Words Matter: The English Language and the Happy Horse

by Tania Kindersley

You are not mired in the Idiot Swamp, without a handhold. You are, just like everyone else, only human and you will sometimes make mistakes. You are not a write-off, you are not beyond hope or help.

Thank God!!!!!

You are not letting yourself off the hook, you are giving yourself the opportunity to be a better human.

Truth!!!

It is equally vital to understand how the horse’s mind works, so that you can go with the grain of the equine nature rather than imposing your own human ideas on that nature. It’s also important to develop what I call the quiet virtues: patience, consistency, kindness, empathy, generosity.

The great Ian Leighton, a lovely, thoughtful Australian horseman, always says that one of the best things you can do for your horse is be its place of comfort.

Love, with horses, demands a huge amount of awareness, of action, of self-discipline. It requires a degree of selflessness. (This really is not all about you.) It takes imagination and effort. It needs practice.

You know that you should take a deep breath and get perspective and let things go, and instead you stay up all night obsessing over some slight, or some perceived insult, or some act of disloyalty. You know that you should count your blessings and write your gratitude journal and bless the fact you have running water and opposable thumbs, and you fall into a beckoning pit of self-pity because life didn’t turn out the way you planned.

There are three things I know about shame. The first, and perhaps the most important to me, is that it is not useful. Shame does not build anything up, it tears the whole house down. Shame is a wrecker. Shame does not gently show you the error of your ways and teach you how to make good your mistake. Shame simply tells you that you are useless.

The second thing I believe is that you have to drive off shame, and that you absolutely can do this. It is unbelievably difficult and amazingly simple, all at the same time.

The third thing I know about shame is that you can learn to defend yourself against its surprise attacks by working on good mental habits. There are many ways to do this and you will imagine your own brilliant strategies. I’m still working on mine. At the moment, they are mostly composed of a lovely melange of realities. (Shame is a fantasist, so reality and truth are its most bitter enemies.)

It’s the Ray Hunt principle of making the wrong thing hard and the right thing easy.