perfect without ever changing anything.

So it is a dance of positivity and negativity with Myrnah and me: the quiet perfect moments where I lie in the grass as she nibbles the blades around me, a blissful moment in the sun perfect in it’s simplicity, the moments of flow where we practice together, skill and challenge in balance, gently evolving our navigation of the world around us. And the moments of negativity where I want more than we have and I can feel the lack keenly. If I get the dance right, I can feel that lack and negativity and then back off from it into our state of flow… that would be the development I spoke of in development versus training. If I feel the need to wrestle with negativity instead, I can always push harder and see what happens. The thing about this project is, with no halter, or rope or fences to trap Myrnah in, pushing harder doesn’t usually go so well.

 

Midweek Myrnah and I took our long walk out through the woods. The stream where we sometimes stop for a drink was rushing faster than usual. I wanted to go play in the stream; Myrnah wanted to eat the ferns growing along the path. We had a lack of consensus in direction and plan, and that lack bothered me, so I pushed Myrnah to do what I wanted to do. There are lots of ways I could have seen the lack of harmony between us and used the knowledge to guide our progress together. Instead, I got stubborn and pushed her to stay specifically beside me, regardless of what she wanted. The good news is we are bonded enough she tried her best to see my side of the argument, there was some give and take as we moved forward and and back and left and right next to the bubbling brook. However, on that particular day I couldn’t quite find the positivity we needed to both feel good about the situation, and so, for the first time, Myrnah left me out in the big woods. Whoops. She didn’t go far, five hundred feet trotting back up the trail with me running after her, and then she turned back to me with an expression as if to say, “Are you willing to be more reasonable now?”

 

I have to laugh; this is a cooperative process, and Myrnah gets a vote. The fact that she has never worn a halter and is still willing to leave her herd and walk out in the woods with me at all is amazingly beautiful in itself. The fact that she will go close to the stream when she doesn’t feel like it just because I asked is awesome. The fact that she can say no when I am being unreasonably pushy is a fabulous learning curve for me.

 

The plausibility of positivity being the best feeling in the world is perhaps the most vital piece to Myrnah’s development with me as her partner. If I stray from positivity for too long there is nothing stopping her from walking away from me. This is a dance where negativity is useful as a contrast, but I have to be careful to leave it at that. This is a partnership built on positivity. It is far from black and white, with variations of positivity and negativity to give it scope and vivid fullness. However the basis of this relationship with Myrnah is pure and clearly positive. Without tools of force, we have nothing but the positivity that unites us. I like it that way.

Elsa Sinclair

EquineClarity.com